Category: Work

Elementary, my dear particle

Oh, great. Now we have to rewrite physics AGAIN.

From the same site… Here, have an electric blue worm.

When palaeontologists drink….

Added Book of Eli to the list of movies watched.  Visually awesome, flawed in plot.  Every time I see one of these movies I think… where’s the goddamned food coming from?

Took off work early yesterday to get a massage…. since nobody I actually see on a regular basis is providing one.  Depressing, but there’s divorced life for you.  It’s either pay for it or go without.  Woke up this morning with tingling and numbness in my left hand as a direct consequence of the massage, but everything else feels better.   Massage dude gave me some stretches and reminded me to breathe.  I was testy with him, I admit it.

Memorial service en masse tomorrow.  I’m leaving for the 7 o’clock ferry, we’ll see what everybody else does. I messaged everybody else to either be here at 6 am or find another ride.  I’ll be bringing musical instruments.

I am off to work early to make up for lost time yesterday.

20 parrot tricks in 2 minutes. Just like it sounds.

It’s bloody hot here now.  We go from having the heat on to the air conditioning, it’s truly remarkable.

A Date, among other things

Jeff tells me I am unusually buoyant, to keep trying after so many hilarious (and occasionally creepy, like the guy who put his head in my lap on the Skytrain after I’d told him to bugger off, but I digress) disasters.  I suppose last night gave me a demonstration as to why maintaining a positive attitude is what a person needs to do.  I sure enjoyed myself last night.  It was a cup of coffee & a walk to the salamander pond (they showed up last night, and zow, but there are a lot of them.)   I drove home with the cheerful sensation one gets when one has had a date, enjoyed it, and arranged a second one.  I don’t have his permission to write about him, so I’ll leave it at that.  No, I lie.  He is the single most pleasant person I’ve met in ages – now I’ll shut up.  I have a head cold…. so attractive.

Work is interesting and challenging these days.  I found out that my not having completed a course at work (they have on line courses) rolls up on a report visible to my grandboss and great grandboss.  Never have I felt so motivated to finish something.  Time to get in the car, gas up and get going on it.

The Netherlands-Denmark World Cup game had one of the most amazing saves I’ve ever seen.  It was spectacular.  I can’t find a single mention of it anywhere in any of the sports news and I’m not competent enough to describe it or even remember the defender’s name. (UPDATE.  I changed my search criteria and got “Poulsen’s spectacular sliding save”).  It was one of the Danish players.  I’m thinking of changing my blog topic header to “Soccer, the sport that makes the words “Nil Nil” work as a sentence”.

Damn the vuvuzelas, they make watching the game with anything like true enjoyment virtually impossible.  The BBC is trying to figure out how to strip the noise from the feed.  Go to it, ladies and gentlemen.

The quinoa is two inches tall and the peas have started to sprout.  Everything else is being eaten to the ground by slugs as soon as it pokes its head up.

Margot sits outside Jeff’s door and meows up a storm.  She really does prefer him to me, mostly because he’s home a bit more, feeds her in the mornings more than I do, and he doesn’t brush her.  Sometimes she begs for the brush if she sees it – other times she struggles and complains.  I never know in advance what I’m going to get.

Jeff cut the lawn, after asking me pointedly this morning when the bag and frame for the lawnmower are coming in to the store where I ordered it.  It’s going to be at least another week, which is annoying.  Anyway, thanks Jeff!  It was pretty long.

Be good, all y’all.

Asparagus pee… is it real?

Science to the rescue.

In other news, I planted some things that will be (with luck) food later on this year.

Ziva does not like wet weather.  Winter should be interesting.  She also decided to stop her sunroof from working when I showed her off to Tom & Peggy, the little bugger; it’s fine now.

I watched the CEO do something very difficult very well yesterday, and I still can’t believe what has happened to the company I work for…. namely, that the bunch of sociopaths and psychophants (misspelling deliberate) running the company previously have been replaced by sane people.  I was so impressed I thanked him.

I have a gig on Sunday; still not entirely sure how that happened, but I’m not complaining.

Watched Adaptation and loved it.

Not even with a beer in my hand and a few comments on social media

A series of large losses can make a small loss feel enormous. I told Rob I wouldn’t cry until I had a beer in my hand, and I lied then too.  I’m crying now, but Jeff is meeting the situation with sympathetic noises and the welcome sound of the coffee grinder.  I was going to say more tender things about him, but he’s off in his room now belching so loud something in my room vibrated in sympathy…. still in keeping with the theme, I spose.

There was a brief flurry of amusement last night at Robof9’s going away party while one party member commented to another, “We’re friends, right?” but in reference to facebook.

I now have more than 150 facebook friends.  I have met and spoken to every single one of them.  Some of them are my dearest friends; some I barely know; some are more other people’s friends than mine.  But they are my facebook tribe and I follow their doings, their triumphs and tragedies, the way folks follow soaps. Not so much on the story arc, but man, the set pieces entirely rock.

Livejournal is for filk buddies and church buddies.  When I realized that – that was the point I realized that filk is the religion-friendly portion of SF fandom.  Because all the most religious people I know who are also fans are also filkers.  Things that make you say hmm.  And when I say religion, I mean Judaism, paganism, UUism, and Mormonism.  We all get together in a room and sing our faces off, and we make sure that people’s dietary requirements, both allergy and religious, are met, and we don’t even talk about it because that would all be beside the point anyway, we’re here to sing and love each other.  Livejournal merely supports the meatspace- we are meant to be together, and LJ helps us do that.

Twitter is for people who like the kinds of things I like.  Twitter is mostly people I don’t know, will never meet.  The most recent person to start following me had two midwife attended births, co-slept, baby carried, tandem nursed and looky looky, she’s a vegetarian. All those things in common, and then, clunk.  Uh, no thanks. Personally I fucking hate it when people say they are vegetarian and eat eggs and milk.  You’re still robbing babies and eating them, so how does that bring you to fluffy bunnyhood?  Either be vegan or be sparing in your meat consumption or be like me, the meat on meat inside meat, with meat on the side, kind of person.

I will be a vegetarian when I have to, and not one second sooner.  My brain doesn’t work properly without meat protein and it sure doesn’t work properly without animal fat.  Wish it were otherwise.

Now I have to go outside and plant the saplings work gave me for Earth Day.  I have a funny story about that but I can’t publish because the inertnets are temporarily forever.  I hope Margot joins me.  There’s something very comforting about her watching me work.

Time vs money

I am SO tired of the commute, I’ve decided to buy a car.  Kat has one for sale and she said she would do the cv joint and the muffler for me if I buy the parts and I am very tempted.  It is not a particularly useful car, being, like the MR2, a two seater.  LTGW told me to buy a truck.  This was in the same week he told me I was wearing sensible shoes.  I ended up screaming “Want me to shave my head and start wearing overalls TOO” in the middle of the cafeteria, which certainly made Robof9 laugh.

Robof9 is leaving the Tiled Cell on the Hill later this month.  I am just punched out about that too.

The lights over my desk give me a headache every day.  My eyes are so tired by the time I go home I feel like I’m in a dissociative state.

The weather is cold and windy.  I heard what sounded like ice pellets pinging off my window at 3 am this morning.

Anyway, now that I know I’m getting a car I feel very bad at the same time I am feeling better.  It’s just that I can’t read, play games, watch video on my phone or do anything that doesn’t involve looking out the window to prevent motion sickness whenever I ride the bus.  I can spend two and one half hours a day commuting, or half an hour driving.  I’m 51 and I’ve only got so many hours left.  Translink is not bad for my part of the world, and it’s not their fault that there’s a fucking lake in between me and work.  I am tired of the asinine creature who takes up five seats on the bus with the rude way she occupies the front section.  I’m tired of the men who smell like pee and spilled stuff and the women who smell like air freshener.  I am tired of listening to phone conversations in a babel of languages; I am tired of hearing conversations that make me want to butt in and describe in detail the cognitive biases involved.  I am tired of fucking rude bus drivers (I’ve seen some good ones, but a couple of events in the last month have left me gobsmacked with disappointment and too disheartened to even complain.)  But I should commute because it’s better for the environment.  It would be better for the environment if I jumped off a bridge, too, but that is not in the cards.

The house is shifting on its foundations with the wind.

I want rainbows and unicorns and world peace, and I’m getting dying cats, blue relatives and friends, (this item deleted), (this item deleted), (this item deleted too, sigh), and a bunch of other stuff I can’t complain about.  Currently there are 18 items on the list; most of them I only wrote down so I could add one last item to the list & I FEEL REEAAALLY SHITTY about not being able to DO anything about the stuff that’s wrong.  Oh yeah, Mr. Cheerful Pants, I should just work on the stuff I CAN fix.  It’s all about reframing things.  Well how about I reframe this by breaking it over your head, how’s that work for you?

The only good thing that happened this week is that Mike showed the pictures he took of Rozo in the woods – nude.  Unbelievable.  All that hair, and her standing on a tree stump in Robert Burnaby Park looking like something shot out of a New Raphaelite wet dream.  There was one particular pic, her figleafed with hair, that I want to carry around with me in my wallet so I have something pleasant to look at when things really fuck up.

That’s not true, there was one other thing that happened this week.  I found a website with erotic photos and art that actually has about one in ten pics that I like.  I guess it’s yet another sign that I overshare that my first impulse was to email a couple of links to my daughter.  That’s not funny, it’s sick.

Jeff cheered me up by loaning the car to me yesterday – he stayed home with Gizmo.  I went and got treats after work to cheer us both up.

Now I’m going to do a Tarot reading.  The day can get worse any way it likes.

Today at work

Mike McG said, “And that will be when there’s a third iteration of a snowball fight in hell,” with respect to a request I made.  Okay, it was unreasonable, but did you have to come back with such a quotable quote?

The IT guys continue to rock.  I won’t say why, cause you know, but they do.

Ham scone for breakfast.  And to think I didn’t like ham, once upon a time.

The two things I had to do today are already done.

Back to work.

You will note that the blog is having issues

I lost my post from Sunday, and the comments added themselves to the next post.  Jeff and I are monitoring it, but we had a talk this morning and we think it’s a user error (that would be, uh, me) combined with wireless issues, possibly.

I’m really trying to commit to making church a better experience for everybody, so I loaned my Kaossilator to one of the youngsters on Sunday.  He stopped being bored, instantly, and I helped solidify Beacon’s reputation for musicality…

Work yesterday was excellent; managed to straighten some things out and resolve an outstanding customer issue to his satisfaction and mine.  Also closed some cases, always a good thing.  My open case load is approximately 70 right now, but in real terms it’s less than twenty actionable cases.  I have to leave a lot open or they disappear from my consciousness as requiring action.

I think the worst of the software issues is resolved, but the phone system still drops out when I go on break or work offline.  The really weird part is that it can do this IN THE MIDDLE OF A CALL.  The screen goes dark and I’m still talking to the customer… say wha?

Singing didn’t happen on Sunday – too many people cancelled out on the jam.

Now, coffee and a shower, not necessarily in that order.  Hope everybody has a glorious day and gets out in the sunshine.

I need to make a new list.

Jeff is a genius.  The bicycle pump I thought I broke just needed adjustment, the vacuum cleaner from Granny works perfectly (the missing bit was hiding in plain sight) and he helped me with my blog AND picking up the freezer order.  Happy sigh.

Paul and I walked in Deer Lake Park on Sunday and I saw my first turtle of the season.  Yay!

Miss Crankypants sits in her corner

I have lots and lots to complain about.  Like, lots.  But I’ve decided to save my best and purest bile for real live people instead of the intarboobs, and the saddest and teariest of complaints for other real live people, and the horrid consequences of brutal self-examination strictly to myself. Continue reading Miss Crankypants sits in her corner

Ta hell with it, I’m taking a taxi to work

I am having a very slow start to the day, and I actually felt like blogging instead of lying in bed surveying the ant trap that is my to do list.  My thoughts go in… and they do not come out.

Jeff says I’m crabbier than normal since I started back to work.  It’s the commute. Once I figure out how to make my commute useful, I will probably be less crabby.  I have figured out some of the details on the transfer points (I transfer in different places depending on whether I’m going to work or going home) and I am able to sit all the way to work on the bus, which I was unable to do when I was taking the 145 up the hill.  Also, because it’s not an articulated bus, I have better odds of not being exposed to shippiles of cologne.  And, only one transfer instead of two; and, all in Burnaby so little effect by the Olympics except of course that SFU is a transit hub for Olympic events, but even so I should be as unaffected as is possible in the lower Mainland during the blowout.

Youtube has a video entitled Why I can’t celebrate the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.  It’s six minutes long, heartfelt, intelligent, and very closely matches my feelings.  Except that I’m not paying a nickel, not one red fucking cent, for anything Olympic oriented. When I see the TONS of ads on the bus, I think to myself, in six months the Value Village will be inundated with this hoody and that hat and this shirt and that scarf.  Even then I won’t get it second hand. I did see a cloisonné pin in the Waves coffee house the other night that I actually liked, but once again, I am not spending money on it.

I may end up in a band.  When she told me what the band name was, I burst out laughing and gave a big thumbs up.  More later if possible.  Jeff warned me not to get too invested and it’s good advice (he normally gives good advice…).

I have not written Granny’s eulogy yet.  That plus the Valentine cards should keep this weekend a very busy one… and Jeff is away for part of this weekend so no shopping unless I’m doing the carrying myself.

Work is very funny. I am going flat out and every night there are the same number of cases in the queue as when I left the night before.  And that doesn’t cover the other stuff I have to do.  I have a whole set of tasks beyond that.  And I am fine with it.  I can’t do everything, but I can do something, and that’s what I’m doing.  I am going to reward myself for my entire lack of initiative (actually, it’s an entire lack of worrying) by getting myself some Haagen Dazs on the way home from work today… there’s a Nester’s Market right next to the Cornerstone building now and it’s huge and gorgeous, at least from my bus window, and I am looking forward to spending some money there.

It seems ludicrous to say it, but I’m content right now.  And now, it’s time for a shower and then a quick call to Bonny’s Taxi.

Slow and fast, warm and cold

Right now life is a slurry of goodbyes and re-introductions; changes in temperature, ambiance, the furnace breaks, the filk convention looms, the tooth is snaggled, Granny’s dead, I’m finally back on the ERP at work, I am up again and spinning at a great rate of knots.  The distance between life and the blog is bigger than normal, and I have few venues (not none, fortunately) for venting about it.  Some things are burning brightly, some are swallowed by silence and distrust of the future.  The major thing is allowing myself to be happy by how genuinely pleased people are to see me.  I feel like I’m home, and I’m happy.

My back hurts.  Commuting subjects me to lots of interesting loading on my lower back. This is making me crabbier than normal.

One of my coworkers dreamed I was coming back to work.  I don’t know whether to believe it and I’m not really worried about it either way.  I’ve had one precognitive dream that I remembered, so although my sample size is small my willingness to believe is large.

Pocky.  It’s what’s for dinner. I bought Robbie B lunch.

Long hours of sleep, punchuated in the morning with traffic noise. Lest my mother be upset, that typo was deliberate….. now let me wander off my rails again and think about how we can set up an Aspie friendly place for the boys to do their mourning.  Because as sure as Darwin’s winnowing fan claims us all, I can think of four of my blood kin who need to go off and have their own corner to grieve in.  Of such are the ways of the accommodationist, the ever blooming woman of the boundary layer, who would be, of course, me.