So, last time I updated, I had plans for Saturday. Here's how that worked out:

I stayed up way too late getting things set up with the new phone. I woke up in about time to leave and get there on time, so that's just what I did. I had a bit of a time finding parking, and I would have been happy getting there earlier.

I saw one of the guys outside, and we were shortly joined by the lady who is all up in the ladies-in-tech stuff, and another dude and his girlfriend, who is visiting from the UK. There was various chatter. Apparently the one of the guys (the one whose name is confusingly close to Purple's) had met two of my teammates at the company conference/retreat; from the physical descriptions, it turned out to be another one of the over-abundance (the one with the chickens) and my manager. The weather was ever so slightly warm and windy and grey with the sun just barely visible through the clouds. It was perfect.

There was no sign of Purple, so we eventually went in -- to find that Purple had saved a block of prime seats, and was wondering where we had been. Good ol' Purple. This was a situation that text messages could possibly have solved. (Later, he and R. exchanged numbers before dinner to prevent a recurrence.)

The program had an admonishment in the form of some items on the little list, against messily sneaking food in. I was charmed.

We all got ourselves situated. Stuff commenced. ("And remember, never throw M&Ms in the orchestra pit," I said very quietly to Purple.) I never seem to know what to do with my cane in theatre-like places. I don't want it to fall over or whatever, but I also don't have a great way to secure it other than the wristband. Ah well. I did not clobber anyone with it, nor did it go clattering over, so that was all right.

Mr. Zune was not wearing glasses, and was wearing eyebrows, so he looked a little odd onstage. (Mr. Zune is usually incredibly blond, but has dyed his hair for the role. The eyebrows were later observed to be painted on.)

I particularly enjoyed the physical comedy. Ko-Ko and the giant axe were amazing. As is customary, local references were slipped in here and there. "As some day it may happen" in particular was nearly all localized, to great and hysterical effect. "A more humane Mikado" had a little more of the original left, but was also greatly localized, with a huge laugh at the fate of the student who bombs out of Stanford and is doomed to study at Cal. The schoolgirls were very rowdy, which I approved of. One of the bits involved Peep-Bo taking a pair of floral scissors to a bouquet. ("It does seem to take the top off it, you know.") I think the carnation that actually fell into the orchestra pit was unintentional, but it was unintentional to very good effect.

There was an intermission. The bathroom in the theatre developed a substantial queue, so many other folks and I had the idea to try an adjacent building; I was one of the lucky ones to think of it earlier rather than later.

After it was all over, and Mr. Zune and his girlfriend were duly congratulated on the roles they played (and without his glasses, we were all blurs, but at length he recognized some of the blurs as more familiar than others), and various people pitched the idea of dinner. So dinner there was.

We wandered in the direction of our cars. Phone number exchanging between R. and Purple resulted in Purple flashing around his little flip-phone, and various Star Trek references from Purple. I complained that the references were about the wrong captain, so Purple ultimately busted forth with an extensive Captain Kirk style monologue, with Shatnerian timing, that nearly made me actually fall over laughing.

I had trouble finding a parking spot particularly close to the dinner place, but there were other spots somewhat further away. I arrived just on the point where R. was asking Purple where I was. I'm not sure whether Purple has my phone number in his phone, come to think of it...

Discretion prohibits me from recapping the entire dinner conversation. There were highlights:

Purple saying some of the most amazing things and then ducking
Me obligingly swatting at Purple
The appropriate deployment of that Oscar Wilde quote
R. dipping shrimp into the chili oil, and then seeing if they would light on fire with the candle
Me, insisting that she repeat the shrimp trick again so I could get a picture
The waitress, observing the shrimp shenanigans and removing all our candles
Me fondly telling Purple "But you're the *right* kind of terrible." (I've told him, more than once, that sometimes I just look at him with those eyebrows to see what he'll say next.)
Dessert (oh, dessert, the sort of chocolate that drives people to lick bowls, or would, if they weren't ergonomically inconvenient for the tongue)
The description of the term/concept "Silicon Valley ATM", where all of you go out to eat and then you put the whole thing on your card and everyone else gives you cash for their shares

We probably could/should have moved some of the wrap-up hilarity to the non-smoking bits of the lounge area, but hindsight. Eventually we did head in our separate directions, after hugs all around from that one guy's girlfriend. I'd parked a ways off; Purple kindly walked me to my car. He was still feeling a little guilty for not saving quite enough seats. (he'd saved four, there were six of us: dude's visiting girlfriend hadn't been on the email chain, and neither had I; he'd assumed that I would have been on the email chain, and that given my history of sleeping through entire weekends despite my best intentions, that I fully intended to show up but was likely to sleep through it. I was amused.) Hugs.

Then I called Nora on my way home. She was putting finishing touches on her magnum opus. Hooray!

Safeway's St. Mark's Day offerings were not satisfactory to me. I came home, chatted a bit with the babyfish, and put in a bit of time on the bouncy-ball watching Community, since even with the relatively not-close parking, I didn't hit my step count naturally. I've been enjoying the effects of increased stamina, and would like to continue that trend.

A few nights ago, either late or early, I decided to make myself some toasted English muffins with cheese.

Sometime in the past little while, the sheet of aluminum foil in the toaster oven disappeared, perhaps because it had already seen a few too many droplets of over-toasted cheese. In my infinite wisdom, I did not see fit to replace it before toasting my cheesy muffins.

The toaster dinged merrily after a few minutes, and I wandered over to retrieve my prize -- and found to my everlasting shock that the interior of my toaster oven was merrily blazing away!

Some of the cheese had dripped on the metal piece covering the heating element, and lo and behold, the cheese started flaming away like a despot's oil well in the face of an invading force.

I extinguished my toaster oven and retrieved my muffin. (The muffin was still edible.)

I can cook. I can cook.
Sometimes the kitchen just doesn't like me. Now that the cheese has been scraped off the inside of the toaster oven, it does operate perfectly nicely.

After work, I stopped by the store, really to take advantage of the sale on area rugs (to save me precious deposit money later), but I got distracted by the pizza. So I brought home some frozen pizza. This will be great, I thought. I can stick the pizza in the oven, take a shower, eat my pizza and read LJ, then go straight to bed. So I came home, put away groceries, hauled the pizza stone out of the bottom drawer of the stove (it's the model that hasn't got a broiler below the oven, but a storage drawer instead), and that's where the presence of blue mold on the pizza stone should have clued me in as to how the rest of it was going to go. I should have given the whole thing up as a bad job and gone to bed. But no, I had to decide that I wanted pizza, dammit, and I wanted it now. I cleaned the pizza stone, preheated the oven, and carefully arranged the pizza on the stone while I waited for the oven to warm up...

My conversation with wibbble some half an hour later recounts the subsequent sequence of events fairly decently. (Edited for relevance & clarity.)

wibbble: I saw your post, and was considering if it would be wise to enquire further...
azurelunatic: Pizza, preheating oven. You can imagine what happened?
wibbble: Not so much with the 'pre' heating, as with the 'over' heating, leading to 'burning'?
azurelunatic: Worse/better. Note the "brand new" modifier.
wibbble: It needed to be broken in?
azurelunatic: ... What does one find inside brand-new, never-been-used, never-been-opened cookers?
wibbble: Bit of cardboard and plastic crap. Instruction manuals. If you're especially unfortunately, expanded polystyrene foam.
azurelunatic: I note in passing that it's deuced hard to RTFM when it's on fire.
azurelunatic: Read The Flaming Manual, perhaps.
wibbble: Read the Smouldering Remains of the Manual.
azurelunatic: No, the actual manual did not catch fire. It sounds funnier that way, though. It was actually just the little cardboard insert between the heating element and the floor of the oven. But that was bad enough. So when I opened it up to put the pizza in, I wound up doing the Unhappy Dance Of Juggling Pizza And Smouldering Paper Products.
azurelunatic: and the dance of OMFG It's On Fire.
azurelunatic: And the dance of OMFG It's 11:30PM And I Can't Let The Smoke Alarm Go Off.
azurelunatic: Which is directly related to the thing where I don't want my neighbors to kill me...
azurelunatic: So. Now that I've verified that I have an oven, and also verified that I really need to avoid putting the pizza stone away wet next time (good job I'm not allergic to penicillin), I can start cooking the pizza...

The pizza was, eventually, good. But probably not worth things catching on fire. D'oh.

Acadeca. State competition. 9-12 Talented Yeeth in a large hotel in the biggest city in the state, with minimal adult supervision.

Hell yeah we were having fun.

Someone had bought incense. The hotel thoughtfully provided mini coffee pots in the hotel rooms, with little kits so we could make our own. Excellent.

So, somehow, someone got the bright idea of taking the powdered non-dairy creamer and spilling it out of the package into the air, where it briefly formed a cloud... and lighting it on fire.

Fireballs! Safe, effective, lovely, pyromania-satisfying, fireballs!


There was nothing in the rules that prevented us from playing with incense or lighters. I was surprised. There probably should have been.


They debated throwing a few out the window, since they would not hit the ground. I do not remember whether they did that or not.


At the awards banquet at the end, there were little candles on the tables in the banquet hall. I looked at those candles, and I got a glint in my eye, and I asked a passing waiter if I might have some powdered non-dairy creamer. The rest of the table grinned, because they knew what was headed through my mind.

The plan was to make some fireballs to punctuate the applause for our group, because we were just the coolest, though we did not go on to nationals. Sadly, the creamer was too lumpy, and not finely-divided enough, and merely sat in the wax and sulked.