The funniest today was, some time after I had stubbornly shoved Esme's terrible folding rental wheelchair up three storeys worth of stairs (wide-ish ones) we discovered what looked like dog poo on a wheel.

The least funny was Vash losing power on 5 and needing my partner to come help me navigate getting a tow.

It's been that kind of day.

Weekend!

Saturday, I drove down to Sunnyvale and toured an apartment complex. I liked it. We'll see if/when my raise comes through. (Purple says that on this one, I'm a dude.)

Vash gave me a bit of trouble on the way back, so I should see about getting him checked out.

So on Saturday, everybody got a note through the door that "investor inspections" were imminent. So much of the rest of my long weekend was either housework, or fervently ignoring housework. I am not Actively Displeased with the current state of the apartment, however I am not Pleased either. The packing has been making this easier, and I suppose the cleaning has helped the packing.

Tuesday:
Got a message from the Commandant that she was out sick, and I should take point on this morning's meeting. Okay! So I did some last laundry-roundup and vacuuming, and went off to work in good time to walk up to the secret milkshake bunker, saying hi to Purple on my way as he was coming in. He was in search of Beldorion. I thought I vaguely knew where he sat, but I was at the wrong end of the wrong floor of the wrong building. (Purple was able to find him okay, though.) The heavy equipment I'd seen at the end of the parking lot turned out to be unloading a whole bunch of trees; they looked like small redwoods in large wooden planters.

The Dean is ringleading the playing of a cricket tournament on the big screen. It turns out that none of the cable networks that we get seem to be running it, but there's an online thing. Some of the guys waxed enthusiastic. Yay for them.

The meeting went well! We have a better idea of what we're looking for this year, and some of last year's cracktastic experiments won't be repeated. I mentioned some of the constraints, like gluten-free, and that cut out Hawaiian as a theme, as all their soy sauce has lurking wheat. Partway through the meeting, the lady from catering spluttered and pointed out the window. For all the world like a tall ship under full sail, the top half of a redwood cruised by smoothly. For a brief fantastic moment I thought: Wow, it must be windy out today. Then, as the forklift emerged from behind the wall, the absurdity of the thought struck me. Another two redwoods followed it, to our collective giggles. We called our attention back to the task at hand, and got into logistics and table rental. We shall inquire to see whether there are cafe tables which can be pulled from storage before we see about rentals. From around the corner coming the other direction scuttled one of those same redwoods, beating a hasty retreat from who knows what ent-eater.

On the way back, I wound up telling Madam Standards about the time Shawn tried to make mac-and-cheese.

Purple sent out the lunch ping. Just then, one of the engineers who had through main force of will not screamed about the helldesk software on the You Must Be At Least This High In The Org Chart For This Ride field trip, had a question about how one shipped things. I had answers! I wound up creating a shipping ticket for him, and he jumped through the hoops to get his own login, as he sees himself shipping in the future. This did render me a bit on the late side to lunch, but that was all right.

Mr. Zune: "Is someone else about to be introduced to the Sticky Box?"

I left the shipping ticket on top of the Sticky Box for the engineer to find if he came back before I did.

My choice of food includes prep/waiting time as well as content, so it was the wok for me, even though that would result in picking out hot and cold peppers. There was a seat next to Purple, which I happily claimed. I grumbled about the housecleaning and apartment search some. I had a fantastic headache by that time. Purple told tales of one apartment he'd moved out of, where the place was going to be demolished after he left. The guys had told him he could "have fun", but he'd been too exhausted from moving to do anything entertaining like write on the wall in something that looked like human blood. Somehow this resulted in escalating jokes, with a live goat tethered (with food and water) in the middle of a salt pentagram ("Oh, I would have thought the sacrifice would have been accepted by now!"). Purple joked about using glitter in spells, and I started giggling. That made my head pound. "Oh god, I shouldn't be laughing," I said. Purple patted me on the back and allowed how he possibly shouldn't have been joking about that either. "No no, it's that I have a headache," I wheezed. Then I told him about a certain infamous writer of spellbooks who suggested glitter as a substitute for candles. Not to represent fire, but as a focus object. "So that's why you have a disco ball!" he declared. I mentioned that I might have possibly unnerved people in the past with the giant Christmas light pentagram on my ceiling in college. Heh.

The engineer had picked up the shipping ticket by the time I got back, and mentioned that my cube is certainly unique.

Lunch and lack of sleep and stress and dehydration seem to have been the headache, because post-lunch, caffeine, hydration, and giggles put me pretty much right.

Mid-afternoon, I looked out the window at just the right moment and saw two heads, one golden and one dark-with-a-bald-patch, walking past. It was clearly lb and Purple, going in the general direction of the milkshake bunker, walking fast. I had a quiet Moment -- a pang of left-out, and a swell of happiness that they were getting friend-time that they clearly needed to have. The happiness won, but not without a little bittersweet thread. But I don't have to be part of everything. In fact, I probably have more than my fair share of Purple's time. I can't begrudge another of his good friends some alone-time, in context of that.

Lennon Glasses Guy showed up for the speakers just as I was heading into my research meeting. I directed him where to find it: loon head, fridge, right next to the fridge. In the research meeting, Researcher Carmageddon picked my brain about things we'd like to know that I collected as a matter of course when they came up. They will come up with a list and cross-check. It is the time of year that Researcher Sweatervest has become chilly again, so he was wearing one of his namesake sweatervests. This one looked nicer, and new. Polka-Dot is out sick, and Haystack seems to be out of state due to a death in the family, but had called in.

In conference-driven development news, the Dreamwidth development activity makes me happy, and sometime when my hair is not trying to catch figurative fire I need to sit down and go through code tours looking for docs bugs.

Things in the helldesk software keep getting fixed from time to time. Apparently broken attachments had been un-broken. I cruised into the quiet room to assess the state of the stain, which was non-crusty, probably a drink spill. Then I went into my own building's relaxation room, took a picture of the sad little room with its foosball table, and emailed in a ticket suggesting that if an unloved but unbroken couch could be found in storage, this would make the room a little less sad -- both answering an actual need and testing the attachment situation, which seems indeed to have been remedied. (Trust, but verify.)

In clearing through my inbox, I paused and actually read one of the [off-topic] posts that I'd skimmed earlier in the day, and then paused again.

#cupcake
ajl: from [off-topic], regarding a cricket tournament: "We could always streak it from the laptop."
ajl: does some gentleman on [off-topic] feel like making a private reply including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaking ? I feel this is a disambiguation vs. "streaming" which should not come from a lady.
Upon which statement, several corners inquired whether "lady" really applied in this instance.

Purple had a programming situation which eventually turned out to be an unexpected NULL instead of the nice little object the program was expecting. Mommas, don't let your variables grow up to be un-initialized.

I wanted to get one last email finished before going home. It was quick, but Purple still arrived while I was wrapping up, and put out the Beacon and curled up on the nearby couch with his iPad for a few moments. "I should have waited for a reply instead of just coming over, huh," he smiled.

The parking lot saw terrible stories of dudes setting fire to their packages on video, plus other tales of fire and nether regions. (Hint: "I just got a new high-speed camera!" is not a good reason to light a fart. Sometimes, Purple's friends can pull dumbass stunts too.) We chatted through The Aristocrats, my lack of balance and the attendant jazzhands, and that time that I was the person doing the crazy religious ranting on the bus. I'm okay with informational embargo while a hole gets patched, but er. Ahem. Purple was understanding. My knees were not so understanding. His tire still has a nail in it. There was an owl, but only one this time. Perhaps it's in the owl-house, and not a cardboard box? Or perhaps it's in a redwood.

Purple got roped into doing a thing tomorrow and Thursday, so his lunch availability is low. My team probably gets custody of me, then, or maybe I shall join lb's table.

I chatted with Amber on the way home. Home included a relieving lack of paper stuffed in my doorframe.

Tomorrow will be another day. Thursday will be another inspection (announced Monday morning). Bluh.

06:13 Saturday, 10 January, 2015
Further in the department of eerie similarities, Purple and I have stomachs with similar opinions about the thought of a too-early breakfast in most cases. Though I have harder limits on the other end -- if I wait more than three hours, I'm likely to also be in trouble.

00:44 Tuesday, 13 January, 2015
Things I have done: renewed my car's registration, done my smog.
Things which have not yet happened: got the stickers.
Things which have happened: got pulled over to check that everything was in order because I didn't have my stickers on yet.

My heart rate is mostly normal again (this is the third-and-a-half time I have been pulled over in ~19 years of driving; the first was a headlight out in Alaska, the second was for a FasTrak and Arizona plates, the half was accidentally getting between the cop car and the person they were actually pulling over which took *talent* let me tell you!) and now this. So I do not have experience with this. Even though I am demographically very safe as far as encounters with police go, it gives me the shakes. So the cute young white nerd-boy fencer type cop making small talk while he ran my license and confirmed that yes, I had in fact re-upped all the things and just didn't have my stickers yet, was really surreal.

My laundry will be out of the dryer in a little bit. By then I may be ready to go to bed.

So Friday had a beer bash, at which I actually didn't feel like even any of the sangria. I had a great time chatting with lb and radius and Mr. Netflix; Mr. Zune joined the table as well, with his amazingly fluorescent yellow sweatshirt with the reflective stripes. He'd said it was amazingly bright; the lint it gave off said it was amazingly bright; the lint made it look greener than it actually was. By comparison, the tie-dye orange and white shirt that radius was wearing? So very, very, very tame. Mr. Wizard Beard passed by and said hi.

"We were talking about you this morning," he said. "[Somebody] was telling me how you were yelling at [vendor], and I was like, 'That is the $NAME we know and love, that sounds like something she would do!'"

"... Except it wasn't me," I said.

So there are two $NAMEs at work who berate misbehaving vendors for great justice.


Purple had sat down with various people from his team, at the next table over. I shifted my attention back and forth, but mostly stuck with my table. After a while, Purple came over, snagging the chair that Mr. Zune had abandoned. Other people scattered as well. In the end, it was lb, Purple, and me.

I was introduced to "Fine Art", or, "Data's painting is making me dizzy." It is very much a thing that has Come From The Internet.


We contemplated going over to the fire pit. People were there. We contemplated (without going over there) the sorts of conversation which would possibly cause co-workers to scatter. "A nice coconut glaze" was involved, and phrases which might make Jonathan Swift spray coffee.

As we got up to head in various directions, one of the lights illuminating a tree shone in people's eyes, between Purple's legs. "I'm Old Gregg!" he proclaimed.

Old Gregg, from The Almighty Boosh, had been mentioned in my presence before. I then hunted down and watched the episode when I got home. I do not believe that I would recommend it to 100% of my readers.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0647529/
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xz1pqk_the-legend-of-old-gregg_fun

This thing is nearly 10 years old now. Some parts of the episode are hilarious and I would recommend them to anybody; the thing where Vince the fishing neophyte is in the boat is particularly nice. Some are ... things that I would issue warnings about.

( Discussion of the thing; involves gender, anatomy, and 2005-era clowning with same as super unfunny and harmful stereotypes. )

So ... that's a thing I saw, all right.


Saturday, I went on a shopping run with Tif. There were some bridge shenanigans, so I decided to go the long way. We did some errands in Mountain View, then went across the bay for dinner and kitty litter. Cat videos led to owl videos, which resulted in a discussion of owl cafes and how easy it is to accidentally domesticate wild owls (very; they're smart birds of prey who like to know where their next meal is coming from). Since we were on the approach to the exit I take for work (en route to coffee), that reminded me of the discussion I'd had with Purple about owls living in cardboard boxes. "So there are jobs for them if they can't work in the forest anymore," I said, and followed it up with deeper absurdity. "They can go to work in a cafe instead of being in the unemployment line."

It is good to have a cane to retrieve bags of kitty litter from the back of the deep deep shelf. I pulled another one forward for the next person, as I might as well not make them summon a minion to climb up there and get it when I had the means of retrieval directly to hand.

I am plotting a Valentine's Day hat. It has the potential to be magnificent or terrible.

We did get to see Dorothy, our favorite cashier, on our way out the door. She looked more shrunken and tired than I remember her. :(

Into the Woods' earworm duration is about a week for Tif as well. She'd managed to compound it by singing "Into the lift to leave the mall to go to dinner!" on the way out with a whole crowd of lolita-gowned ladies and one bemused guy in a suit.

Sunday I finished Ancillary Justice, which I'd started a week ago but put down when I felt poorly and started to hurt unbearably. Last week, I'd been having trouble engaging, and felt it was slow going. I also was having trouble regulating my body temperature and other unpleasant details. This week was much better, and between one thing and the other, I had to stay up until I had finished it. I must now get my hands on the next book and also start reading all the various meta which I have been carefully avoiding.

( Some spoilers, I think. )

In terms of fannish expression, I was suddenly taken with a desire to make for myself a set of small jeweled pins to represent current and past major people, places, and events in my life. I feel like icon sets represent the same sort of thing for the LJ/DW people I know, and I am super curious what sorts of pins other people would have. I wouldn't mind seeing that spread around the fandom, with or without concept art. It may help that I was decanting a whole long bunch of buttons which no longer fit my Purple Hat into a drawer that night...

Today (Monday) I joined work with Lunch already in progress. There was some giggling. Later, I did some dredging through terrible ticketage, and came up with the yelly-faced conclusion that it's not just *any* tickets we're unexpectedly locked out of, but facilities tickets, which is just a motherfucker of a situation. In IRC, I used phrasing such as "clogged all the urinals with jolly ranchers" to illustrate the sort of situation that other people in the building would legitimately need to know about, but toned it down for the ticket.

Eventually it came almost four, and that saw both Mr. Zune and me in search of ice cream. We chatted by the fire pit. The Angry Tattooed Man came by, and was introduced to Mr. Zune. It may have been Thursday that he'd recommended http://www.yelp.com/biz/rabbits-foot-meadery-sunnyvale-3 to me. I need to do another compilation of Things Azz Should Not Do At Work, as those are often amusing.

After more whacking my face against my email and the thingy, it came time to go home. I was nearly actually all packed up by the time Purple came over. (I had also figured out a thing to do with shelves, and the loon head was proudly displayed.) We chatted in the parking lot. My knees started to get mad, so we walked all the way down to Vash, and chatted some more. Ducks are terrible parents. Our geese, for all the evil inherent in the species, were good parents, and Friendly was friendly and Tou-Tou was loyal.

I explained some context around how much Thursday's casual treatment of the speech-crash-with-napkin-conversation had meant to me, including some terrible generalities about Shawn as a conversationalist. And yet, Shawn is the terrible ex I'm still willing to speak to. I explained the time BJ and Darkside met, and BJ's takeaway from the encounter. (Darkside is a half-inch taller than I am, and at the time I believe he might have been pushing 120 when soaking wet. Scrawny little geekboy. BJ tops six foot, and has a good 30+ pounds on Darkside. Somehow, BJ left with the impression of a guy who towered over him by at least an inch, and who could absolutely take him.)

It's the terrible exes who get the wacky stories. I gave a brief tour through some of my excellent to not-so-bad exes (and the two reading this? Excellent.)

I got to the takeaway place 10 minutes before official closing, but after they'd turned off the lights (it was, after all, a slow Monday night). I got a bit extra for my troubles, though the selection was what it was. They seemed mildly pleased to have an extra sale and that much less waste.

So it was even later by the time I drove home, and we know how that went. I did check the mailbox on my way up from the laundry. No stickers yet.

Car: retrieved, operational.
Self: exhausted, naptime.

Car is still in shop for Replacement 3 of the offending parts; this time they're using OEM parts, and the second part has yet to arrive as of 3:30-ish today. So bus again. At least the BART strike is over (for now) so the SamTrans stops are not fucked like they were during the strike. (For whatever reason, the SamTrans stops that were inside BART grounds rather than adjacent were moved to be adjacent, causing general chaos and confusion and also me standing around sockless in the cold fog for an hour last night.)

We've figured out how to shave a little time off the commute. By catching the other bus instead of the one bus, we can catch the long haul a good twenty minutes into its haul, instead of at the beginning. By repeating the process in the other direction, we can ditch an hour due to the flaky connection with the late-running bus. But beware, as the earliest departure time from work is just about the right amount of time to catch the last of that bus. (However, if we've missed it entirely, we can continue to the end of the line and get the late bus. Which is hourly. And a long wait.)

Tomorrow it happens again. Tomorrow there is also the chance that I get to meet some of the more interesting, if not affable, fellows from an adjacent department, due to scheduling hilarity. It's unlikely that I'll be gravely needed, but I'll be at work anyway. Robin Sparkles and I were chatting over lunch, and the topic came up; I got to tell the tale of my introduction to the guy that she thought I was talking about. I've honed the story, it's now down to: "And then I found out how poorly the following elements combined: [off-topic] list, the phrase "with all due respect", the phrase "bite me", and the reply-all feature."


The commute is made reasonable via podcasts, which I was going to describe to somebody but the comment is surely piled under several hundred others in my inbox now, and gods know when I'm going to dig out. So:

The Nerdist: Newly subscribed, yet to listen.
Competitive Erotic Fan Fiction: ditto
Today We Learned: ditto ditto
Nerdist Writers Panel: ditto ditto ditto


How I Met Your Mother: ditto again, and I'm really looking forward to a creator-side view.

KQED: This Week in Northern California: I'm not sure this is updating. I need a better local news type podcast. Also maybe some actual weather.

NPR Programs: Wait Wait Don't Tell Me: Mostly enjoyable with some cringeworthy moments.

NPR Programs: Fresh Air: I like that the format includes both long stories and little snippets. I'm not as charmed by the way the weekend one repeats stuff I've already heard, but that can sometimes get weeded out.

NPR Topics: World Story of the Day: Informative. Short, and can be used as buffer between long-format.

MSNBC Rachel Maddow: Yay Rachel Maddow! Politics news that doesn't make me want to get stabby (well, not at Rachel, and someone else saying WHAT THE FUCK NO I MEAN WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE makes me less stabby in general).

Fandomania: Fannish type stuff. Updates weekly. Decent but I'm not super enthused.

SF Squeecast: Seanan's on it and it's awesome. Various speculative fiction type writers talking about generally fannish related things that delight them, with bonus witty banter, hilarity, and occasionally cat-related incidents like Alice trying to eat Seanan's microphone.

Slashreport: Podcast of my heart. This is the podcast that convinced me that maybe I should listen to podcasts, and then it reminded me that hey, I grew up with radio, maybe audio format was a good thing for me.

Welcome to Night Vale: Speculative fiction radio show of my heart. Clicks hard with a lot of people; doesn't click hard with some. I'm one of the ones for whom it clicked. Hard. And I fell in love instantly.

The Hidden Almanac: So ursulav heard descriptions of Night Vale, and got a particular mental image of how it was. Then she listened and it wasn't. Now her husband narrates The Hidden Almanac. You know those updates from ursulav's garden? Now imagine that as filtered through the same blotter paper that Night Vale was licked off of, in compact 4-minute segments. (The updates about the historical points and especially the lives of saints requires no filtration, they just are that weird.) Includes amazing messages from the sponsors, which need listening to from the beginning. There are only sixteen episodes. That's just over an hour of listening. Start now, they're small.

So on my way back from work when I was changing lanes at highway speed, he lurched a bit.

Then when I was speeding back up from like 40 after "the cone zone", he lurched again.

And when I was contending with a hill on Skyline, he didn't wanna change gears going up hill and expressed this through interpretive dance, or shuddering and refusing to accelerate past that point.

I had a few things to say about that. (Link contains tumblr non-autoplay audio, with a great volume but small variety of barracks-language.)

BACK TO THE MECHANICS.

Car is still in the shop. Parts that were bad last time he was lurching and coughing are again. They replaced those under warranty at no cost to me.

That being done, I inquired after the timing belt. I got a quote. I looked at my accounts and swore just a little bit. I called back and confirmed I wanted the belt and water pump done now.

Hope to pick him up tomorrow (later today).


Taking transit to work has me hitting 1.5 of my current step goal, if not more. Part of it is being shaken around vigorously inside the bus. Part is not. Holding on is not a small amount of work. I like admiring my cane muscles. When I have to sit sideways, I hold on to the rail and I move with the bus, and my weak arm, even my weak left arm, feels titanium light.

OUR STORY SO FAR: Vash's engine has never been perfectly smooth, but he has better and worse days. I am attuned to the sound and feel of this. After the family reunion trip, he started running worse in a way that I was reluctant to venture far afield with; I turned around on Monday because I didn't trust him 30 miles to work, hoping that an oil change would do him some good.

The oil change did him enough good that I was willing to take him to work Thursday, even though the mechanics were unable to duplicate the problematic behavior. Thursday evening he failed to start after work. I returned home on the bus, alternately cursing and praying that a jumpstart would either fix all that was wrong or at least get him back to the mechanics without a truly painful towing fee. (I didn't remember about my chintzy towing plan until much later.)

A jumpstart got him going, reluctantly. 1.3v is not a good voltage for a car battery to be carrying. ( I got him to my mechanic's at roughly fifteen miles per hour, mostly flat, flat-out terrified until I stopped being terrified and started being awesome instead. )