Writing Wrongs

More than 2 tired.
Slept very little last night. Insomnia till after 3 am. What saved me from falling over at work is three separate projects cropped up at the same time, busy busy.

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I haven't written anything about Sunday. It was a busy day with 2 blood pressure raising football games. The Cinderella teams won, which is Right. I like both teams, and while I would enjoy seeing my home team win, I'm perfectly happy to see the other team's city get trashed. Baltimore has a reputation for burning down significant sections of the city after national championships. Lately that's mostly been U MD.

At about 3 pm or so I started making Kourabiethes (Greek shortbread cookies) for the Brigadoon potluck, from the original recipe. They came out much better than last time, but I still overdid the flour a little bit.

The potluck was okay, there were a lot of salads which did not appear edible to me, but there was also a variety of appetizers. The cookies went over well until they cooled off and stuck together. I'd made about 3 dozen, I took home about 15. 12 seconds in the microwave and they separated out fine.

The potluck started a little after 6, and at 6:30, WAY too early, the costumer brought out a relic from Renn Faire who proceeded to entertain us with what he claimed to be the way an authentic Scotsman puts on a kilt. I sure hope they don't do our costumes the way he showed us - basically 15 yards of cloth folded into about 50 pleats and then belted. This may have been the way the warriors who lived in mud huts dressed, but it's not what the audience expects, and is entirely unworkable on stage.

This left very little time for introductions, but those are mostly useless to me, I forget names. Easier for me to read the cast list and look up faces online.

Read-through started at close to 8, thanks to a lot of bureaucratic nonsense which would have been better handled through email. They brought a boom box instead of an accompanist, so we had to sing over the voices in whatever not very good recording they had picked. At 9 it was time to stop, we had not made much of a dent in the show.

So we're not off to a brilliant start, but I've been in much, much worse. This cast is very friendly, there are many hot women, some remarkable voices and the music is very pretty.

The woman sitting to my left when we did the read-thru was a bit of a disconnect for me. She's ethnically Korean, but she has a gorgeous soprano voice, and no accent. The no-accent didn't surprise me, I know several Korean-Americans who speak American, but I don't think any of them sing unless they are drunk. Korean karaoke is not pretty.

I did learn one name, a drop-dead gorgeous woman in her 30s. Personal trainer/Pilates instructor. I looked her up on the cast list then on Facebook, and she appears to be married, darn it. I hate when that happens.

So that was Sunday.

I wrote about Monday  already

The rest of today was busy. Lunchtime I dropped the slides off at Costco to be scanned, the last 300 from my Thailand Peace Corps days. Then home, picked up the phone I'd bought on eBay which should have been here a week ago, and a very heavy box which had a big bag of cat food. This food is star-shaped, the same food in the smaller bags is pellet-shaped. WTF?

After work I took the eBay phone to Verizon and had them transfer my service to it. It downloaded my stuff from Google while I drove to Amtrak, got my tickets and a parking pass for tomorrow, and was pleased to see about 10 empty spaces in the parking lot.

Home, spent a lot of time updating the phone to the latest system & Android releases, and then grabbing the applications I like to have and setting them up.

That done, I packed as much as I can for the trip. Will add meds and toiletries in the morning. Cat food towers are topped off, will do their water in the morning. Litterboxes are clean. Took out some garbage. Chose which camera gear I'm taking.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Home
Work will be busy
Probably will go home for a short time before heading for the train station. Probably leave here at 7:15 to get there early enough to not have to rush.

My morning so far:
Woke up at 7. Counted on my fingers and decided 5 hours was not enough sleep. Back to sleep. Woke up at 10, lying on  my back, Domino was doing her sphinx imitation on my chest, purring loudly. I petted her, which she usually does not tolerate for more than a minute, but she just stayed there happily. It was time to get up, she didn't take the hint when I rolled to my side, so I lifted her up and off.

Did my morning stuff, checked email, gathered the Sprint phone receipt and wrote the login code on one of those pieces of paper, and went to the work place. Opened the top drawer and started taking things out of it. Stabbed myself on a push pin taking out the insert. Then removed a bag of cough drops. Then the little black kit bag which contains my Hgl measuring stuff. And there was the cell phone OEM battery underneath. Score!

Off to Sprint, who told me I would lose the phone number if I returned the phone without buying a new one. They said if I meant to change carriers, I needed to have them port the number first. For that, they said I needed my account number and secret code.

So back to within a few blocks of work, to AT&T, looked at my paperwork and saw I had left the secret code at home. Bother. Decided to try without it. I picked up an HTC Vivid, which is basically the EVO 3D without the 3D but with a better 2D camera, front and back. They did not need the secret code, just my Sprint account number & SS#. Unlike Sprint, they had someone at the door taking names and putting them in the queue, which was on a display on the back wall. I was paired with a rep in 5 minutes. She did a good job, no wasted time, but enough info. I had asked about Motorola phones -- they didn't have any! But she said they had a generous discount for Motorola employees. I told her about the impending Google deal and she said Google probably has an even better discount.

Back to Sprint, got the phone returned and refunded. They will still charge me for service for the 10 days I had it, the bastards.

Hung out in the Starbucks at the other end of the plaza, and got a notice on the phone that all my apps from the EVO had been restored to the new phone. They were, but I still had to log into the ones which needed it, and set up my email app. The gmail account is linked to the phone's gmail app, but I had to manually add the howeird.com accounts to Kmail. And sign in to FB, twitter, foresquare, etc.

And they have to all be brought onto the home pages, at least the ones I use a lot. That's about half done. One of the perks of AT&T is automatic free linking to their wi-fi hot spots, which includes Starbucks - no browser hoop to jump through.

That done as much as i wanted to do, I fired up the netbook, and had it update anti-virus and windows  while I wrote a review of last night's theater.

I guess I owe a note about yesterday's morning adventure, which was the first LUNAR rocket launch of the year at NASA Ames. Click on the photo to see the set. About 500 pix, I'll pare it down later into a set with just rockets.
( under the cut )