2002-05-13 - 10:12 a.m.
A Monday in allergy season is doubly blessed ...? *ahem*

*yawn* Ahh, Monday. I'm slightly headachy from lack of sleep, heavily congested due to the blooming cottonwood trees, and moderately cheerful about the future. I talked grad-school with Mom yesterday when we went home for Mother's Day, and she said that if I manage to get some sort of scholarships, she'd be proud of me for going. Note the qualification; but at least it's better than, "What good is it going to do you besides getting you deeper in debt?"

Azash and I ran by the mall on our way home for a last-minute Mother's Day gift, and lucked across a sale at a Harry Ritchie's Jewelers right inside the entrance. They had those extremely tiny little birthstone rings, made to hang on a necklace, at $19.99 each. Aquamarine for me, sapphire for my brother, and the $79.99 gold chain we picked out was on sale for $29.99. Not too bad. Worth every penny for Mom's reaction when she opened the box. *grin*

I read two books this weekend, The Silver Arrowhead by Joseph A. West and Moonfall by Jack McDevitt. The former book was a mystery-slash-Western that never quite managed to engage my interest. The main character was a little too unbelievable to me; she had too many skills and at the same time was far too self-effacing and submissive for me to possibly identify with her. I was pulled out of the story to an extent that I spent more time cataloguing the impossible plot points than feeling suspense about whodunit. Not a keeper.

The latter was absolutely spectacular. I'm usually not a fan of hard science fiction; I much prefer epic fantasy with all its wonders, strong characters, and grand themes to dry explorations of decaying future civilizations any day of the week. Yes, I'm aware that those are generalizations, and poor ones, at that; however, the contents of my shelves speak very loudly to the fact that I've found few hard sci-fi novels that fit the criteria I just named for my preferred reading material. Jack McDevitt's novels are among those few. This is the second of his books I've devoured (the first being Deepsix) and they're definitely keepers.

I also finished my HTML character-entity chart. I wanted a list of codes I could use in here to make strange characters show up; I already use the < code to represent the less-than sign in my back/next links at the bottom, and the > sign to represent the greater-than sign, but I was curious about the rest. It turns out that most entity charts online are woefully sketchy; they only give you the entities (the word phrases) and not the numeric codes. You have to dive into the Unicode charts for that, and not all codes work in all fonts, even the Unicode fonts.

Hence, my own personal HTML character chart. Now I can throw in a Euro symbol € or a star ☆ or use Spanish-language punctuation ¿ ? ¡ ! or a heart ♥ or musical notes ♬ whenever I like. Neat, isn't it?

*yawn* Time to go get some more tea and loosen up all the phlegm in my chest. I detest allergy season! Blessings.