Month: May 2005

Weekend

Plans/goals for weekend:

1. See Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (tickets already arranged for tonight).
2. Get a replacement hubcap (oh, i haven’t been posting the car saga, have I?).
3. Finish posting Hawaii photos.
4. Get some sleep.

Re: #1, we tracked down a copy of Clone Wars Volume 2, which is much heavier on story than volume 1, and looks like it leads up to about 5 minutes before Episode III begins.

The car saga

A matter of perspective

Yes, you really do notice different things on foot than in a car. For instance: after the heavy rains this past winter, all the empty lots in the Irvine Spectrum area are full of weeds. But in spring, when the weeds are green and in bloom, those fields look an awful lot like meadows.

The lot (or meadow) in front of the Ford building, in particular, had so many birds wheeling and swooping above it that I stopped to watch, and also spotted butterflies and a ladybug that zoomed past my hand to land on the bag of allergy medication I always carry whenever I go somewhere to eat. (I moved it over to the hedge I was standing next to and waited for it to jump off.) A bit later in the walk I started to notice bird songs, and something I couldn’t quite identify as a very loud cricket, a frog, or just a gravelly-voiced bird.

Not all the empty lots look like this. The one nearest the building where I work is, at this very moment, being reduced to stubble by some guy on a power mower.

Random Weekend Bits

Thursday: Went out for Cinco de Mayo Sushi. (We figured the wait would be shorter than if we actually went out for Mexican food.) Realized I’ve never actually had a Corona. It’s probably just as well. Came home to find UPS had tried to deliver our copy of Mac OS X Tiger, but there was no one to sign for it. Naturally, they only try to deliver at times when no one is home. Ah, UPS!. Redirected it to my office, since I’ll actually be there when they show up.

Friday: Fought with UPS to clarify why they think I gave them the wrong address and determine whether they tried to deliver Tiger again today or not. Theoretically should arrive at the office on Monday. B5 and comics for the evening. (alenxa and I are trying to stay a couple of episodes ahead of the viewing parties with maldis and andrea_wot.) Brakes are definitely making a funny sound. This is really annoying since I took the car in for a full inspection last weekend.

Saturday: Slept in too late to take the car in and get it back earlier than 5:00. Wasted time cleaning out my inbox and random websurfing. Dropped by local comic store for Free Comic Book Day (and to get new comic bags) and picked up the Keenspot Spotlight. Made up for lack of Mexican food on Thursday. Re-watched The Phantom Menace in preparation for Revenge of the Sith, which is starting to look like it might be worth seeing. Neither of us had watched the movie on DVD before, just the special features, so it was a surprise to us that Lucas actually made changes to this movie too. Two brief exchanges were added (I can only remember the second one, just after arriving on Coruscant, where Jar-Jar calmly(?!?) remarks to Anakin that Queen Amidala is being awfully nice to them). He may have dropped the scene where they return to Naboo and notice the blockade ships are gone, or I may have just blinked.

Incidentally, Episode I is a rather different experience with beer involved.

Sunday: Responsible Adult Day. Many hours of laundry, calling mom for Mother’s Day, packing up the computer parts I recently sold on eBay (and discovering that of the dozens of boxes I’ve saved from Amazon and eBay purchases, the motherboard and cpu won’t fit in any of them), etc. And staying up late to post another in the series of much-slower-than-I-intended Hawaii reports.

Tomorrow I’m taking the car in on the way to work. I figure this guarantees that UPS will deliver Tiger before I get there. Fortunately there are other people in the office, and they don’t necessarily need my signature, just a signature from a live person.

Current Mood: 🙁melancholy
Current Music: Tori Amos – Concertina

Morning – what’s so good about it?

Insufficient sleep.

30 minutes to drive the 7.5 miles to work. The 405 was so bad I decided to take University to Alton, which would have been fine except for the construction on University, where they stopped all traffic one car ahead of me so that construction workers could run a cable diagonally across the intersection, then hand it to a guy in a crane who lifted it up to the top of the opposite pole, at which point they all started pulling to raise it above the level of traffic. Which was at least interesting, even if it did slow down my commute.

So I arrive at work, and the monitor on my desk is showing not the blackness of a sleeping video display, but a blue screen starting out “STOP 0x00000a”. Yeah, just the way I want to start my morning, fixing my computer. It at least booted afterward, but it apparently didn’t get very far in the defragmenting I started before I left last night. For all I know the defragmenting caused it.

Fortunately I have two computers at my desk, so I can work on server admin stuff on the Linux box while the Windows box defrags. Or tries to.