Writing Wrongs

This morning's Big Project was gathering up all the packages of syringes and insulin pen needles and CO2 cartridges which I don't use anymore and Hazmatting them. Also took a glass door which has been sitting next to the entertainment center, because it just gets in the way.

Next big project was taking the three suitcases I never use, Mom's luggable sewing machine which I have tried without success to give to costumer friends, and put those in the car.

Then I pulled all my suits out of the closet, and made a pile on the bed of the ones which don't fit. This included, much to my displeasure, the dark blue silk one I had made in Bangkok on my last trip and wore to the ambassador's party. Actually they took our jackets as soon as we entered, so I only wore it en route. And I went through my costumes, Elvis stayed in his garment bag and went straight to the dumpster. I did not wish the shower of gold sparkles on anyone. Kept my blue scrubs, but the green ones and the ghost ones went onto the pile, along with a garish blue velvet faux Renn blouse. Kept the striped coveralls and train engineer shirt & cap. And a black shirt which fits and has a train logo, from the gift shop at PDX I think. Put all the clothes into a big black trash bag, added that to the load in the trunk. Also from the storage room was Domino's old carrier. It's in good shape but needs the outside cleaned.

Made an appointment to have my nails done at 2, and went off to Goodwill.

Goodwill wouldn't take the cat carrier, but they accepted the rest.

I was heading for the new place, but Home Despot was on the way so I stopped in there to see if they had re-keyable locks. They did, but each on was $35 while a whole set of 2 deadbolts + 2 keyed door knobs all using the same key was $23. I was forced to decide quickly, because of the Jesus music. I will not be returning to that store until next year. We are talking 1960's vocals of the most blatant Christmasness. Joy to the World-ish stuff. What Child Is This? I wasn't alone, I nearly got run over by a woman in a sari pushing her palette with a large appliance on it as fast as she could toward the exit.

Now I was hungry, the apartment was on the way, so I made a Meatish Swedeballs TV dinner, petted Domino and then went for the manicure. They made me wait for 15 minutes, and even though my Michelle was there, she passed me off to not-so-good Jennifer or Jessica or J something, who did the worst job ever. My fingers still hurt.

From there to U-haul, long slow line to get packing paper and plastic wrap.

Next stop, the new place. Dropped off the locks, checked the mailbox (in it were two pieces of junk plus a set of pages from the mortgage CU.) Looked on the porch and picked up the Amazon box which had been delivered. This was a test, and they passed. It means I can let the UPS box expire whenever it does that.

Back to the apt., did some stuff online, watched Stanford try to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and fail. Flipped back and forth between that game and USC-UCLA where the Trojans managed to succeed at that. They didn't use enough protection.

Looked at the calendar, it started sinking in that the move is IN LESS THAN A WEEK! and took my butt back to the storage room, and stuffed three boxes with camping gear, and broke down the rack it had been parked on. A big part of that was wrestling with a huge tarp, which needed to be folded properly to fit into a box at all. There were two more tarps already folded well enough. The tent and the picnic canopy are too large for the boxes I have, but they have handles so don't really need to be packed away.

Gave Domino her kitty crack while I indulged in a chocolate muffin, then assembled a file box and put most of the contents of the top file drawer in it & taped it shut, parked it in the livingroom by the other boxes. Repeated for all of the 3rd and 4th drawers. The first few files in the top are postage things which I may yet need, and the second drawer is all my current files, it will take 2 boxes and can wait till the day before the move.

I also pulled out the Red File which has all the paperwork around buying the house. That will go to the new place tomorrow.

An one last trip to the dumpster, with an elderly, el cheapo carpet steamer which I had asked the movers last time to toss out, but they just moved it instead. It has been sitting on the patio for more than a year.

Called my Baltimore sister, got her voicemail. Forgot she had gone to see her sis-in-law in a production of Hairspray. Her husband's wife is DDG, talented and smart. If only she wasn't married...

Called my Olympic Peninsula sister, we chatted for about an hour. Lots to talk about.

Plans for tomorrow:
New place:
- install the new deadbolts
- Re-wind the one too-tight window shade
- Show Janice around (sometime in the early afternoon)

The sunburn has subsided. My face is still red, but it will be tan by morning, or so.

Not much going on at work. Perused the Arris web site, they have a megaton of products, which all look very industrial.

Lunch was that Chinese chef someone Bad Food place, which has okay chicken salad and the worst egg rolls. The boneless BBQ beef was fine after I washed off the muck they call sauce.

Found stuff to do at work, discovered two of the ports on my main test machine are not connected to the lab network. Filed a ticket on that.

After work I went to Starbucks nearest the apartment, almost wrote this there but got distracted. Many many pretty women there, both at tables and just passing through.

Dinner was a concoction of frozen breaded fish fillets heated with lump crab on top, and then heated again with swiss cheese on top. Quite yummy. Watched an episode of Paul Harvey and also some pre-NFL-draft stuff. The draft is Thursday, I may work from home so I can watch it. OTOH, probably better to wait for the Tivo recording, since there is a ton of waiting between choices and Human Disinterest crap I will want to FF through. I don't really need to know that he was raised by his aunt as a single mom when his parents spontaneously combusted at a crack party, and after 3 years in juvie for shooting a teacher in the crotch for dating his girlfriend, he accepted Jesus as his personal savior and, except for that one carjacking and a 7-11 holdup, has been an upright scholar athlete ever since.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work. 1-on-1 with the boss. We will probably talk about the human sundial
???

Lazy morning, I got out of bed at 9 to email work that I'd be in at 11. Got there at 10:30.

At 6, Kaan wanted to play fetch, and when I did not, he decided to play fetch with himself all over the bed. So I threw his toy out the bedroom door. He dropped it against my back 3 seconds later. He is one fast kitten. Runs like a greyhound, fetches like a lab or retriever. Disguised as a sealpoint Siamese.

At 8:30 he tried again, this time he got tired of it after maybe 10 throws.

Work was mostly wrap-up stuff. Except for one project which another department asked me to do 2 days ago, but then the person who was supposed to do that side of the work never got back to me. Person did when I copied both our bosses, but person is on travel all next week so if person's boss doesn't help, they won't get this project done. Any other department at work which asks me to do a project (or really asks my boss, who assigns one of the testers) will work together with me quickly and keep on top of my progress.

The good news is it is probable that when the company sale is final Any Month Now™, that department will go away. Or be absorbed into the new corporate bureaucracy.

I think I spent more brain cells on my weekly report than I did on actual work today. It was a busy week.

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International Women's Day. I have a hard enough time with Pride Day and Black History Month, so a day for the majority of the world's population is not a big whoop for me.

( And some history )
So I guess you would say my female role models match up against pretty much any male role models out there. Which is why I don't think International Women's Day is any biggie. For every Hilary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren there is a Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman.

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Brigadoon is shaping into a pretty good, fun show. Which is why I was all WTF over the beautiful publicity postcards they came up with:

Lovely picture with enough info on the front.

But the back:



So. Where do I put an address label and a stamp? And where is the USPS required 1/4 inch blank space at the bottom for their barcode?

FAIL.

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Sold an item on eBay which left here with a pristine screen and one small scuff mark on the back. It arrived in Anapolis, the buyer said everything was fine, it was in her office charging. It was sent to her residence, which is not her office. Next day she says there is a small crack in the corner of the screen. I tell her the item was insured for what she paid for it, she should take the packaging and the phone to her PO and file a claim. Phones can get broken just by the package being dropped, something about garvity, acceleration and instant deceleration. But she says no, she will just buy a protective sheet for it. Yes, it might cost more than what she paid to replace the screen, but isn't $250 in your pocket better than $0? So I'm convinced she broke it herself and was either trying to scamme, or just too embarassed to admit it.

Another similar phone didn't sell, and someone sent a message asking if it sold or not. I replied that no, it did not sell, and I was re-listing it as soon as I took pictures of it. Unfortunately, eBay's phone app sent the reply to the first buyer, whose name is Crista. Second buyer's name is Chris. Crista went ballistic, thnking I was going to try to re-list her phone (how? Idiot). As soon as I got to a real computer at home I sent her an "OMG, oops, sorry" message and sent Chris the message which should have been sent in the first place.

Then I took photos of the phone front and back so there is evidence that the phone was fine when I shipped it. It is now re-listed and set to start on Sunday at noon, ending Thursday noon, when most Americans who have jobs are on their work computers playing on eBay.

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A fairly famous and incredibly talented woman I am acquainted with (have known her from both sci-fi and opera for 20+ years) has posted on FB that she has finally kicked her abusive husband out, filed a restraining order and divorce papers. She almost did this a few tims before, but never got up the courage. I am heartbroken to hear what she has been going through, until last week I had no idea. I stopped wondering long ago why women who appear to be strong and independant allow themselves to be regularly battered by the people they love. In this case it is especially shocking because she has a HUGE number of people around her who would not hesitate to help her.

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That's quite enough for not having anything to write about.

Except this: if smallship1 hasn't heard, at Consonance there was an announcement, and a note in the program encouraging folks to visit your online store and buy stuff. It was very well received and I hope there have been/will be some positive results.

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Oh, and this: looking at the photos Boskone returned, the ones which sold were of a crescent moon against a black night sky, a very colorful Chinese temple dragon, and lemmozine in his guitar sunglasses.

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Plans for tomorrow:
10 am appointment to have the car's remote trunk release fixed and the broken backup camera replaced.
That will take 3-4 hours, which will probably be spent at the mall. I shoud bring my cane.
Maybe I will start organizing those aerogrammes I sent home from Peace Corps 


 

Today at work was too much fun. I had two bugs working, each on a different product with different engineers, both of which needed my attention pretty much at the same time. And both took some significant setup, though the second one was done in 20 seconds as soon as it was set up. The second one stumped the expert, the first one stumped me.

Lunch was a Carl's Jr. stop with two of the team, who had been planning on walking but my knee was complaining about the mere thought, so I drove us. 

After work, Fry's stop, picked up some luggage tags - the kind which laminate your business card into them. Looked for accordion hanging folders, but they have removed all their major office supplies. Turns out I had them at home, just was looking in the wrong file drawer.

Home, built 10 luggage tags from my latest set of calling cards, fed the cats & had dinner, then sat down at the PC and started to build my 2012 calendar on the Costco site. And then on four other sites. They all had one thing in common - they clipped about 1/3 of the image when it is placed on the page, and while one can zoom in, one cannot zoom out or in any way see the full picture. Annoying since I had prepared the cover page with the year and "photos by" credit, both of which were clipped by the software.

I finally phoned Costco photo support (they are open till 10 pm Pacific!) and the nice man had the numbers right at hand. It was not straightforward for a beginner, but easy to figure out and program into Photoshop for an expert such as myself. The secret code ( is cut for boring ) After I batch processed the images, I had room in the canvas area to caption each one.

Those were uploaded and Drag'n'Dropped onto the calendar, with some juggling to match the image with the month where it made sense, and trying not to have two of the same kind of image in a row. I'm happy with all my choices except for one, which was chosen for the novelty of the subject more than the quality of the photo composition. And I am disappointed that two people whose photos I wanted to use declined the honor. And by the way, lemmozine, the spices photo on my final pass did not pass muster - it's at a bad angle. So I used the shot of the museum's gift shop from the rafters instead.

That adventure ate two hours, which I should have used for unpacking. So I did penance by unpacking all my CDs. And discovered I have far more CD rack than CDs. There was a lot of stuff parked in there which was thrown out or Goodwilled. The top of the rack is filled with Beanie Babies and similar animalia.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work, bring my 20x30 framed photos for new co-worker to choose from to hang in her cubicle. ( Read more... )
Pack for Baltimore
Maybe do some unpacking.

Last night was the final evening performance of Carousel, we close after today's matinée.

The weather had turned overnight from summer to winter, nippy temps, strong wind, overcast. No rain, though. Did some shopping for pet stuff, made the rounds looking for affordable printer paper, after seeing earlier in the week that Best Buy's bargain price was $3.50 a ream. Sometimes it is on sale for $1 or so. The office places were gouging on the single reams - $5 was the lowest. $2.50 a ream if you bought a case of 10, but I don't have anywhere to store that, and it would be a multi-year supply. Fry's in PA was pathetic, nothing less than $6 and the shelves were almost empty, with price tags not matching what was on the shelf. Fry's customers are notorious for dumping things on the wrong shelves. Also, all the bulk boxes (10 reams) had been broken into and were missing reams. Nothing was on sale. So I'll probably go back to BB.

Somewhere in there I had lunch and dinner, then drove to the theater. The show went well, insane crew chief was relatively sane and kept to the other side of the stage except where he is supposed to be on my side. Stage left crew leader was in a great mood, he had seen the show Friday night and enjoyed it. One of my stage left crew is a hot little MILF whose son is in the show, but she's from Livermore, and appears to still be happily married. Sigh.

Had a nice chat with one of the more stunningly beautiful cast members, she's in law school, so she's smart as well as pretty and talented. She brought her boyfriend to one of the rehearsals. I was not impressed. But she is, which is what counts, I guess.

Well, time to get dressed and ready for the show.