Fried Day

Was falling asleep after dinner, decided to just crash without journaling.

Got to work early because I'd had enough sleep to actually get out of bed when the alarm went off.  Actually, I stopped of at the CU on the way to work, but the ATM refused to accept the State Controller's tax refund check! I was going to share moon cakes with the staff, but it was Alleged Bagel Day, so maybe Monday instead. I say Alleged, because Noah's, which is where they have been getting them from, no longer makes bagels. They make dinner rolls shaped like bagels. They fall apart when they are schmeared. :-(  I make excellent bagels when I have a kitchen set up to do so, and the process is very different from what Noah's is doing. They haven't just left out the boiling, they have switched to a completely different batter formula. For people who have not been brought up on bagels, this stuff may actually seem better, but it's like my gripe about American Thai "salad". If you bill it as one thing and deliver something else, you have FAILed.

But moving on, the support person who stole my machine was in the lab as I walked through. I was hoping for an update, but didn't get one.

At 10 we had a boss' boss' team meeting, which was supposed to be 90 minutes. After 2 hours I was going into insulin shock, and bailed. The presentation at that point, by the automation guy from the other branch of boss' boss' product line,  was dead boring and completely useless to me. The whole meeting was a bore, sad to say. Usually the big boss has new and interesting things to share with us, but not this time.

Lunchtime, back to the CU, deposited the check with a human, and also asked about mortgage info 101, so she filled out an online form which told that group to call me in the afternoon.

Back at work, not much to do. I was saved by my favorite engineer dropping by to chat about a bug I had filed. Turns out I had left off a crucial step in the step-by-step "how to make the machine do rude things" section. And he also was interested in why I'd said this bug didn't happen in the previous release, so I dug up the test case and showed him how three different test engineers had run the test in the past with no failures. So now that info is in the bug doc too. One thing I love about him is he is a very traditional young Chinese man, and he always bows slightly when he leaves, because I'm Old®.

The rest of the day was spent looking for tests to automate, but without a machine I can't actually write the automation steps. Also looked at the corporate training site to see if there were any more classes worth taking, but got distracted by a series of self-improvement offerings which are done through a third party.

My weekly report was pretty short, and a little angry because I was still coming down from the low blood sugar episode.

Home, dinner was a sort of pastitsio - Greek pasta with egg filler. Boiled up some macaroni, chopped up a slice of ham, added thyme, garlic and pepper. Drained and poured into a deep ceramic soup bowl. Poured in 1/2 cup of egg beaters, topped with a couple of slices of Kraft American singles and two pieces of string cheese sliced into little dots. Microwave for 90 seconds for the cheese to melt and the egg to set up.

I wasn't too sure about the egg beaters. Use-by date is a month away, but it was already open (I don't remember doing that).

Started falling asleep, so after dinner I took my meds, and went to bed. Got to sleep at about 10. Woke up a few times during the night.

Weird Dream Channel

I am driving my older sister to a hotel in Minneapolis. I misread an exit sign and as the city fades into the distance in my rear view mirror, we are on a packed dirt road, with deep arroyos on each side. We still appear to be traveling at freeway speeds.

Each time I turn around to head back I get more lost. But I do find a hotel each time, just not the one we are looking for, and maybe not even in Minneapolis.

Rain of Terror

Woke up several times last night, most of those times Kaan was at the foot of the bed and Domino was under one of the clothes racks near the bed. Up for real at about 9, walked to the apartment office at 10 to get a package which I couldn't figure what it might be. Turns out I forgot to whiteboard the two items from the US Mint. For obvious reasons the return address on the package gives no clue where it is from. Got it home and it was only one of the two items. Both were ordered within 5 minutes of each other. Go figure.  This one was the full proof set of 2013 coins, which I did not remember ordering. I thought I had ordered the 2013 special quarters. But it includes those so maybe I decide the price was right for every single type of coin minted this year.

Got to Goodyear in plenty of time for the appointment. About 5 minutes after appointment time a tech came out to ask me what tire needed replacing. Apparently the note I wrote online didn't make it. Also apparently they don't look very closely - I expect he looked for flats or bad tread. After I explained, he got it. It took an hour (less time than Toyota) and was $105 ($50 less than Toyota). Lesson learned.

Home, football time. The Maryland game was on ESPNU, and just by dumb luck while trying to figure out why Tivo was not showing any channels between that, 788 and 790, I found I also had the Pac 12 channel, and it had the Washington game. So I flipped between them. Huskies totally blew out Idaho State, the Terps handled West VA handily. I was sort of disgusted to see Rick Neuheisel as the halftime Expert Commentator on Pac12, especially during a UW game.

During the next game, email said there was another package for me at the apartment office, no doubt the other US Mint order. I put on shoes & hat and went out into the covered outdoor passage, and the sky opened up, pouring down rain as hard as any Oregon coast storm. The guys coming out of the upstairs apartment going to the moving van said some rude things about how they thought they had just moved to Sunny California, WTF?

So I went back inside, watched more football and went onto the patio to read. I had been reading David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself which had lots of good reviews, but gave it up about 1/4 of the way in. This was a case of enough material for a  short story being stretched into a novel, and he lost me when he started getting way too anal/philosophical about some of the paradoxes possible with time travel when the traveler not only meets himself, but also falls in love with and has sex with himself. Nuked that and pulled up another of his, Child of Earth, which seems like it was intended to be YA. It's billed as being in "The Sea of Grass Trilogy" but further research shows the second book was published 5 years later and is out of print, and there does not seem to be a 3rd book. Anyhow, for now I'm still reading it. We'll see for how long.

The moving van blocked my car all day, which encouraged me to watch more football.

When the rain let up, I picked up the 2nd Mint package, this was the Girl Scouts 100th anniversary commemorative set in a gift box, which I put into a priority mail package, printed a label and will mail Monday to my youngest sister, who was both a scout and a counselor. And I went online to order two sets of the quarters, one for her and one for me, and one set of 3 of the Ft. McHenry 2013 quarters for my Baltimore sister.

And while I was spending money, it occurred to me that maybe someone in the US is now making the very comfortable cut of briefs I found at Marks & Spencers in Inverness about 10 years ago and haven't seen since. M&S only ships within the UK, and I don't feel right about asking cousins to buy underwear for me. Or anyone else, except my valet.

Dinner was the last of the frozen fish fillets, with a side of dolmathes.


Plans for tomorrow:
Looks at weather maps.
If it looks like we will be spared the rain, the plan is to go to the gay rodeo in La Honda.
If it looks like rain, I will probably do a Costco or Safeway run and watch a lot of football.
And maybe shampoo the dirty spots out of the carpet and mop the kitchen floor.