Pancake Day and Ash Wednesday

Well, this has been a week of frustratingly non-productive days. I've mostly finished the reading part of the work I'm doing right now, and I've been trying to start writing, but it hasn't happened. I can feel that I'm on the verge of getting there...these things tend to build in me over time, where I'll be unproductive for a while, and then it will reach a point where the text just pours out of me...but I don't quite seem to be there just yet. I've reverted to the old standby of rereading my notes and making an outline of the things I want to include, so that it will help me get into it better. So, we'll see how that goes. On the upside, though, I came across this article, which gives me great joy in the fact that I don't let myself work crazy hours. I try to work only during the day, stopping at 5 or 6pm, and not to work on the weekends, and now I've found out that apparently I'm helping fight dementia. Go me!

In other news, today is Ash Wednesday, a holy day, and I'll be going to Mass pretty soon to be marked with ashes. Surprisingly, I'm not hungry, despite the fact that I've not eaten since around 6:30pm yesterday (Ash Wednesday, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a day of fasting and abstinence, thus, no food for me). I'm willing to bet that at least part of this is because I seem to have moved my wakeup time from 9am to 10am lately (this will be corrected very soon, as I'm starting to feel very lazy, and I need to start going to the gym again to work out my knee). Anyway, as we all know (or, at least, we will all know, if we keep reading), the day before Ash Wednesday is Fat Tuesday, variously known as Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday and, I've learned, Pancake Day. I had to look this one up, but apparently here in the UK (and some places in the States, though myself and two American friends of mine, representing the West Coast, the Mid-West, and the South, had never heard of it), Mardi Gras is a day to make and eat loads of pancakes. The tradition seems to have developed because, traditionally, eggs and butter and milk and things like that were not eaten during Lent, and so the day before Lent begins, people would try to use all of these ingredients so they didn't go bad, and apparently the easiest things to make with those things are pancakes. I did not have any pancakes yesterday. I've not had pancakes in a long time, though they are sounding quite tasty at the moment. They're on the Corndog List.

The following are two very cool pictures of one bolt of lightning. The first is a screenshot taken with regular video; the second is the same bolt, but with high-speed film. Check 'em out:




That second one is so much cooler. It looks more like treeroots than I've ever seen lightning look before, but it's very awesome.

And, finally, I bought and successfully watched my first region 2 DVD, the latest Futurama movie, Into the Wild Green Yonder. I love Futurama, and now I know I can watch region 2 DVDs on my computer.

I'm going to get ready for Mass now.

-stephen