P-Oed

Left a little early and drove to the main Sunnyvale Post Office to pick up a package I'd mailed from Thailand. Got to the location and the post office site was totally bulldozed and something is being built in its place. You would think they would have sent a notice or something. I was just there a month ago. It was a very old facility, and I sure hope they are building a mo-betta one. A few years ago Mountain View tore down the central PO and built a new in its place, but the new one is smaller, has no customer parking lot, has fewer clerk stations and a tiny passport office. FAIL. So I'm not real hopeful.

Looked on the back of the claim for, and it listed  a PO clear on the other side of town. I've been there once before, it is on a divided road with no left turn into it (you have to go a couple of blocks past it and make a U-turn) and it is tiny. At 1:20 pm the line was out the door, and there were only 8 people in line. Only 2 clerks on duty, no special line for package pickup. I was in line for 40 minutes.

Work was busy, lots to do. No boring details needed.

Home, opened the package and it was my Thai silk suit. Somewhat crumpled, but I had just crammed it in there. I'll have to take it to be dry cleaned and pressed.

The slog to rehearsals was grim, lots of traffic. I'm going to ignore the ludicrous 6:30 call and leave at 7. Curtain is at 8, it only takes me 10 minutes to put on makeup and costume. The Stage Manager hasn't looked at the sign-in sheet in a week, so why bother?

Instead of just running the show as planned, they threw in some more dance rehearsal, which means I am just standing there for 15 minutes watching Bad Choreography™. We were supposed to start at 7:30, but didn't get going till 15 after.

The staff stays in the audience, so they don't see what a mess it is backstage. They think the show is great. It's barely adequate. Biggest gripe tonight is all the musical numbers were what the director thinks is up to speed. They are all way too fast. Some are even faster.

During the pat 2 days I've spent 2 hours on the phone with Comcast trying to get the full channel line-up on the newly activated old Tivo. Still not succeeding. The info on Tivo's site is incorrect, which is not helping.

Plans for tomorrow:
PO (got a notice for package #2, which was mailed at the same time as #1)
No rehearsal. Relax.

Boxes Day

Went back to the PO to pick up the second box from Thailand. This one contained a bunch of beautiful silk screened T-shirts, and stuff I had not worn my first week in Bangkok: jeans, a bathrobe, a windbreaker.

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Work was more fun than usual, they delivered my new laptop (which is always docked and acts as a desktop machine) and as usual, were half-assed about it. They imaged the box with the bare minimum of required software, and left it up to me to transfer the files from my old XP laptop. The desktop support clown did not even know about Easy File Transfer. I set that up at around 4, and left early because it was going to tie up both machines for 5 hours. I still need to install a dozen tools for video testing which IT should do, but doesn't.

I'd been hoping to read a book at lunchtime, but as I was going out to the car, automation guy was returning from the team's afternoon walk, and decided to go with me. We went to Barn Thai again. Good food, fast service, and both waitresses now speak Thai to me automatically.

He was asking about green coffee extract. My answer was anything being touted by Dr Oz has to be a scam. I'd looked into it for him and the only tests which have been published were not double-blind, and had tiny sample groups (like 16 or 22 people).  I told him not to waste his money. Maybe in a year they will have actual data. Maybe.

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My legs and thighs have been very sore from all the standing I've been doing at the incredibly unplanned and time-wasting rehearsals, and the lack of places to sit backstage. There's a nice green room, but it's in a trailer behind the theater and takes a while to get there and back.  So as soon as I got home, I checked to see if the hot tub was warm (it was), changed and went for a 15-minute soak and bubble massage. Then I took a 2-hour nap. I feel much better now. Domino joined me, she parked her head against the headboard and draped her tail over my arm.

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At the door was a large UPS package, I did not recognize the sender's name. It didn't match anything on my expected packages list. Turns out it was my photos from Chicon7. It included a bid sheet, and I actually sold two photos, not just one. Bamboo Cat as well as Raven. Those were two retreads, I like them a lot. So with 10% commission, I made $90. It cost about $300 to participate. I'm thinking maybe I will enter Loscon after all, using some of these prints, since they are already printed, mounted and labeled.  There's also an Art Ark show I want to apply for, but probably with poster-framed prints instead of mounted ones. In both cases I'll set the sale prices low (like $25) which will pay for printing and mounting. And maybe at that price people will bid up. Maybe. We'll see. I still have a lot of other stuff to take care of.

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The person who won the in-dash unit on eBay finally paid. It's a toy store in North Carolina. Odd but true, 3 out of 4 of the things I sold this week went to NC.

Got a bizarre email message from PayPal that the idiot I sold my HTC Vivid phone to wants a $60 refund (on a $200 sale) because he can't figure out how to make it vibrate when he gets a text message. I sent a message back that I didn't mention such a feature in the auction, and he needs to take it to an AT&T store - if they say it is defective he can send it back to me for a full refund. I'm not giving a partial refund for a perfectly functioning phone in the hands of a dysfunctional customer. I can sell it for the same price or higher to someone else.

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After my nap I tried swapping the cable card from my working Tivo to the bedroom one. It worked. Swapped the non-working card to the working Tivo and got an error message. Basically, Comcast gave me a blank card. It's supposed to be programmed before they hand it to me, and it wasn't.

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In other news, IMHO it's time to leave 9/11 in the past. It has been 11 years, and we have killed more than a million people in response. Mostly the wrong million people.

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The attack on the embassy in Libya touched me personally a little bit. Chris was a Peace Corps Volunteer from the Bay Area, and returned while I was on the board of the Norcal Peace Corps alumni group. He served in Morocco, which meant he spoke Arabic, and was one of many PCVs from "hardship" countries who joined the state department to continue to use their language and cultural skills. I am hugely upset that the US Marines who are supposed to guard the embassy staff did not. I'm not too surprised that the Libyan government, which pretends to be our ally, did nothing to protect the embassy on the second day of riots.

Romney was out of line in the way he commented on the event, but he was right about the underlying issues.

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Plans for tomorrow:
Work
PO to ship eBay item
Comcast to trade in the defective cable card
Rehearsal