Today I learned that you can only fit about 4 relatively large latex helium balloons in one of those zip-up blue tarp duffel bags from IKEA. The cluster of balloons associated with a certain glad-you're-back cheerful bunch of flowers destined for the desk of a certain Overlady contained 5 balloons.

Now picture the Reverend Lunatic, wearing black from top to toe with the exception of a blue-tipped braid and a navy-blue cane, a classic sufferer of Bitchy Resting Face, carrying a very large blue IKEA zipper bag as if it weighed approximately nothing, with a single cheerful balloon rising from a ribbon coming out the middle where the two ends of the zipper meet.

I'd like you to picture that very hard, because it's likely that no such thing will ever happen again.

(Well, until the next time I need to transport balloons and the trunk is full.)



[00:48] azurelunatic: Today Outlook began giving me shitfits
[00:49] azurelunatic: it decided that email from my junior researcher and manager was spam, and that I didn't need to view headers
[00:49] [unnamed work friend]: yow
[00:49] [unnamed work friend]: I thought our spam filter was separate from [the previous thing]/exchange
[00:49] azurelunatic: it is!
[00:50] azurelunatic: But that didn't stop plucky little outlook from deciding to apply its own
[00:50] azurelunatic: which was set on default of "no, really, this shouldn't catch any actual mail"
[00:50] azurelunatic: WELP
[00:51] azurelunatic: I complained to poor [Purple] about this.
[00:51] azurelunatic: His commentary was along the lines of "You missed a 'fucking' there, before 'default'."
[00:52] azurelunatic: (the paragraph already contained "fucking" about six times, so I could be forgiven for not typing it again)


Later, Purple made a cognitive leap [editor's note: apparently the concept of "cognitive leap" tied to Jack-in-the-Crack ranch sauce is a deja-vu anchor point for me] from the mention of a fairly arbitrary number in the 70s to trombones. "But there were 76 trombones," I said. "Where did the [difference] end up?"

"In the closet?" he guessed. "With a flute?"

I began facepalming steadily. Scotty, late of Much Ado About Star Trek, plays the trombone. If he were to be caught in the closet with anybody...

I indicated that it was possible that more than one character from my 1994 novel, the one that started when my friend "Bugs" (the one who had drummed on my head) tried to set up the cute little nerd girl with the cute little nerd boy because they both liked Star Trek, might be invading my ~2004 novel, and that in the original, Scotty had had a certain problem with gayness, particularly the idea that his BFF Jeff might be gay for him. His BFF Jeff who might well have played the flute. "HOW MANY CHARACTERS FROM THIS THING ARE GOING TO START INVADING?!?!" I asked.

"So you'd say they're getting the band back together?" Purple said. "Just think of the repercussions," he threw in as an afterthought.

My mouth opened. My mouth closed. My mouth went sideways. No words came out.

Apparently that was the most bizarre expression he'd seen on me to date. "What did I say? 'Getting the band back together'? What? You've poked me so many times that if this were on Facebook I'd have been hit with a sheep by now."

"Repercussions," I finally managed.

He hadn't even realized it.

Honorable sentients: my friend Purple.

22:24 2014-03-16
Laundry has been accomplished. This includes actually hanging up the tops and skirts. I'm impressed with myself.

There is coffee in the refrigerator. I'm attempting to cold-brew. We'll see how that goes.

I have polished my nails. This time I used black, then a glitter with big silver chunks, little light blue bits, and a sort of blue jelly liquid. Then the top coat. Once the weird edge spills come off in the shower, I might take a picture.


23:58 2014-03-19
The nail polish has shattered and is peeling.

Tuesday had some heavy conversation in the late evening. It turned out that something fairly random at work rebooted my brain straight into some really bad state from October. I walloped it a bit, and then Purple cheered me up some too. I thanked him again tonight, and made sure that he knew that in the excessively unlikely event that he should see me in a worse state, that wasn't something that he was expected to deal with, and should call someone. That kicked off a moderately deep and meta conversation.

Naturally it didn't stay that deep for excessively long, because the concept of attempting to get to sleep while there are two people over in the next bed and one of them is giggling ensued. We unleashed a veritable staircase of witticisms; I won with "I'm trying to sleep! Can you make your penis a little less funny?"

Not being a one to waste a line like that, I started tweeting. "It's going in a book?" "... Yes. And we know just the one, too! Aww hell, I didn't know there was a third part!"

( Various bits, resulting in Cutting Room Floor babbling, including a whole-cast rename. The only one to keep her name is Beatrice. )

Oh well. :D


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrM7jZ9pUAo

( Oh, novel notes, how you entertain us. Not entirely SFW diagrams. )

"The most difficult part of my trip was figuring out whether I could carry cheese on an aircraft." -- kilarneyblarney, 8/20?/2008
"She's bought $30 worth of fermented cow."

( Cheese on a plane sketch from dinner. )

"I don't care if my gay men are straight or not." -- rhea_windrider

11/5/2008
"Can I have the split pea without the ham?" -- kilarneyblarney, joking, but channeling M.

Sublingual tea: hcolleen cannot drink hot water straight out of the pot and brew the tea it in her mouth.)

Bad translation: "I'm defrosting it now" -- from Armitage III, about an encrypted file

Man: "Give me an example of something I did feminine."
Woman: "Your aura."
(from the Gay Denny's, 2008 11 25; she was mad because he hadn't been being straight with her. Or something.)

Things Shuttleslayer May No Longer Do In RP
Anything from the Book of Vile Darkness
GM
The Sith version of Riverdance
Have my World of Darkness characters do anime jumps (this was the Shuttleslayer incident)
Play Alucard (besides, he's too powerful to be fun to play, so what's the point)

It's Opposites Day.

Friday was work and team breakfast.

Saturday was work, and first I dropped my water bottle, then I had a fight with the computer systems over my password (and lost an hour). I also figured out what that customer meant when she asked, "I bought the shop. Will it take more than 3000 MB in a different hotel?" It puzzled me vastly, as it had puzzled a teammate and our supervisor previously (I got a new request from the same customer and was trying to get some context) and then *snap* it clicked -- she meant, of course, "I have purchased your e-commerce application and would like to host it elsewhere. Will I need more than 3000 MB of space?" (The answer to that question is "No, our e-commerce application cannot be hosted elsewhere. I apologize for any inconvenience.")

I zombified with hcolleen when I got home Sunday morning, then slept. When I woke up, I called Darkside and then realized that I had two emails from him (what!!) that I hadn't read. Sensing that time was a-wasting (and because I had some coherent from not waking up to alarm) I quickly showered and drove over. We had pizza and comedy, taking a detour through a History channel show that resembles Mythbusters in the construction, destruction, and mess, before getting into The History of the World (Part I). As the last time I had seen that was with Shawn, I enjoyed watching it for the first time. We then wound up in anime, Shadow Skill, which is silly, fun, and not a bad substitute for Slayers.

I made reference to Home Movies from the Cutting-Room Floor, and then had to explain it. (I reassured him that he's nooowhere in it.) Darkside doesn't do written slapstick comedy (my specialty), and he really doesn't do boys in skirts. (Pity.) That led to a discussion on what it was that he read. "Magic and explosions" sums up much of it. :D

• 18:35 "But you don't understand -- the Catholic Church is trying to come into the 19th Century." -- meacu1pa #
• 18:36 @gameboyguy13 wtf driving. #
• 19:34 Need to put Home Movies down on its own calendar so I can parse it out for relative dates. How long is the camp? 4 weeks? 6 weeks?? #

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Fictional Beatrice is in the hospital. This is awesome.

90 posts today, which averages out to 85 because yesterday sucked. Today had about 45 minutes taken out of it, though, because All Sorts Of Stuff went Down for about that long. Woe! I still got that much done on top of that, though! I cleaned my email while stuff was down.

I got bit in the car on the way to work by a title bunny. At work, the rest started coming to me. For those who recall Home Movies from the Cutting-Room Floor, this is about Harry and Harry's old friends, when Sally is away, and all the woe that becomes of it.

For those who don't recall that book, that book is the tale of what happens when a girl with a really embarrassing family crosses paths with the guy who is a bad-luck curse to all of his friends. Our protagonist there has a little sister, Sally (short for Alsatia, who is geographically named for a location in her parents' second honeymoon approximately 9 months before her advent) and Sally acquires a boyfriend girlfriend Significant Other named Harry Harriet Harry Harriet during this process. (Harr[y|iet] hasn't decided on a serious and permanent gender identity by this point in time; s/he's still too busy with self and social to worry too much about long-term gender roles, except she is far more popular as a girl than he was as a boy.)

At any rate. Harriet is an unlikely mentor for a group of assortedly antisocial and surly geekboys. Her girlfriend (and sense of perspective and rationality on certain topics) is out of town. Prom is coming up. OH GOOD FUCK NO.

There was team breakfast today. Winz!

Work's been having a lot of dead time, because two or three projects got delayed, so there's been a big push to keep as few people in as possible, and to make sure that the people who are there are the best of the best. There's been shaking in the corporate tree, and things are falling out and hitting us as well. Gods alone know what's coming up next.

But since my supervisor training is evidently done (I feel confident about my ability to run jobs, though I'll still want someone looking over my shoulder on the paperwork) I've been hitting the phones again.

Yesterday was brilliant. Figment came in late, so the Cute Geek Super (who was check-in yesterday) shoved him in the booth next to mine. I'd been absolutely dead on the phones until he came in, but after he came in, I got cheerful all of a sudden, and wound up getting six surveys on a job where you're lucky to get one or two (though planned production is more like 3 or 4).

Today, I was back on the phones on that same job. (If I were to give it a Vorkosoverse name, I'd call the client the Dendarii Brewing Company, and the business the client is in is obvious, though it's actually pretty hard to figure out the actual specific client from the survey if you don't know already.) I had no such luck to be sitting next to Figment, so when Cute Geek Super came by and told me, "I want six from you, just like yesterday!" I told him, "Well, you didn't put Figment next to me today, so who knows. I work better around him."

Turns out I only got one lousy survey. The respondent and I were having fun, though. It's always good when you've got enough good rapport with the respondent to be able to laugh at the way the survey is phrased and the way it repeats in a seemingly pointless fashion. (As a person who's taken a stats class or two, I see why the surveys are made the way they are, but it's bloody dull if you've just done the same thing all week.)

I got a handwritten page of dialogue between Beatrice and her mother over the Harriet issue, and Beatrice wound up delving into her angsty history of past relationships. I now need to sprinkle references to past ill-fated relationships throughout the story, with "the Jacob incident" being the worst of a bad lot, and tantalizing detail here and there so you actually do get a good picture of the thing without ever sitting down and outlining how it started out bad and got worse. You should know enough about it by the time they bring it up so that you'll know what they're talking about, even if some of the details they bring up are a surprise.

I got four pages of paper journal finished, which was a good thing. I like being able to do brain-dumps at work. That makes lots of brain-dump today, because I did get my morning pages in. I also got three pages into a paper letter to Darkside. What sucks about the communication between him and me is that the only reasonably private communication media we have are in person (rare), on the phone (narrow window of opportunity) and paper letters (slow). He shares an e-mail address with his parents, see. *facepalm* Is the man not a graduate of a reasonably infamous university with a bachelor's degree in CIS, living in the information age, with a job in his field? I am tempted to take away half his geek cred.

Figment and I had a very cryptic conversation over lunch today, with a very confused othercat sitting there watching the evil twins at play. All computer viruses and computers referenced were actually very metaphorical, so the kind offer of the parental unit's computer was sadly useless, sorry... othercat wants a Rosetta Stone to understanding my particular brand of Utterly Cryptic. The problem with that, however, is that the definitions keep changing. The only common factor seems to be that if the cryptic is supposed to be aimed at you understanding it, you should already have the inside knowledge being referred to so that you can unlock the reference. (And if you still don't get it, ask me. Because I will explain. Eventually.)

For example, I mentioned "The Clue Stick", and made cryptic reference to something Figment knew so that he'd know what the item was. Then I deciphered to othercat: "You know that LJ icon that I have, the one that's purple and moves? Something like that." This nearly caused a sodaspew, because that icon of mine is particularly infamous and not exactly entirely work-safe, but if one had never seen the icon in question, one would still be in the dark. And one of the things that a well-respected, polite, friendly, popular, and very work-appropriate supervisor does not want to do is shout out in the break room, "It's a dildo, okay?!"

Figment stopped by after work, with the general idea of taking me out to dinner, but that was not to be, as I'd already showed, changed into pajamas, fixed myself soup, and needed to get sleep in order to pry myself out of bed in the morning to get to work at 8:30. He wound up hanging around for a little to describe old movies to me. What is it with me and bondmates describing TV shows and movies to me? I've got two of them now. Clearly, the geekboys need to meet and have some Male Bonding Time (probably paintball and tabletop gaming) before they grow to resent each other and wind up destroying the universe.