Could be taller, could be darker...

My mother used to tell me she went to a fortune teller while she was pregnant with me, and asked what I would be like.
"He will be the Tall, Dark Stranger" they fortune teller replied
Then she looked again into her crystal ball
"Wait! Could be taller."
"Wait! Could be darker."
"Couldn't be stranger."

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A busy Plan A- day:
Just after 10 am I was at Best Buy in MV, had to wait about 5 minutes for the second cell phone expert to be free, first expert was explaining in Spanish to a woman seated on the bench in front of him, and it looked like she was planning on spending the day there, going over every line of her 6-page, single spaced on both sides bill. I showed my expert the printout from their site, she looked it up, the Samsung S4 Zoom, got one out of the lockbox, but when she pulled it out, it was a camera. The image online did not show the very large lens. So, instead of saving $200, I ended up spending way too much on the same phone I had broken.

She activated it for me, it worked, I was happy, except this time the apps did not auto-load. For that I spent more than an hour on the PC sending "My Apps" one by one to the new phone, and if the app needed a login (like Flickr, Facebook, LJ, etc.) I had to enter those by hand. And discovered how many I did not know. And two which still had my email address/hacked password, which I changed on the PC. So now I have at least 90% of what was on the smashed phone. Maybe more, because there were a couple of My Apps which had never transferred the last time I change phones.

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Then went nextdoor to BB&B, bought four expandable (26-40 inch) closet rods. Needed 2, could use 3, maybe the 4th somewhere. Also got a couple of little doodads. Needed a bath mat but theirs were too expensive.

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Home, had some lunch, played with the phone until it was time to bring Domino in for shots @ Petco Sunnyvale. She was pretty quiet on the trip there & back, but meowed all the time as soon as we got into the store. Small as she is, most of the dogs in line with us were smaller than her. Plan A was to get the whole package of shots, but the vet said she is too old to give her more than 2 at a time, so we went with Plan A-, which was to skip the rabies shot because the last one she was given is good until October, so as far as the boarding place is concerned, she is covered.

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Had just enough time at home to decant Domino and spend some lap time with her. Then it was back to MV for coffee & a chat.

Home again, installed the first two clothes rods, and unloaded the first 60 hangers onto the first rod.

Dinner was a pot pie, dessert was strawberries and cream.

The phone setup took up the time I was going to spend putting T-shirts on hangers, but I can do that tomorrow.  I have ~ 160 of them, and I like to keep them in groups, but that's been hard since the last move because the shelves are too high and cramped. Groups such as sci-fi/cons, places I've traveled, humor, R-rated, Thailand, theater, etc. 

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Email from my UK family prompted me to list my itinerary, so now I have all of it in one place on Evernote, and in sent mail. The good news from them is I may be able to spend my first night back in London at the Forest Grove house. This is Special. When I started pen palling Viv in the 1950s, she and her sister Hazel lived in this house, which maybe 10 years ago her mother turned into a B&B. Hazel and Mum ran it together, and when Mum passed away a few months ago, Hazel kept it up. I have never been there, I've only been to Brian & Viv's house in Bourne End, which is near LHR.  The rest of the plan is to go to Brighton to see B&V's daughter, whom I adore, and maybe we'll go the next day to see cousins up North I have not ever seen, I don't think. At the B&B we may be joined by Brian's brother Howard, who originally was supposed to be my penpal, but he wasn't interested. I met him for the first time my last visit.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
T-shirt hanging festival

Yo No O Ko

Woke up at 7:30 with the alarm, tried to delay the inevitable by powering up the Nexus and searching online for something, but Domino climbed up her steps onto the bed and stared at me, just out of reach. I hate when she does that. So I got out of bed, did my usual morning stuff, except I completely forgot the PC, which meant I was at work at 9, which is usually my goal and rarely met. It also meant the PC was on all day, because it auto-starts at 6:30 every morning. And today it was very hot and unusually humid.

Morning meeting was run better than last week, stand-in boss learned from his mistake and did not call on Lecture Mode Man From Upstairs until all of our team's projects were discussed. LMMFU was royally pissed off by that, and he took it out on us by yelling that training us on his product is not his job (even though it definitely is, because he borrows some of us for weeks to work on his product) which made The Guy Who Never Shuts Up launch into a tirade about not needing to be trained, he will learn it himself (which is not strictly true). Moderator was saved by the bell - another team had reserved the room for the following hour, and protocol is when "next!" opens the door, y'all leave. LMMFU stomped out in a huff because he got cut off in mid-tirade.

It would have been a totally boring rest of the day, but we got a new build for the new product, and there were some installation instructions Engineering forgot to give us, because the manager thought they had fixed that.

One of the side effects of re-installing all my phone apps is the ones which have automatic noisemaking "notifications" make automatic noises. As I'm talking to Automation Guy, eBay "items ending soon" chimed at me for two things which would end in 14 hours (WTF?), Facebook wanted me to sync with my contacts list, and two people had looked at my LinkedIn profile. One of them left an endorsement for me for a skill he really doesn't know I had. My lab manager from 1983, who knew me as a hardware repair tech for things like terminals, printers, plotters and early PCs. The endorsement was for Internet Video. It was nice to see him there, he was one of the best people to work with. He had built an electric car out of a VW bug shell, lots of 12V car batteries and the starter for a commercial jet engine as the motor. At the time he held the world distance record for electric cars, a record which wasn't broken for many years.

Had time to do a search, and had my brain jogged - the last time I needed a cell phone repaired, it was done in the Sunnyvale branch of Click-Away, but somehow my brain had blocked them out, and skipped to the time before that when I found a hole in the wall place on San Thomas Expressway. Both did good work, but the Svale place is more convenient and less shady. Good news is they can repair the phone for less than I can sell it for, bad news is they can no longer unlock phones, but good news is AT&T can. So I made an appointment with C-A for tomorrow, and went online and applied for my new phone to be unlocked. Once the first one is repaired I'll take it to AT&T and have it unlocked too, so it will fetch a better price.

I was going to order a SIM for the UK from the site where I got my Oyster card, but they won't ship it outside of the UK. Found a place in the US which will, but their prices were hard to understand. I'll hunt more later.

Came straight home intending to hang up some T-shirts, but got distracted. Home run derby was on Tivo, but the first hour was a rain delay, and they did not speed things up to make up for that. Also watched TMZ, did some Quicken work, faxed Domino's vaccination paperwork to PetHotel, had reheated corned beef for dinner, should have tossed that in a crock pot for a few hours instead. Tough as leather. Domino kept jumping up on my lap to get some, but there wasn't much to give.

Before I grabbed dessert I gave her the last of her latest can of food.

Also did the feeding of the sourdough starter, which entails tossing half of it down the drain and adding the same amount of water & flour as we started with, which means each feeding it grows half again as much as before. Even though I had stupidly used tap water last night, there was actual yeast activity in both jars. Oh yeah, last night I did not throw half down the drain, I doubled down, pouring half into a second container and adding the same amount to both. One more feeding tomorrow, then let it rest till the weekend.  Tonight I remembered to use the filtered water.

What else delayed me? Oh, yeah, used the device I bought at Costco to wash the car. It's a brush with a soap compartment, on a long tube which attaches to the garden hose. Looks like it worked well, but won't know till morning, because usually hose water here is dirty. I don't do the hand drying thing, too much work.

BBC says they will TV debut the next Dr. Who on BBC One (after some cinema previews) on the day I will be in either London or Brighton (or both) with my Whovian relatives. Brilliant.

Plans for tomorrow:
Drop of the phone for repair
Work
Maybe hang some T-shirts