Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2014-02-03 03:54 am
azurelunatic) wrote2014-02-03 03:54 am
Entry tags:
"All power corrupts, but we need electricity."
Yesterday (Saturday), I met up with my aunt for Dinner Out for my (belated) 33 1/3 birthday. The bulk of the day, from about 1am to 4pm, with maybe two hours of various phone-based internetting, were spent asleep. I clearly needed it.
Dinner was very good food, and great views of the ocean, both there and on the way. Afterwards, we went back and started in on the backlog of Movies I Have Not Yet Seen And Really Should Have. The current entry was Blazing Saddles. I gather it was intended to hit pretty hard with the Wow, That Was Racist stick, which poked in directions that might not have been intended at the original era of filming, especially the bit where Mel Brooks was seen in redface. I enjoyed it, but I would introduce it to un-hypothetical fishdaughters with a big ol "contains era-typical views on race and associated language" flag, no matter how satirically framed. I am glad I watched it, if only to see the pie fight to end all pie fights that I feel the one in How Much for Just the Planet has to have been a callback to. After the movie, my cousin showed up, after an evening in the city and before a morning in the city, because crashing at mom's house is sometimes preferable to a trip down thattaway when you've just gotta come back again bright and early. I didn't do laundry. Woops.
Today (Sunday) I woke up to the dulcet shriek of an angry uninterruptible power supply, along with the uncomfortable warmth of an unmoving fan. I shut down the computer in advance of its battery running out (and an embarrassing number of Windows updates commencing...) I crawled back into bed with my phone and attempted to figure out how to report or check on a power outage from mobile. First the website was immensely non-working on mobile, and then I tried calling according to the instructions and my phone just did not want to listen to the keypushes. While I was trying to call again now that I had attained better mastery of the phone, it rang -- a mass alert of a likely outage in my area. No shit, Sherlock. I opted for more sleep, along with asking for text updates on said outage (this being least likely to disturb whatever sleep I managed to get).
When I woke up again, the power was still out, and my phone's battery was getting low. I knew I had to head out for power if this went on much longer, and also I had errands to run. I found my battery pack.karlht had offered a corner of his living room, which seemed like a good plan.
I attempted a shower. The less said about that, the better; let us just say that while the heating part of the water heater is gas, some other parts are clearly depending upon electricity.
Ordinarily, I would not have attempted Costco until the football had started. I made a deal with myself: if, after I got Vash refueled, I could easily find a parking space, I would go in. If not, I would run the other errands first. Much to my eventual dismay, I passed by several likely-looking parking spaces before snagging an advantageous one. I called Kat somewhere in there. Kate was trying to take a nap. The giggling was a bit loud. Sorry, Kate!
Inside was still crowded. I made the mistake of pre-paying for a hotdog, because the pickup line was split into two for the purposes of dealing with all the people who had purchased pizza, and it was sensory overload levels of crowded, in ways that I have mostly managed to train myself out of. (Part of it was blood sugar and low protein, which was promptly solved by the hot dog after I got it.) But pre-football crowds are notably hell in ways that ordinary weekend crowds are not.
By the time I hit Trader Joe's, nearly everybody had gone to the various tv-bearing establishments, and I concluded that section of shopping in peace. I called the outage hotline again. This time the phone accepted my key-punching, and the line told me that there was no outage at that time; the blinking time on my clock bears that out.
It was getting on into the evening-wards section of afternoon by then, and I elected to head forkarlht's. Between the roads and the GPS, I took two non-consecutive wrong turns, and first had a tour of an unrelated bit of suburbia, and then found myself zipping down the highway in the wrong direction. It was the right direction for Michaels, though, and I was both in possession of a gift card from some teammates who were happy with my conference-membership-wrangling skillz which had been burning a hole in my pocket for some time, and in need of some green yarn for a project that afuna knows exactly what I'm plotting. (Heh. heh. heh.) So there was yarn on markdown, and also other shiny things. Yay, shiny things. Anti-yay, small child in possession of his mother having some sort of very loud screaming meltdown. I'm sure it sucks more to be him, but it sucked a lot having hearing within hearing range of him.
The checkout at Michaels was also crowded, despite the ritual sacrifice of beer and balls to the awesome, fearsome, Suburb Owl that demands its yearly tribute. I guess it's not a particularly big crossover audience.
After that I navigated successfully tokarlht's, and enjoyed a cup of tea and a chat with him and his wife, while crocheting the beginnings of the current vaguely mysterious project. Yay local people!
After that I went home, and the power was on. Hooray. I carried the last of the hard pieces of the former couch to the dumpster (there's still one cushion left) and did laundry. I noticed that there was basically no IRC backscroll from the bouncer from a bunch of channels, and they were behaving really weird; I burned a little time on that before checking in with the rest of the internet. I report here that "kinda fucky" is a precise technical term, immediately understandable by techs the world around. It was kinda fucky for everyone.
I sorted hella laundry while watching MythBusters. Yay for both.
I never did get that text message telling me that my power was likely to be back. I'm not really enthusiastic about my chances.
Dinner was very good food, and great views of the ocean, both there and on the way. Afterwards, we went back and started in on the backlog of Movies I Have Not Yet Seen And Really Should Have. The current entry was Blazing Saddles. I gather it was intended to hit pretty hard with the Wow, That Was Racist stick, which poked in directions that might not have been intended at the original era of filming, especially the bit where Mel Brooks was seen in redface. I enjoyed it, but I would introduce it to un-hypothetical fishdaughters with a big ol "contains era-typical views on race and associated language" flag, no matter how satirically framed. I am glad I watched it, if only to see the pie fight to end all pie fights that I feel the one in How Much for Just the Planet has to have been a callback to. After the movie, my cousin showed up, after an evening in the city and before a morning in the city, because crashing at mom's house is sometimes preferable to a trip down thattaway when you've just gotta come back again bright and early. I didn't do laundry. Woops.
Today (Sunday) I woke up to the dulcet shriek of an angry uninterruptible power supply, along with the uncomfortable warmth of an unmoving fan. I shut down the computer in advance of its battery running out (and an embarrassing number of Windows updates commencing...) I crawled back into bed with my phone and attempted to figure out how to report or check on a power outage from mobile. First the website was immensely non-working on mobile, and then I tried calling according to the instructions and my phone just did not want to listen to the keypushes. While I was trying to call again now that I had attained better mastery of the phone, it rang -- a mass alert of a likely outage in my area. No shit, Sherlock. I opted for more sleep, along with asking for text updates on said outage (this being least likely to disturb whatever sleep I managed to get).
When I woke up again, the power was still out, and my phone's battery was getting low. I knew I had to head out for power if this went on much longer, and also I had errands to run. I found my battery pack.
karlht had offered a corner of his living room, which seemed like a good plan. I attempted a shower. The less said about that, the better; let us just say that while the heating part of the water heater is gas, some other parts are clearly depending upon electricity.
Ordinarily, I would not have attempted Costco until the football had started. I made a deal with myself: if, after I got Vash refueled, I could easily find a parking space, I would go in. If not, I would run the other errands first. Much to my eventual dismay, I passed by several likely-looking parking spaces before snagging an advantageous one. I called Kat somewhere in there. Kate was trying to take a nap. The giggling was a bit loud. Sorry, Kate!
Inside was still crowded. I made the mistake of pre-paying for a hotdog, because the pickup line was split into two for the purposes of dealing with all the people who had purchased pizza, and it was sensory overload levels of crowded, in ways that I have mostly managed to train myself out of. (Part of it was blood sugar and low protein, which was promptly solved by the hot dog after I got it.) But pre-football crowds are notably hell in ways that ordinary weekend crowds are not.
By the time I hit Trader Joe's, nearly everybody had gone to the various tv-bearing establishments, and I concluded that section of shopping in peace. I called the outage hotline again. This time the phone accepted my key-punching, and the line told me that there was no outage at that time; the blinking time on my clock bears that out.
It was getting on into the evening-wards section of afternoon by then, and I elected to head for
karlht's. Between the roads and the GPS, I took two non-consecutive wrong turns, and first had a tour of an unrelated bit of suburbia, and then found myself zipping down the highway in the wrong direction. It was the right direction for Michaels, though, and I was both in possession of a gift card from some teammates who were happy with my conference-membership-wrangling skillz which had been burning a hole in my pocket for some time, and in need of some green yarn for a project that afuna knows exactly what I'm plotting. (Heh. heh. heh.) So there was yarn on markdown, and also other shiny things. Yay, shiny things. Anti-yay, small child in possession of his mother having some sort of very loud screaming meltdown. I'm sure it sucks more to be him, but it sucked a lot having hearing within hearing range of him. The checkout at Michaels was also crowded, despite the ritual sacrifice of beer and balls to the awesome, fearsome, Suburb Owl that demands its yearly tribute. I guess it's not a particularly big crossover audience.
After that I navigated successfully to
karlht's, and enjoyed a cup of tea and a chat with him and his wife, while crocheting the beginnings of the current vaguely mysterious project. Yay local people! After that I went home, and the power was on. Hooray. I carried the last of the hard pieces of the former couch to the dumpster (there's still one cushion left) and did laundry. I noticed that there was basically no IRC backscroll from the bouncer from a bunch of channels, and they were behaving really weird; I burned a little time on that before checking in with the rest of the internet. I report here that "kinda fucky" is a precise technical term, immediately understandable by techs the world around. It was kinda fucky for everyone.
I sorted hella laundry while watching MythBusters. Yay for both.
I never did get that text message telling me that my power was likely to be back. I'm not really enthusiastic about my chances.
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I was googling around to find the canonical phrasing and source, and that was the source I turned up. It's on my to-read list.
no subject