Pepys rhymes with Sleeps

I can’t seem to stop eating cheap Thai food from the Grange for lunch, and I think it’s making my tummy rumbly. Bother.

This morning I started thinking about Samuel Pepys, and what a champion blogger he might have been, if born in this digital age. He might even have given my ambitiously prolix friend a run for her money.

And then I started thinking: wow, what a neat little applet it would be if someone created “The Pepysometer”, a little tool that tracks how many words you’ve written in your blog, and compares it to the total number of words in the 73 volumes of Pepys’ diary, written between January 1659 and May 1669. I believe he wrote somewhere in the region of million and a quarter words, and I think it would be fascinating to set his abbreviated longhand against the speed of modern typing, which doubtless encourages certain bloggers to write at extreme length.

One of my favorite writers, for example, who I have not read much of since switching from Diaryland to LiveJournal, was a Ms. Xtine Squirrel. Xtine wrote on average 1500-2000 words EVERY DAMN DAY for at least a year after her separation from her husband, setting up her tarot business and discovering her psychic abilities. But the last entry currently sitting on her site is from December 4th, 2004, over a month ago. Pepys (from what I understand) averaged more like 100 words per entry, but the man had endurance. He plunked his activities, no matter how mundane, down on the page every day for 10 years. Consistency counts! How would Xtine measure up? Squirrel versus Samuel? Inquiring minds want to know!

FYI, for those of you who are interested in reading Mr. Pepys’ daily entries, a kind gentleman named Phil Gyford is using MoveableType to create a weblog of exactly that – Pepysdiary.com posts the good old fellow’s daily entries in real time, four hundred odd years later (ie. January 31st, 1661 is posted on January 31st, 2005, etc.)

BBC Article from January 2003 about Gyford’s ‘Pepys Online’ project

Interview with Claire Tomalin, author of “Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self”

Someone make me my Pepysometer! Get coding!

Goal Post-mortem

Re-reading naive and overambitious weekend goals, it hit me that I must imagine myself living in a state of suspended animation between tasks, wherein I never require sleep, food, or recuperation time from blinding headaches that hit me out of the blue. Which is not entirely accurate.
Nonetheless, I managed to do the following:

– Shave legs? Check! Legs now shorn. Am no longer sasquatch.
– Polish toes? Not so much. Glamour must wait for next week.
– Buy caulking and finish trim? Check! (, I felt your pain at the Canadian Tire, telling a male employee I needed “caulk”)
– Sand and paint stairwell? Absolutely not. Didn’t even start.
– Read 40 pages of ‘Brideshead Revisited’ on Friday? Check!
– Finish book by end of weekend? Did not manage. Am 50 pages in.
– Get to bed by 10:45pm? Ha ha ha ha no.
– Answer door on Sat. morning dressed with pot of tea brewing? Was actually still in shower, tea made by JVL.
– Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’? Bitten into! In fact, read half of.
– Acquire reasonably-priced copy of ‘Grosse Point Blank’? Check! At Future Shop! For $11.99! Warning: DVD is now OUT OF PRINT.
– Visit Dad? Check and it was a great visit, too. Hurrah!

So, all in all, not a bad weekend for productivity.

Glenda came by on Friday to hang out and she and JVL played lots of ‘Resident Evil 4’ on the GameCube, which is too, too frightening. I seriously cannot watch it any more, due to the oppressively terrifying music that sounds like a panicked heartbeat being hammered out on a steel drum, and the sneaky zombies who blend seamlessly with the environment until they sneak up behind you in large groups and try to maim and eat you, or impale you with pitchforks or throw dynamite at you or freaking CUT YOUR HEAD OFF WITH A CHAINSAW. God. I just can’t find that sort of thing relaxing on a Friday night. And yet, as with TechTV, I often cannot look away. Anyhow, they played for a while, and then I had a headache so Glenda drove to Shoppers to get me some Advil and I wrote off the rest of the evening.

Saturday was spent with my Mum, touring around used CD shops in search of GPB, which we did not find, and me buying a silly number of other things instead, including box set #2 & 4 of MST3K (Mystery Science Theatre), and ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ and ‘Splash’ and ‘Tank Girl’. What can I say, I’m a consumer slut. We also visited Dad, who was in good spirits probably due to the sunny weather, and he ate well which was heartening for both Mum and I. I had a long nap to pre-emptively do away with further headacheage, and we ate curry and had a glass of sherry each. Very civilized afternoon. Mum had a brief flurry of getting very excited about the prospect of emptying her kitchen cupboards of various objects to send them over to the new condo, but I had to tell her to stop discussing it as a done deal, lest she jinx the whole thing. Still, it’s good to know that I won’t have to worry about whether or not there will be toilet paper for the new place if and when I take possession. Final appointment with bank tomorrow at lunch. Will update later.

Sunday Justin cooked breakfast and Dan came by and Justin’s Mum came by and we went shopping for caulk and while I was in Canadian Tire, Justin went and bought the brand-new ultra-thin network-capable dvd-playing PlayStation2. Which is tiny. Ridiculously tiny. Like, I’m worried I’ll be dusting one day and I’ll sweep it into the pan by accident and it will be gone. Sitting on the media console next to the TV and the XBox and the subwoofer, it looks like it was hit by a shrinking ray. Especially when you compare it to the old PS2. The controllers are almost bigger than the box. Oh, and it would be negligent to leave out the fact that the new Popeye’s Chicken & Biscuits at the end of our street is now open and we bought some and ate it on Sunday and I am going to become so obese oh boo hoo hoo woe is me…

This must be how people felt when the first handheld personal calculators came out in the early 1980s and people were all like “holy crap! this thing that fits in my hand can do more than all the computers at the national department of defence could do 15 years ago! what next, portable typewriters?!?!”

So yeah, that was my weekend. How was yours?