Is It Friday Yet?

[howeird]

Sure feels like it.

6 am, Spook climbed onto and over my legs and meowed for treats. I ignored her and went back to sleep. 7:30, with the alarm, she did the same thing. I petted her a little, but she kept too far away for me to do much of that. Got up and did my usual routine before giving her treats.

Back roads traffic was not light, I took the longest route, but had an early start so got there early. Grabbed breakfast, there were lots of bodies in the break room. It's times like those when we discover how stupidly the three glass-front refrigerators are arranged. Cannot open the middle one's doors when one of the others is in use.

Set up the Plan B machine in the hole,  and started testing. Spent a lot of time testing the Netflix series Fire Chasers which is about the current Wine Country fires, mostly from the fire fighters' POV, with a lot about the women prisoners who trained to be on the fire lines. Talk about from the frying pan into the fire! There was some actual testing involved because it is shot in the new 4K HDR format, with Dolby 5.1 audio, and the unit I was testing had failed to play either of those formats reliably in previous releases. HDR has an idiosyncrasy that it seriously increases the intensity of reds and oranges, so the fires and those orange prison uniforms popped.

Lunchtime was also crowded, but at least my seat was available. Chicken a la king & cookies. Still reading Ivanhoe, and am here to tell you that Mark Twain's comments about Sir Walter Scott's writing being too flowery makes me think he never read this book. It's pretty un-romantic so far, and the level of Antisemitism is astounding.

Back in the hole, next door engineer came over to see why the tuner card was not bringing in any channels. Boss came for sync just as engineer was doing a factory reset (which halfway fixed the problem). Fortuitous because some of the things she was syncing with me on were things his group needed to know too.

Called Sunnyvale Ford, made an appointment for the recall and modem repair for the morning of 11/8. Assuming parts arrive in time.

It was chilly and smoggy all day, never needed the aircon.

Home the long way. Played with the train some more. Spook is now hiding behind me initially.

Watched PTI and the news, which is now mostly fires, most of the time. They actually covered a SF bicycle policeman getting run over as the top story. From the video, there were no SFPD officers patrolling today because they were all either hunting for the perp or escorting the ambulance to the ER. A classic example of horrible deployment of resources in the interest of Looking Good™.

And sports got a full report. Weather man is making up stuff again. He thinks the routine PNW storms coming into BC, SEA and PDX will help put out the fires in wine country by late tomorrow night. I don't think so. Those rarely get farther south than mid-Oregon.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Cough some more
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