A ten-hour shift today. And on the walk home I called a certain best friend of mine. Geeking over the database, general geeking, and me having a few words to say about work...

It's one of those things. The electricity's starting to trickle back in. We need regular, steady contact. This time it was around 35 minutes.

His mother -- his mother -- sees him in a state of perpetual grouch. And as much as I describe him as being a perpetual grouch -- he's not a perpetual grouch to me.

It's so very nice to have someone there for Naomi, someone we all trust. I think that's a large part of how it's working so well now. I inherit from Shanna and Joan-prime. Marah has divided -- it's Naomi(Marah) and Dagger(Marah) now, and Joan-at-work built on a steady base of Marah, Marah, and more Marah.

I have a bizarre vision of a future, where -- this is the sort of thing that gets you tagged as crazy, but if it does work out, and Darkside does come to realize how very much he does care for the lot of us -- he matches very well with Naomi. We've known for a while that Naomi is heir to us all, and the way we do things, it's not a fading-out, it's a melting-into. There are divisions. There are always new divisions. And we're Loonie more than Azz on the inside anyway.

I can get away with talking about the Collective to him in certain ways by saying "my inner geek" instead of "Naomi". He was made dreadfully skittish, once upon a time, and we don't wish to do that to him again. There's really no public perception of the multiple as benign. It's always a Crazy Reality Show House With Psychoes In!! rather than my quiet reality of a quartet of kind of wacky roommates with the same kind of roommate issues you always get when it's four girls together and who the hell was supposed to do laundry and wasn't that my attitude and you're wearing it today and weren't we going to vote on what color the carpets were supposed to be because who the hell got PINK?! There's a lot of giggling. There's always a lot of giggling. It's sort of like college dorms, except with less backstabbing and more RA.

He evades getting introduced to everybody formally, because names make him skittish, and make him feel like there are strangers he hasn't met, but one way or another, he's met everybody. It doesn't matter who's out usually, but we've noticed that he's a little nervous with Marah-who-was, stiff and formal like Dagger, by turns tired and excited and annoyed with me-Azz and Joan-at-work ... but oh, he opens up for Naomi.

So. For him. As we've done before. Except this time, to the observer, there probably won't be much change. Inside, it feels like a white rose bursting into bloom.

I'd ordered a shiny from Amazon. It came yesterday! The soonest Amazon thought it might show up was Tuesday. It's a little silver ring with an oval blue topaz and minimal Celtic knotwork, three overlapping arcs, tripointed, on either side of the gem. Naomi lost her ring sometime in or about the move, and was much pouting but behaving herself otherwise. That was in my mailbox when I got out of work.

My opposite came in for the evening shift, which was good, as I was starting to fade a little. This allowed me to get back up one last charge of steam to get stuff and people squared away. It seems that the scary Disagreeable Old Lady, the one who carpools with Trader Joe's Queen, the one with the utterly foul mouth and habit of saying the most outrageous things, has taken a liking to me. This makes working with her ever so much easier, because if someone likes me, I start liking them a little more in return, unless they're just too much of a weirdling at me. The Scary Disagreeable Old Lady has become ever so much less Disagreeable now. It's amazing! I have a reputation of being able to talk to and smack around computers now.

I have Wednesday off, hooray!

I got home around fourish. I wound up calling Darkside around sixish. We had a good solid half-hour chat about anything and everything, including the concept that I shamelessly borrowed from someone who won't mind me borrowing it: that of certain computer games being not just entertainment, but research, for someone in the field or trying to break in to the field. He'd not quite put that angle on his thoughts before, and it may just sharpen his senses that much more in his chosen field.

The recent sinus cold has diminished my hearing; that and job stress have made it so I have difficulty hearing co-workers talking to me at some points. I used an online hearing screening tool and found out that the remnants of the sinus cold and whatever else have conspired to give me a hole in the 500Hz range, a not-so-great 1kHz range, and another hole in the 2kHz range. I can hear just fine higher than that; 3kHz gives a notable jump in audibility; 4kHz is loud and clear, and 8kHz is a little diminished in volume but is painfully high.

After my head clears out again, I'll go back and see what the differences are. As it stands, I can hear people most of the time, but quiet males not much of the time, especially if they have a name I don't know the sound of. Spelling "Karim" gave me a lot of trouble today. Quiet males are at special disadvantage if they're trying to get my attention or tell me something when I'm distracted. Tenors are the least audible.

Hearing loss does run in the paternal line, so I have been understandably concerned. I was taking a look around that site, though, and a few things jumped out at me. I know that Dad had fun with things that went BOOM! in his youth, where youth has continued up into his sixties. Dad also rode a motorcycle. Dad owned and used a chainsaw, albeit with hearing protection later on in his life. But he had his motorcycle back before the '80s, and probably did not use ear protection. That site mentioned that wind noise on a motorcycle is equivalent to the noise of a chainsaw once you get up to 65mph. Between chainsaw, BOOM!, and most especially motorcycles, I think I perhaps needn't fear so much for my own hearing so long as I take decent care of it.

Besides AdAware, SpyBot S & D, and using a modern browser like Firefox, what are people's favorite security tools? Naomi's making up a toolkit CD, and she's not sure what she wants to put on there besides those three things. (She's got those burned already, and she feels very grown-up.)

(And yes. She's getting herself a copy of Phlak, because that's what some of the grown-ups at the DeLUG meeting suggested. After they told their war stories about pretending the network printer was doing the port scan and swapping the printer test page on a HP printer for the Epson printer test page.)

Yes, he could possibly be more frustrated with me if I died. Probably not by much.

When my enthusiasm over something leads me to repeatedly and noisily hug him in lab, he will flare up and punch me.