6:09 PM:

I wimped out.

I didn't mean to. I drank lots of fluids. I ate some pizza, and I had a Carnation Instant Breakfast, which includes a substantial amount of iron. I went to the blood drive site. I read the provided donation guidelines. I filled out the form. I waited nervously until if was my turn to be screened.

"How are you today?" asked the woman, nicely.

"Terrified," I answered, honestly.

She asked why, in that case, I was donating blood, suggesting that there were other ways I could help. I replied that, no, I wanted to do this, and that I'm used to being stressed out anyway.

In the meantime, she'd taken hold of my wrist, and was feeling my pulse. She pointed out that my pulse rate was 110, and that they didn't accept donations from anybody with a rate above 100.

"I've gotten this far," I said. "I'd rather see this through." So we continued. She asked a few questions, checked my temperature and blood pressure, and my pulse again. This time I just made it, with a rate of 96. Then it was time for the blood test, and I began questioning my sanity.

"This is a very small needle," she pointed out. "Over there," she indicated the other side of the room, "they use a Very Big Needle." She strongly suggested that given that I was clearly uncomfortable with the whole thing, I'd be much better off volunteering to help in some other way. And this time around, I gave in.

She gave me an "I tried!" sticker, and I slunk home.

And then, in an ironic twist, I chopped off the tip of my finger.

I didn't mean to. I was trying to install some memory in my computer. Unfortunately, whoever designed the DIMM sockets on my motherboard apparently didn't have anything like useablility in mind. In the struggle to get the darn thing to go in properly, I somehow managed to remove a circle of skin, about a quarter-inch in diameter, from the tip of the middle finger of my right hand.

Fortunately, I have first aid supplies around. And I didn't get much blood on the motherboard.

Proof that God has a sense of humor? Or a message to the effect that I should get over the whole squeamishness thing? No clue.

As for the computer, I gave up. I managed to get one set of chips in, doubling my memory from 32MB to 64MB; the other 64MB will have to wait until I'm ready to take this on again. Which will probably be a long while.

Oh, goodie.

When I first bought babeltower.org, I noticed in passing that babeltower.com was owned by a porn site, the sort which spawns endless popup windows when you try to leave. Ever since, I've been hoping that I wouldn't accidentally mistype the address in a link, and that my readers wouldn't, either.

Turns out that babeltower.com is now instead owned by some sort of search engine/portal site. Much safer.

Brief update on my life: I'm not actually doing anything that I need to do now. And you'd think that, having identified this as the problem, I'd go ahead and fix it. "Ha," I laugh hollowly, "ha."

One more Yankee-related post, and then I'll shut up on the subject. The following is from an e-mail sent to a classmate last night, in response to an e-mail she'd sent me on the subject:

Anyway, yeah, congratulations. Indeed, this series was a victory for the little guy; a victory against the team in pinstripes; a victory for class and dignity, as shown by the hospitable playing of "New York, New York" after the visiting team lost game 6; a victory showing the importance of building a strong team from the bottom up, rather than spending gobs of cash on hired guns in an all-out bid to win at any cost.

...umm, no, wait...

Remind me again why you were rooting for the Diamondbacks?

11:21 PM:

Damn.

...although, in fairness, if the Yankees were gonna lose the Series in Game Seven, this was about as good an ending as one could hope for.

Still... damn.

After every home game the Yankees win, their P.A. system plays Frank Sinatra's rendition of "New York, New York." This included games 3, 4, and 5 of the World Series.

For Game 6, play returned to Arizona, and the Diamondbacks demolished the Yankees. After which their P.A. system played the beginning of "New York, New York." This was obnoxious, rude, beyond the bounds of propriety... and, actually, rather delightful. As a New Yorker, I can only approve of that sort of chutzpah.

We're still gonna beat 'em tonight, though.

Y'know, I understood that this new Star Trek series was going to retcon a certain amount of the series' backstory, and I was ready to at least pretend that I could accept that, but I just saw the latest episode, and yeesh.

A Vulcan in Starfleet pre-Spock was wrong in the first place, but as long as the fundamental qualities of Vulcanness weren't being messed with (at least in the one episode and occasional fragments I'd seen until now), I held my peace. But this past episode... well, I hated it. First because the Starfleet people were clearly doing everything wrong, and then because the reason why they turned out to be less wrong than one might think was because the Vulcans were, well, acting illogically. (Using the mistranslated definition of "logic" pertaining to Vulcans, that is.)

I should probably specify at this point that my first major involvement with Star Trek wasn't through the shows or movies; it was through the books. There was a time, when I had an allowance and paperback books were roughly half the price they are now, when I bought a new one every couple of weeks. There was a time when there were about sixty books in the series, and I'd read the majority of them. I should also grant that no two writers had quite the same conception of Vulcans and their ways, but at least the ones that were clearly wrong (i.e., the ones I most disagreed with) could be easily dismissed as non-canonical.

Dismissing an entire series as non-canonical is somewhat more problematic, but I'm on the verge of doing so as the only way of dealing with its disregard for What Has Come Before.

Then again, TNG and Voyager both got off to rocky starts (and don't even ask what I think about holodecks and their offspring), so maybe Enterprise will work out the kinks in time.