Decided to try calling Darkside today. He has joined the Eurovision fandom thanks to a friend. We had a good chat about our mutual favorite, as we both appreciate the surreal and have some amount of Finnish ancestry.

Updated him on the Dad situation. He applied some of the usual tactics and insisted that I at least watch one of the videos in the text backchannel because he wanted to hear me laugh. 💗🍌

It was good to catch up. His cat Helped as well. Good cat.

It seems that when my watch crashes in the middle of a sleep session, it does not preserve sleep data. Good to know. Unfortunately, Pebble-the-company is going away, leaving me with a likely-unsupported tech bauble. (One that's a great boon to my life, however...)

The Wednesday/Thursday night was not a great night for sleep, and then the watch crashed, leaving only one hour of sleep out of at least three logged. But I did get enough sleep.

Apparently shipping patterns are not quite back to normal after the holidays, because the new phone that won't keep fucking rebooting itself, the keyboard cover, and the heated CPAP hose, are all at least a day behind the estimated and/or promised delivery time. Alas.

I am in particular impatient about the phone. Though I know if I start doing something inconvenient and sticky, that'll probably be when the delivery arrives ... despite the package tracking not having indicated that it's left the shipment facility. *sigh*

Purple has located delivery pizza that he can eat! This resulted in leftovers, so he wasn't available for dinner out until Wednesday. We decided on pho. It was cold and raining, so I wanted something nice and warm.

It was a lovely time; he brought R along from work, and it's always good to see her. I had grabbed the shirt from her conference off the top of the laundry heap, mostly because I'd worn it recently and it went well with the skirt. (The skirt used to be black. It's since faded to a nice soft gray.)

R had been off communing with penguins and glaciers, and had a number of nice pictures to share.

After dinner, Purple and I went in search of dessert, and R turned into a pumpkin. Among other things, we discussed dreams, and how we're both inclined towards stress-dreams when things are rough, but rarely nightmares.

Naturally, I woke this morning from a legitimate nightmare. ( Nightmare. )

I've been discussing the logistics of some upcoming stuff with my partner. This has been emotionally difficult, and a bit brain-breaking (so many logistical details, and I'm not there to actually handle any of them; behold my control-freak nature) but we're getting stuff documented.

The replacement phone was due to arrive on Wednesday. It did not, in fact, arrive on Wednesday; somewhere in there I saw the arrival date had changed to Thursday. And then it did not arrive on Thursday. This made me cross, and worried.

I've been using the phrase "Call if you'd like" a lot with the partner. It doesn't necessarily take into account the complexities of their reality, in which they may want to call me but other factors make it unlikely, but it does extend a friendly invitation.

My partner spends a substantial chunk of time on the phone with their ex, for reasons that I find good and sufficient (and that get up my nose, because their ex is a piece of work). My partner has taken to responding to their ex's inquiries about whether they are available to be called with, "Call if you'd like."

The ex has taken a strong exception to this phrase. It implies, you see, that perhaps my partner does not want to be talking to them, and would only begrudgingly do so because the ex had forced the conversation on them. So the phrase makes the ex not want to call, because the ex doesn't like to feel ~unwelcomed~ or like they're ~pushy~ about these friendly social calls. So the ex badgers my partner to not use that phrase. Because that's what friendly exes do, to make sure that all their calls are welcome.

I got to have a nice chat with my partner, as they did in fact want to call me. Unfortunately, I saw the phone ring without either my watch or headset humming at me to let me know that there was a call. So I wound up putting the phone on my face like it was a handset.

I did eventually reboot the phone after we were done talking, and it started acknowledging bluetooth again. Sigh.

I called Darkside to catch up. He was playing Saints Row 3, which is excessively silly. We giggled over it. And I managed to drop a decorative metal basket (with sharp edges) on my hand when moving things around in it, so I shredded two fingernails and a bit of callus on one fingertip. Alas.

Darkside and I generally avoid talking politics. This time I mentioned being afraid. ( Read more... )

So that was fun.

3/31 Tuesday
Got to work about 5 minutes before Purple, by the login times. He parked, as it would turn out, one over from me.
Lunch was good, peaceful.
I feel like I'm playing catch-up a lot.
I didn't have plans for tomorrow, but then I developed some. Heh.
StPatience is having a bad week :(

( An insect incident )

That led to other discussions of texting-while-doing; I once fell down some (short) stairs due to reading while walking.

I wound up explaining the one-year gap in wearing my star. "A dude was involved" is a way I have come to sometimes explain some of my more random-seeming decisions to Purple. (I much less often do dumb-ass shit which involves ladies or honorable other-gendered sentients.) It has been quite some time since I actually laid out the reasons why I reacted differently to That Valentine's Day (wherein I was the third wheel in the next room from where the dude I liked banged someone else) and That Rather Bad Evening With Shawn (where the dude I liked banged someone else on the bed that I was trying to sleep on).

I called Kat on the way home. It was good to talk with her. Our brains work better when they are connected.

Now I am trying to get to bed early so I can go in to work and set up the thing.

I managed to crunch through the last of the month's transcription on Friday.

Purple brought the disc. Now I have to figure out time to watch it. Lunch was pleasant. The three-hole punches have been secured.

As it got later into the evening, I pinged Purple to see if he had dinner plans. They were vague. After they firmed up, he asked me if I was in. I was. So I finished the transcription and started tidying my to-do list and tallying up my hours. Then I brushed my hair (which I'd left loose, since it was Friday) and put on lipstick.

Parking in downtown Mountain View was a subbasement of hell. Having gone all the way through one garage and come out the other end unparked, I saw Purple crossing the street. He waved me off the second garage; I obediently turned and sought street parking. Which I found, at length. Then I hiked in the direction of the pizza place.

I arrived to find Purple chatting happily with Mr. Zune and girlfriend; Ms. Antisocialest was there but hadn't been properly introduced. Mr. Zune and his girlfriend headed on their way, and the rest of us waited for a table. I was happy that I'd swapped my cardigan for the jacket. (And Purple still looked really good in his.) We were seated outdoors. Somehow I got to contemplating how to make siege weaponry from common tabletop items, just around the time when the very elastic mozzarella flung a tomato at Ms. Antisocialest.

lb does not like this pizza place, as he is from Chicago and has some very specific ideas about how deep-dish should be done. Pizza is a religious issue. I am a polytheist.

Punkin Chunkin -> I am not allowed to blow pumpkins at Purple either.

Dinner rule: he who grabs the whole tab gets to take home the last two pieces of pizza. Purple claimed the leftovers.

As we were saying goodnight, Ms. Antisocialest said "See you next time", which made me simultaneously happy and awkward.

Purple walked me back to my car. It was a lovely night, and wasn't dripping. We chatted for a bit. I had inadvertently parked on The Other Guy's street, just a few houses down. If I get finished with Catching Fire, Purple miiiight be up for a movie excursion, though his plans are essentially becoming one with his couch. The vacation has been a long time coming for the amount of work he's been doing. (And with my approval or without, Purple is very warm. This has my approval anyway.)


Saturday, I mostly slept, although I did venture forth for groceries.
Sunday, there was some writing.

I called Darkside, yay! His parents are in town for Thanksgiving. The rate his parents are zooming through things on Netflix is going to inevitably result in a close encounter with the bandwidth cap. The Evil Dead musical is coming through Phoenix in a while. Before we said goodnight, he had one quick thing to ask me: did I listen to podcasts at all? Had I heard of Welcome to Night Vale?

"... I recommended that one to you."

So he had, in fact, fallen in love instantly. And he works with a certain number of WtNV fans, including one shift lead who was wearing a NVCR Intern shirt. :D

Got to chat with Darkside on Sunday. Yay! He expressed dubious growliness at the idea that the security guard would be providing advances while on duty, and made various terrible bee-related jokes given the setup of blowing the wasp at Purple. Since Darkside turns out to be one of my more clean-minded friends, this is particularly fun. (He's not actually clean-minded. This is just comparatively.)

I felt a switch in my head go click as I was talking to Purple on Thursday night. I don't know if it's a particularly decisive switch, but it's something different. So I wanted to at least write that down, to see where my brain went after.

One of the things that will eat my brain if I'm not careful, is that Darkside and Purple have the same given name. Darkside is the best $NAME most of the time, but Purple gets to be the best for little bits, about fifteen minutes at a time, generally connected to when he's said something that's a particularly heinous pun. So Darkside asked whether Purple was a good $NAME. "Yes," I said fondly. "Good. Tell him he get cookie." So I emailed Purple, giggling all the while.

Entirely coincidentally, when I came in to work today, there was a small tub of cookies on my desk. I recognized the container, and thanked my Overlady once I saw she was off the phone (much to the surreal confusion of the Hipster Researcher).

There's an ongoing situation at work which I've been keeping my eye on; that seems to be well on its way to resolution today.

Helpdesk shenanigans continue to shenan. I will offer this commentary. How much about email do you know?

Multipart email comes in more than one section. Often there are two sections: text/plain and text/html. The text/html section is the one with the fancy markup and clickable links. The text/plain section is for the benefit of mail readers who don't do all that newfangled stuff.

The text/plain section is supposed to have a copy of any URLs included in the text/html section. That's correct, helpdesk, you aren't generally able to click on them (aside from those plain text mail readers which recognize the http:// or https:// bit and do the smart thing). The expected use case for URLs in the text/plain section is for the user to copy them and paste them into her browser.

IF ALL YOU HAVE IS THE INCIDENT NUMBER, THAT DOES JACK-ALL WHEN PASTING INTO THE BROWSER.

My manager is always relieved to note when incidents involving me shouting at helpdesk conclude without me having actually sworn at helpdesk. After all, some people's capslock keys do occasionally get stuck.


The guys (well, R, and then the guys in #cupcake followed suit) decided that it was milkshake o'clock. So they (minus phone) congregated in front of my cube. Mr. Zune noticed the cookies on the collaboration table. Purple suggested that they had been made with poison. I said that I knew the provenance of the cookies, but cannily did not vouch for their safety. Mr. Zune decided against a cookie at that time. The conversation carried us a good portion of the way over to R's cube. She was missing, having gone upstairs to collect her non-broken new computer. (Purple: If I get punched for saying terrible things, I'm going to be pretty sore.) (Good luck that when the fist stays a foot away.)

My Overlady was visible in the secret milkshake dungeon; I invited her to join our party, but she was waiting on a teammate for coffee.

Among the random stories was that time when Mama's best friend was visiting, and the ladies were talking child rearing woes downstairs, while Tay and I played with her best friend's very small (well, five-ish) and autistic son upstairs.

Now, one of the features of the house was that it is mostly two big rooms -- at the time there was the big room downstairs, plus the bathroom and the pantry tucked behind the interior wall of the bathroom -- and then the upstairs, and at some point my little room off in the corner there. The acoustics were fabulous -- if it was said downstairs, it was clearly audible upstairs.

Tay and I, by unspoken agreement, had never mentioned this fact to our parents. Since generally they were the only ones talking quietly downstairs when we were upstairs, and we were rarely trying to be quiet downstairs while they were trying to sleep, they had never cottoned on.

Mama's best friend began to unload her heart about how very hard it was to have a shattering marriage and nearly sole responsibility for an autistic kid.

Tay and I looked at each other. The little guy might have all sorts of things going on, but we knew there was nothing wrong with his hearing, and it was obvious that he was hearing every word. I scrammed downstairs and urgently but quietly informed Mama and her best friend that due to this one weird trick with acoustics, every word they were saying was broadcast upstairs in full clarity. Where the little guy was.

This was news to Mama, and she clearly had many questions about what exactly we had heard over the years of her thinking she was having fully private conversations with FatherSir, but this was not the moment to air these questions. This was the moment to take the tea outside, where they could have a real private talk.

#cupcake is rowdy under the best of circumstances. I'm not sure what our teammate made of us. My Overlady is long accustomed to people around me being loud and weird.


Purple realized that he has not shaved in a while. I mentioned that his moustache was coming in nicely. He's not sure whether he'll be keeping it or not.

I learned a lot more about the various dynamics of Purple's HOA board than I was really intending to learn.

Purple got a cookie out of my little tub. I assured him that it was not poison. He cheerfully accepted the cookie, because he knows that if I've deemed a cookie not poison, it does not have lurking walnuts, which many otherwise sensible people like to put in chocolate chip cookies, rendering them inedible for those of us with walnut allergies.

I had been wrong by an hour about the closing time of Borderlands. Woops. Alas. No The Winter Long for me tonight. Alas. Purple was sympathetic.

I had to explain the recent helpdesk remote control debacle. That also involved the new software. He grimly suggested some of the exact problems which are happening with the rollout. Did I mention that Darkside is a helpdesk tech?

I mentioned the lack of care about the Linux only users in another rollout, and he audibly rolled his eyes. "What did they think that group of red hats over there were?"

"That's Carmen San Diego. She has stolen the silicon from Silicon Valley."

Darkside is the best Darkside. He laughs at my terrible 80s jokes.

I used the dishwasher incident as an example of the type of ticket that needed to be public.

"Wait, why are you calling the *helpdesk* to troubleshoot your dishwasher?"

"Oh, no, Facilities uses the helpdesk software too. But we had a bunch of engineers."

"Have you tried turning the dishwasher on and off again?"

"No no, the engineers are not at the helpdesk. They're *at* the *dishwasher*."

"Why do I get the feeling that the dishwasher's warranty is no longer valid?"

"*I* didn't get *my* screwdrivers. This time."

"... ..."

Best Darkside.

Highlights from the day:

Hooray for 40% response (all positive) in the first 45 minutes for a research recruitment! I am reminded of an exchange with you-know-who regarding my worries when I'd sent out 10+ invitations and got no response, not even an autoresponder, within 24 hours, so things like this make me smug in retrospect.

( ex-interns, databases, and more. )


So after Purple got un-hella-busy... and he said something including "long-term memory loss", and of course "Amnesia" starts playing in my head, and he mentions getting the Chumbawamba earworm, which leads to me mentioning ( humor involving imagined animal harm, spiders )

( Newsflesh )


One of the tales I was telling Purple involved mentioning the dude who is here called Scotty, but whose name as it is known to the CIA and the IRS is one $REDACTED "Riccochet" $REDACTEDLASTNAME, and I referred to him as "$REDACTED the First". "But I'm $REDACTED the best, aren't I?" he teased.

"No, that would be my best friend forever $REDACTED," I advised.

"Fair enough. $REDACTED the second-best?"

So I had to explain how there was a problem with a plethora of $REDACTEDs, by naming off five of them. He, too, could hear the difference in four out of five, and saw how the lack of distinction could be a problem. (And yeah, he is probably $REDACTED the second-best, but he may not get to know that for a while.)


I showed off my headphone repairs. We groused about weekends and exhaustion. There was an "alas" "a lass" & "likewise" exchange that earned me a high-five.


And thus into Friday.

The flappy plane is beeping at the fluffy nutchewer, and I am braining about hard squares of tasty submarines.

That is to say, the fishbrick concept keeps getting built upon.

( Fishbrick. )

• Sat, 13:49: @mizzykill What's your gchat? Remember that lolariously bad interview last summer?
• Sat, 14:21: RT @PaulSWheeler: @azurelunatic Hi, I am doing some research on a guy called Bill Fox of PRSavings. This sounds familiar. Are you talking a…
• Sat, 15:48: @dduane How soon is "an email receipt ... will soon follow"? Order ID #8354 (yesterday)
• Sat, 17:15: RT @muppetK: SO SO WRONG. (Yet hilarious) #sherlock RT @Sherlocked84: Why. http://t.co/UGpJ7C4ltT
• Sat, 17:23: http://t.co/ujLNR5gXMC - Happiest croc with mouthful of egret I have seen today.
• Sat, 19:12: BFF and I are punning at each other with rock songs.
• Sat, 19:43: @tiferet93 You may be interested in http://t.co/jaDv5BuJw1 if you haven't already filled it out...
• Sat, 22:01: RT @0xabad1dea: The “big things” we’re told to fix are held up by hundreds of the “little things” you tell us not to worry our little heads…
• Sat, 22:53: RT @sabreuse: "Empathy is a core engineering value" is easily my quote of the week.
• Sat, 23:06: Feeling happy about conversation with bff. Said hi to his cyborg mom (new knee). Unsure how conversation degenerated into Bohemian Rhapsody

( Read more... )

It was a Wednesday, so I ducked out for a few minutes into one of the phone rooms and made a call.

The BFF was hanging out with some friends, so we were brief.

"HI DARKSIDE'S GIRLFRIEND!" shouted the peanut gallery.

"He just calls you that for some reason."

"I'm not his girlfriend!" I called back.

There was hilarity from the room. Giggling. Giggling like sixth-graders trying to do the mash-faces-together thing with their friends, the way you do with action figures.

"I am your friend," I mused. "And technically I'm a girl some of the time. But I'm still not your girlfriend." It is a reasonable mistake to make. I guess we keep in contact well enough that I'm a viable presence to people I've never been introduced to.