Many popular and well-loved bloggers occasionally resort to posts of random miscellany. I poked around in the Way Back Machine yesterday and found some of the earliest Cobweb posts, as it appears the good folks at the Internet Archive are better at holding onto our posts than our old hosting company. I used to blog every day, and most days I found something interesting to say. (Even if it was only about the damn coffee grinder.) It boggles the mind.

Things are a little different now, and it’s not just the templates and the truncated archives.

I can’t stop making jokes about Bertie Ahern’s resignation, probably because he’s the only Taoiseach I’ve ever known. Yes, I’m familiar with names of previous ones (Charles Haughey springs to mind as one I’ve read a bit about), but Bertie has held the improbably spelled office since before I even considered Ireland as a possible place to study during college.

Naturally, my first thought was “Geez, he found out the Wanderer was back in the country and hightailed it out of there.” Isn’t Bertie from the Wanderer’s district?

It’s been a turbulent week. The annual group meeting looms large on the horizon, and while I have most of my slides done the talk still isn’t ready. There are a few reasons for this. One, I found out this morning I should get slides from other people in the group, so I can offer a broader picture of the methods rather than stupifying the audience with picture after picture of butoxamine structures. Two, it’s still not clear how long the presentation is supposed to be. Last time I checked, it was scheduled for 15 minutes, but it might go down to 10 or up to 20 or 25.

I have 26 slides of my own, and that was without trying very hard. I’m going to be delivering this presentation like the Micro Machines guy.

Meanwhile, the house is shockingly empty. Without the computers, paints, and Penny Arcade books strewn about, there’s a chance the place will be clean and tidy once I manage to get home and hoover. Once that’s achieved, I’ll start packing the essentials (books, wool) and throwing out stuff I don’t really need. (I have office supplies from the mid-90s that have been carried from dorm room to dorm room for nearly a decade.) The Wanderer and I learned it costs an eye-popping $80 to send a modestly sized 18-pound box from LA to Dublin, which means a lot of stuff is going to have to go.

As a long-time packrat with a terror of waking up one morning and needing something I once had but threw away in a fit of decluttering, this will require a significant amount of willpower.

Speaking of willpower, the New York Times writes a little on it in the context of “If you have to cut down on spending because of the recession, you’re probably going to gain weight because you just don’t have the willpower.” They include a list of activities that “deplete willpower:”

Other activities that deplete willpower include resisting food or drink, suppressing emotional responses, restraining aggressive or sexual impulses, taking exams and trying to impress someone.

No wonder academics are such lushes.

Personally, I’m handling the recession by sending half the family off to earn euros. That’s what everyone else would do if they could.

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