Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
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.
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).
And the game is total crack. alenxa has been playing it all week, and it’s that perfect combination of WTF and fascinating.
Saw Noises Off at South Coast Repertory. Hilarious. Also brings back memories from high school & college productions. Forgot to tape Lost.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Arg. Shoulder seriously sore from tetanus booster shot. Typing hurts. Driving home’ll be REAL fun. Still, better than getting tetanus.
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WTF? Saw an ad saying “Support marriage rights” that’s in favor of Prop 8, which ELIMINATES marriage rights! Someone’s got things backwards.
Thursday night we went up to Anaheim to see a showing of The Nightmare Before Christmas. It was the new 3-D version, and it was at a theater (Cinema City) that looked astonishingly like the Irvine Spectrum theater on the inside (in decor, not layout), but wasn’t an Edwards or Regal theater. We wondered if it had been built or renovated right before the whole industry went through its consolidation phase a few years back.
There were maybe 12-15 people in the theater by the time it started, all adults Perhaps some high-schoolers at the youngest. Naturally the pre-movie programming was aimed at children. It’s animated, right?
The movie was good, as always. It was the second time we’d seen the 3D version, which works quite well, though there was one problem with the presentation: This theater uses all digital projection, and the resolution isn’t quite as high as it should be. In scenes with high contrast or fast movement, we could see the pixels at the borders.
Halloween itself was a bit of a bust. alenxa had made herself up as a vampire, and we’d bought three bags of candy, but I was so exhausted when we got home that I flopped onto the bed for “10 minutes” that turned into an hour and a half. But the entire evening, not a single trick-or-treater knocked on our door. Katie saw groups tromp up and down the stairs right next to us, but they passed us by entirely. She figured there must be some sort of signal you’re supposed to put on your door to say, “We accept trick-or-treaters,” and no one told us. So I figure I’ll just take most of the candy into work on Monday. It’ll go pretty quickly.
Saturday we ran some errands down in Lake Forest (among other things, checking for post-Halloween sales at Costume Castle) and drove through a No On Prop 8 rally on the corners of El Toro & Rockfield. We waved, honked the horn, and Katie woo-hooed. [Edit: forgot to mention, there was at least one person holding a handmade sign that said something like “Christians voting against Prop 8.” Nice to be reminded that not everyone falls for the false dichotomy.] We had lunch at the original Peppino’s (a bit expensive for lunch, but the leftovers will feed us for 2 more days) and realized that we hadn’t been to one since the restaurant in Tustin closed. Then I spent the afternoon doing laundry catch-up, while Katie got started on Nanowrimo.
Last Friday (Oct 3): attended alenxa’s cousin’s wedding, held on a boat that cruised back and forth in Newport Harbor. Lots of people I’d only met once before — at our wedding.
Most of the week: fixing Katie’s computer. Drive dying. Needed to (a) verify that it was the drive, and just the drive. (b) get a new drive. (c) install it. (d) install Mac OS X on the new drive. (e) Transfer all the data. (a) and (e) took the longest.
Tuesday: Finished watching entire series of Blake’s 7. The good episodes hold up quite well after ~30 years. (The bad ones… well, they were bad to start with.)
Yesterday: Checked out the restaurants at the new “Diamond Jamboree” center at Jamboree and Alton. Decided to try Tokyo Table sometime when we weren’t wearing funny T-shirts.
Friday: Finished reading Gateway. About to start on Neil Gaiman’s latest, The Graveyard Book. (I skipped the reading in Santa Monica on Monday, but my brother and his fiancee went to the one in San Francisco last week…and were kind enough to send us the extra copy of the book!)
1. Finally took the time to finish reading Victory of Eagles. Very good — on a level with Throne of Jade, which had previously been my favorite in the Temeraire series.
2. Also took a bunch more boxes to storage, including 4 comic boxes. I’d intended to put half my comics in storage when we moved back in May, but I wanted to catalog them all first so that I could find them easily. Then my arms fell off after we moved, and I didn’t want to carry the boxes, and then I just kept putting it off. Now we’ve got a chance of clearing a patch from the co-ax outlet to the TV, so…
3. Arranged for cable. I’d been hoping we’d be somewhere more permanent by the time the fall TV season started, but we haven’t had much luck.
They’re coming on Thursday, but we’ve made arrangements for the second ep of Bones and the premieres of Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles (try typing that three times fast) and Fringe (that was easier!). Seriously considered Time Warner’s DVR package, which is only around $10/month, but it’s only available with their digital cable package… which starts at around $50/month. And there isn’t really anything we’d be watching that isn’t on the $15/month broadcast-only package, at least not until BSG comes back sometime next year.
4. Finally saw Wall-E, in a theater with 4 other people, including a kid who kept making comments and hadn’t yet learned the art of moderating his volume. And a sound system that went wonky during the second-to-last preview and stayed that way through most of the film, even after I went out to report the problem during the short. Fortunately it was just an undercurrent that sounded kind of like a high-pitched refrigerator warble, and not distortion of the soundtrack. Also, the print was rather badly scratched in the middle third of the picture. Despite all that, the movie was still quite enjoyable.
Started moving boxes and furniture around so that we can actually have someone install cable. Moved some boxes into bedroom, made room in the closet for others, and dug out my corner desk from the corner of the living room where it’s sat since May. When we set up our computers in the bedroom, we left enough space for the desk, but never got around to moving it.
As it turns out, the desk won’t fit through the bedroom door.
It took both of us carrying it and rotating it about 3 feet in the air just to get it into the hallway, but there’s no way to get it from the hallway into the bedroom without removing the corner leg… and I’m not sure it’s possible to do that without breaking the thing.
So the desk is back in the corner of the living room, under a slightly smaller pile of boxes than before. I guess I’ll put some of them where I intended to put the desk.
Also: Watched Labyrinth. I still like most of the movie, but I can no longer take the goblins singing and dancing with David Bowie.
1. I’ve been going through old comic books looking for Hostess ads from the late 1970s. They had these one-page stories where a hero would run into a really lame villain, and be able to stop them by distracting them with Twinkies, or fruit pies, or cupcakes. Some of them are total crack, and there’s a web archive with snarky commentary. I got the idea to profile the villains that the Flash fought (even though there’s still a bunch of minor villains and supporting characters from canon to add), so I’ve been looking for pages to get higher-res scans. I found 2 of 4.
The funny thing? It turns out that the Omnivore’s 100 list I posted includes Hostess Fruit Pies because the author was nostalgic for those ads.
2. Dinner with MIL Saturday, after alenxa went to a cousin’s wedding shower.
3. Majorly dehydrated on Sunday, or something. Tried to start going through the piles of boxes against the edge of our living room, but ended up spending the afternoon on the couch reading, sipping water. Read sections from The Flash Companion and a comic book trade, Supergirl and The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Dominator War. I’d picked it up months ago, before we moved, since it was a sequel to a story I’d liked that came out in 1989 (Invasion!) but hadn’t gotten around to reading it. Not bad, but didn’t wow me either. Fortunately felt better in time to…
4. Hit the Orange Street Fair on Sunday evening. Passed on Abelskivers (sp) this time. Was in line, but realized I just didn’t want them. Agreed we have to explore Old Town Orange sometime when it’s not a fair and businesses are open. I think the last time I did that was more than 10 years ago.
5. Responsible day today. Groceries, Laundry, etc.
6. Interviewed the outgoing writer on The Flash last week!
Goals for this week:
1. Locate cable outlet.
2. Arrange for some sort of TV service. The fall season is starting, and we’ll actually be watching stuff live and not just off of DVDs.
1. House-hunting continues. Just about every place we’ve put an offer in on has gone for ~10K over the asking price, so we’re starting to factor that in. Looked at yet another condo in a complex we’ve looked at repeatedly: fantastic condition (except for the door, which looked like it had been kicked in — alenxa figures it was probably a forced repo), but right in front of the pool. A place that needs work can be fixed up more easily than a place in a bad location can be moved.
2. We have bees again. This time they’re setting up shop in the bathroom wall, crawling in through the handle in the plumbing access panel in the back yard. One actually made its way into the bathroom through the bathtub overflow before we taped it over.
3. I spent the weekend watching the new DVDs of the 1967 DC super-heroes cartoons by Filmation. Fun in a cheesy, over-the-top way. Only ~2 hours (18 episodes at 7 minutes each), but had to spread them out. Plus I was trying to do a write-up of the Flash episodes, which meant re-watching, taking screencaps, etc. I’ve posted a review on another blog.
4. Speaking of cheesy, we finally watched Aztec Rex. We’d been warned, and it was only because some of the Farscape production people were involved It actually wasn’t as bad as I expected (even if the first ~40 minutes were interminable), though that may have been the sidecar talking.