Tag: original status: locked
Protected: Job Hunting
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*
Protected: On the Third Day of Christmas…
Meds! (aka the Joy of Food Allergies)
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…
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.
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*
Protected: Also…
Protected: Goin’ on a House Hunt
Protected: Ah, Comics Fans!
Protected: Barricaded
Don’t ask me questions, just fix it!
Last Wednesday. Customer sends email to complain about spam. Asks, “Is spam filteirng even on this account? It’s getting 100s of spams a day!”
Tuesday Morning, 3AM
After realizing I was still way behind on sleep debt, I decided to go to bed early last night. I think it was around 10:00. Then in the middle of the night, my phone got an alert from our monitoring system at work. I dragged myself out of bed, checked whether I could get onto the system remotely, and saw that it wasn’t responding to anything but pings.
Whee.
So I threw on the first clothes I found and drove in to the office at a quarter to three in the morning so I could get the server running again.
I never assume that I’m going to be the only one in the office anymore. Some of my co-workers tend to keep late hours (though none so late as the guy who actually slept during the day and came in around the time everyone else went home). And once I was in around midnight to deal with another server crash, and another coworker walked in with a bunch of his friends. They were on the way back from somewhere and he’d stopped to pick something up.
I didn’t see anyone last night, but this morning I got asked by another coworker, “So, what were you doing in so early this morning?” He’d been working late and just crashed at the office instead of going home. Apparently he woke up just enough to see me when I walked by.
The Fourth
Went out to see the fireworks at Laguna Beach on Friday. I started the day reading comics, including the new House of Mystery issue — Vertigo is not making it easy for me to cut down on comics purchasing — and the first two issues of Gemini, about a super-hero who doesn’t know he’s a hero. (There’s a second personality, activated remotely by a controlling agency. And the hero personality doesn’t know about his civilian ID.) Also read some old Flash comics, originally to prepare for a couple of profiles on my website, but got distracted by Silver Age wackiness.
Ended up sleeping half the afternoon, since I haven’t been sleeping well and I’ve been trying to adjust to getting up earlier for alenxa’s new job. (Annoyingly, I discovered the next morning that a server problem came up on Friday — if I’d been my usual Internet-addicted self, I would have spotted it much earlier.)
Anyway, since Katie didn’t want to wait around for hours on the beach like we did last year, we aimed to arrive around 8:30, during twilight. Again, we made good time down the canyon and parked up at the entrance (across the street from Laguna Playhouse and Tivoli Terrace). It’s amazing how much more expensive it is to park just a few blocks closer to the beach.
We found a good spot, and this year the wind didn’t blow the smoke toward us, so the view was clear, both of the fireworks launched from the base of the cliffs and of the fireworks launched a mile or two farther up the coast. Someone was selling cheap blue lightsabers on the beach. We saw a bunch of them. Unlike the good ones, you could really see the individual bulbs/LEDs along the length of the blade.
We let tradition win out over annoyance at Starbucks, and went to the place that used to be a Diedrich Coffee. That, and I kind of needed the caffeine to get us home. On our way back to the car, we stopped at a gelato place, and I had a really good combo of cherry and chocolate.
Saturday morning I was stuck going into work, then afternoon was mostly errands. Then I let myself get caught up in a flamewar, wasting time I intended to use finishing up on that reading. Finally made the time for it on Sunday, as well as reading through the PDFs of The Flash Companion (I’ve made arrangements with the main author to post some excerpts online to promote it). Discovered that in the Contributors’ Biographies section, my website got hyphenated. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except it’s the domain name, and some domain squatter owns hyper-borea.org.
Protected: Temeculee, Temeculaa
This is not my idea of a good time
At this point, none of the desktop computers have made it through the move completely unscathed.
1. Katie’s desktop, when we set it up after moving, couldn’t open the CD/DVD tray. It tried, but after whirring for a few seconds, it would give up. Because of the way the case is set up, I had to open it up and pull out the drive in order to get at it with a paper-clip, manually open it, move it a couple of times, and blast the whole thing with compressed air.
2. The transmitter for the cordless mouse went on the shared Windows box. So we went down to Best Buy to get a new mouse. The next day I found the 10% off coupon I’d printed out when setting up mail forwarding with the post office.
3. My computer, after working fine for a week and a half, suddenly stopped displaying a desktop. Instead I got flickering rectangular fragments. Flaky video card, obsolete hardware, and 64-bit decisions.
Stuff
You never realize just how much stuff you have until you have to put it all in boxes. It’s getting down to the wire now, coming up on Saturday, and the go-through-everything-and-triage plan is about to give way to the just-shove-it-in-a-box plan.
Last Thursday, alenxa went out to look at condos with our realtor, and found one that looked promising. She arranged to go back that evening when I could take a look at it. Unfortunately we basically need to put an offer in now, and jump through a bunch of hoops. We jumped through the first one, but with all the moving prep, neither of us is in the mood for jumping through any more.
Cleaned out the refrigerator the other day. Katie looked through the fridge, and I took on the task of opening and cleaning the containers.
Sunday was mostly spent cleaning, since we’ve got an inspection scheduled with the apartment complex tomorrow. We want to make sure they don’t try to charge us for any of the remodeling that they’re going to do anyway.
I’ve taken 2 days off later this week, and I’m not sure it’s going to be enough. The place is full of boxes, even after taking stuff to storage.
Movies, Moving and More
- Saw Iron Man on Saturday. Very good, possibly the best superhero movie since the first Spider-Man. Perfect balance of action and humor — it knew when to take itself seriously, and (more importantly), when not to.
- Tried “curry chips” at an Irish pub near the movie theater. French fries, only lightly salted, and a bowl of curry to dip them in. Surprisingly good.
- Also watched Never Been Kissed via Netflix. Funny, but in a painful way, since the movie is all about public humiliation.
- Boxed up most of the books on our main 2 bookshelves. The plan is to put most of our books (and the shelves) in storage until we get a more permanent place, except for one to-read box. 10 boxes later, we still have the non-fiction shelf, the manga shelf, the humor+coffee table shelf… We’re going to need more boxes.
- Speaking of which, we’re down to less than 2 weeks to the move. Once we landed an interim apartment, I was relieved, but now I’m starting to worry about whether we’ll have time to pack everything up. Which reminds, me, I never got a response on my request for a quote for movers. More calls to make…
- Finally replaced the last of my large plain T-shirts with mediums after almost a year of holding at 150-155 lbs. Printed shirts are a bit trickier.
- Sleepy+hungry. Finally got around to reading Superman: Birthright last night, which was considerably better than the online consensus would suggest. But it meant I was up past midnight, and I got up early so that we could go to the DMV before work this morning. (alenxa and I both had stuff we needed to do there…this week. The funny thing is, we ended up at windows right next to each other, despite being in different queues.) So I got too little sleep and had breakfast 2 hours earlier than usual, and now I’m ready for lunch at 11:00.
Moving! Stage 1 of 2
With our move-out date (May 17) rapidly approaching, it became clear that we weren’t going to have a condo in time to move straight from our current apartment. We asked about moving to another unit in the same place and staying month-to-month, but they wanted a minimum 3-month occupancy, and $200/month on top of the market value for the privilege of not signing a lease. With the post-renovation price hikes, the result was that it would have cost us more to rent a studio than we’ve been paying for our 2-bedroom apartment. Not an option.
alenxa found a place just a few blocks away that does everything month-to-month, was reasonably priced, and isn’t in a scary part of town. We toured the property and filled out an application on Monday, and signed the paperwork this morning.
So we have a place to live!
Pros:
- We don’t have to put all our belongings in storage and move in with my parents for a few weeks.
- Once we find someplace permanent, we won’t have to break a lease to move out.
- We already know the nearby grocery stores, restaurants, etc.
- It’s quiet.
- It’s reasonably located for my commute.
- It’s on the ground floor.
- Laundry room uses a card system instead of quarters.
Cons:
- It’s smaller (1 bedroom), so we still have to move some stuff into storage. But even including the storage cost, it’s still cheaper than that studio would have been.
- There’s no guest parking, and street parking is extremely limited.
- There’s no dishwasher. I think I can deal with that for a few weeks/months.