Nazia Hasan
26 September 2002, 4:48 PM

*sigh*

Pant, Pant...
26 September 2002, 2:23 PM

I am so wiped out.

I've been on the run all day today and I'm feeling a bit wiped. I don't know why, but the last couple of days have been a blur of activity and I've STILL got so much to do!

I joined Jeff and his family on Tuesday to pick up his sister from the airport. She was returning from her 1.5 years in Japan (she'd been teaching English there) and as a joke (long story) we all wore those funny nose and mustached glasses. You know the kind - all Groucho Marx, bushy eyebrows, 'stash and overly large rubber nose. Her mom, dad, brother, myself and all her grandparents were there and we were ALL wearing the glasses. It must have been quite a sight. :-)

That evening I got to see the season premiere of Smallville! I've been waiting for this on pins and needles since the season finale. I really like this show - I think they've really done an good job of telling the "untold" story of Superman in his teens and what the heck it must have been like to grow up in Smallville. Some good acting all the way around, and the story is getting even more interesting. They're developing Lex Luthor very nicely.

This morning I had a bit of a Twilight zone experience. My division had scheduled a morning meeting with SAP vendors to talk about their portal technology. Unfortunately my class ran right through the middle of the 9am-noon meeting. So for 30 minutes I was listening to modules, knowledge management, authentication and portals, and three minutes later I'm listening to info about the Late Paleoindian and early Archaic periods, stratigraphic analysis and lancelate projectile points for an hour and then another three minutes later I'm back to database integration, application unification, content management systems and single signons. My head is spinning. :-)

Oh, and the garden spider is still hanging around. Yesterday I got to watch her create the zig-zag pattern in her web. That was just the coolest thing. When weaving the rest of her web she pulls the silk from her abdomen and uses her legs to gracefully attach it and move along - it's really an elegant procedure. But when she's creating the zig-zag, she does a little butt shimmy! She produces a larger glob of silk, and instead of pulling it with her legs, she just wiggles back and worth and then set her hind end down to attach it. It was actually kinda cute to see.

And I found the male! The literature out there says that there's usually a smaller male nearby who makes a smaller web attached to hers. And since she went to all the trouble of laying eggs, I figured that there probably was male around to fertilize them. Sure enough, I found him. Holy cow, I had no IDEA the difference in size between the two. he's a little squirt. I mean, really! Her body is about an inch and a half long and her legs could span about 4 inches. He's about as big as one of these letters! He's TINY!