Hint taken

This morning I looked at the vine that I’ve routed along the top of my cubicle wall and thought it was just getting long enough to warrant a new paper clip to hold it in place. (I have clips at two to three-foot intervals.) Just now it flopped down off the wall to hang in front of my calendar.

Hint taken, plant! New clips are in place.

Seeing the light(s)

Monday night, as I parked the car in the “garage”, I noticed the light looked funny. Sure enough, one of the headlights had gone out. I didn’t have time to pick up a replacement bulb on Tuesday, so I grabbed one last night, picked up some work gloves that weren’t all covered with gardening dirt and plant bits, and called alenxa to ask whether we had any safety glasses since the bulb package had a warning about how it was pressurized and could explode in your face if handled incorrectly.

Now, you probably haven’t noticed this unless you’ve watched me turn into a driveway, but the front left turn signal is white instead of yellow. This is because when it burned out a year(?) ago, the store only had clear bulbs of the right type, and I had somehow gotten it into my head that the glass in the turn signal assembly was amber (it isn’t). I went with what I had, and checked back at the nearby auto parts store a week or so later to see if they’d gotten the amber bulbs in. Once I had them, I let them sit on my desk for a year because I didn’t feel like messing with it, and hey, the signal worked, didn’t it?

So I figured as long as I was replacing the headlight, I’d take care of the turn signal at the same time. Only one problem: I’d bought the wrong bulb. I needed 1157NA, and picked up 1156NA. The bulb was the right size, but it had the wrong number of filaments, the wrong number of contacts, and the pegs on the base were in the wrong spot.

So the car has a full set of headlights now, but the turn signal is still off-color.

Meh.

Christmas Coffee Calypso

I’d forgotten about it overnight, but today was the office building’s annual holiday party. This means that they set up a cappuccino cart, a pastry/fruit tray, and a calypso band playing Christmas songs on steel drums and a keyboard out in front of the building. (There’s also one in summer, not connected with any holidays, with smoothies instead.)

I just grabbed a plate, since I was carrying a travel mug of coffee from home, and the line for coffee was about 5 times as long. Unfortunately this meant I had extra food, which I forgot to put in the refrigerator. Not a problem for the raisin bread, but the yogurt’s probably toast. Oh, well…

Ended up grabbing a chai at Starbucks after lunch (and reminding myself why I usually don’t get chai there), which led to a conversation in the elevator with someone who works on the same floor. This was unusual on several accounts, since I don’t always take the elevator and when I do, I rarely talk with anyone beyond “What floor?”

Work itself involved a lot of frustration, a tale that I’ll have to tell in another post.