It's official

Both Kaan and Domino are only using the new "traditional litter" box. Which means the second one cannot arrive too soon.

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Work may have been my most boring day ever. Spent all day pushing the "go" button, waiting an hour, checking the results, lather, rinse, repeat. Ironically I was trying to get it to fail. After 5 successful runs, I gave up on the bug (which I had seen 2 out of 4 times yesterday) and submitted the script to Automation, making it Somebody Else's Problem™.

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Lunchtime was wasted at Fry's, looking for standard items which they used to carry all kinds of (push buttons, cordless soldering iron, solder, shrink wrap tubing, small-guage stranded wire) and left with a junky looking cordless soldering iron, the right kind of solder in the right amount, way too much shrink wrap tubing in two sizes, the wrong kind of button and no wire at all.

Back to work.

After work, Radio Shack had All Of The Above. I bought everything except solder. Will return the button and the iron to Fry's soon.

Home, just enough time to tape together the sheet music which I'd brought home to repair last week. Grabbed my horn and headed for rehearsal, planning on being 5 minutes late. But there war a HUGE birthday party at the park, no parking spaces for two blocks. So I was 15 minutes late, but a lot of other people were too.

We ran through a lot of pieces, and for most of it I was not doing a good job of keeping up, especially with key and time signature changes. We play a lot of medleys arranged by people who have cut and pasted instead of transposed, so there is a lot of that.

Home, dinner was falafel, hummus, creamed spinach, pickles with chocolate chip macadamia cookies for dessert.  And my home made lime seltzer.

And somewhere on the ride home I went to test the new amp/speakers with some Sarah Chang violin pieces, only to discover I had erased all the classical music on the iPod because it was recorded at 120 bps and sounded like crap, and I never remembered to re-record them at 360. So I just did that. And it reminded me I also have at least 2 CDs of theFine Arts Quartet which I'd meant to put on there. And now that I have found them, I see why I never did. The husband of one of my parents' cousins, Abram Loft, was a violinist. violist with them for decades. He wrote a book about it: clicky.  Looking at the CDs, they were made after he left the group. :-(

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Re-do the valet button
Veg with the cats

Weird Dream Channel

I am moving, and two strapping young Russian men arrive with a U-Haul truck, but I have not boxed anything up yet. They have no problem with this, and start by removing furniture and items which don't need to be in boxes. Meanwhile I am frantically looking for boxes. Which I eventually find a vertical stack of. But I notice I have not seen the movers in an hour or more, I wonder what's up. I find them in the basement (which IRL I do not have one of), moving all the stuff in there into the truck. I start thinking that this move is going to take several days, and go back upstairs to box things up, but am paralyzed by the huge task which that is. The Russians are just stevedores, porters, they are not there to pack things.

Plans B, C and D

Plan A was to unsolder the broken valet button, solder in longer wires and a less valet-button-looking button. The stuff is still in the trunk. Because:

Stream of consciousness attacked.

I stopped by UPS to pick up what I thought was one package, the replacement pumps for the cat fountains. But while I was en route the 2nd litterbox arrived, so I picked that up too.

Which reminded me that I needed to park the crystal litterboxes in the storage room.
Which reminded me that in a box in the storage room was my 5th webcam, and I very much wanted to mount it to the kitchen/diningroom counter and point it at the front door. I used to have a camera there, but moved it to the other side of the diningroom so it could see the cats' main food and water. It also sees into Domino's hidey hole and can swing around to cover most of the diningroom/livingroom.

So when I got home, I found the white webcam (all the others are black) in the storage room and its antenna in the bedroom, white gaffer taped it to the counter, plugged it in and set that project aside.

Took the 2nd crystal litterbox's cartridge out & taped it up for the trash, then took both crystal litterboxes out to the storage room. Back to the "office" aka litterbox central (it's the only room with windows which can be locked into 2" open position - on both sides).
( Left side of the window is open a crack. The litterboxes are on the floor just this side of the sill )

Out to the car, got the 2nd litterbox, parked it in the office. Noticed the broom by the door. Remembered the patio needed sweeping - !@#$%^& landscrapers with leafblowers keep blowing leaves through the little crack at the bottom of the patio. :-( 

Swept the patio,  Chased Kaan out of the storage room, locked it up, back to the litterbox room and started unboxing/unwrapping the new one.  Way too much wrapping, I needed a break so I went to the kitchen and poured a glass of lactose-free milk and added chocolate syrup and went back onto the patio to re-hydrate and re-chocolate. The cats kept me company.

Which reminded me to water the plants on the patio wall, so I did that, trying not to spill too much on Kaan.

Back to the office, set up the litterbox, filled it and tested the mechanism. Jeez it's loud! Just as loud as I remember the previous model despite the marketing lie that this one was quiet. It didn't quite work, the rake needs to drop down at the end of the pass, and it doesn't quite drop enough.

But as soon as I stepped away, Domino was in there giving it a test run. And Kaan also inspected it.

Took a break by saying rude things on Facebook. Also looked at Twitter, but I've got a bogus name psuedonym nom de plume account, not accepting any followers, so nothing I post is seen by anyone else, unless I @ it to someone. Also sent email to a musician friend who took The Leap and tried out for a part in a musical (she usually is playing in the pit or music director). It's her book I just finished reading, so I sent something like a review, but more of a "nice book, thanks". My view of t is she wrote it to exorcise some minor demons and a dash of guilt concerning her relationship with her parents, who both died too young. She isn't a writer, but for the most part it's an easy read. There are some cut and paste errors. And once in a while she does odd things to word order which makes one have to re-read the sentence to figure out who she is talking about.
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After 10, the cats annoyed me for their nightly crack. Gave them that. Maybe I should have dinner.

Still have not installed the replacement pumps. Maybe later tonight.

I forgot about work. Boring say, spent writing an automation script to cover a pair of test cases, based on the tough one from the other day, but much simpler. Got it done, just need to run ti on the automation machine a few times.

Lunch was at China Stix, aka The BatCave. Remodeling has made the entrance a bottleneck, but they still have the best beef chow fun, and good dim sum.


And one of the project managers came by to say goodbye. He's moving to LA to a bleeding edge startup. That's where a lot of the video jobs are these days. Sad to see him go, he was great to work with.

Plans for tomorrow:

First real fair weather LUNAR.com model rocket launch at NASA in the morning
Becky's New Car at the Dragon Theater in Redwood City. I think I'll drive, since the train doesn't run very often on weekends.
And maybe in between, fix the valet button and install bigger bug-eye mirrors on the car