azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 ([personal profile] azurelunatic) wrote2016-03-28 02:58 am
Entry tags:

an eventful weekend

Friday: working on stuff, followed by dinner. Purple got interrupted with a work crisis right before dinner, so it was a bit delayed (I wound up calling him to see what was up, to find that he was in fact on the phone with his boss) and he wasn't able to stick around to chat after. He sort of glomped me inside and was about to run out, except the lobby was filled with a very dense group of people all "leaving" (chatting and not leaving and not letting anyone else through) for a bit.


Saturday: so there's this "traditional holiday" filled with eggs and rabbits and zombies. Went over to a friend's to celebrate, having first put myself in zombie makeup. There was egg decoration, an egg race with zombies vs. humans, nachos, games, and general merriment. Got to see JD, Ryan, and [twitter.com profile] xlerb among others.

Egg decoration started out somewhat vaguely traditional and then went off the rails. Glitter aside, it all started going weird when someone busted out the stick-on rhinestones and someone said "Are we going to bejazzle an egg?" at which point I went "... yes. Yes, we *are*." I dumped an egg in the pink dye for a bit and grabbed a pink Sharpie. Someone handed me the pink puffy glue and the red glitter glue. I found a brown Sharpie and drew an asterisk.

Thus there existed in the world for a brief time a very delicately decorated egg that matched a certain hat I'd made in some respects, except this one had blue glitter standing in for stubble, and once the outer glue had dried I applied a triangle of judicious rhinestones.

The play-dough sculpture was just obnoxiousness. The crocheted hat was educational. This one, I am starting to suspect a bit of a pattern.

We all picked up and headed for the beach, which was a short walk up a bit of a hill after crossing the highway. This guy's house is not in much of a better position than my apartment, when the Big One comes. I found myself picking my way down a legitimate sand dune. I paused and considered, then flomped myself to the ground, positioned myself deliberately, and turned over.

Reader, if you have never rolled down a sand dune onto a beach? It is an experience. Up and down ceased to have a meaningful distinction. I had started the journey deliberately and under my own control, but I had become the playtoy of friction and gravity, who were arguing about who got custody, and arranging to place sand in every crevice which could be induced to accept sand. It was glorious, and also dizzying.

I sat there for a moment or five before getting up.

One of the other guys grabbed my cane from where I'd accidentally dropped it on the way down.

I was on Team Zombie. Our mission: to intercept and crush any eggs being transported on spoons by Team Human, before they were put into the safe haven of the base. It was wild. There was running, yelling, giggling, and rather more tackling than intended. The rules may be adjusted next year. We were super popular with the seagulls.

The hill looked a lot bigger from the other side. It took me a while to get back up, particularly as I realized I should put my sandals back on halfway up. By the time I got back, the line for foot washing was nearly clear. It's amazing how much sand you wind up wearing, though I think I was wearing less sand than I had been wearing glitter.

We had nachos and played games. It was good.

In May, Eurovision!


Sunday: Called Purple to ask what he was up to, since I was headed down for Palo Alto for a hack day meetup. He registered intent to spend the day in quiet contemplation of the sins of some of his hardware. (He always sounds so surprised and pleased to hear from me on the phone.) So I got done a few things before heading down, and had a nice afternoon working on this and that with R and talking about the Northern Lights with her and the other lady there.

Upon reaching home, I finally started getting the (now previous) Media Tower bookshelf unloaded of all its accessories and electronics, and moved the small Ikea table to its new place. I shall now figure out what exactly to do about placing the other elements, but I think that was one of the more difficult/obnoxious parts.


I still have no idea what I'm going to do to celebrate April Fool's Day. It's quite literally a religious holiday for me, which means I take offense at the assholes who have mistaken playing nasty tricks for foolery (although goodness knows the trickster gods are not what we would call nice). (Just because the gods get away with being asshats doesn't mean that humans should get away with that shit.) The coherent version of this rant is: "What happens when someone takes your prank seriously? Who gets hurt, and how badly?" Therefore I tend to prefer absurdist and surreal installations rather than taking advantage of my friends' willingness to trust my word on things.

Last year I put an appropriate error message in a room which someone else had inexplicably decorated as the inside of a Windows XP box. (It had been a perfectly functional break room. Then it got a corporate branded "cloud" makeover, and I just took it to the next level, complete with start button that played the startup noise.) This year I don't have the same platforms available to me. We'll see what happens.