An archive of my old LiveJournal
Still trying to repair fallout from yesterday’s power outage.
I won’t go into the full litany, but after the garden-variety power-back-up issues, it mostly comes down to 2 servers and a bizarre network problem. 1 box fixed yesterday afternoon. Network problem popped up & fixed this morning. Still working on the other box.
Oh, and also things breaking that (in theory) weren’t affected. WTF?
*grumble*
alenxa’s sister is coming down from the Soggy North to visit this weekend. Exact plans are yet undetermined, though since she couldn’t come down for Christmas, there will definitely be a family gathering at some point.
My brother is also coming down from slightly less North this weekend–with his fiancee, whom we’re all meeting for the first time. Again, exact plans are still undetermined.
It’s going to be a busy weekend…
Finally got out to do serious Christmas shopping today. Hit a couple of individual stores at the beginning & end of the day, but the bulk of it was taken up by a 3-mall tour:
The Village (formerly known as the Mall of Orange). Not too bad. Parked quickly, though not terribly near the mall. Crowds weren’t too bad, even in the food court where alenxa and I had lunch. Full circuit, found stuff. Stopped at Jamba Juice & Coffee Bean on the way out.
Main Place. Total nightmare. Took 10 minutes to get into the parking lot because it’s behind the mall. They had cops directing traffic, but weren’t making it clear just who they were gesturing to. And then there was turning left into the parking structure at a blind curve with oncoming traffic. Much more crowded — seemed like it was also a hangout mall, in addition to people shopping. Even after doing a full circuit, neither of us found anything suitable for presents. Though we did find a good gelato place. Incidentally, there are some Nirvana songs that are just not appropriate for a store called “Simply Kids,” even if it is primarily an anime/manga store.
The Block. Much nicer. Again, easy to get into the parking lot. At least seemed less crowded. Disappointed to find that Earthbound Trading Company is gone, but managed to actually find stuff for people. Dinner at Tu Tu Tango. Sitting down was a nice change.
Aftermath. Got home, got ready to start wrapping presents for people we’re going to see tomorrow. Remembered we were out of Scotch tape. So I got back in the car & took a trip to the grocery store. They were out of regular ½” Scotch tape. Fortunately, they had 5,000 displays of 3-packs of ¾” tape scattered around the store.
Ended up missing my company’s Christmas party this year because we had tickets to see Tori Amos at the Grove on Saturday. Good concert, but our feet were pretty much dead by the end of the standing show. Sometime I’ll have to post the experience of trying to eat at El Torito Grill beforehand.
Meanwhile, everyone at my office hopped on a bus last Friday at noon to go out to Las Vegas. Apparently they did a murder mystery dinner for the actual party. It was a bit eerie afterward.
Still scrambling to finish a website at work. Also trying to finish some articles that I’m contributing to a book about the Flash. And Christmas shopping? Hah!
5 days before Christmas is a bad time to find out that you’re almost out of scotch tape, but I suppose it’s better than finding out at 8pm on December 24.
Truth in cartooning. We have a customer who, whenever email is down, sends me an email.
Naturally, I don’t receive this critical piece of information until after we’ve fixed the problem.
Annoyingly, I probably would have caught it before he did today, except I left my phone at home. So the handy message from the monitoring box went… elsewhere.
Wednesday: Scrambling to finish a section of this big web project for work so that the client could test things over the weekend, and still get out early enough to pick up alenxa when her office closed at 3. Planned to leave at 2 & hit the comic store first, but got out at 2:50. So I went straight to pick her up, and we got stuck wading through pre-TG traffic and grocery store madness. (Gripe: The express lane clearly says cash only. Why do some people insist on paying with a check anyway? (Answer: because the store doesn’t want to lose that sale, so they call over a manager to take it, and thereby inconvenience all 12 people waiting for the process — which takes 10 minutes instead of 1 for some reason — instead of inconveniencing the one person who really should have been in another line in the first place. Thus do we reward people being either clueless or inconsiderate.)) Helped Katie a bit w/ baking.
Thursday: Thanksgiving lunch w/ Katie’s family. Worked out pretty well, since it meant neither of us needed to eat dinner.
Friday: Holed up in the apartment, venturing forth only to run by the pharmacy. Re-read first 3 volumes of Scott Pilgrim & read the new one. Still holding up.
Saturday: Drove out in the Tustin Foothills/Lemon Heights area to take advantage of the really clear air and see what I could see. Got to see Catalina Island from about 10 miles inland. Also between this and a similar drive early in October, I have some interesting before & after pics of some of the hills touched by the Santiago fire. It got a lot farther north than I thought. Edit: Forgot to mention, got a kick out of driving around the wealthy enclave with “Sinister Ducks” playing on the iPod. Gotta love random.
Then afternoon & evening for a secondary Thanksgiving dinner w/ my parents & brother, who’s out visiting from Florida (but moving to San Fransisco next month). Haven’t seen BSG: Razor yet. Will probably watch it tonight.
Sunday: Ran errands, went to see Beowulf in 3D. Sushi & tempura for dinner (Maki Maki has a teriyaki chicken roll, plus everyone has veggie rolls), then minor shopping.
Monday: I think we may have finished off the leftovers, except for a turkey leg.
Somewhere in all this I took a few hours to pare down my inbox from ~650 messages to ~250, mostly by filing and deleting things I’d already dealt with or didn’t need to (though I replied to a couple of things). Probably around 40 of the remaining items are to do/to read items I sent myself. At some point I’ll need to do this with my work mailbox.
Just discovered 88 Lines About 44 Fangirls. Read. Now.
(via Comics Worth Reading)
Encountered the aftermath of a fairly major accident on the way to pick up alenxa after work. Someone had hit a traffic signal at Jamboree and Michelson and knocked it over. Police were investigating the shattered bits of one of those little equipment covers, as well as the pole, while what remained of the car sat halfway into the intersection. I hesitate to think how fast they must have been driving when they hit. Or, for that matter, what happened to whoever was in the car.
After I picked her up, I decided to take MacArthur to avoid all the spillover traffic. Driving over the freeway, we saw flames climbing up the wall of a sports club building from its sign, occasionally dropping to the ground to join another blaze at the base of the building.
A few minutes later, a fire engine zoomed by on the opposite side of the street. I pulled the car over to the side, and some numbskull decided instead of pulling over behind me and waiting for me to start moving again, they’d creep around me. As if I had pulled over to make a right turn, rather than pulling over because of the big red firetruck with flashing lights and a siren. WTF?
Friday night alenxa and I went to a Gin Blossoms concert in Cerritos. They spent most of the show alternating between songs from the new album (which is surprisingly good) and their old standards. Encore was 2 covers: Rocketman and something I didn’t recognize.
Funniest remark: “We don’t get to play many Performing Arts Centers. Mostly we play casinos and dog pounds.”
Saturday I spent some time filling in random songs for our music collection, going with Amazon’s DRM-less plain old MP3s when possible and iTunes when not.
Sunday we watched Phantom of the Paradise, a truly bizarre mash-up of Phantom of the Opera and Faust set in a satire of the 1970s rock music industry.