An archive of my old LiveJournal
Saturday at Wizard World LA was fun, and much more interesting than last year. Write-up and photos at K²R as usual.
Sunday got together with wayens, andrea_wot, zehntaur and gasean at Olive Garden for Wayne’s birthday. Lots of catching up. Discovered alenxa and I are going to see Phantom of the Opera the same night as zehntaur.
Off to Wizard World Los Angeles tomorrow. At first alenxa wasn’t interested and I wasn’t sure — we’d just been to WonderCon last month, after all. Eventually I figured I might as well go. It is the closest comics convention to where we live. Then the con managed to get a certain actor to show up for the Heroes panel, so it’s going to be both of us.
With luck it will be a bit more… alive than last year (though admittedly, I went on a Sunday last year), but not be too crowded.
Made it home from San Francisco. ~1200 miles since Wednesday. Covered Hearst Castle, Winchester Mystery House, Napa Valley, WonderCon, and points in between. Visited sekl and non_seqvitvr, as well as my brother and his fiancee.
Fun trip. Posted first 2 days during trip. Will post more soon. Now… to sleep.
Got some nighttime photos yesterday of the orange moon (to the right) and the glow coming from the hills in front of Saddleback.
The smoke is back again, like Monday. It’s thinner, so at first I figured it would be better, but I feel much worse. Maybe because I’ve been breathing the crap for the last 4 days, maybe because without the wind, the smoke and ash are settling at ground level.
Meanwhile I’ve been putting out virtual fires with our network since about 3:00 yesterday. Yesterday my boss and I spent most of the afternoon trying to troubleshoot a computer that was running incredibly slow, but only when the network was plugged in. I was there until almost 6:30 trying to troubleshoot problems that started affecting the few other people who were still in the office at that hour.
This morning, I got to troubleshoot the connection issues that started cascading around the office. Finally I discovered a cable on the back of the stack of hubs was plugged into the wrong port. We’d temporarily disconnected it yesterday afternoon for testing, and someone (presumably my boss) plugged it back into the wrong connector.
And of course, anything that’s already flaky has taken the opportunity to stop working, leading to follow-up “Hey, X isn’t working” visits that have led, so far, to rebooting a server, replacing a network card in a desktop, and resetting a hub. Did I mention my boss isn’t in yet, and no one’s really sure if he’s going to be in today?
So here I am, sitting at my desk, writing this in bits and pieces when I have time, drinking hot lukewarm chocolate, wishing I’d remembered to grab that bottle of Vizine or Clear Eyes or whatever it is from home. I really don’t want to go anywhere at lunch today, between having to leave early and wanting to stay indoors as much as possible.
Lungs doing tolerably well, considering all the smoke in the air. On the plus side, it’s a lot clearer (relatively speaking) than yesterday, since the smoke seems to be concentrated in the canyons & drifting outward, rather than being driven directly at the building where I work. (Naturally, I had an appointment with my allergist yesterday. In an office on the edge of the smoke plume. And she insisted on doing a breathing test.)
Family are all okay, though my dad’s workplace keeps trying to call people in despite being a few hundred yards from yesterday’s fire lines. AFAIK, friends all live out of the danger zone (I think we’re the second-closest to the Santiago fire, after wayens).
Work’s been interesting, with people periodically clustering around computers for online updates or around a conference room window that looks out at the mountains. Two co-workers who live out in the Santiago Canyon area: one was evacuated this morning, and figured he might as well come into the office. No word from the other. We’re all speculating as to whether he’s still helping put out fires, or standing guard at his house, or what.
Been fireblogging at K2R, with photos.
The theme of the day, at least for me, has been trying to keep cool. I went to see Transformers (and I have some things to say about it at K²R) in part because I was curious, in part because I found a Regal movie pass I’d forgotten, but in part because movie theaters are air conditioned better than our apartment is.
Came back mid-afternoon. Rehydrated. Opened up all the windows since it had gotten to the point where it was just as hot inside as outside, and at least outside had a breeze. Thought about swimming, then thought about just sticking my head under the shower for a minute. Finally settled on swimming, for the first time in several years.
We’ve been in this apartment for something like 6 years, and until today, neither of us had ever used the pool. The last time I swam was on our 2003 trip to Hawaii with the IVC choir (with alenxa of course, and also andrea_wot and zehntaur, though I can’t recall whether either of them were on that side trip), when we stopped at a small bay on the north shore of Oahu. That was salt water, so buoyancy was another issue. (On a related note, every time I walk down the main aisles of the Spectrum, I get stopped by the “Wonders of the Dead Sea” spa people. It’s getting to the point where I want to start responding, “Yes, I have heard of the Dead Sea!” and then rattling off a bunch of facts about it. Then telling them I still don’t want their spa products. Do I look like their target audience?)
Treading water is more tiring than I remember. And I seem to have no natural buoyancy. When I lie on my back, I have to flap my arms and legs from time to time or my face starts sinking below the surface. Still, I was out there for about an hour, trying to keep out of the way of the family teaching their two kids to swim (I think it was the mother and an aunt, with the father sitting out on the deck). When I realized that my eyes were clouding up with chlorine, and my fingers were beginning to look like prunes, I climbed out and walked on unsteady legs back to the apartment, rinsed off, and collapsed for a few minutes.
It’s still warm, but it’s a manageable warmth. Evening should be more comfortable.
It’s not particularly smoky or even hazy in the Irvine Spectrum area. It does, however, smell like a campfire outside. Just slightly east of north, a huge plume of smoke is rising from the hills, drifting west in a band across the entire northwestern sky.
Last night on the way home we could just barely see the silhouette of those same hills, outlined by a faint orange glow almost invisible against the glare of street lights and traffic signals.
I took some photos at lunch. I’ll try to post them tonight, along with some that alenxa took yesterday morning. Yesterday was really strange, because it started out foggy. The fog had mostly lifted by the time we left for work, but the beginnings of the smoke from the hours-old fire seemed to blend with the remnants of the fog.
Meanwhile, the LA Times has posted some impressive photos of the smoke and, closer up, the efforts to contain the fire.
Edit: Photos are up at K2R.
This morning alenxa asked me if I’d posted anything on comic book time (the effect by which Superman and Lois Lane are roughly the same age now as they were in 1938). I’d actually started writing about it a while back, but never finished it.
Around lunchtime I took a look at the Drafts folder on my keychain drive, and I found it — a lot shorter than I remembered, and a lot more recent. I also found an epic I had written ages ago based on another of our conversations — one wondering about the dearth of sci-fi art films. This thing is several pages long, deals with defining sci-fi, fantasy, and related genres, and doesn’t even get to the art film issue, and predates our group blog by several months. In fact, it’s old enough that the first line starts off, “My girlfriend and I were having a conversation about movies….”
There was a footnote about popular derision of science fiction vs. popular consumption of it that I thought was worth posting on its own, although since it dealt with top movie grosses, it needed a bit of updating. This piece of weblog history can now be seen at Viewing the Impossible.
I dashed off some thoughts on several other half-finished pieces (including the time issue), as well as a new one I’d been thinking about while drifting off to sleep last night (or maybe drifting off to consciousness this morning). I figure on finishing and posting them over the next few days. Maybe I’ll start breaking up the epic and post that too. With a new opening line, of course!
I was just looking through web traffic statistics for K-Squared Ramblings, had just finished reading the top 20 search terms people were finding us with, and started on the list of individual pages linking to the site. I muttered “Ah, direct hits,” and then, at the same time, alenxa and I both started saying “Krakow! Krakow!” (old “Calvin and Hobbes” joke).
For those of you who haven’t already seen them, I’ve posted some of the more amusing pictures from last weekend’s camping trip (well, mostly from the drive to and from Joshua Tree) over on K-Squared Ramblings.
Also, I found that the location of the last retreat alenxa and I made it to, Cuyamaca State Park, was indeed wiped out by the Cedar fire last October. There’s a picture on the park website right now of “what’s left of an ancient oak” – a collapsed, hollowed-out trunk with burning coals still visible inside. Right next to our campsite, there was a fenced-off oak tree labeled as one of the oldest oaks in the state. The page also has a picture of the picnic area where we stopped for lunch on Saturday, showing a half-collapsed picnic table.