Writing Wrongs

Slept till 10, did nothing productive, watched some Shark Tank, made brunch - four steamed BBQ pork buns (Thai = salapow, Chinese = Cha Siu Bao).

Off to the theater at 12:30, 15 minutes early for cast call. Waited for someone to open the door.

Sundays always start late, mostly because the crew doesn't have to rebuild the set.

This was our biggest audience yet, probably 30 empty seats. Hard to tell because it's festival seating. It was so nice to have critical mass for laughs.

My Big Number was a huge hit, and I still want to slap the music director for starting up before we milked the applause.

They applauded when I was eaten by the plant.

After the show my lobby visit was very short, nobody I knew was there, except for one of the ushers. The audience practically ran out of the theater - it takes me maybe 2 minutes to take off my mike and walk to the lobby, and the auditorium was empty by the time I arrived.

Strike after the show, I got to carry some stuff out to the dock and help load the truck, but there were far more people helping than they needed. Got done by 6. After-party at 7, but even going out of my way for a Safeway stop to get goodies, I was still 10 minutes early. Everyone else was fashionably late, having gone to dinner at some Mexican place, among other things.

Everyone showed up from the cast and crew, the choreographer, drummer and the synth player (who works where I do) did not show. The hostess was one of the co-producers, she has a big beautiful house with a huge front and back yards, and two buildings behind the house which look like people may live in them. I didn't ask. And she had 5 chihuahua type dogs which bark when someone comes to the door, but are very friendly once you are inside. And two very shy cats. She is a major proponent of animal rescue.

She had a very large spread of munchies, and guests added to it.

During the party I chatted with the director. He has no clue, nor did I give him one, that I really don't want to work with him ever again. He's co-directing the next show, which is funny because it's A Chorus Line and he is disabled in a way that makes it impossible for him to walk straight, let alone dance. Even when he was abled (in a show we did in the 1980s) he couldn't dance.

As expected it was a loud party, with the usual loudmouths, and a couple of people who become screechers when alcohol is added. I stayed till about 9:30, when they set up the karaoke, because this group doesn't have the consideration to shut up and listen when it's not their turn to sing. Lucky for me the crew took that as their cue to leave, so it paved the way for me.

Home, took out the garbage, took my blood sugar measurement and it was way high as I thought it would be because I forgot to shoot up before the party. Also saw I had forgotten to take my daily meds this morning. That happens when I wake up late.
:-(

Took a shower, made myself a lime soda, caught up on email and Facebook.  Updated my FB cover to a non-show one. and profile photo to a close-up in the dressing room.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
BASFA

County assessor's letter arrived today, looks like they are doubling my property tax. Boo. Hiss. Turns out they re-assess any time it is sold.

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Got to work just in time for what was billed as a hands-on demo of a very complicated video analyzer. It was nothing of the sort, partly thanks to the two bozoids from upstairs interrupting the sales engineering rep before he even showed his first slide.

It was a disjointed, scattershot presentation with a lot of interruptions. No actual hands-on, and the presenter talked so softly and with a thick accent it was mostly useless. His marketing rep (identified easily by her Apple laptop) spoke louder and more clearly, but it is apparent this is an amateur company and we are using their product strictly because of a low price point compared to the professionals.

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Finished my digital signal processing project and wrote it up. Customer description of the issue was wrong, much worse than the actual issue. In short, some versions of the product pretended to allow you to add a text crawl or overlays or change the resolution of the video on a trigger or a schedule, but when you looked at the output it wasn't there. But any pre-existing ones continued to work. Most of our customers don't change those after they put them in place.

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Got my nails done. Had to wait 10 minutes for the owner to get back from dialysis. Would rather have it done by her little sister, but she was booked. No time for lunch but a snack at the bakery a few doors down.

Back at work, not much to work on, so I researched telescopes, and ordered one which looks much better for photography than the one I have. Two main points" f/5 compared to f/12.1, eyepiece is at the top on the side, not at the bottom middle.  Also has a unique tripod built for scopes.

Meanwhile I need to organize all my lenses and put everything in the carrying bag, and think about putting it on eBay or Craig's list.

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Costco on the way home. Spent almost $150 and am pretty sure I'd have done better at Safeway. Prices at Costco are skyrocketing, but the requirement to buy in bulk remains.

Home, heated some canned dolmathes from the produce store and three pork buns from Costco. Watched two episodes of TMZ. I am soooo behind on my Tivo watching.

Took the second load out of the laundry, could only find 5 of 6 socks. These are my black socks for the show. #6 showed up on the floor as I was hanging up my shirts.

Email from baby sister, she will be here Saturday. We may have time to do lunch. Pissed because she is flying into SFO not SJC, and wants to go to the farmer's market, as if she will be able to bring anything back home with her. Original plan was a bike ride. Looking forward to seeing her & her husband, they are both acoustical engineers with lots of Navy experience, and I am eager to pick their brains about the search for the Malaysian airliner. Due to the nature of her work, we can't mention stuff like that in email, let alone FB.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Leave at 5
Show at 7:30

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

For the first time in a while it's both before tomorrow and I'm mostly awake. No work. No rehearsals. Took it easy.

Got to the Contact conference in time for Seth Shostak's talk, which was very entertaining, about SETI's new theory that red dwarf stars are the best place to look for inhabitable earth-like planets. It made a lot of sense, except he didn't say anything about the effect on life that red sunlight might have. One good thing is he reminded me I need to make an effort to tune in to his podcast.

Next up was someone formerly at ILM now with the CA Academy of Sciences whose presentation a couple of years ago was exceptional, but this year he phoned it in, and showed boring snippets of fish-eye video which the CAAS uses in some of their environmental displays. Boring.

I ducked out a little early to drive to the office, grab a photo I wanted in the Contact art show, drive back and hang it with the rest of my display (there was plenty of room).


Before I left for the conference this morning I had printed a tag for it.

It was still lunch time, I walked a block to KFC and ate there.

Back to the hotel, there was supposed to be a panel with Larry Niven, but he didn't show and nobody even mentioned that he was supposed to have been there (it was pretty clear in the program, with a bio and everything). Boring panel about several artists, social scientists and real scientists coming up with visualizations of space aliens by basically looking at the science and pulling ideas out of their butts.

The next talk was almost as boring, a part-time anthropologist with horribly crude slides made from purloined web photos placed at random angles. Her assertion is that until we are all  

    Trustworthy,
    Loyal,
    Helpful,
    Friendly,
    Courteous,
    Kind,
    Obedient,
    Cheerful,
    Thrifty,
    Brave,
    Clean,
    and Reverent.

we will be unfit to welcome visitors from the stars. She rates the US as 4.something out of 10 in meeting her requirements. Frankly, it was more like 0.3 from what I can tell. I asked her why everyone has to meet these requirements when it's only the best of the best and some military jocks who will actually have First Contact and her answer was something like "can't we all just get along?"

I ducked out before the next speaker started, I wanted to read some more in the book I'd started on Kindle, which was by someone I sort of know and respect. It also gave me a chance top duck into the art display and see that it had been set up, with lots more than just my 10 photos. The book failed, and I made the mistake of going back into the presentation room while Ms. Global Warming was slogging through her doom and gloom scenarios. Bottom line, according to her, is we will all die in 2022. Most of her stuff was on ways to make coal burning power plants cleaner. No clue about nuclear. A couple of unworkable alternates (kites?). She needs to get a life.

The final talk of the day which I was very much looking forward to again was a no-show, I walked out a minute into the not at all interesting to me replacement.

Hung out in the art show with the art show director and one of the more impressive artists, and the guy whose book I had just failed. He does some pretty good drawings.

There was quite a crowd at the 5 pm art show reception, but a gaggle of people gathered in a traffic-blocking mass in front of my photos to pass around 3D-printed alien models. I think 2 people actually saw my stuff.

Went to Lowe's to get a replacement for the broken kitchen faucet aerator, also got a couple of self-watering planters for the drying-out vines hanging from the kitchen curtain rods, and a fuchsia to replace the hummingbird feeder outside.

Home, took care of that, made dinner, watched two episodes of TMZ, remembered not to feed the cat any treats no matter how much she yelled at me.

Have been going over my lines in my head, I think I know them all, mostly in order, and maybe also with blocking.

Plans for tomorrow:
Look at lines, especially for a couple of songs I am not a soloist in
3 pm-ish, back to the hotel and pick up my photos - there is nothing in the Sunday program I am interested in
7-ish, Sitzprobe at the theater. That's French for first time singing with the band. Probably will go till 10.

Friday was a late night and so is tonight.

Friday, lots of work at work, lunch at Togo's which was a special treat because there were two redheads working, one old enough to be the other's mom. Who knows? But the older one was very freckled, with bright red hair, the younger had that alabaster complexion with closer to auburn hair.

After work I had sometime to kill so I went to the Starbucks of the usually full parking lot, but there were parking places and places inside to sit, because most of the customers were taking their orders to go, which provided a steady stream of Friends of Spandex candidates. I studied my lines over an iced mocha, but looked up often. :-0

7:30 it was over to Santa Clara Players were three friends were in Arsenic and Old Lace. And another friend runs the box office and was producer. My friends did well, but it was horribly directed, and makeup sucked, and the leading man was dropping lines all over the place. He's supposed to be in his early 30s, but his hair was gray and he carried himself like a 50-year-old. The villain was horribly miscast, much shorter than the leading man (the part was written specifically for, and mentions Boris Karloff several times). And he wwsn't scary enough. But he knew his part well. Teddy was excellent except for on HUGE detail. He couldn't play the bugle. Hardly got a blat out. The whole show revolves around him waking the neighbors with his bugle.  Director should have gotten him lessons. I thought about trying out, because I play bugle, but I'm done with stage plays, too many lines to learn..

Dr Einstein is a friend I had not seen onstage before, and he was excellent. The two police officers had much bigger parts than I remembered (I directed this in college in 1969).

And I never thought I would say this, but the woman playing Elaine was way too sexy. Actually it was the costume. She's supposed to be a preacher's daughter going to the theater with the leading man, but they had her in a diaphanous pink gown with way shiny earrings. Should have been something much more conservative.

There was no pre-show or intermission music, but they played snippets of songs as the lights came up on the two acts, and during the curtain call. The lights-up music was vaguely wrong, I can't remember what it was, the curtain call was to the Adams Family theme, which was disgustingly WRONG. A&OL is not about fun-loving freaky but harmless creatures, it's about criminally insane cold blooded murderers. Another horrible call by the director.

Was up WAY too late last night, tried to sleep as long as possible, made it to work just in time to get a diet Coke and be at the 10 am team meeting. I was out of things to do, so I volunteered to test a new tool which was developed to help customers monitor a bunch of our boxes.

That didn't take long. It actually took longer to write up the results.

But it did make me late for lunch, which was Plan Aed for a trip to a new nails place I found on Yelp as close as Sassy Nails, but in the opposite direction on El Camino. Orchid Nail Lounge, found on Yelp. I didn't find it, probably because (looking at Yelp again) it isn't on El Camino but on one of its cross streets. But while I didn't find it on the right side where I expected,  on the left I saw Barbie's Nail Spa, so I took the first available U-turn to get there, but before I reached it I saw a much less provocative name, Nails by Kathy, next to  Thaibodia, which was also due for a visit. Kathy was not in, but her sister Ann was, but she was in the middle of a manicure and asked if I could come back at 2:30. No problemo, went to Thaibodia for lunch because their service is notoriously slow and I needed to kill an hour.

Ordered the drunken noodles, and yes, it took 20 minutes to arrive despite me being the only one ordering at the time. And it was dry and anything but drunken, with the wrong kind of noodles, and the chicken and onions cut too large. As I was digging in, she brought a salad-like object. And in another trip the soup. Yup, service still sucks there. I asked for "medium" spicy but it was more like 5 stars. So it took a long time to eat. The Thai Iced Tea was excellent, and helped detoxify the noodles, a sip for each forkful.

It didn't take as long to get my check as usual, and my change arrived in less than 5 minutes, so I was 15 minutes early back at Kathy's. The person being manicured was a very attractive woman somewhere near my age, with platinum hair streaked with black (a Quality hair dresser job) and she struck up a conversation. We had a nice chat, I gave her my card, she Ann said her name was Joy. Joy was wearing a light button-down sweater over a corset-like chemise. Nice figure.

Ann was lovely too, and single - very odd for a nails person. Kathy was out because her son had something serious enough for the ER.

So, two attractive single women who will talk to me, in one day. Yay!

Last night the director had announced we were doing publicity photos, half an hour early,  and asked me to bring two pairs of pants - khaki and black, a white dress shirt, suspenders and the costumer was bringing a bow tie. I remembered to grab the clothes and put them in the trunk of the car before going to work. But I forgot my script.

So I left work half an hour early to go home and get my script, and while I was there I got the mail, which included a lovely surprise from lemmozine - a set of his Indegogo project CDs. I'm listening to one now. He sounds different than in person. Mostly in a good way. When I Grow Up I Want To Be Snidely Whiplash is currently entertaining me. The singing is adequate but the finger picking is nothing short of amazing. And this isn't even one of his more challenging numbers. Thanks, Lem!

The lamb stew was done, and had started to cool, so I acheologicked a place in the fridge for the crock, and in doing so discovered a 3/4 full bottle of rosé I had completely forgotten about. It was from an experiment to see if a small dose of wine before be would help me sleep. It didn't.

Got to the theater about 5 minutes late, to find the director and most of the cast sitting outside. I asked if it was a case of the best planned lays, but director said no, it was just really nice outside. And it was, mid-70s. A Jekyll-Hyde day, started off with rain.

We went inside, I got changed into black pants, black suspenders and white long-sleeved shirt and bow tie. The photo session was a total clusterfuck, the music director and the stage manager both took pictures with real camera, and The Voice of The Plant used his cell phone. Here are a couple from the music director which came out okay:





Changed back into civvies and the plan was to block Act II, but as usual, the director got so caught up in minutiae that we didn't make it to the end. Had I known that would happen, I could have gone home an hour early, because I get eaten early in the act, and don't appear again until the finale.

I'm called for tomorrow, but he gave us Wednesday off, mainly because for some unknown reason neither the theater nor the usual rehearsal backup place was available. I may also be called for Sunday, but I need to send a message to the choreographer because she probably doesn't need me. I'm called for Thursday, at the backup location, but that looks like it may also be a waste.

Meanwhile, while punching holes in the revised script I'd printed Sunday, I found the black nozzle had clogged toward the end, so had to re-print the last 12 pages. Punched them and loaded it all into the folder behind the original. I need to print index tabs and transfer my blocking notes, but maybe that will be Wednesday.

Home, made a frozen dinner.
Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Rehearsals

Rehearsals are great for getting a good night's sleep. Slept till the alarm went off, only woke once during the night.

Work on time, barely. Some work on the specs and tests. 68° at lunchtime, which was also dentist time. They did X-rays and a cleaning, no cavities, and the dentist didn't mention the insurance company slam dunking her request to re-do two of my crowns the right way.

Went next door to see if the little nail place could repair a broken nail, but the person who does acrylic left early. SO I went to the other next door for a light dim sum lunch. Light, because they were out of half the things I wanted (it was late).

Drove straight to the rehearsal hall, which tonight was a park clubhouse which I've been in many times before, for auditions and rehearsals, and because a LONG time ago I lived in the apartments across the street. King George apartments was a run-down, poorly built and even more poorly maintained place - my first night there the sewer backed up into the livingroom, they had to wet vac it and replace the carpet - owned by a Chinese family named King. I lived there from 1995-97, when they gave us all 8 months' notice, paid us about 3 months rent and the promise of first dibs on the new apartments they were going to build there. They bulldozed it right down to below the sewer pipes, and in about 3 years opened the Renaissance apartments, a 3-story affair (King George was 2 stories), high end. When we left, a 1-BR cost $300/month, when they re-opened it was $1600. Looking at the apartments from the park, they have about 1/3 vacant.

Rehearsal added some cast members who had conflicts, but the leading man was not there (he's in the show now onstage). Director filled in for him, sort of. About an hour of my time was wasted. This director doesn't have the concept of only calling people whose scenes he is blocking, he want to do it in chronological order, which in this case is very inconsiderate. The scenes are modular and it would have been easy to schedule nights off. I have no nights off during the entire Sunday-Thursday schedule, even though I'm not in half the scenes.

Home, by way of two 7-11s, I needed $300 cash from the ATMs, but those give $100 bills for anything over $200. I don't like to carry hundreds.

Had a light dinner. Caught up on FB. Downloaded all my financials on Quicken and both my state and fed refunds had come in, so I paid off a couple of credit cards.

And now to sleep.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Manicure
Consonance. I will probably miss Kathleen's concert, but really want to hear Mark's Toastmaster concert.

Slept well, no lows, got to work okay. Mostly continued the usual stuff there. Lunch with the gang, we poked our heads into the Philippine place, but (a) our resident Filipino was not impressed and (b) there was noplace for 5 people to sit. Went to Sushi Blvd instead, which is usually jam packed, but they were half empty. Had a bento box.

Home after work, the Thai flag was fine but the US flag had wrapped itself around the pole 4 times. I thought I had fixed that. Grrr. Grabbed the rent check and drove over to the community center and put it in the slot. Usually I walk there but tonight it was raining and blustery. While I was there I turned on the lamps in the billiard room, and played a horrible game of 8-ball which I lost by scratching on the 8-ball. We have a table at work now, but if I racked up on that there would be vultures in minutes. I'm not very good, I don't want to play 4-somes, which is what always manages to happen.

Back home, caught up on FB. Used my laptop, partly to charge it and partly to update Windows and Norton.


The last model friended me and tagged my photo. The one I took of her. Somewhat NSW so I'll hide it ( behind the cut )

Also proved the power of social networking:( Way TMI ) In short, I helped two of my friends connect and find a theater internship for a deserving daughter. Yay!

Yesterday I was looking for a photo of a cousin when he was about 5 to embarrass him with, went through a ziplock bag full of photos where I thought this one was, but it wasn't. Instead I found a handfull of old pix with me in them, which I just scanned. It looks like I had something going with one of the violinists in the Fiddler on the Roof show I was in in Sunnyvale a long time ago. She's an FB friend but she rarely posts, possibly because she works for a FB app company. I wonder where I went wrong? Probably didn't follow up after the show was done.

Plans for tomorrow:
Photo shoot at 11
Little Shop of Horrors at Foothill College at 8
Stop off at Fry's somewhere in there to get a replacement power brick for my laptop (the one I keep at home died)

Potlatch-SF this year is in SJ. I missed the opening ceremonies, first panel and parties because when I got home from work I was beat, and felt like I was coming down with a cold, and the prospect of battling 101 traffic to get to San Jose was daunting. So I went to bed.

And woke up at 11, made dinner, watched 5 episodes of TMZ (which is more than 1/2 commercials), went to sleep again.

So this morning I delayed the hunt for Girl Scout cookies and went to Potlatch, and enjoyed the conversations and readings but had to mail at 4:30 to get to the homeowners assn Chinese New Year dinner. They had snotlickers, egg rolettes, and soda/wine to start, the main course was fried rice, chow mein and something like chicken nuggets. There was also hot and sour soup which I declined. Dessert was an unidentifiable but tasty scoop of ice cream and almond cookies. I was stuffed. Made a couple of friends, two of them on my street and one not. Got some good advice on gardening and construction protocol (check everything with the manager first, the only thing you can't plant are trees).

I joked that I would not be setting up the meth lab or marijuana farm, and the guy who has lived here for 40 years said if I did it wouldn't be the first.

Home by 7:30, did some extra insulin.

Janice's remote arrived, lightning fast delivery by an eBay vendor. I hooked it up and created an account on Logitech for it, but that's all I can do till she gets me the makes/models of her gear.

Flag poles & anti-wrap-around clips arrived yesterday, after dinner I unwrapped them and now have two wrap-resistant poles, one with the Stars and Stripes and one with just the Stripes (Thailand). The holder is designed to display one flag at full and the other below at 3/4. They are not long enough to add my C&GS flag. :-(

Also waiting to be done were the index tabs for the Little Shop script. Downloaded Avery's template, printed out 14 inserts and slid them into the tab holders, and now they are on the script, very unevenly but mostly functional. The most useful thing is now I can easily flip to the music. I'm only in 4 numbers. I only tabbed 3. Oops.

Watched some of the NFL combine on Tivo. 6'7" 325lb offensive linemen running the dash is not my idea of a good time.

Plans for tomorrow:
Find Girl Scout cookies. Buy some.
Potlatch by 11. Bring some of Nancie's cookbooks for the "books about food" session.
Maybe study some lines

Well, not really, just one, which happened yesterday and it was so epic I completely forgot to journal about it. When I got home from the mattress place by way of Kinko's, my body was trying very hard to believe I was already in the bathroom poised for victory. After draining the lizard, I felt that warm wet sensation which usually means someone was too quick on the trigger. I took my pants off, and the whole right rear side from the waist to the knee was wet. Water wet, not pee wet. Wet enough to empty the pockets, remove the belt and toss it into the dryer.

Totally puzzled, I could not think of how that happened. The driver's seat of the car was dry, so was the floor of the bathroom. I could not think of a water source which I could have encountered in the time frame, except for the remote possibility that one of the mattresses I sat on had a leak.
Hmmmmm.

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Got to work early, thanks to being very nervous all night about the astronomical blood sugar reading. I woke up at 2 am and it was 190, which is too high for the insulin dosage, so I shot up another 6 units (equals 35 units of regular). But when I did my morning reading it was up by 8 points. The human body is not a precision instrument, but this is ridiculous. I'm gonna write my diabetes doc and tell him I want to go back to the last regimen, shooting up before each meal. As poorly as that was working, it was far better than this.

Main reasons to be at work early was twofold: I was going to leave at 11:30 to be home foe the noon-2 bed repair window, and boss had emailed me a very complicated test to run for Engineering and I needed to re-learn how my older model machine worked so I could send video and 4 audio channels to my new model machine. And then mess with which audio streams were sent and seeing how the new machine handled the changes. The bottom line is I couldn't fool the new machine into misbehaving. It played all the audio I sent it, and didn't miss a beat (literally) when I added a stream or pulled one or two, or completely replaced the 4 original streams with 5 new ones. That was a lot of work, I hope it's what engineering wanted, because the email from them was open to interpretation.

After that I continued to update the test database with setup requirements and steps. Got home by 11:45, and immediately got a call from the bed people that they would be there toward the end of the window. So I fired up the VPN and remote desktop, and continued to continue. Got about 5 done before the bed guys showed up at 1:45.

Domino wanted to help, after all it's her bed. I put her in the bathroom to get her out of the way. They did a quick job of taking off the mattress and lifting the frame up on its side, removing the legs from the frame, removing the wheels from the legs and screwing the wheels straight into the frame. Frame back on the ground, mattress back on the frame and it was all done in 15 minutes. Now the bed is just a tad lower than I like, but I can always raise the feet a little (adjustable frame) where before it was just way too high.

Domino yelled at me as I made the bed, and jumped onto it after I was done. It is now low enough for her to not need the pet steps, so she has her choice.

Back to work, completed the first feature set, and proceeded to plan the next one, which I can't really do without the actual machine. November, they say. This feature involves testing that the device sends alerts to designated PCs when certain events occur.

After work I took the copied script/music for Little Shop to the Mercado Starbucks, waited for a seat by a non-high-chair table opened up, and highlighted my lines and underlined my cues. Many of my cues are not underline-able, as they are ends of songs or scene shifts. It is a big part, and my character leads off most of the dialog. There is one tricky section where my lines alternate with music the plant is singing. One thing I discovered at the launch rehearsal is the guy playing the voice of the plant and I are from the same planet. This is often not the case with one's duet partner in community theater.

That all took about an hour, which was still early enough to throw some Costco spanikopita into the oven and watch the Tivoed Olympics. Some major crashes in the women's snowboard, and it was good to see the Jamaican bobsled team, out there again. There is also a Thai skier, but he didn't make the US broadcasts. I hate that they lump disparate sports into a single 3-hour broadcast. Tivo doesn't do a good job of skipping chunks of video, and figure skating just looks rude in 3x FF. And there are way too many fluff stories (making nested dolls has no place in a sports broadcast). And I can do without the tutorials by US team members.

I've been spending time on BBC.co.uk for coverage which makes more sense.

In other sports news, I subscribed to Sports Illustrated online, which will get me a year's print issues plus online access. And a Seahawks bonus package for free. Which I will send to Baltimore sister.

Looked at my online calendar and saw a big empty space where the London Worldcon should have been, so I poked in the flight and hotel info and marked which days are con days and one long mark for the entire vacation time. One thing I would like to do after the con is take a significant side trip. Ireland is high on the list, Paris is trying to win me over, a chunnel train ride is tempting. But I have cousins to visit as well. One in Brighton, a couple in Olney and a couple in Buckinghamshire. There are more, but I'm not surer where. Cousin Howard has always been an enigma. To the best of my knowledge he is not fannish like all the other cousins, and I have no real idea where he lives except "far from the rest".

Irish rail has some lovely looking London-Dublin rail/Ferry packages, which poetically start at London's Euston station and end at Dublin's Heuston station. And once in Dublin there are train tours to some very scenic places.

But first I need to survive Little Shop.

In mortgage news, I called the lender CU and they said Allstate was wrong, the refund check is to be sent to them to be put into my escrow account to cover the new insurance which they already paid. There will be an actual amount owed on my next CU statement, and I should use the enclosed envelope to mail it in.

Serendipitously, MetLife mailed me a card saying that the new company gets a 15% discount, so while waiting for the bed guys I phoned to find out what it would cost to move my auto insurance to them. The guy asked where I was located, and when I said CA he said Metlife wasn't licensed to sell auto insurance in CA but he will transfer me to someone who can. So I hung up. But now I'm thinking I may have misunderstood him, and he was saying he personally wasn't licensed in CA. I think I'll go online and try again.

Bought the other three Giver books on Kindle.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Start studying the words to my songs