13:49 Saturday, 17 January, 2015
Today I woke up, decided to have a nice lie-in, and lolled about in bed for a bit. Pelvic floor exercises may have been involved. So then I rolled over to get out of bed and felt that peculiar sensation and ran *very carefully* to the bathroom, to find that one of the epic, epic blood clots had fallen out into my underwear. If I had "nice" underwear anymore, it would have been stained into ruin. As it is, it's merely stained, and it's been rinsed so the blood will drip out of it and won't cause a scene no matter how late I am with the laundry.

22:46 Sunday, 18 January, 2015
The thing about starting a tale "There are way too many $NAMEs in my life, so I label them; this was Shrimpy $NAME..." is that when you are done with the tale, the other guys at the lunch table are looking at you bright-eyed, and then ask, "So which one..." and nudge a shoulder in the direction of the engineer who has brought you to this lunch table. Because clearly they have a grasp of the important issues.

"Purple," you answer.

"That's not so bad," they murmur.

Purple provides further color commentary, and the guys nod understandingly.

00:01 Wednesday, 21 January, 2015
My weekend was sort of a mess. The theme turned out to be "flooding". There were the events of Friday, of course. Then there was Saturday night.

Saturday night was going to be the night where I stayed in and watched the code push roll and kept on top of the comments. Then, about 5 minutes before push time, came a conversation shaped approximately* like:

Tif: Azz, what's your weekend like?
Azz: uh, sleep? maybe?
Tif: could I get a ride to Home Depot for a wet/dry vac tomorrow if I order it tonight?
Azz: sure?
Tif: OH THANK FUCK YOU'LL NEVER GUESS WHAT MY WASHING MACHINE JUST DID ALL OVER MY KITCHEN FLOOR AND IT'S SPREADING TO THE LIVING ROOM
Azz: Hold that thought, let me see if my shopvac swings both ways.
Azz: So, guess what! Also, I'm bringing the steam cleaner. Have pants on; I ride at midnight.

* actually it was 12:30-ish, by the time I left

So that happened. Which was why by the time it was all over, we swung by a diner for much needed breakfast lunch dinner breakfast, and then I didn't get to sleep until 9:30am because Costco gas was almost open by the time I passed that way, and then I was a little hyped up, and ... yeah.

So my sleep schedule was a little discombobulated all weekend, culminating in going to bed around 8pm on Monday, waking up at 11, only realizing it was because I was hungry at 12:30 ... and nothing in the kitchen looked like food. So it took a while to get back to sleep after that, and then I was up and out the door and actually to work before my first alarm went off. It was just as well, because there was a conference meeting, early-ish.

The thing about PCOS is that you find yourself accepting situations like "and then I bled through my second overnight pad of the day in under 4 hours" in stride, and people like Madam Standards are looking at you aghast and saying things like "And why didn't you get me to drive you to the hospital!??!" because apparently for the more typical uterus, this is a bloody nightmare.

Party committee kickoff went all right, if sparsely attended. I had a few words of caution: yes, by all means, improve on last year, but don't get into a game of one-upmanship with last year.

At lunch, I keep being The One With The Internet. So I showed the guys what Purple meant by "caber toss". The Rollercoaster Tycoon hung around to chat with Purple and me as the other guys wandered off. He's a very energetic fellow, and we'll miss him.

On the way out from lunch, I explained to Purple that flooding had been the theme of the weekend. "And there was Friday, of course," I said.

"Refresh my memory? One or two words?" he asked.

I could have been deeply obnoxious, but instead of the verboten #bloodcannon, I chose the tame but evocative "Menstruation."

Rollercoaster Tycoon, who sits in the same building as Purple and hadn't yet entirely split off from our little group, would have done a spittake had he been drinking anything.

I feel a little overwhelmed by the number of demands on my troubleshooty nature. There are three distinct things at work. Researcher Haystack is Shocked and Appalled by some of the shenanigans of some on-premise-hosted software the team is considering, but compared to *cough* the current thing, he nearly fell out of his chair when the external vendor's thing turns out to be night and day better than the homebrew thing with the wack UI actually is.

It could have been a milkshake day, but the meeting overlapped that.

The former intern who is leaving so unexpectedly soon (announced today, last week is this week) is doing so because his wife is going back to Korea to accept a much-hoped-for university teaching position. Which, if you're doing that, that is an entirely legit reason! The ladies (the Dogesitter, the visual designer who shares the office with the very buff guy, and Designer Sparkles) were talking about how sharing offices tends to mean that someone leaves. I noticed that Sparkles phrased it as "and [Overlady] kicked her officemate out" even though, in the most technical sense, Haystack is the one who has remained with the company and on the team. (Exceptions include, of course, the Stage Manager and Non-Boring Manager, who have been roommates forever, Madam Standards and the Norseman, and the lady with the tiny dustmop dogs and the Hawaiian Shirt Dev. The Monkey House used to have three, and now it has two because the guy from Bulgaria chose the peace and quiet of a cube, so now it's just the two skinny blond bearded white guys who are fortunately different heights so I can tell them apart reliably. Not to mention all the people off in other buildings.)

Some of the recruiters were making the rounds, hoping to see some of the more unusual things people have done with cubes. It was "our guy" (someone the others recognized but I didn't), who was giving the tour to someone from Cambridge and someone from Home Office, Arizona. I shared espresso beans. I don't have much out of the ordinary wall-wise, but the interior is an entirely different matter. Most people's cubes do not contain a large metal rooster, a disco ball, a very tiny mini fridge, or a couch. To say nothing of the loon hat.

The evening saw me rapidly getting cranky to where Everything was Terrible, more so than Friday night, as I told Purple. Friday night had been hilarious, if horrifying. This was tedious and I was cranky. Unfortunately, this was not the helpful sort of cranky that lets me successfully explain why the suggested fix is insufficient. Sometimes you ride the flux, sometimes the flux rides you. Declining to explain Emory, I instead found a snack, and that made many things better.

My friend's department has discovered that the helldesk software generates flowcharts. They are really, really, really inexplicable things, and a source of wonder and terror all at once.

Some of the helldesk software tickets are reaching revolving-door level epic status. The Stage Manager and I are both generally of the opinion that until the fix is live, we stay on an open ticket about the issue. To make matters even better, the helldesk software is now issuing duplicate notifications about each change, one for each type of tracking number. (There are two now, thanks to the hilarious way they stuffed the implementation in sideways at the beginning in an attempt to not scare the horses. Things done to "not scare the horses" tend to be ... less good ... if the 'horses' are in fact Companions...)

It was, however, time to go home. I poked Purple and he came to collect me. His hair was freshly washed, and formed spirals that shone silkily in the lights of the parking lot. The top of his head was fluffy. Because both of our brains went there, I told him that no, he was not a pink fluffy unicorn. "You're a Purple fluffy unicorn!" I told him.

It turns out that "purple unicorn" is now on the List of Unfortunate Phrases. "One-eyed purple unicorn" is worse, and "one-eyed weeping purple unicorn" is just right out. From there it was a quick step to Weeping Angels. (Steph declares that Weeping Angels, like loon units, do not belong in the pants.)

#dammitpurple is not a regular hashtag in my things. #AzureLsInTrouble is, but that's a slightly different thing.

Fetched dinner, and about a zillion tubs of cold soup for when nothing else is food. Did laundry. Reloaded laundry card. Checked mail. It was a good mail day, all told:
* spam
* W-2
* utility statement
* two free drink cards from Starbucks because their survey sucked
* my 2015 sticker from the DMV

So that's my tomorrow morning before work sorted then! An alcohol wipe, a sticker, and a coffee. I can live with that.

I arrived at work to find that someone had brought in their extra Halloween candy, and had topped off my pumpkin and had left the rest on the team table. To my delight, it included some of the large lemonheads, which are among my favorites. (They are also enjoyed by both my Overlady and our manager.) I saved out most of them. :D

I also learned that someone had added me to the cc: list on an email thread about some piece of infrastructure which had gone down over the weekend. I learned: a lot of the thread is about adding people to the cc: list; it came back up by itself; they would be investigating why it had gone down; one of the main people who should have been called was not reached in a timely fashion; this is because they were calling her cellphone and not her landline; she has a landline for the express purpose of being called by work because her cellphone flakes out at home; her preferred name is not the name in the directory. Then I emailed the guy who had added me privately, and asked whether I was the [name] he'd meant to add because I don't actually support that service.

The fucking email filter chewed on some customer responses that I was waiting for in arranging participants for Researcher Sweatervest. No permanent harm done though.

Even though the phrase is short and evocative, I should avoid "bloodcannon" around Purple, as it's ... a bit too evocative. But that was why I spent the weekend mostly asleep, in pain, or both.

I remember lunch conversation as being good; I can't remember offhand what-all it was, although some of it was movies and video games. One of the newer guys on Purple's old team, the one who makes kind of a point of wearing sweatpants when he can get away with it, was dressed up (for him) in a red polo shirt and khakis. "Heyyy, you're dressed up!" someone said. "You got an interview?" someone else teased. "At Target?" I added, and then immediately said "I'm sorry, that was mean." Good times were had.

The guy who moved out from the Monkey House into the cube back behind me wondered why there was no action on his move ticket. So I called helpdesk. Twenty minutes of hold time later, I learned that while the Stage Manager had verbally approved the move, he also had to approve it in helldesk. So helpdesk walked me through the procedure, and then I went and walked him through the procedure.

My jellybeans arrived. Jelly Belly sells "belly flops" at a slight discount. Gimbal's sells "bumble beans". The Stage Manager asked why so many of these beans were stuck together. I explained that these were the imperfect ones which had been sorted out from the rest. "Like me," he said.

And then I 1:1-ed with my manager, who had an update on a question that I've been checking on for a while; wasn't the best answer and wasn't the worst answer.

lb dropped by. That was good. I showed him my new jellybeans. Some of the stuck-together ones were pink and looked like butts. #grownassadults

I did some data entry while listening to the greater department all-hands. I wandered up to the top of the hill for the post-all-hands debrief shindig, and complimented She Who Put That All Together. We compared notes on a few things. I also got a chance to talk with the Polka-Dot Researcher, who confirmed that yes, she and her officemate (last year's Party Commandant) are planning to co-chair the upcoming year's team+ conference. Good times!

Designer Sparkles is headed off to do the tech equivalent of missionary work for the next three weeks, and I had some printing to do for her. This resulted in the discovery that somehow the goddamn three-hole punch had disappeared from the mail room again. This resulted in an office depot order in high dudgeon after a tour around the first floor entirely failed to produce the instrument.

Purple came to retrieve me. He picked some Starbursts. I presented him with a roll of Smarties which I'd saved out for him. We wandered out chatting about three-hole punches, and how I am on the point of asking helpdesk for a tie-down or something to keep it in the mail room. From there we somehow got off onto crying at work. We've both done it.

I will three-hole-punch tomorrow.

I ran a brief mission for Sass, hooray! I will attempt to fit a trip to the post office into my schedule tomorrow.

Bonus: Steve vs. Electricity; tiny!Azz vs. the Honda Civic.

I've been in a bit of a fog all week, and today was I think the worst. I woke up at 5am (not unusual) and stumbled to the bathroom (utterly normal), on my way colliding with the bookshelf (which has been there for five years) painfully (though it seems to have not left a mark). Then I couldn't get back to sleep until 9. I wisely unset my alarm. It took a while to head off to work.

Shenanigans related to 2nd Thursday continue. Shenanigans related to the new helpdesk software continue. I have Opinions.

Purple was still out. Wednesday he knew he was contagious and worked from home. Thursday he was pretty much nonfunctional. Today he was apparently mostly functional but still coughing.

My buddy phone from #cupcake had leftover lemon bars that he brought in to share. Currently #cupcake has three representatives in building B and three in D. However, Purple was out sick still, and lb was off celebrating an anniversary. That left three #cupcake denizens in D. So we converged around our downstairs kitchen and had a bit of a chat.

Later, phone got to meet a few folks on my team over beer. I wasn't feeling terribly well at that point; by the time my everything stopped hurting, there was no food left. C'est la vie. Also, when The Norseman talks, I generally have to listen a second time. The combination of low volume, low pitch, accent, and I'm probably not watching to lip-read, is pretty dire for getting it on the first try.

( Menstrual shenanigans. )


A brief timeline of hugs:
( Read more... )


My attention span is suffering. I think I need more sleep, and more hours in the day.

I have handed off Indexing to Purple, as I think this will be a great introduction to Seanan for him. He's already been introduced to Mira's writing.

For some reason, Purple said "Hello Mudder hello Fadder" at lunch, followed by "I love that song." I brightened, and informed him that one of my very favorite literary formats was the non-reassuring letter home. He was briefly baffled, so I started composing: "Dear Mama: Don't worry, we're all mostly safe now, and the doctor says that the worst of the injuries will be healed up in a couple weeks." He brightened in his turn, and we spent a while trying to yes-and each other's allusions to horrible events past and arguably ongoing. "I like the way your brain works." "Likewise." We beamed at each other.

Did I say that my team now knows where we're going? We know where we're going. (Mostly.) ( Shenanigans. Also, blood. )

I managed to score a parking spot within a holler of the door. Well, maybe a hoot and a holler.

Thence, deskwork. Loads of deskwork. I did things and called people and emailed people and still feel like I'm sort of behind, but at least it's a kind of behind that comes with progress and stuff emanating from the department of the people who handle some of the murkier tickets.

Somewhere in there, I found food.

There were supposed to be games tonight, but in between all the deskwork, I was also bewilderedly and dizzily menstruating my marrow out. So I decided that I was not going anywhere not on my own floor, and stayed pretty close to my desk. (My favorite. Data entry.)

My manager dropped by and told me of the plans for tomorrow. The Junior Researcher dropped by and chatted about swag. I tottered past the Renaissance Man's office to drop off my plate, and on the way back we chatted a bit, including a bro-fistbump for having shared the experience of freezing the bottoms of our feet off in really stupid ways when much younger. Neither of us lost toes to the experience.

Chatted with Kat for a bit on the way home. She will have finished watching Pacific Rim by this time, and I hope she has enjoyed it for what it is.

I was the last customer through at the Costco gas place. Then I curled up in front of the computer for some refreshing funtimes with a new set of the usual suspects.

My little fish got some good news on the college front today. Yay!

• Sat, 13:28: In the future, a makerbot will individually place the batter-coated fruits from a known good fruitcake matrix into the pan for making.
• Sat, 14:32: Alas, I think I need a supplementary backup drive, but probably not this month.
• Sat, 17:03: Photo: unbuttonedinawood: i never thought i’d write the words “deeply evil carpet” but. seriously. what a... http://t.co/hD78dlr8lj
• Sat, 18:27: I think the best adjective this month is "profuse". #PCOS
• Sat, 19:12: Falling asleep while playing card games on phone.
• Sat, 22:09: on the usage of "and" in advertising - thegreatgodum: fun fact of the day it is totally legal for an ad to... http://t.co/e6JgaRkJMw
• Sat, 22:11: Photoset: cmkz: . http://t.co/Wb0c3yNHoG
• Sat, 22:29: Photo: escapedgoat: Gentrification is real http://t.co/RWUEi8f7IV
• Sat, 22:49: RT @doingitwrong: The @tomscocca thing on smarm is as good as all the people who linked before reading to the end told you it was. http://t…
• Sat, 22:53: RT @NickHanauer: Federal min wage of $7.25 would be $10.50 if it had tracked inflation, $21 if it had tracked productivity.

( Read more... )

The good:

So after having said "I don't know where I'm going to get sufficiently horrible candy at this hour!" to Drew, I found that Safeway served my needs well and inexpensively. Gloriously equipped, and attired in basic black with my fabulous trainwreck of an Easter/Pride hat atop my head, I set off. While resetting my calendar for the month, I cleared my usual candy dish offerings and put out the hilariously wrong stuff.

My Overlady examined my hair and approved. There is a very subtle navy halo that you can miss if you're not looking for it. She looked at the candy. "This is candy that should not exist," she said.

Later, the Stage Manager stopped by (as he does) and looked at my candy dish. "Aww," he said, in some disappointment, upon not finding chocolate.

"Happy April Fool's Day," I said.

He took a Peep.


It was the sort of day where you plow through stuff and you are simultaneously surprised that the day has just disappeared, and feel like you could and should have accomplished more (despite having done rather a lot). I plotted my trajectory, packed up my rooster and a few things, and headed for San Francisco. A random lady on BART complimented me on my hat and asked for a picture.

I arrived at Books, Inc. early, got the book, and settled down to reading, giggling out loud intermittently. (This is apparently an expected side effect.) They set up chairs. I got a nice seat near the front. The lady behind me complimented me on my hat and asked for a picture.

TheBloggess appeared, and explained that she'd taken her anxiety meds, arrived early, and had taken refuge in the bar next door. When the meds hadn't hit, well ... and then, inevitably, the meds *and* the drinks hit her all at once, right at go time. So there she was. We applauded and cheered -- it seems that at her events, we know from anxiety. (She also mentioned that basically the whole audience has meds on them, and in event of an emergency, will be generous. Which sounds about right, and got another big cheer.)

She talked about stuff, and did a reading, and answered questions. ( Read more... )


I took a few minutes to gather myself together before heading in a general busward direction. To my delight, I was not the only person to have brought a rooster. The other rooster was a good four feet high, with peacock feathers in his tail. I was sorry to leave without more time to chatter with the good folks there, but I thought I'd left enough time for chatter after before the bus home, and hadn't looked up later trips.



The bad:

It helps if you don't forget your water bottle at home. Fortunately I did have a bottle of sparkling fruit juice, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.


I was dredging through the lower end of my to-do list, having cleared my inbox effectively enough. This meant working with the database. It was thus that I discovered that you cannot add the same person multiple times to the same study. This is a problem, because it's meant to be able to do this, to log multiple points of contact with the person regarding the study, and for studies spanning multiple months with multiple instances of participation from the same individual.

Also, the pagination is ridiculous. Ten or twenty (depending on the page) results at a time? Which would be less bad if there were a way to pull it all at once. There is not. It would be less bad if the sort sorted by all, not just by that fucking page.

There are bugs filed. The severity is Critical, because I want to be able to go up a step to Catastrophic if things get worse.


It appears to be time for my uterus to misbehave entertainingly. ( TMI )

Since I've seen at least three separate people mention this sort of thing today, and I myself am having that sort of week...

( Cut for those uninterested in talk of menstrual gear. )

I have the best friend in the universe. I know this because I called him today while I was waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in. My uterus is not happy with me today, and it was not wasting any time in letting me know this. I didn't even feel like I could read. My vocabulary was drastically limited because I couldn't string two coherent thoughts together. I couldn't actually laugh because doing so would disturb my uterus.

My best friend kept me company as the ibuprofen kicked in, and managed to distract me enough so that the half-hour was not the utter agony it could have been.

Most of the actual conversation was somewhat bizarre and probably didn't make much sense. That was OK. He was concerned about my lack of coherent, but once I explained he settled down, although he did recommend a nice warm bath. (That would still be nice.) When I mentioned Dawn's hosed phone, he got me good by pulling a hurt-and-angry on the "If that's what it takes to get her to call me...!", then laughed at me when I apologized. Moment of panic, thinking I'd hurt the dearest man to me in the world.

Once I finally started to feel better, he complained about TMI. "You mean it's TMI when I tell you my uterus doesn't hurt, but it's not TMI when I tell you it does? ... Or it was TMI then too, and you just weren't complaining because I was in so much pain."

He gets cranky when I tell him he's sweet. But he is. ♥