Grocery Shopping

I really enjoy shopping for groceries. This week, I went to Walmart, and spent about $50 on groceries for the week. When I got home, I was curious about what I had gotten. I was hoping I actually had a whole week's worth of food; it seemed to me as though I had far more than a week's worth.

Here is what I bought (click for a giant version):

So, I was curious how this compared to my calorie intake. Assuming I might eat about 2000 calories per day (and ideally I would eat a bit less and lose weight, but in fact I think I eat a bit more, so I just chose this as a nice round number), I need 14,000 calories per week.

The groceries above come out to 12,475 calories - not quite a week's worth.

Of course, some of the groceries above will likely be wasted, some (like the jelly) will last beyond the week, and some rely on ingredients not shown but that I already own (like peanut butter to go with the bread and jelly, and pasta for the spaghetti sauce). And I also have other food in my house.

Assuming I eat about 2000 calories per day, the per-calorie cost of this group of groceries suggests I will spend about $8/day on food. It is, of course, quite possible to eat more cheaply than this - even much more cheaply, depending on your willingness to make more food from scratch and/or eat the very cheapest boxed dinners and the like.

But $8/day appears to be about my comfortable average, under present circumstances.

Taking the GRE

I took the GRE yesterday and man did it suck.

It's on a computer now, which is great for the analytical writing - I was so glad I got to type. I think I wrote a really kick-ass essay for the first analytical writing task (where you respond to a position), and a decent take-down for the second (where you analyze someone's argument about something unrelated).

But in addition to being on a computer, it also uses adaptive testing for the multiple choice parts. This means they give you a question of medium difficulty to start with, and then based on whether you get it right or wrong, they go up or down in difficulty. Your score is roughly based on the level at which you start to miss about half of the questions (or so I've read).

What this means is that, unlike in normal standardized testing, being above average doesn't mean you can mostly answer all of the questions. It means you get consistently really hard ones, and it sucks so bad.

The first section I got was the quantitative, and I only finished 22 out of 28 questions in the time allotted. It was terrible. I really hoped it was maybe not the one that counted, because they sometimes put in an extra section that they are testing for difficulty. And I felt like I had really blown it.

Then I got a verbal section, which was fine and relaxing. I finished it in plenty of time. I think verbal questions are relaxing because you don't really have to work at them and try to puzzle them out - you pretty much know what MENDACIOUS means or you don't. (I don't. Just for the record.)

And then I got another quantitative section, which did indeed mean that one of the two (the one I'd already taken or this one) was going to not count as part of my score. I tried to be smarter on the second one, and on some questions I gave up and just guessed early rather than wasting a lot of time. I still only completed 26 of 28 questions, and it was still murderously hard.

At the end, you get a choice to either keep or discard your scores. If you discard them they are gone forever. If you decide to let them stand, you then get the chance to see them, if you want. Naturally you can't see them and then decide. (Thanks, ETS!)

I was slightly tempted to just throw my scores out, but, you know, fuck it. Hopefully my future grad plans aren't going to require me to have super high scores, and I didn't really want to throw away the afternoon. So I kept 'em.

720 Verbal / 780 Quantitative

Wow! I was aiming for a 750 on Quant, and didn't care too much about the Verbal, so that was just an awesome result for me. I'm thinking it means that the second quantitative section counted, because I can't imagine how I could have gotten a 780 on the first one. I guess I got lucky there.

My advice to anyone taking the GRE:

1. Practice the math a lot. Get a workbook or something. Especially, if you can, try to practice the timing, and figuring out when to give up on a question instead of wasting time on it.
2. Expect taking the test, at least the quant part, to suck.
3. Don't take the horrible feeling of failure and misery as a sign that you did poorly.

Book List Meme

I don't really know where this comes from, but here's how it works:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you started but did not finish.
3) Underline the books you LOVE. (Note from Tam: I am going to underline any books I did love, even if I don't love them anymore.)
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 or less and force books upon them.

1. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
2. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
3. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
4. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
5. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
6. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
7. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
8. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
10. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
11. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
12. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
13. His Dark Materials (trilogy) - Philip Pullman
14. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
15. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
18. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
19. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
21. Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
22. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
23. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
24. Animal Farm - George Orwell
25. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
26. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
27. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
28. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
29. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
30. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
31. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
32. Complete Works of Shakespeare
33. Ulysses - James Joyce
34. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
35. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
36. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
37. The Bible
38. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
40. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
41. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
42. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
45. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
46. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
47. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
48. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
49. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
50. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
51. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
53. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
54. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
55. Middlemarch - George Eliot
56. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
57. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
58. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
59. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
60. Emma - Jane Austen
61. Persuasion - Jane Austen
62. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
63. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
64. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
65. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
66. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
67. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
68. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
69. Atonement - Ian McEwan
70. Dune - Frank Herbert
71. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
72. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
73. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
74. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
75. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
76. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
77. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
78. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
79. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
80. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
81. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
82. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
83. Dracula - Bram Stoker
84. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
85. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
86. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
87. Germinal - Emile Zola
88. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
89. Possession - A.S. Byatt
90. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
91. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
92. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
93. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
94. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
95. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
96. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
97. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
98. Watership Down – Richard Adams
99. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
100. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

Semicolons

Slate has a cute article today about the disappearance of the semicolon. It reminded me of something funny that happened to me once.

I was at Houston Community College, taking an English composition class to satisfy some general requirement. Our essays were graded based on this rubric where you got points in various categories, one of which was Punctuation. On my first paper, I got less than full credit in this category, which I found rather astonishing - I had surely not made a punctuation error. But it seemed that in order to get full credit, you needed to show sophistication.

"More semicolons!" I told myself. I was careful to include a couple in my next paper.

And, sure enough, I got the credit.

Environmental Science Paper

Today I have to do a little "minilab" for my environmental science class. I had to go outside and find some plant and figure out what it is and write 800 words about it. Fortunately, now that I've identified the plant I photographed, it seems to be dalmatian toadflax, which is an invasive species. I'm putting the pictures I took here so that I can link them in my online paper.







These are from my new digital camera, which is giving me much better pictures than my old one.

GRE Prep

On July 12, I'm scheduled to take the GRE, which these days consists of a couple of essays you have to write, a verbal section, and a quantitative section. I am most interested in my quantitative score, though I plan to do well on the other parts as well, of course. I am generally good at standardized tests, and did well on the SAT back in the day.

One interesting thing is that the GRE uses adaptive testing, where the questions you get depend on how you answered the questions that came before. It's all on the computer, of course, and there is no going back to previous questions. In the beginning of a section, you'll get a question of medium difficulty, and then they move the difficulty up or down depending on whether you answer it correctly. So it's especially important to get the earlier questions correct so that you move quickly into the more difficult questions. My understanding is that once you reach a point where you are answering about half the questions wrong, that level of difficulty determines your score.

I took a sample test for the quantitative section and scored a 690 (out of 800 total), which is pretty bad. I feel like I need a 750 to be a credible candidate for a science-based graduate program. (I'm calling this a "feeling" because I don't know or can't remember where I may have picked up this magic number, if indeed I didn't invent it completely.) Granted, when I took the sample test I wasn't giving it my full and complete attention, but then I wasn't stressed as I might be under actual testing circumstances either.

I had a particularly hard time with the geometry problems, as always. And in general I think I have a hard time accessing my cleverness to solve the problems, which is what they require. (The math GRE questions are a pretty low level of math - basic algebra and geometry - but they often have a "trick" to them.)

My tendency is to employ brute-force methods, which is a terrible strategy when you don't have a calculator and you're under a time crunch. Take this question, for instance:

If the average of six consecutive numbers is 18.5, what is the average of the first five of those numbers?

This can be solved by brute force, as was my initial inclination. Letting x stand in for the first number, you know that

((x) + (x+1) + (x+2) + (x+3) + (x+4) + (x+5)) / 6 = 18.5

It's pretty easy (though arithmetically annoying) to solve this for x, and then take the average of just the first five in the series. But there is a very easy way to solve this problem with a little bit of thought instead, and that's the way I need to remember to do things on the GRE.

So, to that end, I bought a GRE Math Workbook, specifically the Kaplan one. The first part is large review sections on Arithmetic, Algebra, and Geometry. These are divided into sections, each of which ends with a test with easy, medium, and hard GRE-style problems. Each test has an answer key with descriptions of how to solve the problems, sometimes with several methods described. The second part is divided according to the three question types used on the GRE, with several practice tests for each question type.

I haven't been reading the actual review sections, because I basically do know math, of course, but I have been taking all of the tests, even the ones in the Arithmetic section. (It's not basic problems, but GRE-type tricky problems.) I feel like this process is making me more clever and definitely more ready to kick the GRE's ass.

A part of me rebels against the idea of preparing for a standardized test. What am I, some kind of goody-two-shoes who has to work hard because I'm not that bright? Fortunately, that part of me has been hastily stuffed into a sack and sat upon.

Off-Goofery

I don't goof off anywhere near as much at this job as at my old job, but when I do get some down time, it is major, serious, heavy-duty down time. Right now, for instance, there is simply no work. I finished a couple of projects (one small, one larger) for our president earlier, and now she has left to attend a conference. The senior tech is also on vacation. I have spoken to the other techs and none of them have work to delegate to me (or, for the most part, work at all). I haven't been here long enough to have files that need organizing or a particularly messy desk. So I can goof off with a completely clear conscience.

The truth is, I hate seeking out new work, but I love it when I have work. If people would give me 10 long projects with no deadlines, I would be as happy as a clam, knowing I could come in for many, many days without running out. I much prefer showing up to work in the morning, rather than coming in between projects.

When I do have work, I have to work pretty solidly. They're billable hours, after all, and I'm not willing to have my company bill other companies for my time if I'm half-working, half-surfing the Internet. So I stay pretty focused and only take occasional short breaks. We bill down to the quarter hour. It's...rigorous.

So I am enjoying today's (hopefully) brief respite.

Durable Goods Moratorium

I am declaring a moratorium on purchases of durable goods, starting now and effective through August. This means no new clothes, furniture, kitchen supplies, toys, etc. - basically anything that is not consumed. (Obviously it would be much more radical to try to survive without groceries, paper products, cleaning supplies, etc. I'm not that radical.)

I think I have everything I need at this time, so I hope I can stick to this.

Taking Math Forever

For a while now, I have spoken of wanting to take math classes forever. I like how learning math makes me feel (the short version: initially frustrated, then brilliant as I figure something out). I should graduate in about a year, and then the question is, what next?

I could keep taking math at Metro for many more years - there's plenty of math I haven't gotten to. But it would be nice to have something to show for all that math. It would be nice if my resume could say something more than "BS in Geographic Software Engineering, and oh yeah, I also took 45 more hours of math after that."

While Sally was here, she helped me look for master's programs I might be able to do without quitting my job. And we discovered that Texas A&M has an MS program in Computational Math that is fully online. It was a great find, because math master's degrees are not that common as distance education programs. (You can find a lot of math education master's, but not so many other kinds of math.)

The program requires 36 hours of coursework, i.e., 12 classes. They give you 7 years to finish. I figure I can easily finish in 6, taking one class per semester, which ought to be doable. And if you have taken the GRE and graduated from college, you can enroll with "G6" status, which means you don't have to actually apply and get in. Once you've taken a couple of courses, you can then apply with (hopefully) great grades in the program already under your belt, and the classes will count towards the degree.

It'll be great to be working towards this degree. At worst, I'll get interrupted somehow and not finish it, in which case I'll still have been taking math as per my wishes; at best, I'll end up with a nice master's degree in math. Whee!

A Shameful Confession

I love Moby. (His music, I mean, not him personally. On a personal level I think he's kind of a flake.)

I feel guilty about this, believe me. The music is...well, a bit formulaic, to be honest. Want to make a Moby song? The most common formula goes like this:

1. Get a clip of a black person or choir singing 1-30 seconds of something.

2. Play the clip a few times with a simple rhythm behind it.

3. Play the clip a few more times with some more sounds behind it.

4. Add some soaring electronic chords.

5. Continue adding more and more sounds to the clip, but never letting go of the original simple rhythm.

There are other types of Moby songs, but these are the kind I like best. And I mean, I totally adore them. I just put a new Moby CD in my car today and I could not get past the first song because I had to play it over and over. Here, see for yourself:



Embarrassing. Oh yeah, here's another one I like. This isn't the original video, just someone's collage.

Time Estimation

Let's say you had 53 categories or data items. And you needed to make four different graphs of each item, and then put them in a binder by data item, with tabs. You would have 53 tabs, each of which would have four graphs behind it.

You've been working on the graphs for days. New and corrected information has shown up, requiring you to redo a lot of the work. And you just now got around to making the fourth graph. And everything needs to be finished today, by 4 pm.

Let's further assume that you had acquired more than 53 tab dividers, the kind that use labels you print with a computer and then stick on, and you gave them to the receptionist at 10:30 am, confirming that she had time to do them.

How much time would you estimate it would take to put the finished binder together? Would you allot a full hour for this activity?

Guess what I just spent the last hour doing (including waiting for the dividers to be finished, punching holes, and watching the engineer - who eventually left to catch a plane with his mostly-but-not-entirely-finished binder - pace)?

Gas Tax Holiday

John McCain and Hilary Clinton recently both came up with plans to suspend federal taxes on gasoline over the summer. This is a stupid plan for reasons I'm sure are familiar to all of my readers. But what's refreshing about it is to see a public discussion of an economic issue that is actually simple enough that people can think it through. Understanding comes in stages that seem to go roughly like this:

• It won't save people a lot of money, and it's bad because the government will lose revenue.
• It encourages oil consumption, which is the opposite of what we need to do long-term.
• Wait - it won't actually lower the price of gas anyway. It just means the oil companies will get more profits and the government will keep less. (Some might view this as a feature rather than a bug, but few Democrats would.)

Of course, many people get to the point of realizing merely that the oil companies will raise the price to compensate. If they can charge $3.50 (or whatever) now, including the tax, there's no reason they wouldn't continue to charge that in the future. Oh, those greedy oil companies - is there no level to which they won't stoop?

As far as I know, the oil companies (at least in America) are not a cartel. They do not actually control the price of gasoline. It's a free market, which means that the price is (more or less) a function of supply and demand.

Please note that I'm not saying they wouldn't control the price if they could. I'm not saying the oil companies are virtuous and trying to get us a fair deal. They want to make as much money as possible, just like we want to save it. But they no more control the price of oil than realtors control the price of houses, or than Kroger controls the price of oranges.

Ahem. I really didn't mean to lecture on points familiar to everyone. So, let me return to my earlier point - it is great to see some public debate on a simple economic issue. And this one is apparently so simple that Clinton's campaign couldn't come up with a single economist to support the gas tax holiday. People thinking their way through economic issues, even though it has mixed results, is a good thing.

Billable Hours

At my new job (which I started last Thursday), I have to do billable hours - we're a consulting firm. So I have a record every day of how many hours I've worked on various projects, and how many hours I did other things (generally recorded as "G&A"). This is how I've done so far:

Thursday (1st day at work):
Billable - 5 1/2
G&A - 2 1/2

Friday:
Training - 5
Billable - 2 3/4
G&A - 1/4

Monday:
Training - 1
Billable - 4 1/4
G&A - 2 3/4 [I ran out of stuff to do]

Tuesday:
Training - 2 1/4
Billable - 5 1/2
G&A - 1/4

So far today (as of lunchtime):
Billable - 3

So that's all going rather well, I'd say.

Lovey Dovey

Sally is coming to visit me for Memorial Day weekend, three weeks from now, which is very exciting. She'll finally get to meet Ed, who I started dating just shortly after her last visit here. We drove practically right by his old apartment last time, but it didn't seem right to introduce them. Both of them have (rightfully) given me crap for this ever since.

Meanwhile, sometime around Sally's visit is our one-year anniversary. It's hard to believe that it's been nearly a year since we started this goofy experiment. The time has been well spent.

Overall, the relationship is just great. Sometimes when Ed is stressed, or I'm just weird, things get worse between us, a bit, and I start to wonder what the hell I'm doing here, but then we get some time together, talk, have sex, cry, or whatever, and things are fantastic again. I'm crazy in love with him and it seems to be mutual.

So, yeah, life is good.

Spring Cleaning

In an utterly out-of-character move, I took advantage of having five days off and have gone through everything in my entire bedroom (including the closet). I got rid of a lot of things including

• just enough books that I could shelve all of the remaining books
• all of my clothes that don't fit or are stained
• giant amounts of papers that I don't need or want
• a kite I never fly
• five of my seven pairs of snow gloves/mittens
• a scarf I would never wear
• shoes I don't like
• sheets that are not the same size as my bed
• one of the six pillows I own
• a tiny cooler and a giant thermos
• about six backpacks and other similar types of bags
• my Miami J collars from when I had my surgery
• connectors and cables for tech equipment I no longer own
  

I also finished going through all the papers I have from childhood. When I bought my beautiful file cabinet a couple of years ago, Mosch and I went through almost all of my papers and filed them away or discarded them. But I left one medium-sized box of papers from childhood because I just ran out of steam, and figured I could get around to them later.

I like to keep almost everything like that. I love to look at elementary school reports cards, the paper on solar energy that I wrote in 3rd grade, my high school journals, and all kinds of stuff like that. And now they are all filed properly in my filing cabinet.

The nice thing about a serious filing cabinet is that, once you have one, and until it is full, there is no cost to adding more things to it. It takes up the same amount of space whether it is half-empty or mostly full. So it was really wonderful to get all of the papers in there.

We also, while filing all papers, emptied out my "to be filed" file folder and either filed or discarded everything in it.

I had a lot of help from Mosch and some from Ed, but I worked really hard, and I'm super pleased that I've thinned out my possessions somewhat, and organized and cleaned the rest. The room and closet got an excellent vacuuming too, so everything is just super nice.

I still feel like I own too many things, but at least in my bedroom, I don't own anything I don't actively want to own. When we did the closet, we took every single thing out first, just to make sure that (a) it was just as easy to throw things out as to keep them, and (b) the stuff would get reorganized. Obviously I couldn't do that with the whole bedroom, but still - almost everything was gone through.

As much as I love getting rid of things I no longer need, and seeing the useful things go to thrift stores where other people who actually want them can get them, I'm usually way too lazy to clean and organize. But since this was my last week at my old job, and I had to work hard all week to get caught up, I was in the habit of working, and since I spent the last day at my job cleaning out my old office, I was even in the habit of organizing and cleaning.

I'm very pleased with myself tonight :-)

Irritates Me

A while back, this office building moved to become more environmentally conscious. One of the changes was that they took away our trash cans. We still have trash cans in the common areas, but the ones at our desks are unlined and are for commingled recyclables: paper, cans, plastic bottles, glass, or whatever. But you are not supposed to put garbage in there, i.e., used paper plates, discarded kleenex, food waste, etc. (The fact that they are unlined is a good reminder of this.)

It's inconvenient because you tend to get little trash piling up around your desk. I keep a paper cup on my desk in which to put things like small candy wrappers and used tea bags, but sometimes other things pile up in an annoying way. But overall I think it is a good plan and it has greatly reduced the amount of waste our building produces.

But recently, two different people have admitted to me that they just put their trash in there anyway. That pisses me off because, you know, it just means someone at the processing facility has to go through and take out your own personal garbage and route it to garbage. I'm sure I sometimes throw away something that isn't really recyclable because I'm just mistaken about it, but I try to do it right.

And just this morning, another coworker picked some dead leaves off a plant in my office and then threw them in my trash. "You can't-!" I started, but it was too late. So I pulled them out. She didn't understand why they couldn't go in there since they are biodegradable.

"But they're not recyclable," I said. "You can't put them in here."

"Oh. I always put them in mine," she said, shrugging.

Argh.

A New Job!

You should hear the title in that Bob Barker (or whoever) voice they use on the Price is Right to tell what's in the showcase. A ne-e-e-ew car!

Anyway, now that it's official: I have a new job. Rather than working for an exploration & production company, like now, I'll be working for an (oil & gas) engineering consulting firm. The new place is a 5-minute drive from my house, rather than my current 25-minute drive downtown. It's a small company and the people seem very friendly.

I'm super excited. I almost had a heart attack when I had to tell my boss of 10 years that I'm resigning, but I lived.

So...yay!

Old-Timey

OK, I fucking love this contest to create vintage ads for modern products. I'm a total sucker for this kind of thing.

Yelling at Coworkers

It's pretty rare that I let myself get really angry with a coworker, but today I did.

A guy I'll call Bert is one of my best pals in the office. He's cool and nerdy and has similar political views to mine, so we talk politics pretty often. He also argues politics with a Bush Republican I'll call Rufus. I never talk to Rufus about politics, though. I don't actually care to argue politics with coworkers, at all. (I don't mind discussing views on a specific issue if it can be done really calmly and respectfully, but I'm not going to seek out someone specifically to argue with them.)

So Bert came into my office a few minutes ago to tell me that he told Rufus that people who voted for Bush must have done so for one of three reasons. I can't remember the three that he listed but they were something like ignorance, greed, or pure evil.

I just sort of said, "Oh, god," and covered my face with my hands.

Then another coworker, Kristin, came in, and I happen to know she's a Republican, and Bert started to repeat this to her, and I said, "All right, if you guys are going to argue politics, don't do it in my office."

Kristin wasn't into continuing the argument, but Bert was determined to at least make his few points. Ultimately I got very serious and yelled at him (not that loudly, but definitely yelling) to get out. In fact I walked up to where he was standing, forcing him to leave. I was actually pretty angry.

"You can talk to her somewhere else," I said.

"But she's not leaving," he said.

"I'm sure she'll leave sometime and you can find her then," I said.

Kristin and I laughed about it afterwards. Our boss overheard it and thought it was funny. But I do feel bad, and hope Bert is not too pissed off at me, because, after all, he's one of my favorite people here, even if he does enjoy arguing for the sake of arguing.

My Name

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 27 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

I think this figure was arrived at statistically rather than being an actual count. But until I tried a coworker with a really unusual last name, I couldn't find anyone among my friends with a more unusual name combination.