Category: LiveJournal
Protected: Job Hunting
Writer’s Block: Roommate from Hell
Have you ever had a nightmarish roommate? What made you incompatible? How did you eventually resolve your conflicts?
This isn’t technically a roommate from hell story. It’s a story about the ex-roommate who (I’m 99% certain) stole my credit card, then convinced his friends that I’d been going after him.
A tale of theft, compulsive lying, police, and not covering one’s tracks.
Thanksgiving
Spent Thanksgiving Day with the in-laws, who were helping host a huge Thanksgiving dinner for people at their church. So instead of the 8-12 people I’m used to for holiday dinners, it was 24. Hectic, but I discovered that I’m actually good at playing Jenga. (I swear, I haven’t played the game since college, and I don’t remember being any good at it at the time.)
With the warm weather, I’d been joking that we should have a Thanksgiving barbecue. The first thing I saw when we got there: a barbecue. Okay, it was being used to cook a turkey, but still…
There was also the highest pie-to-person ratio I have seen in a long time. I think there must have been at least 10 pies, if not a dozen. Probably enough for everyone there to eat half a pie!
We stayed in on Friday, avoiding the insanity of Black Friday sales (though I did look through the 15 or so emails from various online stores whose lists I’m on), then drove up to Westwood in the evening to see Equivocation (Shakespeare gets caught up in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot).
Normal?
As of tonight, I am back down to the level of allergy medication I was on a year ago!
Short version: a reaction to *something* (lots of tests, nothing identified) last November gave me systemic hives for months. By January I was up to three 24-hour antihistamines…each twice a day. Plus Benadryl. All on doctor’s orders. (Slightly longer version here, from last Dec.) After a couple of attempts to lower the dosage resulted in the hives returning, I stayed at that level for several more months. Since the beginning of summer, my allergist has had me slowly been tapering the medication down.
Last night, I took the last dose of Allegra.
I really like not having to take zillions of pills a day!
Naturally, this coincides with the arrival of dry, windy weather, which is wreaking havoc on my usual allergies. I’m thinking of adding something back so I won’t spend all day sneezing. *facepalm*
There’s a Zombie On Your Lawn
And the game is total crack. alenxa has been playing it all week, and it’s that perfect combination of WTF and fascinating.
Time-Shifting TV
Saw Noises Off at South Coast Repertory. Hilarious. Also brings back memories from high school & college productions. Forgot to tape Lost.
Into the Rainy North
Final preparations are underway for our first vacation of the year. We’ll be heading up to the Bay Area this week, hitting Hearst Castle, Monterey & Carmel, San Jose and San Francisco and visiting my brother brionv and his fiancee, my aunt, and sekl and non_seqvitvr. We’ll also be attending WonderCon for the second time. We had fun last year, but figured on making it an occasional trip rather than something annual. Then we decided to go visit people in the area, and found out the best week (i.e. when was going to be done with her current job) was going to be the week leading up to the convention. If we were going to be in San Francisco anyway, the con was cheap, so we might as well go. (Then the perfect timing became irrelevant, but we had already bought tickets to the con, and I’d already arranged for the time off, so we were at least partly anchored to this weekend in San Francisco.)
It looks like this trip is certainly going to mirror last year’s trip in one more aspect: rain. Someday we’ll have to schedule a trip up north at a time that it’s expected to be sunny. (I’m guessing February isn’t it.)
Disappear-ring
One of the side benefits of going on a restricted diet to try to identify what the heck new allergy I’ve developed is that after working off the holiday weight gain, I kept going. I’ve been hovering in the 150-155 range for most of the past year and a half, climbed up to the 155-160 range around Christmas, and have dropped down to the 145-150 range.
There’s only one problem: Back when I was fitted for my wedding ring, I weighed somewhere between 170 and 180. And it’s been cold lately, so my fingers are even smaller than usual.
This morning while making my lunch, I stopped to washed my hands. As I dried them on the towel hanging from the refrigerator handle, the ring slipped off, landed on the floor, bounced a bit, then rolled right under the refrigerator until it pinged to a stop against something metallic.
Ordinarily I would have used the plumber’s claw to retrieve it, except for one detail: I haven’t been able to find it since we moved. alenxa suggested using a BBQ skewer, so I took a flashlight, lay down on the kitchen floor, and looked for the ring. Fortunately it hadn’t rolled too far back, but I still had to flatten my hand and reach under the refrigerator to get the skewer far enough in. It took a few tries, but I got it back. Katie helpfully finished my sandwich while I went to change into a shirt that didn’t have dust all over the cuff.
To top it off, it fell off again at work while I was leaning my chin on my hand. It took a while to figure out where it landed, until I realized it had fallen into my shirt pocket.
New task: get ring resized.
The New Year
Took a half-day on Wednesday, then went home and took a nap. Went over to help my parents set up for their New Year’s Eve party, planning to come home later & watch LA Confidential, and ended up staying. Watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and the “auditions” for the Evil League of Evil submitted by fans. Some were good. Some were…not.
Slept in Thursday. Started out reading Greg Keyes’ The Hounds of Ash, a collection of short stories set in the same world as The Waterborn and The Blackgod. After 2 stories, decided to re-read the novels. Fortunately, we recently pulled them out of storage since alenxa was thinking of reading them. Ran some errands, ended up across from the Apple store in South Coast Plaza. We’d already discussed replacing the mostly-dead PowerBook, both wanted to replace it with another Mac, and we’d even worked out which model we were going to get, so we just went for it. Then headed over for dinner w/ my brother & his fiancee (who flew back on Friday) & my parents, where we helped work through leftovers from the party.
Friday: more reading. Made a point of walking to lunch. Laundry. Working on my Flash site after a long delay. Watched 2 episodes of “Walking with Monsters: Before the Dinosaurs” (computer-generated nature show with prehistoric animals). Nice visuals, but I was bothered by some of the things that I can’t imagine could be extrapolated from fossils — like protective coloring & behavior that’s not based on skeletal structure.
Saturday: Shopping. Finished “Walking w/ Monsters,” watched “Helvetica.” More interesting than expected, but less interesting than was led to expect from reviews.
Protected: On the Third Day of Christmas…
Christmas: Day 1
Somehow managed to get through last-minute Christmas shopping. I’d like to thank the following people for helping: Starbuck, Kelly, Peet, and the Bean sisters (Coffee and Lost). Read and reviewed the final issue of The Flash (the third time it’s been canceled for a relaunch in as many years) while alenxa baked cookies, and on to a “relaxing” evening yesterday of laundry, dishes, and wrapping gifts, with a break for Mickey’s Christmas Carol.
Today, went over to my parents’ for breakfast, meeting up with them and with my brother and his fiancee, who flew down Wednesday and are staying at their place. Then carpooled off to my grandparents’ house for the big family get-together. Follow-up with alenxa’s family on Saturday, originally scheduled around SIL and her boyfriend driving down from Oregon. With all the snow earlier this week, they decided it wasn’t a good idea to try the drive, so it looks like we’ll be hitting the post office sometime in the next few days.
Meds! (aka the Joy of Food Allergies)
Irvine & Snow
The whole Santa Ana Mountain range seems to have gotten snow yesterday. I took a detour on the way to work to take some pictures, and ended up on Barranca, where I remembered to stop and take some photos out by the lake at Woodbridge.
Eventually I made it up to a cul-de-sac up on Quail Hill where I took a panoramic photo of the whole area, but I probably won’t be able to stitch it together until evening. I’ve posted a few segments, though.
I’ve been posting the pictures, along with the ones I took of the San Gabriels on Tuesday, in a Flickr photoset.
Writer’s Block: Prophecy or Fallacy?
Happy birthday, Nostradamus. Many people consider the prophecies of Nostradamus to be uncannily accurate, while others remain skeptical. Do you think it’s possible to predict the future?
It’s absolutely possible to extrapolate certain aspects of the future from current and past events. The sun has risen and set every day for the entire length of human history, so we can say with certainty that it will do so tomorrow, even if it’s hidden behind clouds. We can predict large-scale weather and climate patterns, though not details like where next year’s hurricanes will make landfall. We can predict that major earthquakes will hit California over the next few decades, though we don’t know for sure where or when they will strike.
As far as human activity and society, we can predict some things, particularly in the short term, again by looking at what’s happened up to this point and extrapolating. But there’s always the chance that something unexpected will completely derail it. I suspect sociologists and science fiction writers have about as equal potential for accuracy.
As for prophecy and Nostradamus? Say something vague and cryptic enough, and there will always be someone happy to go throught he contortions needed to make it fit something they consider important.
Overnight in San Diego
My company will sometimes do its Christmas party as a destination event. It was in Las Vegas one year, and one year it was even a 3-day cruise. I think it’s a holdover from the dot-com days during which we’d always have an annual ski trip and an annual summer trip. Then it was cut down to one trip. And now it’s combined with the Christmas party.
This year it was held in San Diego, at the Omni Hotel. Since it’s relatively close, we were all on our own for transportation, so alenxa and I took it at our own pace, spending Saturday afternoon in Old Town, hitting a farmer’s market, and so forth. Unfortunately it was casino-themed, and I’m not really big on gambling (though Katie made a killing at blackjack), but the food was really good (it was the in-hotel McCormick and Schmick’s, and while I couldn’t eat the seafood, the steak was quite good, and the chocolate cake was excellent), and I think I have gained at least a rudimentary understanding of craps beyond “you roll the dice and bet on how they land.”
( K2R: Old Town, the Omni, and just how big is that space by the convention center, anyway? )
Now if I could just figure out what to do with this wireless keyboard and mouse…
What I Did on my Thanksgiving Vacation
My brother and his fiancée drove down from San Francisco to visit last weekend, and we ended up spending a lot of time hanging out with them at my parents’ house. And playing Munchkin. Which was fun, except for the interminable turns when someone needed to discard a bunch of cards and, because most of us were new at the game, agonized over which cards to toss.
Family gathering on Thursday at my grandparents’ house. In the old days we’d drive to my parents’ house, then pile into their minivan and carpool the rest of the way, but since my mom traded it in for a Camry, we had to split 6 people across two cars. I’d planned on driving since I knew neither Brion nor Marti was going to want to spend ~2 hours driving in holiday traffic after spending the entire previous day on the road.
Other than visiting family, I mostly stayed at home. No Black Friday sales. I did order tickets to a play (The School of Night, about the death of Christopher Marlowe), and tried to order tickets to Man of La Mancha only to discover it was in presale, and I didn’t have the code. (Subsequently signed up for Reprise’s newsletter. Next time…)
Did a lot of reading. I’m about 100 pages into George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, and decided I needed a break. I picked up Robert J. Sawyer’s Flashforward the day before ABC announced the first casting for the TV pilot. Jack Davenport — yes, Steve from Coupling and Norrington from Pirates of the Caribbean — is playing the lead , and Courtney B. Vance (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) is playing a character who is either new to the adaptation or shows up at least halfway through the book. I get the impression from earlier articles that they’re not adapting the plot so much as they’re taking the concept and using it as the basis for an ongoing series. I also reread Girl Genius from the beginning, which is much easier to do in book form than on the computer.
alenxa completed Nanowrimo over the weekend, having written 50,000 words during November, though she’s pretty sure the full novel is going to be more than twice that.
Also, on Tuesday we went out to Huntington Beach’s street fair to see Gigi Edgley, Farscape’s Chiana, do fire twirling (write-up w/ photos at K2R).
Today, I’m tired. 9 days of antihistamines plus 3 days of getting to bed late and getting up early plus a couple of weeks of not sleeping well. Okay, back to work.
Decompressing
Just finished fighting with a Linux server that somehow ended up re-activating a service which it didn’t need, but which interferes with a service that it does need. *grumble*.
Boss returned this morning from a week out following back surgery…and has jury duty. Figures if he actually gets called in, he can easily get it dismissed, but for now, the only number he has is for the automated message.
Managed to mostly avoid fire+smoke problems this weekend, except Sunday afternoon why my eyes just wouldn’t stop itching. A co-worker had to evacuate his parents from Yorba Linda on Saturday, but their house made it through okay.
Got together with andrea_wot, wayens and gasean for Andrea’s birthday and monopolized a table at Cosi for about 4 hours on Sunday. Fortunately they didn’t seem to mind!
Caught up on comics & Netflix over the weekend. Read Crecy, about the 1300s battle in which the English longbow triumphed over vastly superior French numbers. Mostly about medieval war tactics, swearing, and xenophobia. Narrated by an utter bastard who breaks the fourth wall a lot. Did I mention it was by Warren Ellis? Also read Chrono Mechanics, about a squad of techs whose job is to repair time. A bit too crazy even for me, and I loved Tales from the Bully Pulpit. And finally Harley and Ivy, a collection of stories focusing on Batman villains Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, which was great fun.
As for TV, we’ve finished season 1 of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. I also wrapped up watching season 5 of The Batman (though I haven’t watched the earlier seasons, and based on this one, probably won’t). And then there’s Stan Lee’s Lightspeed…I had to watch it because it’s about a speedster, but OMG it was awful. At least now I know Netflix’ “Watch Instantly” service works well with our system/connection. Snarky commentary will go up at Speed Force in the next week or two.
We’ve backed off on the house hunting for a bit. We actually got a counteroffer on one of the places we looked at a few weeks ago, but decided not to take it. We need to reevaluate what we’re looking for before we dive back in.
Drove alenxa to an interview this morning. Thought it was in one of those two new buildings by the spectrum until she told me the address, and realized it was actually across the street from where I work. Highly convenient for today, but the actual job location is off in another direction.
Fire and Dreams
So, this morning I read that there were a bunch of fires around LA. Hardly a big surprise, given that we’ve had a really dry year, and it’s insanely hot for No-frickin-vember, and we’ve got genuine Santra Ana winds going.
Except that last night I dreamed I was on a ferry returning from Catalina Island, and saw smoke coming over the mountains, to the north of Saddleback. I thought there must be a fire in the Santiago Canyon area, or possibly on the other side out toward Riverside, and this being a dream I had some way to get higher (Plane? Helicopter? Really high hill that doesn’t exist? Balloon? Don’t remember.) and saw the huge conical volcano that had sprung up out of nowhere in the hills southeast of Corona.
I also dreamed that I left the laptop computer on a table at In-N-Out as I left, walked back in to grab it, and was convinced that someone had swapped it for an identical one during the 30 seconds I was away from it. And then it turned into one of those extremely tiny portables that only have half a screen and sort of fill the gap between smartphone and notebook. And I couldn’t find where they’d put the period key, which really bugged me because I wanted to use proper punctuation.
I think I want Monday back
Seriously.
Yesterday morning I got a tetanus shot. No pressing reason, just it was time to renew. By lunchtime it hurt. like. hell. To the point where I was using my right hand to position my left arm on the desk so that I could type without moving anything above my elbow. Driving home was “fun.” I think it was worst last night — trying to find a comfortable sleeping position was “fun” too — but it’s not exactly fantastic this morning either.
I seriously considered staying home if it was still bad enough to make driving difficult, until I remembered it was Microsoft Patch Day. Then I started seriously considering looking up the bus schedule. It seemed to go better this morning, but that was under the influence of aspirin.
This morning I got in and discovered that our database for spam filter training had collected enough bad data that it was consistently labeling a ton of spam with a 0% rating. Trying to reset it led to ~45 minutes of various services either not working or having to be disabled so that other services could work, and of course phone calls. (In the middle of that, alenxa called and I had to cut her off. Sorry!) On the plus side, it looks like part of the performance problems we’ve been having are related to the large size of the database, so it should run more smoothly for a while.
Edit to add: Also, got a response from a customer to whom I asked several questions in the for X or Y? — all of which were answered “yes” or “no.” Yes to X or yes to Y? *grumble*
Email seems under control for now. Off to deal with patch day. *Le sigh*