Writing Wrongs

Usually just the exercise of being in a show is enough to make me hurt in the usual places, but that wasn't enough today.


Had a very long sleep this morning, after staying up too late last night after the show. Went looked online for cordless hedge trimmers, and the corded one won;t do for the hedges on the side of the house where there;'s no outlet within 50 feet. Home Depot's web site had what I wanted, so I headed there, but while they had the trimmer, they did not have any extra batteries. They had plenty for some Korean brand they were pushing, but no Black & Decker. I was also looking for a garden hoe, and strange but true there were none of the type I wanted. And the "help" was no help at all. So I put the trimmer back on the shelf and went to Lowe's.

They wanted $10 more for the trimmer, but they had batteries and a hoe. The batteries come with three free spools of weed whacker cord which I have zero use for unless I need to garrote someone for fun & profit or maybe set up a Rube Goldberg door opener. But the price was the same as without, and they had no without.

Home, had just enough time to unpack the trimmer and set the battery on the charger before heading for the theater.

Sundays are always late, because the crew doesn't have to build the set (Thurs-Fri they have to take down the set after the show because there's children's theater performing in the following afternoon). So being 15 minutes late nobody noticed.

My microphone pack went south during the mike check, it took them a while to get the replacement up and running, but after that delay we were good.

For a sunny Sunday (80°) it was a big house. For Easter it was downright miraculous. About 100 people. This means word is getting out. The show went very well, lots of audience reaction, but after the show the big WTF is only half a dozen people stayed to meet the cast.

Stopped off at Denny's and tried the new bacon bourbon BBQ burger. It was pretty good. Would have been better without the burned bacon. The waiter kept speaking to me in Spanish. I guess the mustache makes me look Mexican.  He also kept calling me "patrón". Kind of amusing because literally it means "boss" but implies I Am Old. It reminds me of a song by Shel Silverstein called Time, in which a man is bemoaning his getting older, and says "Today in the park, a grown man called me 'Sir'".

Home, slapped the now-charged battery into the trimmer and attacked the two way overgrown hedge plants on the side of the house. They are on the border with the neighbor's carport, neighbor has a narrow strip which is part decorative stone, part dirt garden with a pile of rust-colored large-stone gravel in between. I had to trim back the plant so it wasn't taking over their property. Previous owner had let it go way too long.

Raking up all the trimmings both from today and yesterday was a lot of work too. It all went into the garbage, the trimmer went into the shed and the battery into the laundry room to re-charge.

All that needed recovery and rehydration. My recliner and the standing fan helped. So did a couple of glasses of seltzer with lime and one of coconut water. Watched some mindless TV too.

Caught up on FB and Quicken. And here I am. Debating whether to have dinner, or if the burger at 5-ish was dinner, or maybe I just need a couple of scoops of ice cream.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work.
Maybe BASFA, mostly to hype the last weekend of the show.

Slept till 11, took the relatively long drive to Summerwinds nursery and was surprise at what they didn't have. It took a while to go ahead and put that $35 rose bush on my cart, but I frankly could not remember what the were at Lowe's or Home Depot. Also bought a lot of strawberry plants, and six small planters of mint.

Spent about $85 all together.

Home, dug a hole and planted the rose bush behind the two I put there last week. When I went to bring the hose around, it had been disconnected from the faucet and the nozzle had been taken off and put on the ground. I'll have to call the manager about that - I am under the impression ll the plants in front of my house are my responsibility, no one should be messing with that hose except me. Next Saturday I'll stand guard - I'm 90% sure it happened when I was out shopping.

After a short hydration break (first the rodes then me) I raked the bark away from1/4 of the strip by the carport, used the shovel to till the soil. It turns out to be pretty rich, with some clay mixed in. Someone had planted there before, long ago. Then I got on my knees and painstakingly took each strawberry out of the container, and planted them row by row. Four sets of 6. And then I was completely pooped, so I decided to cheat, and planted the last two in their containers. The containers are split at the bottom, and while the container won't  decompose, the roots do have someplace to go. I may do it right later, but right now I'm calling it An Experiment™.

I was way too tired to plant the mint, so those are setting beside the recycle bin on the driveway. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow, after the show if there is still daylight.

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I cooled off in front of the fan by setting up Office on the Windows 8 machine. It's pretty fast, but the touchpad is a little difficult and the touch screen has a slow response time. Not at all like a tablet. The ugly tile interface which they show on TV can easily be switched to a Windows 7 style interface in a single click. In fact, some actions like installing software flips to that format automagically.

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Once again, 1/3 full audience sounded like a full house, especially on the laugh lines. I have several of them, but the guy I say them to has zero sense of comic timing and stomps on my laughs a lot.

I'm finally feeling comfortable with all the stupidly written lines. My attitude has gone from WTF to "who cares?"

Meet and greet after the show, the leading man from Brigadoon was there with someone who apparently is now his wife, but I (a) don't think she was when we did the show and (b) I know I have been onstage with her but we couldn't figure out when/where. She has a very distinctive nose. Porcine. Hard to forget that face, which is otherwise attractive. A couple of high school girls said they were doing the show at school next month. Valley Christian. I'll try to see it. 

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Stopped at CVS for dark chocolate truffles (on sale for less than half price) and also picked up a couple of spray nozzles for the garden hoses.

Plans for tomorrow:
Sleep in again
Cast call at 1:00

Up at 7, out of bed in a few minutes, played on the computer a little and did my usual ad hoc filling of the lunch box. Was at work at about 9, I think.

There was a lot of work to do, this project I'm on. My weekly report took an hour to write.

Lunchtime the plan was to go to Starbucks and install the VPN software. There was no parking at the first one, but plenty of parking and seating at the big one a couple of miles down El Camino.

Tried the orange-mango smoothie. Not bad, but not good enough to try again.

The VPN software did not work on my laptop. I was on wi-fi, it was expecting me to be hard-wired. And when I rebooted, just in case that was the issue, it showed me two login icons, identical. That ate up half an hour as I tried everything reasonable to get it working. I may call support on Monday for ideas. Most of us have laptops as our company PCs, it has to be something they have seen before.

Safeway after work, because they have better produce than Lucky's. And better Klondike bar flavors.

picked up lactose-free chocolate milk, which will make making egg creams real simple. And some regular lactose-free milk.  And half a gallon of egg nog. Wanted a pumpkin pie, but the ones they were selling were way too big.

Home, installed Quicken 2014, but it didn't work with my check printer program and Quicken *still* hasn't come up with a check printing widget which lets you build your own background design. So I uninstalled it and re-installed 2013. Check Designer will eventually update their program, maybe in 3-4 months.

Plans for tomorrow:

Morning - visit the movers' and maybe pick up some picture boxes and something for the glass tumblers and coffee cups. And maybe a roll of packing paper. Maybe.
1 pm Sunnyvale Library is holding a class on low-water-usage plants which grow well in this climate, taught by master gardeners.  I'll also return the Fragile Things CD set and donate a bunch of books to the friends of the library drop-off.

But that's how it shakes out today. I did a lot, considering how little I accomplished. Woke up at about 9, played fetch with Kaan. Took my Hgl readings and shot up, did some stuff online, like changing my Twitter password. Also killed the connections between Twitter and Facebook, because that seemed to exacerbate the friendslist spam issue.

Tried connecting the phone to the USB 3.0 cable which arrived yesterday, plugged into the PCIE USB 3.0 card which has been in the PC for ages but has never worked. I thought it was the cable, but it's the card. Windows says it has the latest drivers. Will have to replace that, but not till after my trip, because why bother?

Showered, dressed, took my meds, decided today was round tuit day. When I get things in boxes, eBay things, Amazon.com things, etc., unless they are HUGE boxes I get out my box cutter, slice through the tape, fold the box and slide it into a space between the livingroom garbage can and the coffee table. After a few months this gets to be an eyesore, which was today. So I loaded all the boxes onto a dolly and wheeled them out to the dumpster. It took two trips. And it also took me un-stupid-ing what some stupid person did in the dumpster. A couple of days ago, Wag.com sent me my order of 6 litterbox refills. In the past they had put them into a square box (the items are rectangular) just long enough to fit, with a pile of inflatable plastic pouch filler to fill in the empty side. This time they used a box twice as large, with enough filler to re-carpet my livingroom. Literally. I had noplace to store such a large piece of cardboard so I broke it down right away, flattened it, and put it in the dumpster (the apartment does not recycle cardboard. Boo. Hiss.) This morning, the box was back to its full HUGE shape again, blocking anything else from being thrown away. Flattened it again and it was all good. So, this took two trips, partly because at the bottom of the pile of boxes I had found a box of 1,000 super-sized drinking straws which had FAILED and were there to throw away; plus a box from Costco of my first pass of 2013 calendars, on which they had made a printing error (they re-printed the right way, but had no use for the misprints).

Now there is a bit more room in the livingroom next to the trash can. Whoopee.

Next on the list was Kaan-ifying the patio, now that it is swept and no longer crunchy to walk across. Domino can be out on the patio unattended, because she is too short to jump the wall. Kaan is tall enough. The solution: put a row of flower pots on the wall and fill them with flowers. Not pots exactly, but those long narrow planters. And the flowers should be ones which attract hummingbirds. Measured the wall width and depth, 139" x 6.5". the 139 could also be 125 if we subtract the sides.

So, off to the nearest nursery, paid way too much for 4 30" planters and 14 4" square-potted plants. 7 each of Salvia and Fuchsia. Also got a big bag of potting soil, more than I thought I would need in my lifetime. Took those home and set up on the wall, and saw I could use two more plants and a trowel.

Long drive to Saratoga looking for a nursery I liked 12 years ago which I thought was on Saratoga-Sunnyvale road. The further I drove the more certain I was that I was on the wrong road. Must have been Saratoga Avenue. But no problem, Yamagami's was up there, they are huge and mostly less expensive than the local place. But they did not have Fuchsias in 4" and their salvia looked scrawny, so I popped for two 6" Foxgloves and a trowel.
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Home again, set up the folding table on the patio, and spent about two hours transferring the plants into the planters and filling the spaces with potting soil. Used the whole huge bag, almost - not enough left to save - then watered them.
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While I was doing this, Domino had claimed the patio seat/pillow which she used to curl up on at the last two apartments, Kaan kept walking around, not sure what to make of this new space.

Done, folded the table back up, vacuumed the mess off the floor, got some Crystal Lite on ice and my Kindle and sat in the chair I used to use, and did some reading. Kaan made several attempts to sniff at Domino and got hissed at each time. Somewhere during my reading Domino went inside and perched on the top of the small cat tree and Kaan curled up where Domino had been. 

Back inside, made dinner, way early (6-ish). Finished the book over a portion of Marie Calendar's alleged country fried steak. Took a peek outside, Domino was back in her spot, no sign of Kaan. I looked all over for him, was scared he jumped the wall anyway, but nope. Inside, looked up and found him on the top platform of the tall cat tree. I had been thinking a couple of days ago it has been a month or more since either of them has used the cat trees. :-)

The book: All the Stars by Andrea K Höst. Aliens invade earth, spraying dust which gives some humans blue skin and super powers, and other humans green skin, making them drones of the aliens. People who escape the dust stay human. Set in Sydney, Australia, with Aussie spelling. Fairly consistent world building, no blatantly "pulled it out of my butt" moments. Probably meant to be YA, teen romances occur, teens are the main characters. I gave it 4 stars out of 5, but could see 3 stars as a reasonable rating as well.

Facebook is all photos of fathers, this Hallmark Day. I refrained for several reasons, mostly because Dad didn't believe in any Hallmark Day except the original one, Mother's Day.
 ( TMI below the cut )

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Pack for Seattle (3-day trip, not much to pack)