If you don't fit into the Always A Man or Always A Woman boxes, this survey wants to include you.
https://survey.gendercensus.com/
https://lgbt.io/@gendercensus/112434000838053982

Belovedest's new work schedule is kicking in. Friday's a better shopping day than the weekend, in general. In nature, when an otherwise prey-looking animal has extremely bright colors, it often signals toxicity. Don't eat me, you'll regret it. There are now two days at work where Belovedest wears one of their unfuckwithable bright red shirts. (They have two of them as of some time ago, when I found a reasonable deal on a second.)

My hip varies between fairly calm and completely terrible. Sometimes I just Take To My Bed over it.

New therapist isn't bad, but there are a few things we're not on the same page about. Normal for humans! Today we wandered off into Shooting The Shit about gender essentialism. (He's against it, and has a few feminine-coded hobbies, but I think this was the first time he'd heard the phrase.) I also got to explain about the way that some gender dysphoria doesn't become apparent until after the intervention takes. (Like my uterus.) This was news to him! I'm glad to have added that into his toolkit. He, uh, thought that since the uterus is internal, it's not necessarily a huge problem. (!!!!) I mentioned that there are times that it makes itself known. Regularly. Which was how we got into gender essentialism: the aggressive pinkness of menstrual gear.

And he had a fishmum, by any other name.

I got some bubble tea powders on Monday, for the tea part. Also some other miscellany, like the soup base I'd been sent for. Tuesday was my psych appointment; I plan to ask next time why we're on a 6 week cadence when my prescriptions are at a 30 day. I'm adjusting my sleep med dosage back to the previous level from last month. I've also got some new features on my sleep chart spreadsheet, like the star ratings and the average times for the month.

The cheddar bay biscuits just came out of the oven, so I should apply myself to those.

This was written up over about an hour, and several months after the fact, so there's a lower attention to detail than the original draft (which I am sure I have somewhere). But I figured it was time to get at least a half-assed version posted.

This details my personal experience with getting my twat irradiated. I didn't collect any trauma from this, and the medical professionals I interacted with all tried very hard to be helpful and respectful.

( Read more... )

Been a while since a proper update! This is not quite a proper update, but at least it's substantial?


"I found whistles, maracas, 5 hour energy, coffee mugs, headphones, and a cellphone charger, but I did not find the other webcam."


Faceblindness! It's fun for the whole family! I'm not sure if I've properly told the "some woman" story about my faceblindness on DW as yet, but it's become my go-to story for "no, really, Rev. Lunatic is faceblind" though to be fair, Mama says that it took seeing Tay walk (well, bounce) in the airport to recognize her, since she's changed a lot.

However, in compensation, I have a small non-face-related superpower. I had a really fun encounter in the past year-ish where lb showed me some photos from his mid-90s college crew, and I was able to identify lb in a group photo where lb himself wasn't quite sure which of two people he was. This was based on my knowledge of how lb stands, and another photo which established what lb was wearing. ( Read more... )

I cannot perform this party trick with just anyone, but I can usually spot Purple in very large group shots if I know vaguely where he was in the crowd. Sometimes it's based on a sneaker. (Purple wears white sneakers that trend increasingly towards grey and ragged until he gets replacements. He also lounges ostentatiously, Kirklike/catlike. I find both somewhat endearing, but I would.)


One of my forms of comfortgoogling is chicken pictures. Current small pet peeve: when any old picture of a hen on a nest is used to illustrate "broody". Broody is a very specific state of chicken, generally characterized by unwillingness to get off the nest and hoard eggs, and sit there until the chicks hatch. Broodies are cranky, will cut you, have flattened themselves on the nests with wings slightly out away from their sides, have their necks pulled way down into their feathers and their tails raised so usually the tail-bump is higher than the head. They make a characteristic rhythmic "clook ... clook ... clook ..." noise (similar to the syllable of the rapid "buk-buk-buk" tidbitting noise but more spaced out, and more relaxed than any part of the "buk-buk-buk-buk-ba-DAWK-et!" alarm call which often follows egg-laying, fox sighting, bush rustling, or Disturbance in the Force). If you try to steal their eggs, they will growl/roar and also try and cut you.


Fishie is finishing up sophomore year at college. (OMG, how time flies.) She'll be 20 soon. She's majoring in computer science now, and doing things like acing the midterm where the median grade was ... not super great. The teacher for that class will be pleased to write her an academic recommendation, and says that she'll be able to do anything she puts her mind to. I am so proud of her. She works so hard, and she's getting so much better at picking her battles. She has been figuring out her summer activities: after finals, she goes to her internship Down South. After that she may wind up going to see her grandma, and after that, spending time with a friend in San Diego.

The concept of "like 5, 6 nice" has entered our dialogues because Fishie's Terrible Mom #yamappendix would make a big deal like "I AM BEING THE NICEST PERSON EVARRRR BECAUSE I LOVE YOU SO MUCH" when doing normal and expected things. So when Fishie encounters people who are being genuinely kind, she is equally floored by small kindnesses that don't inconvenience others, and big kindnesses which do inconvenience others. It's all pegged at like 10 nice for her, when someone with a scale that isn't at "Mommy is an abusive fuckwad ( Read more... )" might view it as maybe a 3,4 nice.


For those who don't dwell anywhere near Silly Valley and also aren't tapped in to the latest tech tat, "hoverboards" have been A Thing for a while. It used to be that there was just the one dude at work who rode one around, and he was proficient and discreet except for how he was going pretty fast and kind of gliding. Now, of course, many tech bros with more money than sense either have one of their own, or have access to one. Thus it was that one dude who I IRC with wound up in the ER one fine evening after doing a wipeout on his hoverboard while at work. In a subsequent all-hands at his company, there was a safety admonishment about unwise hoverboard usage.
Tech Bro 1: "haha bet I know what happened."
Tech Bro 2: "hahah yeah I heard about that."
Tech Bro 1: "sucks that K had to go to the ER tho."
Tech Bro 2: "wait, K had a wipeout too? I was talking about X."
Tech Bro 1: "Oh, what happened with X?"
Multiple hoverboard collisions in one week: not a good thing.


One of the best days of my young life was the day my father brought home a label-maker. It was a about the size of a large typewriter. I recall it having a few large font wheels. We started labeling everything. We kids dubbed it "The Advance", because it had a large key labeled "Advance" in place of an Enter/Return key. The key fed blank tape.
One of the most tragic and terrifying days of my young life was the day when the label-maker caught on fire. I saw black smoke rising up out of it, and immediately began screaming and jumping up and down. Fortunately it was winter. This meant that the appropriate response, which my dad immediately took, was to unplug it, pick it up (it was smoking, not flaming) and hurl it out the front door into a convenient snowbank.
After that we didn't have a label-maker anymore.


"I feel like both of these perspectives are valid, but they're not compatible."


Being around a whole whackton of other non-binary-gendered folks has helped me focus my gender identity feels some. It looks like the identity that best fits is agender. Non-male-identified, though sometimes I present masc and sometimes I present High Soft Femme. Though maintaining High Femme feels kind of like the thing where you're clamping down in the vain hope that you won't bleed all over everything before you get to a bathroom with supplies.

"... a bit of a radfem (without the skateboard)" (said of a radical feminist who might not so much be the "raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaadical, duuuuuuuude!" kind)


Hard problems in gender, privacy, and community safety: where is the line between outing and community safety, when you happen to know that someone who has Caused Problems Before is in a community [a different one] under an identity that is at least slightly discontinuous with their old one, and the new identity is tied to a gender marker change (and the old identity is really most sincerely dead)? (Tentative answer: take it case by case and hope you get it right.)


Once upon a time, Reverend Lunatic gave themselves hiccups as the result of an orgasm. Once not that long ago ... ( Read more... )


I have started watching the Great British Bake-Off, finally. It is so charming! I appreciate that all the contestants and guests are treated respectfully by the editing and camera, in a way that US television rarely does. And it's just so amazingly sweet!


Now that the conference is wrapping up, I'm down to just job-searching with a side of wrap-up work, not job-searching AND ALL THE CONFERENCE. This makes more time to tidy. Last fall, I'd decided to re-arrange my apartment. It got halted halfway through, and the result was nothing short of chaotic (though better arranged for certain things like sleep and computer). I decided that enough was enough, and I would work slowly but steadily in the direction of making it guest-appropriate. It's been coming along nicely, though it still is like a bit of a wacky game of 2048, where you have to calculate and carefully merge two things into the same space without upsetting anything else or making anything important too hard to reach quickly. This has resulted in random acts of mending, because part of this is seeing problems and fixing them.


My favorite hair ornament is a little basket of wires that's secured with two long metal spikes with glass knobs at the ends. Unfortunately, our relative heights are such that when I wear it, I spike Purple in the face with it when he hugs me goodnight. I have determined that I will seek alternate updo-securement, and have located a thing or two which should work better. Purple was a little "but you didn't have to -- it didn't draw *blood*!" when I showed him. :>

(I was headed to bed, but then my brain was full.)

Woke up, stopped by aunt's but she wasn't there, got coffee, took morning pills, picked up prescription, hit work. Realized that having taken morning pills on 40g carb which was *also liquid and coffee* was not a suitable "snack"; effects were to make me owlish with a -17 modifier to my DEX. Fortunately I was rolling 19s pretty consistently until I got food, at which point the handicap started dropping precipitiously.

Purple and his crew opted for lunch inside Purple's building; Mr. Tux and I joined the three of them.

Even now, the ghost of Brad haunts us. I explained the 90% programmer (yet again): the one who says "This is 90% done, someone else can complete the other 10%" and the person/people tasked to complete the other 10% say: "What the shit were you smoking? This is 10% done." "But it's working!" "It's not usable." "*I* can use it!" "You're not a user."

I proceeded through my inbox, and popped out of my building with coffee at the appointed time. Two people from a friend's department were due a ducking in the duck pond. Two ducks were present, which I felt was a good omen. They did not fly off.

The first guy asked was he going to have to duck himself??? Eventually they got things straightened out, and people picked him up, waded out with him, and tossed him in. The other guy couldn't go actually in the duck pond for health reasons, but had cheerfully agreed to a "virtual ducking", where they took pictures in front of the pond, paraded him into the adjacent building and doused him in the convenient shower, then brought him back out for more pictures. I came down to offer both gentlemen cellophane-wrapped packets of boozecandies, and fairly terrible slide whistles.

One of the apparent traditions is also that the team provides dry clothing, often of a hilarious nature. Mr. Zune's Overlord, a dyed-in-the-wool Stanford man, had been given sports attire of a rival institution. One of the guys came out of the building wearing a red Angry Bird costume -- a red sack with a surly face on his belly -- with violently orange shorts. The other guy came out in a giant cigarette box and plaid pajama pants. He held the slide whistle in his teeth and clutched the packet of boozecandy, giving the effect of a box of cigarettes who was also smoking.

#3 suggested that I come back for cake, but I had a meeting and also blood sugar that said no.

The meeting was button construction with the Commandant. ( Breast cancer awareness! )

Exchange's message for when you accidentally put a period at the end of an email address contains, in point of fact, a period directly after the example of what an email address should look like. Since I had copied the address (period and all) from not!Facebook's email integration helpy dialog, I submitted a suggestion to the not!Facebook gods to risk the wrath of the commafuckers and remove the period from the email integration dialog (to help the careless copiers).

There will be a meeting tomorrow morning. I will be taking notes. I coaxed Purple out before the hour got too late.

Since every employee who chooses to go to the Halloween extravaganza gets to bring two guests, Purple had claimed a wristband for me (as well as his own and one for his buddy from the condo board) and dropped it on my desk while I was off with the Commandant. I tried it on. Wow, was it tight. I concluded from that and from something someone said on [off-topic] that the guest wristbands were sized for kids. I left feedback, that maybe there should be some non-kid-sized wristbands next year. The person replied (in a way that wouldn't inform anyone else of what to do) that in fact there were two sizes. So I wandered down to the security office to swap mine for a grown-up sized wristband. The security guy hadn't realized there were two sizes.

Purple and I are comfortable enough to twit each other about gender a bit. He showed up to walk out, and I mentioned that I'd got the wristband thing sorted out. "What kind of woman are you?" he teased.

"I'm a man," I declared in my lowest comfortable speaking voice.

Purple busted out laughing in sheer surprise. He hadn't been expecting that. Mind, he didn't know what he had been expecting, but it hadn't been that.

My gender is a miasma of incandescent plasma.

So today I also had one of those terrifyingly emotionally naked philosophical-disagreement-except-for-me-it's-less-abstract conversations with Purple, one of the ones that I would not be having in the slightest with someone, except that I trust his intentions toward me, I trust that he generally views women as people, I trust he never intends to hurt me, and I know when he hurts me he is sorry and tries to help in ways which are legitimately helpful. (And I think we're both of us sufficiently grown-up and not all raw nerve endings and have a much more formal and decorous relationship that he's only managed the emotional equivalent of an accidental whack to the funnybone every now and then; with Darkside some 14-ish years ago I was gutted and tearstained practically once a week. Plus that time Darkside literally put a finger up my nose by accident, which was not exactly painful but was completely undignified.)

We started out at http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/wah-wah-why-dont-you-cry-a-little-more-you-little-man-jk-stfu (which someone in a chat had shared largely on strength of the slug), went into high standards, went through some specifics related to scarcity of women in tech, then got into the aforementioned philosophical disagreement. I know I'm being vague. He was very respectful of my emotional labor and thanked me for the screed he knew I was in the process of typing, before I'd sent it. ;) It was a bonding experience, and it took a turn for the somewhat unexpected when the phrase "take offense" came up.

I asked him to unpack what that meant to him, since it's a phrase that has some substantially different meanings to various people, and to be quite honest I often find it dismissive of the actual problem. While he was composing his message about duration, and the offense is the ones that stick with you a while and bother you, I was breaking it down Inside Out style, and mentioned that while one of the common connotations involves surprise and disgust and maybe some anger, what I typically felt when something "offensive" happened was maybe less surprise, certainly disgust, probably anger, and fear.

The fear surprised the fuck out of him.

It shortly became apparent to me that I needed to establish a baseline.

I said that at a conference like Open Source Bridge, I was about 99% confident in my safety. At work, in this workplace, about 95%. At work late (not in his presence), 90%. (I did not mention that his presence is a significant booster.) Familiar grocery store, about 80%. He was nodding along, with a wince at the drop for grocery store. Same grocery store's parking lot, poorly lit, 75%. He seemed a bit startled: oh, the grocery store number was inside the store? Yeep.

16th and Mission BART (outside), 55% (and here being tall, fat, white, armed*, and not on wheels gives me a bit of a buff vs. a woman who lacks some of those). (BART elevator *entirely* depends who's on it with me so I didn't rate it, but I do have 5 9s of confidence that I will encounter some pee there.) DEFcon, no greater than 45% confidence in my general safety, which is why I don't even think about attending. He agreed that personal safety there seemed ... spotty, and mentioned that even as a guy, he would want an experienced buddy at least the first time he went. (I don't believe he's been, either.)

* For the purposes of the mean streets of San Francisco, my mobility cane doubles as a weapon.

Then I rated general tech conferences (not Open Source Bridge) as 75%, which surprised him: we'd been aligning pretty well on most of these (except apparently the grocery store vs. parking lot). Similar to work, as a white technical guy, he would have a 95% expectation of safety at a random technical conference.

I did start unpacking my threat assessment of any given man. I feel like I am more physically confident than a less heavy and less strong woman, because for most (not obviously super-buff, not obviously armed) men under about 175lbs, my physical threat assessment is generally "meh, I could sit on him." (I find this assessment hilarious.) Also my old college roommate Sis taught me to walk with the confidence of the well-armed, and that tends to deter guys looking for easy prey.

Sadly for the discussion, because it was super fascinating and I want to continue unpacking my risk and threat assessments (including the fact that with individual guys it's not necessarily "how likely is he to do something bad" but "how much trouble am I in if he decides to do something bad"), Purple had a pre-existing appointment for dinner with one of the unfamiliar guys who'd been at lunch. I look forward to establishing to a greater number of oblivious tech bros that in fact that women tend to carry a substantial fear burden, and tech does not generally provide a shelter from that fear.

It's one of those invisible things that I don't tend to discuss with *sigh* sadly Purple specifically, because most of the time I feel like I have a lower fear burden than the average woman, and the last time it spiked because of a situation in the workplace, he tried to be supportive because he could see that I was in distress, but he didn't understand it and very clearly communicated that he felt I was freaking out over what was essentially nothing.

I was parking just as Purple was walking through the parking lot. He stopped and waited for me to extract myself from the car, then walked me in. It was a pleasant start to the morning.

The CSS wars continue. "Please advise." has been added to the Gallery of Hostile Signatures.

I arrived at work just as a meeting that I was supposed to be in was wrapping up. I didn't get to sleep until late, but I set my alarm for 10 minutes before the meeting so I could call in. But there was no number. So I emailed Madam Standards (whose meeting it was) and then the whole group, to ask for a number or if they could just call my cell from the conference room phone. But nobody remembered to. They did, however, realize they needed me, and assigned me a task in absentia which I had already started before the meeting even met. Logistics, meet me. Heh.

Lunch was with Purple's table. Lennon Glasses Guy now has vaguely better context for some of the random things Purple and I say to each other, because #cupcake.

When there is bell pepper and cilantro all up in the rice for burritos, I have started asking for the guy to use the rice from the Indian food station next door. Today I called it "uncontaminated rice", which was not the most tactful phrasing I've ever used. I'm not allergic because I don't swell up and die, but I taste that thing in the cilantro (stink bugs, not soap), and my stomach is unhappy with bell peppers in more than fragmentary form, and I associate the taste with badness.

The package has arrived with the customer. I had the emails sent to radius, not me, so he was the one to be all giddy about that.

Around 5, I realized that the Beacon (the lava lamp on the collaboration table) was not lit. I reckoned that there might only be two hours left, but I turned it on anyway.

I have had a situation going on with my right hand for the past couple days: I slept on my right shoulder wrong, which produced some upfuckery which has gone down to the flexor tendon in my right index finger (it's not like I use that all the time or anything). So I am being very ginger with my hand. Mostly I can't grasp with that finger when my arm is turned inward and bent at the elbow. Or at least I should not. So I am trying not to, because it was hurting. Whatever had gone wrong in my shoulder went *spang* sometime today and it feels normal there again, but my hand has still been somewhat tender and swollen. It's gone down over the course of the day, but I'm going to be gentle on it for another couple days.

More paperwork related to the swapover of certain management things, and oh god it's just a *pain*. Yesterday one of the people called me, and I got to speak gently but firmly about the importance of including gender identity and gender expression specifically by name in their anti-harassment document. While I largely adore my team and don't think we'd run into any such problem, it needs to be there to protect the people who really need the protection and don't have that level of knowledge and trust. I would hope they'd do the right thing anyway, but when you need that protection you don't always know, and [insert horror story from domain shop here]. And the lady on the other end of the phone started, I think, to see why it was important, and it is a document that they keep updating with the lawyers, after all.

Dear cisgender folks: one concrete thing you can do is keep an eye out for lists of people who ought to be protected, and make sure that trans* folks and other gender minorities are included where they can be. It's part of the onboarding process for me now. Check, then comment if it's not there.

My co-workers keep trolling each other with the dried durian. Sparkles got Rocky to huff air from the bag. Rocky staggered off groaning. Sparkles headed out of the building giggling. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

The fellow working from Home Office: Japan in #VirtualH has been doing botsmithery again. This time, the number of hours until beer bash. I've been running a day ahead, so I thought it was only 21 hours when the bot said 33. The Botsmith pointed out my error, and started muttering about timezones. I adjusted my math. 45. Okay. The bot was still 12 hours off. "Is it ignoring the PM bit?" I asked, because 12 is a magic number, and the math made sense if the bot thought it was 4am, not 4pm. That turned out to be the basic shape of the answer, though the details varied slightly. That's one of the things to check with datemath, if it's 12 hours off for some reason.

Fishie has taken a Goodreads book quote widget intended for a blog or webpage and is using it as a desktop widget. Then, since she wanted it to refresh on its own, she hunted down some javascript that would do that, and a refresh button, and jammed it all together. I'm so proud of her.

I checked in with Purple about where he was in the thing around 8. "Pretty close, about 10," he said. "Minutes," he added hastily. That was good, because if it had been 10pm he'd meant, I would have packed up my stuff and wandered over to give him a hug goodnight, roll my eyes at him, and head out to the parking lot alone.

It turns out that Purple and I can start from "Gosh, living in Alaska is gorgeous" to "No, even if it were lego-sized bricks, if it's square enough to work as a brick, it would hurt to poop it." Via the metal detectors in San Francisco City Hall. Conversations with us are weird, man.

I did laundry Monday. Today, since I was feeling slow and sore, I was low on steps. So tonight I sat myself down on the yoga ball and set out an outfit for tomorrow night while watching some Mythbusters. The new format is all right, I suppose, and the game episode was cute. I got my steps made. I checked my averages, and sure enough, it was up enough to progress my goals.

21:05 Saturday, 03 January, 2015
Got car oiled & smogged.

Napped.

Called Darkside. We have both now seen the Into the Woods movie. We spent quite some time thinking up hilarious stunt casting. The best one was Nathan Fillion and John Barrowman as Princes.

I've been reading through my 2014 entries, and will eventually post some sort of wrap-up.

01:43 Tuesday, 06 January, 2015
Sunday night/Monday morning early was kind of dreadful. ( Read more... )

I felt a bit lagged at work, but nonetheless got some things done. I went to lunch a bit later than usual, because Purple was logged out on IM and hadn't emailed back when I pinged him for lunch. He was at the table with the guys when I came in (having looked up from work to realize that it was time to wander over regardless); he found the text he'd tried to send me in his outbox, having not sent.

Turns out he'd come in to find that his computer's hard drive had died. So off he went to find one of the desktop techs...

When I headed back in, I saw the Lizard Prince (who is still a helpdesk tech off in Executive Land, which is now up on the hill instead of one building over) waiting for the shuttle, and headed out to chat with a handful of candy. It turns out that building-helpdesk is at 50% or worse between vacation and sick leave (and sick kids and hurt pets and breaking the *other* leg tripping over the dog, and so forth). Which would prove to inform a lot of Purple's day...

Conference planning is proceeding what I can only conclude is apace. The Commandant has unlocked the committee email address (fucking helldesk tool is involved) and there is a committee starting to gather/be voluntold.

lb snagged me for a milkshake run, having missed Purple (in what would prove to be a Saga later) and we talked various things, including shop. The Godwin-denying fellow went to a meeting which involved various people including the current buck-holder, and got an update which he variously flakily relayed. I have also been hearing things which I used to corroborate that tale in slightly more coherent ways.

The one dude got his sawed-off pool noodle and his phone fixed, yay!

Fishie slipped on some ice and tweaked both knees; she's feeling much better now but is under fishmum's instructions to continue taking it easy. Her winter break job seems to involve a decent amount of Being A Warm Body. After the first day, she is sort of wondering How Grown-Ups Even Live. She has also been learning to shop for groceries to feed herself, how to estimate what she'll need in the way of groceries, and many other prime Adulting skills.

Purple may have managed to forget his badge at home today, so I let him in and then gathered up my stuff.

He had a sort of terrible computer day, with one thirty-minute fix chaining into the next, with bonus time searching for an actual helpdesk person in the office and on duty. First, his hard drive died. Then, the power supply. And the fan's rubber shock mounts had basically crumbled away into nothing, so it was rattling about terribly, and had to be replaced. And one would think that helpdesk has the tools for various jobs, but in point of fact the screwdriver was not the right shape... I offered a pointer towards my own toolbox, and next time he'll know where to look. Helpdesk did get one from Facilities or something, however.

Since it had been a while, we did spend some time out in the parking lot chatting. That is always nice, even if this time it was a bit chilly.

This weekend I gave radius my contact info, and let him know that occasionally there were #cupcake-and-friends dinner events. He gave me his personal email domain, and instructions to be creative (it's got a catchall address). I appreciated his endeavor, and figured that "vuvuzelalullabye" was a reasonable starting point as a response.

Purple and the Other Guy were plotting maybe something this week for a #cupcake-and-friends outing. (The Other Guy is "and friends" often enough, as he Does Not IRC.)

There was that time that the Army was trying to recruit my sister. Tay had just been talking about her desired career plans, so when I picked up the phone and it was a recruiter, I had some answers. "No, she's a pacifist."
Recruiter: "We have plenty of jobs that don't involve killing people! What does she want to do?"
Azzlet: "She wants to be an itenerant minstrel."
Recruiter: "We ... have a band?"
Azzlet: "No, thank you." *click*

Purple's dad once managed to get himself into some trouble that it took some doing to get out of: during the height of the McCarthyist red scare, you don't go on a rant about how the US Army is the closest thing to proper Communism that the US has, when the Army asks you if you happen to know any Communists. (The Army was not super amused.)

I began to lose my balance somewhere into the second hour of chatting, and Purple very kindly escorted me over to my own car. It wasn't that I was exactly losing my balance in that I was falling over and needed to be propped up, it was that the direction of "up" had begun to be a bit ambiguous, and Purple was a helpful guide in the proper direction.

Once home, I had a few things left to do. I fired up the tv, and re-prioritized my tivo queue a little. Agent Carter. No more HIMYM. That's a lot of Mythbusters repeats. Etc. Since it was also mentioned, I decided to see whether Galavant was something I wanted to see more of.

( In which I explain to sithjawa my feelings )

So yes, I think I shall see more of this.

It was laundry night.

I also got a facelaser, upon recommendation from a friend. (I have pale skin and dark hair. This makes me an excellent candidate for laser hair removal.) We shall see how effective it is on me. So far, I have tried on the lowest setting. I have also decided that the recommended numbing cream is possibly a more unpleasant sensation than the zapping.

( Gender-feels. )

10:52 Wednesday, 03 September, 2014
So one of the local NASA outposts is having their 75th anniversary. Apparently their last open house was nearly two decades ago. So they're having another one. Someone brought it up on [off-topic]. I thought it was a great idea. Since I know that Purple has [off-topic] going straight to a folder, I pinged him. He thought it was a great idea. He pinged the people who he usually hangs out with on Saturdays. They thought it was a great idea. I pinged the Usual Suspects. phone thought it was a great idea. R thought it was a great idea; since the Other Guy is on vacation this week, R reserved him a slot in case he thought it was a great idea too.

I have been feeling fairly smug about this sudden snowball of latent spacegeek activation, and delighted for the chance at meeting some of the greater circle of association within the Usual Suspects network.


http://www.nasa.gov/ames/openhouse2014/


In the off chance that anyone was wondering, my reaction to seeing that someone who I haven't seen around for a while posting somewhere is shaped like "yay, signs of life from a friend!" rather than anything touching on the "but I have not been meeting my Various Social Obligations and it has all been Piling Up!" guilt spiral. Life happens. Not Being Able To Even Deal With Any Of That happens too. If you have the Even to poke your head up and say "hi! been ... busy or something, but anyway, hi!" it is always ... um. De-cocooning amnesty? idek! around here.


23:18 Wednesday, 03 September, 2014
Work was a lot of That Damn Program interspersed by other fun stuff. It doesn't put URLs in text/plain. It doesn't show the site services guys the email body when you email [function]@[company-internal], and it's not clear to me whether the problem is that the site services guys are having a hard time with the tool because the tool is crappy and therefore they aren't seeing it, or whether they actually cannot see it because the tool is just that crappy.

I finally did remember to bring the sawed-off pool noodles today.

Purple had lunch elsewhere; I joined the outdoor contingent of my team for a bit. That was fun! Later, the Stage Manager was having trouble with some new computer equipment. I pointed him in the direction of some possible troubleshooting, although I did not have a multimeter on me at the time. I told the story of one of my cousins vs. Tier 1 technical support.

This is the cousin who is the electrician. He'd just moved into the new place, and he didn't have internet. He whipped out his multimeter and stuck it across the coaxial cable. There was voltage, so he knew that it was at least connected, and so he called up the help line and told the poor Tier 1 tech that he had no internet, but there was voltage. "Oh!" she said. "You have digital! You shouldn't have voltage!" Whereupon he hung up and called back, hoping for a tech who wasn't broken.


Did have a fun parking lot conversation with Purple, involving accidental use of the word "ballgame" to describe ( genital pain ).

( Sometimes friends have heart-to-hearts about rape culture and institutionalized sexism, and that's a good thing. With bonus earworming and happyfuntimes dick jokes. )

Purple stopped by my cube after the day was over. we found what looks like a test unit in the conversation hearts in the little heart shaped candy dish. it was hilarious.

I told him about the toothpaste prank. he said "and you were wondering why he broke up with you." I know why he (digitalambience) up with me. it was because I was the little bit on the side.

Knocking a glass of lemonade into a very expensive keyboard is always the best way to start a day at work. Fortunately the keyboard was recoverable. Then I took a nap. The nap was not optional.

good news on a random work-related paperwork front. I can't really talk about it yet but it looks like it's going in a good direction. unrelated to my team of course. But it's something that was bothering me since day one.

some of the random designers doing a little study on their own were looking for guidance on how to present their findings to the rest of the team. It was flattering that the model they chose to present was the briefing packet -- which they attributed to researcher Carmageddon but actually was created by me.

pardon the random punctuation and such. most of this is being dictated.