Writing Wrongs

With Sunday reserved for football, having today off was mostly useless. The Tech Museum was open and the Star Wars exhibit was extended so I did the experiment of walking to the light rail stop (10 minutes, thanks to a very long stop light), and barely catching the 10:14 train because it arrived at 10:09 and did not wait longer than it took for us to get on board. I had to run to tag my Clipper card, and run even more because the train stopped at the far end of the platform, and there was only one car instead of the usual two. It took four stops before I got my breath back.

Got off at the Paseo stop, one stop before the closest to the museum, it took 40 minutes for what takes 20 minutes to drive. Paseo is a pedestrian mall, and I was hungry and thinking of stopping at Starbucks or the European bakery for some goodies, but didn't want to risk being too late to get a ticket at the museum.

The line was enormous. It was not helped by the crowd of morons gathered in front of the info desk, blocking not only the entrance to but the view of the ticket line. Once I figured I had to push through those people, it was about a block long line to enter the maze. 11:20 by the time I got a ticket and my entrance time was not till 11:45. At the entry, the Nice Lady said "you know that the Star Wars exhibit is in the other building?" Why no, there was no clue about that until right now. No biggie, just go out past the block-long line, out the doors, hang a left, around the corner to the attached next building. Got there at 11:30 because I'd stopped in at the cafe for orange juice and chips. There were two lines, one for xx:15 and xx:45 and one for xx:00 and xx:30. Again, poor signage had some 00 people waiting in my line, not knowing they could go right in.

The exhibit was large, and had a ton of stuff for kids, all kinds of experiments based on the science which was fictionalized in the movies. Many display cases of models used in the films, and some of the costumes. That part of the room was very dark, and the displays were harshly lit with halogen spotlights, and there was no flash photography allowed, so most of the shot I got are way high contrast. I had the lens pegged at 1.8, at 1600 ISO, and was surprised how few shots were too blurry to keep. Because of the crowds, especially the kids whose obnoxious parents would push them in front of others so they could take pictures of the kids in front of the displays, I did not get all the shots I wanted.

I like this one:

There's only one X-wing fighter, the glass display cases made for lots on interesting mirroring.


This model is about 6" tall


Lots of kids escaped parental supervision. Lots of parents just didn't give a hoot.

It took me an hour and a half to see everything twice. The full photo set is here.

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I took another hour or so to go downstairs and then upstairs in the main building to see other exhibits, but the ones I had not seen before were all kids hands-on things. I wanted to get a better infrared photo of me, but the tag reader was broken.

Back to light rail, just missed the train, was too walked out to go anywhere for half an hour so I sat on one of the benches. This time the 3:14 arrived at 3:20. Figures.

Long slow ride home. On the ride to the Tech, the only nasty was one perpetually whining/crying baby. On the way back we had a series of smelly homeless people and too many bicycles for the limited number of racks.

Home, the garbages had been collected,  and my new bigger garbage can was there, replacing the too-small one. I can finally throw away the packing materials and such which are not recyclable and have been sitting on the dryer and the laundry room counter.

On the carport stoop was a pair of boxes. One had the storage tub, which I managed to put the night table on top of. It's not a perfect fit, but good enough, and it raises the table high enough. In the other box was a 4-pack of 10-packs of Quaker low-cal oats variety individual serving pouches. My usual at-work breakfast. And a 200-count container of Centrum Silver.

Answered email and FB, then went to BASFA which meant I didn't have to make dinner. Very sparsely attended, but people still were talking among themselves when they should have been listening. gil_liant scored several good puns. My rumor of the week won, I know not why. I did not manage to find a place for this pun: A new musical - Web Site Story.

Home, Domino yelled at me until I gave her Fancy Feast. She is now curled up in the bed between the file cabinet and the postal stuff rack.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Giving a demo at 11
???

the way the government is running these days, April Fools' Day would be a Federal holiday.

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This morning was quite the time suck. I was intending to sleep till 10, do my morning routine, change the litterboxes and relax or read until 1 when it was time to go to rehearsals.

But Kaan wanted to play fetch at 9, and I had the GoPro by the bed with the battery charged, so I snapped it onto the headband mount, fired up the app on my cell phone, and recorded some rounds of fetch. And that needed to be transferred to the PC, edited and exported for Youtube. But the transfers take a while, and I had read the help page on Turbo Tax which showed what I had been doing wrong in trying to amend my taxes, so I multi-tasked between the two, and before I knew it it was 12:45 and I hadn't done any of my morning stuff.

So I took meds and grabbed my reading glasses and jacket, punched the address of the rehearsal into the GPS and headed for some middle school in San Jose, which was more like in Cupertino. It only took 20 minutes to get there, and rehearsals did not start till 2, so I had a lot of time to walk around, watch soccer practice and discover I had forgotten to bring my Kindle.

This was the first rehearsal with the orchestra, and it was okay. Cast and musicians wandered in over the course of the first half hour. Seating was inadequate for such a large cast, and that orchestra is twice as large as it needs to be in most sections. I recognized a few of the musicians, one has worked several shows I have been on, a very good double-reed player. At least one of the two cellists sounded great. String bass player was familiar, and excellent. Overall, they sounded okay. Intonation was pretty good, they mostly played all the notes, and by the time we open they should be fine.

I'm still worried about our leading man, though. Excellent voice, but I have not heard him project well either in dialog or singing. We have a woman singing tenor and playing a man, and she is having a tough time learning a very difficult part and making herself heard. She's really an alto with a very low bottom note, I think. Lovely person, fun to be on stage with. There are three or four very weak soloists in the ensemble who have one solo line each. I like the share the wealth idea, and none of them will destroy the show if their line is not heard. But I'd rather have strong singers all around.

Maestro managed to work it so the chorus could eave early, which was about 4 or so. By 4:30 I was waiting for a manicure, a half hour wait and once again I regretted forgetting my kindle. I think it was tattoo special day, several of the women clients had a lot of ink on them. Two of them were very large canvases.

Next stop, my local PO to get another priority mail envelope (I had one for the IRS, needed another for the Franchise Tax Board). They have a display in the unlocked section for all the various free envelopes, but it was empty. So I went to the little PO near Sunnyvale CalTrain, and they had about a thousand express envelopes, and almost as many small flat rate boxes, but only padded flat rate envelopes. Around the corner is one of those contract stations, and he was open and gave me the kind I needed.

Home, took care of the litterboxes and staged them by the door then crashed on the recliner until I was ready to take them to the dumpster.

Printed PO labels from the USPS.com site for the tax stuff, and now those are ready to drop off Monday.

Launched Quicken, saw that both my paycheck and bonus arrived in my account, so I paid off my Amex Blue, Capitol One  and Discover cards. The first two were small amounts, Discover was about equal to a paycheck. Will have to wait another paycheck to pay off Amex Costco card. That one's a 0% interest card. Actually, so is the Capitol One and Discover, but the latter is coming close to the end of its grace period.

With Things Being As They Are In The World™, I want to be as solvent as possible.

Broke for dinner. Last night I'd baked a 10-lb honey glazed spiral cut bone-in ham, the first time I have ever even thought of doing that. I did it in honor of Good Friday, and all my superstitious non-meat-eating friends. Before I went to bed I pulled all the slices off which I could, bagging them and throwing the bags in the freezer. Whichever company does this ham poops out before they cut the last few inches, so those I had to chop off in ugly chunks, which went into a bag in the fridge for further processing. Tonight I threw the chunks into the Cuisinart and made chips and slice-lets, and took about 1/3 of them, threw that into the cast iron skillet with some eggbeaters, string cheese and American Singles, and had a nice ham & cheese scramble. The remaining bits went back into the bag, and into the freezer.

Took the litterbox cartridges out to the dumpster, where a Chinese mover was trying to understand an Indian tenant. It was not pretty.

It rained intermittently all afternoon, but it's still pretty warm.

Fed the cats their Fancy Feast, caught up on LJ, FB and Twitter. Part of that was looking at the Hugo nominations (science fiction fans vote on these).  The Bay Area club is very strong, and works up a list of nomination suggestions for members by gathering them from the membership and posting them on the web site. I think LA, DC and maybe Boston does this too. There may be others. Anyhow, I was not surprised to see us well represented. Also not surprised to see seanan_mcguire on there 5 times, and actually wondered why she wasn't on there for graphic novel-ish things too. I'm a fan of her, but not the genres she writes in. I was bothered a bit that she was running against herself in one category. Officially the Hugo is for the work, and not the author, but I'd bet real cash dollars that most people vote for the author as much as, if not more than, the work. I'd be in favor of a limit of one nomination per author per category. Which would also widen the "short performance" field which had three Dr. Who episodes running against each other.

And once again I have a dilemma on voting for fan artist, because dinogrl and maurinestarkey are both nominated, I love both of them and their work, and it's apples and oranges because Mo does stunning drawings and paintings, Spring does the most amazing genre jewelry. And dinosaur poop. Mo won last year so I think I'll vote jewelry this time.

I was tempted to throw my name in the ring, my photos have been seen by fans in the Bay Area, Denvention, Chicon and Boskone. But photography never draws the ooohs and aaahs of hand-crafted art. And I think that's probably As It Should Be.

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My left knee has been hurting a lot the past few days, and not responding much to Tylenol. Can't take Ibuprofin because my liver is already waving the white flag.

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Plans for tomorrow:
Fry's, buy a couple of reams of printer paper. I made a couple of mistakes printing the tax forms, fed the shredder a lot of paper.
It may continue to rain, in which case I'll catch up on Tivo & maybe throw Princess Bride on the blu-ray. My newest great-nephew was named Wesley, which made me want to puke at first, but on his first posted FB photo a light went on and I wrote a comment: "As you wish..."
I also may try to have a late lunch at Shoreline Park, especially if it rains.
Oh yes, Easter Sunday. Time to bite the head off a hollow chocolate bunny.

One of the things I dislike about the new apartment is it is a 2-block walk to the other side of the complex to get the mail, and it usually isn't worth the trip. Especially today, in the rain, with nothing but a Christmas ad.

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Worked from home this morning because I woke up at the crack of OMG with a splitting headache, which I think actually stared when I discovered at about 2:30 am that after I told the new Squeezebox radio in the kitchen to synchronize with the not as new one in the bedroom, when I turned on the one in the bedroom at low volume to the easy-to-sleep-to Thai easy listening station, the one in the kitchen would tune to the same station, at its last known volume which was LOUDER. And using the remote to turn it off also turned off the one in the bedroom, so I had to walk out to the kitchen and turn off the power switch. And back in the bedroom, un-synced them.

Tried to get back to sleep after taking 2 Anacin, but Domino thought it was snack time, and my subconscious thought it was time to remember last night's lap dance at the strip club. Her stage name is
Isis,
totally wrong for a petite blonde with next to zero knowledge of Egyptian deities.

I finally dragged myself out of bed and did the morning rituals, including treats for the feline, went to the PC and sent email to the team that I would be working from home. And went back to bed.

I did eventually remote into my work PC and get a lot of cut and paste work done and at noon-ish had lunch and then went to the office and finished the job. And then ran some tests which I could also have done from home, but are easier without the extra layer of network lag. A new engineer came by for some clues on how to use an encryption feature I've become an expert with, which I did have to be in the office to do. 

Ordered an electric fondue pot on amazon, using some of my Discover card cash back bonus.

Just as I was getting ready to leave for the weekend, my calendar popped up a reminder that I needed to write my weekly report, which would be longer than usual because it had to cover the last 2 weeks.

Wanted to go straight home and watch the Stanford game, but needed some stuff at Safeway. I can't believe they don't carry windshield washer fluid anymore. And I forgot the whipped cream. But I did find little flasks of Kirschwasser and some nice goat brie.

Am pissed at George Takei. I pre-ordered his new book, which means a downloaded pdf, but they password protected it in the stupidest way - every time you open the file you need to enter the password. It is gobbledygook mixed case and digits and not easy to type into the Kindle. And no way to store it on the Kindle to cut and paste. So that's one book I will not be reading.

Watched the last quarter of the Stanford game, which was very exciting, apparently much more so than the previous 3 quarters, and they won, which sends them to the Rose Bowl. Good thing, because it's kind of redundant to send UCLA there.

Plans for tomorrow:
Surgical strike Shopping: A different Safeway for whipped cream and French onion soup mix, Trader Joe's for fondue, maybe Bevmo for a real bottle of Kirschwasser, and maybe Milk Pail for sheep brie. It's a long drive, but there's a TJ and Bevmo in that shopping center. And Safeway is across the street. And an auto parts store across the other street.

Sci-fi readers/writers meetup in the evening, if they announce a location.

Not writer's block, just kinda in hermit mode. Dropped out of the NorCal Peace Corps alumni group, have stopped going to BASFA meetings, withdrew from the Silicon 2009 art show. Pulled out of all the photo meetup groups which do group model shoots.

Been watching America's Got Talent on Tivo. The first 10 minutes of each show is crap & commercials, so FF gets used a lot. I have come to cherish Piers' comments. He mostly thinks like me, though he's way too soft-hearted when it comes to the Everyman entrants. The show is not called "America's Got People Who Sing Flat" or "America's Got Derelicts Who Clean Up Okay". And I want to shoot the producers who have torpedoed some real talent by over-producing their numbers, putting them in horrid costumes, and making them do numbers which don't suit them. My Way as a trio? OMGWTFBBQ. Backup singers for a child trio? High School Musical production numbers for solo dancers? And worst of all, IMHO, making the reincarnation of Paul Robeson sing tacky contemporary with backup singers and sexy women violinists. The only person they have done justice to is one Barbara Padilla, who sings opera so beautifully I have cried during each and every one of her performances. They have costumed her perfectly, and let her sing in her own genre. Her voice still needs a wee bit of work, but she would have fit right into one of Pavarotti's master classes.( cut for length )
Been reading Mainspring a lot. I am finding it very slow reading. Part of the problem is the name of the main character. Hethor. That name makes my eye stop. It makes my brain freeze up too. You know that theory Mel Brooks has about "some words are funny, some aren't"? Hethor is just one of those words which does not look like a name for a character in a book set in British New England. And since he tells the story in the third person, it's on the page early and often. Did anyone else have this experience, or is it just me? Other than that, I'm torn, because it's certainly a very creative setting and story, but I keep running into phrases which stop my eye, or just make me wish he'd called it something else. Anyone know if Jay owns an astrolabe? That would explain a lot. I'm almost done, I may or may not write a full review. Yosemite's reading list will include Sherri S. Tepper.

Looking forward to Thursday's band rehearsal. It's what got me started on the implant thing - it can hurt a lot to play Baritone or trumpet without real teeth. One of the other older bari players suggested it to me.