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
???

Last night about 11 I took half a vicodin, since I didn't care if I was sleepy all Sunday. I guess it worked, there was no knee pain and I slept well. I think I only woke up once, at about 5 am. I was very unmotivated most of the day, though, but managed to eventually take yesterday's boxes out to the recycle area, and spent some Quality Time in the car programming presets into the radio, and making sure the CD player works. The audio quality is much better on this unit than the last two, which surprised me. Their specs are almost identical. Another 5 minutes playing with the iPod controller, which is so intuitive I couldn't figure it out until I stopped over-thinking it. Bad support item: there is no printed manual, just a CD, which cannot be read by the unit.

During this process I noticed the tech who had worked on it had disabled the passive alarm on the car (he probably got tired of tripping it) so I'll have to take it back to have that re-programmed. :-(

Just for grins I asked the GPS to find me the closest Starbucks, and it was not one of the three I thought it would be. It's a short trip on Central, in a shopping plaza which has a KFC an a Lucky's. I had an iced tea and a pastry, and played on the smartphone. There was some eye candy, but not much. After, went to KFC and bought a bucket of original, then to Lucky's for walnuts and some other misc. items.

Home, watched the night football game and from time to time flipped to the baseball game to see how badly the Giants were doing. Made dinner - KFC, corn on the cob, and brie melted onto sourdough bread. Klondike bar for dessert.

After dinner, attacked the final office projects, and now all the books, music, maps, cards and tarot decks are out of the boxes and into/onto the bookcase. There is a lot of empty space I did not know I had.

Also put the surround sound speakers out where they make a difference.

I'm not sure when the next big project will get done, no free time till Wednesday. That will mean pulling almost everything out of the storage room, bringing the big rack and its associated big, heavy boxes into the livingroom, and putting all the ancestral phonograph records and photos in the rack. And re-arranging what is left in the storage room so I can get to it. The movers basically played Tetris with that room.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Saratoga for a talk on the science of Dr. Who

Thanks to a comment made by quadrivium over on the Book of Face, I had loaded onto my Kindle the classic novel Slave Girl of Gor by John Norman. It is, perhaps, the most poorly written romance novel of the 20th century. Or maybe not, since I have not read many of them. Three, I think. It is Not Safe For Work, so I read it before I go to sleep (at home, not at work). To balance this out, for times when I am wearing clothing, I also have on the Kindle Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself by Harriet Ann Jacobs. They balance each other in an odd way, the first being fiction about a girl born free, kidnapped into slavery and getting more and more into it, and the second being about a girl born a slave, trying to get out of it.

Reading the latter book was mostly how I spent my evening, outside in the sunny side of the apartment's picnic area waiting for an eclipse. I was stupid and did not go to Fry's as planned to get safety glasses or something similar, and since the cell phone was between my eyes and the sun I was able to take pictures, but without a filter all I got was a bright ball of sun, as if nothing was happening. At about 6:15 it started to get a little darker, but the big clue was when the wind picked up dramatically and the temperature dropped. It never got that dark - maybe 25% darker.

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This morning I slept in, Domino joined me for some of that, and spent most of the morning loading about a hundred updates onto the ASUS laptop. I managed to sync Firefox with my main PC, except they lied about it syncing passwords - I had to do those all over again.

I'm not 100% sure I will be keeping this machine. The Toshiba fingerprint login is much more reliable than ASUS's face image login. ASUS has placed the delete key next to the power button, and they are the same size & shape. And the "home" and "end" keys are function keys so it takes two hands to use them. The touchpad is HUGE and I keep brushing it by mistake.

It is faster than the Toshiba, and has a sharper display, but not by much.

While I was installing, friends in Baltimore Skyped me, and we chatted for about half an hour. My old theater buddy George and his parents (who were visiting from Ashland, Oregon). He and his parents are all long-time friends, we did The Wizard of Oz together in Fremont, CA in 1986. George and I were in at least three other musicals before that. He has given up theater for a wife and two boys. So it goes. Domino jumped up on my lap during the chat. George used to have about 6 cats, but gave that up too when he moved east.

Plans for tomorrow:
work - 10 am meeting
BASFA, probably