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It was pouring down rain this morning, so I didn't take the freeway to work. Not much doing at the salt mines, but two meetings helped pass the time. One about the upcoming product and the other my bi-weekly 1-on-1 where we spent as much time talking about telescope photography as we did about work.
Home, both flags were soaked and wrapped around the poles defying the anti-wrap devices I had installed. Took the Thai flag down and threw it in the dryer with the bedding which had come out of the washer.
Had just enough time to walk to the community center for bingo. $5 for 4 cards, I won $9.50 on one bingo. Did not win the door prize or the 50-50, which was $5. So all in all I lost 50 cents. But I met a lot more of my neighbors and got some gossip on the people in #8.
Walked home, it was raining but not too hard. Seattle and a little more.
On the commute home I played my Little Shop songs several times, but still don't have the hang of most of the patter and syntax. Grrr. Usually I pick that up quickly, but usually the songs are well written. These are songs which were cut from the movie. For a reason. :-(
Late dinner.
Plans for tomorrow:
Work
My first Little Shop music rehearsal
Where Does The Time Go? NOT!
Dec. 18th, 2013 12:59 amThough the room was set up for snacks, none appeared.
I was hugely pissed off, because the big exec started the meeting by praising the vast amounts of Christmas decorations. He's from Massachusetts, where they actually do have snowmen and mostly Christian staff. Note to exec: quantity is not always commendable.
Went for Pho with Automation Guy, the meeting spanned lunchtime. Grrrr.
Spent the rest of the day reading the specs, and having the most amusing mini-dreams when I dozed off for a few seconds at a time.
Stopped at 7-11 for cash, thinking I might get a massage after the manicure, but I ended up waiting a bit more than an hour for my nails to be done (did not know they were appointment-only, but they had one opening at 7 which turned out to be 7:20). Sassy Nails. New place not far from work, friendlier and more organized than Michelle's. It will be my new regular place.
Next stop, Costco, which I thought was open till 10, but turns out it closes at 8:30, so I had 15 minutes to go to all four corners of the store collecting stuff on my list. Could not find the loperamide or booze-filled dark chocolate bottle-ettes, forgot the string cheese, but got everything else. $140.
Home, 9 pm, fed myself a thing of cream of chicken soup which has been the in fridge for about a year. Domino liked the bits of chicken. Watched the finale of The Voice, which for a change picked the only winner possible, as they had narrowed it down to two mediocre singers and a ringer. First week when I heard her, I knew it had to be her. Not really fair because she was a well-established pro before she entered the contest.
Lady Gaga and Christina Aguilara did a duet, which showed that Gaga is flashy with a decent voice, Christina is a diva with some flash.
In local news, the house is getting there. This weekend will feature another cardboard recycling run, and if it doesn't rain I'll empty the shed. pull out most of the shelves, and stack things back in to make much better use of the space. The shelves are too deep and prevent the inward-opening door from opening all the way. Have to get inside and close the door to do any work in there, which is rude because there's no light. Or I don't remember one.
Plans for tomorrow:
Work
1-on-1
Massage?
Woman of the World Day
Sep. 25th, 2013 01:03 amIt was not a crushing day, however, sort of. Our Jill-of-all-annoyances emailed me and a handful of others that it has been 2 years since we took the ESD training course and accompanying test, and we would lose our lab privileges if we didn't complete this by some date in mid-October.
This was a good news/bad news message. The good news is I have worked there for more than 2 years now - good news because the last time I worked there I was laid off on my 2-year anniversary. The bad news is all our complaints have gone for naught that this course does not apply to us, and is a total waste of our time. I was hoping the new company would drop the requirement, which is left over from when we were part of Motorola.
( An explanation for the non-engineer )
I used to be a hardware repair tech, in the 80s, so I know all about ESD, but like all corporate classes, the test questions are based on the class material, not on what is important to know about the subject. One question wanted to know what polarity of electric charge rayon clothing has. That's immaterial (pun intended) to the subject. Just the fact that synthetic clothes carry a charge is the important thing. Four of the 20 questions were like that. Another 6 were about specific ESD prevention equipment I have never seen used in an actual lab. I got 100% on the test because I took lots of notes on things which struck me as useless.
The rest of the morning was make-work.
Lunchtime I dropped the gift box for baby sister at the PO, and went to Popeye's for lunch. I like the non-Cajun food. I had planned on going to KFC around the corner and down the block, but when I got there it was the grand opening of La Taqueria. And the diner across from it is Consuela's Cantina. Gag me.
Back at work, after an hour Automation guy invited me to the break room to keep him company during his lunch (meetings and crunch schedules keep him from regular lunch hours some days). I had not had dessert, so I brought the bag of ลำไย I'd bought the other day - too many for me to finish by myself, and also a little dried out, not as delicious as usual. Automation Guy is from SE Asia, he too was addicted to this fruit. Soon we were joined by our Puerto Rican team mate, who had never seen a ลำไย, aka longan, and he found them addicting too. We killed more than an hour talking about World Fruit, tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes.
After work it was surgical shopping time at Target, where I bought only what was on my list:
Polident
Sodastream
Extra sodastream cartridge
Two extra sodastream 1-liter bottles
Then straight home, said hi to the cats, saw that I had just enough time to try out the Sodastream. It was easy to set up, I was almost able to do it without cracking the instruction guide. It made good seltzer in one of their proprietary bottles in about 20 seconds. The bottle caps are twist-on, airtight. I stuck that in the fridge for later, along with two more filled with water but not carbonated yet, because the guide said it's best to use chilled water.
Done just in time to go to Peninsulairs' voice lessons. Each session (this is #3) there were more people. I could see that for lesson 2, because there is a lot of review, but halfway through the course you would think they would stop taking new people. I'm only griping because the space is not big enough for the number we had tonight. And the newbie who parked himself next to me for warmups was an obnoxious, tone-deaf, ukulele-playing jerk.
Once again, 30 minutes of information packed into a 90-minute class. For the first time there were glaring bits of misinformation. The teacher obviously doesn't play a wind instrument other than his larynx. He kept claiming that the voice is unique in its range of sounds, that brass and woodwinds had fixed sounds which the player could not change. Utter hogwash. I can make a clarinet quack like a duck (one of this examples), and produce a horse whinny on a trumpet, or an elephant trumpeting using any lower brass instrument. This is a guy who has never heard the tone-bending stylings of a Klezmer orchestra.
He did some interesting things to get people to sing from the diaphragm, which were easy and effective. I would have been impressed if (a) that didn't come naturally to me and (b) he ever said the word "diaphragm". In three weeks no one has said that word in class. Not even to joke about contraception.
When he ran out of material he asked volunteers to come up to center stage, and had them sing a note, then a half scale, and adjusted their posture to help the airflow. One guy was singing from his mouth, teacher pushed on his tummy and got his volume up about 5x louder. Unfortunately the guy was tone deaf, and his scales were not in any recognizable tuning. But that's fine, he's the person this class is meant for.
Home, made a glass of fresh squeezed lime soda from the Sodastream bottle (a liter makes a little less than three glasses). And I charged up the other two now-chilled bottles. This thing is head and shoulders better than the 1-liter siphons I've been using. One cartridge charges 60 bottles (siphon cartridges charge 1 liter), and it has lots of other pluses I won't bore myself typing.
Had that with a TV dinner, fed the cats Fancy Feast and then had my ice cream dessert, and watched mindless TV. Turned off the tube (which isn't a tube anymore, is it?) and took care of some Quicken things, FB and this posting.
Got a message from one of
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susandennis' lurkers, katbyte, which reminded me that during the last flood of Russian spammers I locked out non-friends from commenting and had forgotten to change it. Now any registered user can comment, but non-friends' posts are screened.Two community theaters in the area are doing Les Miz. The performance rights holder is supposed to not allow this, but somehow Stage 1 in Newark and South Bay Musical Theater in Saratoga are both opening this Saturday. I have friends in both. Hyper-marketing by South Bay sold out the show 3 weeks ago, so I'm going to Stage 1 a week from Saturday. I try not to go to opening nights, the casts & crews usually need a week to get used to an audience.
Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Hearing test at Miracle Ear in the Cupertino Sears store. Mostly just to find out about their technology. I played some tones on the PC today, and was only able to hear up to 8400Hz. Last test was 10k. :-(
1-on-1
Was in bed at about 10, read for an hour from Octavia Butler's Kindred, loaned to me by someone who never reads sci-fi but somehow she read this. I don't think the writing is outstanding, and the idea is not new, but I'll probably finish it. While I was reading, Domino planted herself on the fleece blanket at the foot of the bed. She used to own that spot while Pumpkin was alive. These days Kaan usually beats her to it.
Woke up at 7, Kaan was there, I didn't see where Domino went.
Got to work half an hour before the 9 am team meeting, but it was at 10 this week. It rotates every week, and I have it in my calendar correctly, sometimes I forget to look. Not a problem, there was work to do from over the weekend.
Team meeting was very short, we have finished testing on the next release and all that remains are bug fixes, which are waiting on the next build. Which we expected Friday, but it came in too late to get checked in. I talked a lot, since I'd found some things to pass along during this morning's work.
The build came through late in the day, and I plowed through all the bugs I had filed, and then tackled a couple of others. All of them passed.
Had a nice long chat with one of the engineers who built the CALM feature. My former US Rep, Anna Eshoo, got this bill through Congress which requires broadcasters and cable companies to make sure that ads played at the same volume as the programs they were inserted into. Our box just won an Emmy for its ad insertion feature, so we needed to put this in place. I had some questions on how to test it, and he filled me in, and as usually happens when I talk to him, we chatted for half an hour about other things. Like the upcoming sale of the company, which the DOJ just screwed by waiting until today, the last day of the 30-day review period, to ask for more details from the two companies. So now it's another 30 days of waiting, which screws all our stock awards.
Lunch was at McDonald's for the wifi.
Home at 5:30, sat with the cats & read.
7:10 off to rehearsals, our first music rehearsal, which really should have been a month ago. Musicals work better if the cast knows the songs before they learn the blocking. He's a fine music director, one of the best. It was a good rehearsal, he kept it fun while making us work. The harmonies in this score are wacko, the bass part looks like it was written by someone on a pogo stick. But when sung right, they sound very good. Music Director loves the music, which makes it a lot better.
He let us go right at 10. Just before we got to my solo. Maybe next time.
Oh, and we finally had an accompanist, one of the best ones too. He's been pianist for at least five shows I've been in, and several auditions.
Home, heated up some edamama and dolmathes, and made some lime soda. Ate the soy beans while online, still have the grape leaves in the microwave. TBE.
Plans for tomorrow:
Work
???
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