Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
What was the first music album you ever bought or owned? Do you still listen to it or have you moved on?
If I remember correctly, the first album I bought was the soundtrack to Glory. I haven’t listened to the album itself in a long time, but the music’s on the instrumental mix.
Finally started getting my sleep schedule adjusted, only to send it completely out of whack this weekend.
Friday I just took a break from everything and caught up on comics. I read the first issue of Madame Xanadu (looks promising), re-read the first volume of Welcome to Tranquility and finally read the second.
On Saturday, we went up to LA to see The Drowsy Chaperone. It was the first time in years that I’d gone to see a play knowing little to nothing about it. It was a send-up of 1920s musicals, structured as a fan sharing a favorite from his record collection. It was fun, but I don’t really have any desire to see it again.
We ate at a restaurant called Tesoro, which turned out to be at the base of that amphitheater-like area below the Omni Hotel. I got lost earlier trying to get to it, because I got off the parking lot — excuse me, the freeway — a couple of exits before Grand, and figured that if I took 3rd I’d be able to catch up with where the directions said to be. Somehow I’d never noticed that there were multiple levels of streets with the same names. So instead of catching up to 3rd and Grand, we ended up in a tunnel underneath where we were supposed to be…
Today we went out to see Hellboy II, which was quite good. One of the things that makes it work is that, like Iron Man, it takes itself just seriously enough…no more. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but there’s a scene near the middle of the film that is absolutely WTF-worthy and hilarious, but it works. Also dropped into Borders to pick up the new Temeraire novel, and walked out with 3 books…
I also finished a novel, Ringworld’s Children, the fourth volume in the Ringworld series. I think my favorite of the series was probably the second one, The Ringworld Engineers. This one looks structured to be a final book, but then I suppose the others were too. It’s a series in the “Hey, I have another idea for this concept!” sense (or, in some cases, “Hey, fans pointed out scientific implausibilities, let’s see if I can come up with a story that fixes that”), not an arc sense.
Sunday was mostly errands — replacing the lost rice cooker (In the rush to clear things out of the old apartment, I walked into the kitchen 3 or 4 times to grab or check things, saw a box sitting in an open cabinet, thought “I need to grab that on the next trip,” and promptly forgot about it each time), getting stakes to train the morning glories in the backyard to curl around something other than the patio furniture, getting a new welcome mat (which of course was missing a label, the last one on the shelf, and wasn’t actually on the shelf, so we had to guess which empty bin it was and convince the clerk that it was the correct one), etc. Groceries.
I also launched a new comics-focused blog to go with my Flash website. I’d started posting news on the front page, and wanted to simplify management, and realized I was basically building a mini-blog already. And then there was that domain name I picked up last year and couldn’t figure out what to do with. I had some other stuff I wanted to finish first, but I kept running into news items I wanted to post, and figured it would be better to have them on an actual blog. So I set up a new copy of WordPress, pointed SpeedForce.org to it, picked a suitable theme and and put together a few posts to get things started.
alenxa and I went to see Aimee Mann at the House of Blues on Friday. Rather than trying to eat somewhere in Downtown Disney, where no one takes reservations and everything is crowded on a Friday night, we just ate at Taco Rosa and drove up after dinner. It worked out pretty well — we ended up there after the doors had opened (so we didn’t have to stand in line), but early enough to secure a spot on the main floor, putting us closer to the stage than we’ve ever been before. The concert was good, but a bit strange in that her new album had only been out for 4 days, so most people didn’t know the songs. Older songs got cheers as soon as people recognized the intro, but the old songs were met with silence until she finished and the audience applauded.
And she told a funny story about how one of the songs started out as a sort-of commission for Shrek III. Unfortunately they wanted a happy, encouraging, “Come on, you can do it!” song, and she said she’s not very good at that kind of message.
House-hunting on Saturday turned up a few prospects. Meanwhile, did some cleanup at the apartment. Finally arranged the front of the living room so that the display case doesn’t block access to the window.
As for the goals I set for myself:
A follow-up on the bees we found in the kitchen last Monday. Management brought in exterminators on Tuesday, and aside from a half-dozen dead bees on the floor, they were all gone by Wednesday morning. Well, except for the ones alenxa found when she opened up the cabinet above the stove today:
Great, so there were several dozen bees in the cabinet by Tuesday. It’s a good thing we didn’t open it.
After spending Friday night and most of the daylight hours Saturday and Sunday moving furniture and boxes around, putting stuff on shelves or in closets, hooking up electronics, sorting stuff to keep/sell/donate/take to storage, and generally trying to make the new place liveable, I decided to just relax on Monday.
That morning I finally got around to reading The Stardust Kid (which I volunteered to index at the Grand Comics Database last summer when I figured I’d pick it up any day now. Oops). Then in the afternoon, after a quick grocery run, I finished rereading Ringworld. alenxa made purple potato salad from scratch, and we watched “Once More With Feeling” with dinner. We followed is up with an episode of Bones (which is decidedly not dinner material, as far as I’m concerned).
Today: back to work, trying to remind myself that it’s not Monday, it’s Tuesday.
It’s been slow going, but we’ve cleared out enough of the living room to set out the coffee table, making the couch usable, and set up the TV and DVD player.
One thing we’re doing, since we hope to find a place to buy within a few months, is not getting cable for the time being. Sure, we were only spending $15/month for the broadcast channels, but all our shows are going (or have gone) on hiatus for the summer. Why pay for something we aren’t going to use? When I explain this plan, people are often very confused. The AT&T tech actually started to say, “Well, you could watch…” Why? I don’t watch TV just to have the TV on. If I’m interested in a show, I turn it on. If I’m not, I turn it off. If I’m bored, I’d rather pick up something from my backlog of books or comics, or go to the internet.
After I set up the TV today, we popped in our DVD of Raiders of the Lost Ark. We’d gone out to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night with andrea_wot, wayens and gasean, which was fun (both the hanging out with friends and the movie), and we found ourselves quoting the new film to each other at relevant points in the original.
1. Wednesday morning, I took the car in to a place that would not only wash the outside (which it desperately needed), but vacccum the interior. I paid a bit more than I probably should have and had the car waxed as well.
Thursday morning, I set a 3/4-empty coffee cup on top of the car as I arrived at work. A gust of wind promptly knocked it over, spilling it all over the windshield and hood.
Thursday at lunchtime, a freak storm hit, drenching the entire region, flooding streets, causing mudslides in canyons.
Talk about timing.
2. Meanwhile, we haven’t managed to excavate the tv yet, and only half the couch, but alenxa and I watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on one of the computers last night.
3. Also, finaly let myself get talked into setting up a profile on Facebook. Trying to figure out the culture, not so much for the people I still keep in touch with, as for the people I haven’t seen since high school. Now I know why there are so few members of my graduating class on LJ — most of them must have waited until Facebook was the big site before they started getting involved in social networking.
This is all the living room stuff, 1/3 of the bedroom stuff, 2/3 of the kitchen stuff, most of the closet stuff, some stuff we intended to put in storage but didn’t label, some stuff we intended to sort through and toss but didn’t have time…
We’ve made a bit of a dent since then, but it’s going to take a while.
We did it!
First, a big round of thanks to wayens and andrea_wot for their help throughout the morning and afternoon, and to alenxa’s father who pitched in by adding a trip with the van. I don’t know how we would have managed without them. I mean, it was a nightmarish process as it was!
Some problems:
The movers were here about twice as long as anticipated. By early afternoon we told them to just load the rest of the furniture and big items, and we’d come back for the rest later in the day. Even then, we ended up wrapping up just under the wire. The leasing office at the old place said they were open until 7, but they were locked up at 6:55. I knocked on the door, called & left a message, and eventually went around to the back door and knocked there before someone let me in to give them their keys.
We got the bedroom & computers mostly set up Saturday night (bed = critical, and we had AT&T coming out on Sunday morning to set up the Internet), and we’re starting on the kitchen. The living room, at the moment, is mainly a box storage facility with a path from the front door to the back of the place, but that will change as we go through and start putting things where they belong, or moving them out to storage, or getting rid of them entirely (since we ran out of time to seriously sort things beforehand).
Unfortunately this destroys my nefarious Indy-a-night plan for the week, since we don’t have room to sit on the couch or see the TV.
This is most likely my last blog post from this apartment. We’re not done packing, and we’ll probably be at it until ski o’clock (tomorrow will be time for coffee & adrenaline). But I’m turning off the computers and packing up all the cables, power strips, etc. except for the DSL modem and the wireless access point, just in case we need to check something in the morning.
We went over to pick up our keys for the new apartment today. Much less paperwork than the place we’re at right now. Took a few items over — bags of stuff, boxes w/o lids, things that we didn’t want to risk falling over in the moving truck.
It turns out they just put in a new wireless network, but I couldn’t get the laptop to connect. It doesn’t really matter — we’d have to put wireless cards in the desktops as well, and lose the ability to safely share files among the computers. And I doubt they’d be happy about me grabbing the latest Fedora Linux via BitTorrent. So, no Internet access until AT&T shows up on Sunday morning.
Finished off as much of the stuff in the refrigerator & freezer as we could, & put the rest in a pair of coolers, while the freezer defrosts.
This past weekend would have been great weather for moving. Not too warm, not too cold. Monday was nice and cool, but too drizzly. I’ve noticed they expect it to get hotter each day this week…
And now the updated forecast is out and they’re anticipating 90 degrees for Saturday. Gee, isn’t that just perfect moving weather?
Could be worse — they’re predicting 97 for Friday, when we’ll be frantically trying to put the rest of our life into boxes in a place with crappy air conditioning. I liked the earlier prediction of 84 better.
Of course, Sunday, the day after we move everything, drops down to 76.
*sigh*
A month or two ago I dug out a bunch of CDs I hadn’t listened to in years, including some musical-related stuff, and started importing songs into iTunes. My plan was to play the albums first, then pick out which songs I wanted, but it didn’t quite work out, so I put a lot of stuff on just from memory, or in some cases just imported the whole album with the idea that I’d remove anything I found myself skipping. Some worked out well. Others… well the Man of La Mancha suite from Quantum Leap just wasn’t as good as I remembered.
So today, as alenxa and I were driving around to look at condos, Bernadette Peters came on, singing “Cupid.” It was a bit more easy listening-sounding than I remembered, but not cringe-inducingly-so… and then my brain stepped in to “enhance” it.
You see, we’re also working our way through the third volume of Animaniacs on DVD. I found myself picturing Rita (as in Rita and Runt) singing the song.
“Brain, stop it!” I said.
Katie: “Is yours doing the same thing mine is?”
“I think so…”
“On a fence post?”
“Yep.”
In house hunting news, we found a couple of good possibilities. Well, one good possibility, and one that was really nice, but the rooms were way too small. Fantastic view, though.
And then there was the place that had been trashed so badly that when I dropped my sunglasses, I refused to pick them up. Ugh.
After Wayzgoose on Saturday afternoon (where we caught up with various fellow UCI alumni including wayens ), alenxa and I went to see My Fair Lady that evening at the Ahmanson. It was a very enjoyable performance, though there were times when I couldn’t quite catch what people were singing — especially Higgins, in his sort of speak-singing numbers, and almost anything involving Eliza’s father. (Surprise casting: Marni Nixon as Mrs. Higgins.)
We finally decided to try having dinner in downtown LA instead of eating early or in the car. It turns out that a lot of downtown restaurants offer free shuttle service to the Music Center. The restaurant we picked was Cuidad, and was very good, though a bit pricey.
Saturday at Wizard World LA was fun, and much more interesting than last year. Write-up and photos at K²R as usual.
Sunday got together with wayens, andrea_wot, zehntaur and gasean at Olive Garden for Wayne’s birthday. Lots of catching up. Discovered alenxa and I are going to see Phantom of the Opera the same night as zehntaur.
Very unsteady energy today. Aside from 2 nights without enough sleep — last night I stayed up finishing Julie E. Czerneda’s A Thousand Words for Stranger — I seem to have come down with something cold-like. I could feel the beginnings of a cough yesterday, then woke up with a nasty sore throat this morning. Copious amounts of water and juice helped, but I’ve only had energy in 1-to-2-hour segments of the day.
It didn’t help that alenxa and I had planned a full-afternoon shopping trip. It started out with me just wanting to pick up the 2 sequels to the book I finished last night, and her wanting to stop by Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory to try their sugar-free offerings, but we both kept remembering other things we needed to look for, including groceries.
And I woke up sick.
I really wanted to get those books, though, and since the sore throat settled down, we went. I just washed my hands a lot and tried not to cough on anything.
In the end, I had to go to 3 different stores to find the books. The Borders near Whole Foods had full sets of 2 other trilogies (one of which I zoomed through last October), and about 4 copies of the book I’d just finished, but neither of its sequels. So instead of starting book 2 while Katie picked up groceries (I figured I’d keep my germs to myself instead of wandering around a ton of other people’s food), I browsed the sci-fi and graphic novel areas as my energy level dropped.
We dropped by Barnes & Noble on the way home, but they had even less selection — just the most recent series (again, the one I’d already read) and a stand-alone novel. I’ve decided that when I start the remaining series, I’m going to just pick up all 3 at once, since I know I’m going to want to read them all.
While I found myself hard-pressed to focus on just driving the rest of the way home, Katie had the practical suggestion of just calling stores in the area. I figured I’d do that, then pick the books up tomorrow. Fortunately, a little rest, some more water, and the satisfaction of actually finding a store that had the books got me going enough to drive down to South Coast…to the Borders where I remember looking at the books back in October, trying to decide which series to pick up.
So now I’m lying on the couch, half-ready to sleep, half-ready to read, trying to decide which I’d rather do.
alenxa’s sister is coming down from the Soggy North to visit this weekend. Exact plans are yet undetermined, though since she couldn’t come down for Christmas, there will definitely be a family gathering at some point.
My brother is also coming down from slightly less North this weekend–with his fiancee, whom we’re all meeting for the first time. Again, exact plans are still undetermined.
It’s going to be a busy weekend…
Finally got out to do serious Christmas shopping today. Hit a couple of individual stores at the beginning & end of the day, but the bulk of it was taken up by a 3-mall tour:
The Village (formerly known as the Mall of Orange). Not too bad. Parked quickly, though not terribly near the mall. Crowds weren’t too bad, even in the food court where alenxa and I had lunch. Full circuit, found stuff. Stopped at Jamba Juice & Coffee Bean on the way out.
Main Place. Total nightmare. Took 10 minutes to get into the parking lot because it’s behind the mall. They had cops directing traffic, but weren’t making it clear just who they were gesturing to. And then there was turning left into the parking structure at a blind curve with oncoming traffic. Much more crowded — seemed like it was also a hangout mall, in addition to people shopping. Even after doing a full circuit, neither of us found anything suitable for presents. Though we did find a good gelato place. Incidentally, there are some Nirvana songs that are just not appropriate for a store called “Simply Kids,” even if it is primarily an anime/manga store.
The Block. Much nicer. Again, easy to get into the parking lot. At least seemed less crowded. Disappointed to find that Earthbound Trading Company is gone, but managed to actually find stuff for people. Dinner at Tu Tu Tango. Sitting down was a nice change.
Aftermath. Got home, got ready to start wrapping presents for people we’re going to see tomorrow. Remembered we were out of Scotch tape. So I got back in the car & took a trip to the grocery store. They were out of regular ½” Scotch tape. Fortunately, they had 5,000 displays of 3-packs of ¾” tape scattered around the store.
Ended up missing my company’s Christmas party this year because we had tickets to see Tori Amos at the Grove on Saturday. Good concert, but our feet were pretty much dead by the end of the standing show. Sometime I’ll have to post the experience of trying to eat at El Torito Grill beforehand.
Meanwhile, everyone at my office hopped on a bus last Friday at noon to go out to Las Vegas. Apparently they did a murder mystery dinner for the actual party. It was a bit eerie afterward.
Still scrambling to finish a website at work. Also trying to finish some articles that I’m contributing to a book about the Flash. And Christmas shopping? Hah!
5 days before Christmas is a bad time to find out that you’re almost out of scotch tape, but I suppose it’s better than finding out at 8pm on December 24.
Wednesday: Scrambling to finish a section of this big web project for work so that the client could test things over the weekend, and still get out early enough to pick up alenxa when her office closed at 3. Planned to leave at 2 & hit the comic store first, but got out at 2:50. So I went straight to pick her up, and we got stuck wading through pre-TG traffic and grocery store madness. (Gripe: The express lane clearly says cash only. Why do some people insist on paying with a check anyway? (Answer: because the store doesn’t want to lose that sale, so they call over a manager to take it, and thereby inconvenience all 12 people waiting for the process — which takes 10 minutes instead of 1 for some reason — instead of inconveniencing the one person who really should have been in another line in the first place. Thus do we reward people being either clueless or inconsiderate.)) Helped Katie a bit w/ baking.
Thursday: Thanksgiving lunch w/ Katie’s family. Worked out pretty well, since it meant neither of us needed to eat dinner.
Friday: Holed up in the apartment, venturing forth only to run by the pharmacy. Re-read first 3 volumes of Scott Pilgrim & read the new one. Still holding up.
Saturday: Drove out in the Tustin Foothills/Lemon Heights area to take advantage of the really clear air and see what I could see. Got to see Catalina Island from about 10 miles inland. Also between this and a similar drive early in October, I have some interesting before & after pics of some of the hills touched by the Santiago fire. It got a lot farther north than I thought. Edit: Forgot to mention, got a kick out of driving around the wealthy enclave with “Sinister Ducks” playing on the iPod. Gotta love random.
Then afternoon & evening for a secondary Thanksgiving dinner w/ my parents & brother, who’s out visiting from Florida (but moving to San Fransisco next month). Haven’t seen BSG: Razor yet. Will probably watch it tonight.
Sunday: Ran errands, went to see Beowulf in 3D. Sushi & tempura for dinner (Maki Maki has a teriyaki chicken roll, plus everyone has veggie rolls), then minor shopping.
Monday: I think we may have finished off the leftovers, except for a turkey leg.
Somewhere in all this I took a few hours to pare down my inbox from ~650 messages to ~250, mostly by filing and deleting things I’d already dealt with or didn’t need to (though I replied to a couple of things). Probably around 40 of the remaining items are to do/to read items I sent myself. At some point I’ll need to do this with my work mailbox.