jumpy jumpy vitamins « Rugby? and other hard-hitting things

Rugby? and other hard-hitting things

Yup, it’s another in a long series of quick updates.

First, the title. For a long time now, I’ve been interested in learning how to play rugby, but have put it off for some silly reason. This past week has had a couple Universal Nudges<tm>, though: a story in the Post-Dispatch about a local club, a post by Jimbo that mentions a recent match of his, and a rummage through the cold-weather clothes that turned up a rugby shirt I like.
Following up on these, I discovered that the Chicago Dragons are willing to help start an IGRAB-affiliated team in St. Louis. I wrote the current president of the Dragons, and was invited to Chicago this weekend to meet the team (along with the visiting Atlanta Bucks and Madison Minotaurs [please be gentle with the Minotaurs link]) and potentially scrummage with them; though I can’t make it, I’m eager to visit sometime in the near future.

Building upon this even further, I did a bit more research and learned that the Bombers run their B-side as a developmental squad during the fall. I can’t make practices until this school term is done in mid-October, but as soon as I can I’ll be there trying to extend my rugby-feel from purely intellectual to grittily experiential. (and no, I did not just make that last word up.)
Chorus rehearsals started Monday with a full house and 5 newbies. Our interim director for this show has a very emphatic, fluid style that I like; it doesn’t hurt that he’s easy on the eyes. That said, I’m sad that a particular song has already been stricken from the program (and no, it wasn’t the crazed medley that kept venturing into 7/8, although that one would have been quite a challenge).
My traffic has gone upwards lately, and it took me a few minutes to realize why: a feed from the “Wikipedia” category hereupon gets published on Planet Wikimedia, a blog aggregator administered by the Wikimedia Foundation. Since I’ve had two new posts in that category, I’ve had a surge of new visitors for those particular posts.
Speaking of which: I keep meaning to post a response here to Kelly Martin’s excellent post “On Ignoring All Rules“, about the Wikipedia policy of the same name. It’s on my list, and I have a rough draft saved, but have not yet finished it for regular consumption.
Did some clean-up on the scrubbook’s hard drive over the weekend. I found ~25GB worth of songs that I NEVER listen to, so *poof* they vanished. That still smarts.
Also started to tinker with the header images on here. Nothing is ready yet.
Been having some lingering phone and network issues at work. Yesterday got so bad that, while the network admin and my boss were busy shepherding the telco’s tech from one piece of infrastructure to the next, I was able to re-do most of a major workflow app. (Normally I’d be inundated with calls and e-mails, but when nobody can call or e-mail…)
The weather is freaking awesome today.
Classes are OK. My programming logic class is a walk in the park because I already use programming logic nearly every day. My philosophy class, OTOH, is somewhat interesting; it’s a pretty diverse group of students, with pretty diverse views on things, so discussions can get lively when we aren’t watching Woody Allen movies.
Yeah, definitely loving this new theme so far.
The inaugural Tour of Missouri is this week, wrapping up with a big finale in STL on Sunday (at the same time as Cardinals-Cubs and Rams-49ers). Apparently things are going well on the Tour as long as they keep armadilloes out of the peloton.
Wow, somebody had better update the IGRAB page. No new posts in over a year? Seriously?