Tag: slice of life

July 4, Reading, Weekend

Spent Saturday afternoon shopping for alenxa’s parents’ birthdays. Not terribly exciting, though we did go to Javier’s for lunch. We’ve never been there for dinner, because they’re always terribly crowded and they won’t take reservations for only two people. But we’ve always walked straight in for lunch. Sunday was mostly spent with the previously-mentioned relatives.

I finally got around to reading The Time Traveler’s Wife (thanks, andrea_wot!) Very much a character study: what would spontaneous, involuntary time travel do to someone, and to the people around him?

Plans for July 4: Head down to Laguna Beach before sunset & find a good spot to watch the fireworks display. They launch them off of the bluff to the north of the main beach. I think it was 3 years ago that we first tried going there, but arrived too late. We were walking down Broadway, and could hear the finale, but by the time we made it to PCH, it was too late. We spent some time at the Diedrich Coffee across the street to let the crush of cars dissipate a bit. Then the year after that I was sick, so we just walked down the street to see what we could of the local fireworks display. Last year we made it out to Laguna on time and found a spot on the beach well before the fireworks started, which was nice. Again, we stopped at Diedrich before leaving.

This year, Diedrich is gone. There’s a Starbucks about 300 feet away, but it’s just not the same. (And, of course, Starbucks is quite literally responsible for Diedrich being closed!) There’s apparently one more coffee place in walking distance — Coffee Pub on Forest, which looks pretty close to where we parked last year. Maybe we’ll give that a try.

Fogging Things Up

  1. When I got out of bed, alenxa said, “Hey, there’s fog out there!” A half an hour earlier, when she’d gotten up, it had been clear. By the time we left for work, all that was left was just enough haze to maximize glare and make the broken sun visor and lack of sunglasses a problem. We did get a great view of one of the ex-marine base blimp hangars where the near end was perfectly visible, but it faded into the fog so that the far end was completely hidden. (Naturally, by the time I dug the camera out, the light turned green and we didn’t get a picture.)
  2. There’s something fascinating about the high-tech/low-tech contrast in surgery where the instruments consist of a styrofoam cup and a long Q-tip. OK, the cup has to be full of liquid nitrogen, but it just seems so simple.
  3. Last week I got into work and said to a co-worker, “Is it just me, or do people not know how to drive in the rain?” “I think they just don’t know how to drive.” I spent nearly 10 minutes at a turn signal this morning because some idiot didn’t notice it turned green, and the next car was a big two-piece truck with no acceleration capability whatsoever. And then there was the freeway…
  4. Amazon’s shipping decisions just don’t make any sense. Last week I placed an order for three items (so I could hit that magic $25 and get free shipping). I checked the box to lump everything into as few shipments as possible. So of course they decided to just ship two of them. Then they shipped the third the next day. Yesterday, the second shipment arrived, but I’m still waiting for the first. Edit: The first package arrived today. It seems holiday shipping is already in full swing, because the UPS guy showed up around 7:30.
  5. Server room is freezing. This is good. When it isn’t, my boss says things like “You can smell the electronics trying to die!” And things crash. And we have to spend half the day fixing things that crash.
  6. Speaking of things that crash, I’m getting very annoyed at Microsoft’s decision in MFC 7.0 to stop hiding menus and toolbars in Print Preview mode.

Lunch Lessons Learned

  1. Smoothie-and-sushi, while an excellent combination under summer and fall weather conditions, is less than ideal for a cold, wet day.
  2. Even if you’re convinced that it can’t possibly start raining enough to warrant an umbrella in the next 45 minutes… bring it anyway.
  3. Check the soles of your shoes once in a while so that you discover they no longer have any tread before you find yourself slipping every few steps on a wet sidewalk.
  4. With #3 in mind, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf isn’t particularly close to the food court at the Spectrum. It’s really too bad they kicked out the Diedrich’s instead of, say, moving them into the food court.
  5. Frosty doesn’t know how to pronounce the word chaste. As I got out of the car, they were having a big argument, with listeners IMing in to tell him that Heidi and Frank were pronouncing it correctly and Frosty insisting that he had heard the word more often and therefore knew how it should be pronounced.

Sunset

Since about 7:15 (barring a break to bring in laundry), I’ve been out on the balcony with the laptop, doing Net stuff I’ve been meaning to catch up on. It’s been quite nice outside today, except in direct sunlight, but there’s been a light cloud cover most of the afternoon. But we just can’t seem to get the apartment cleared out.

There was a dicey moment when I was watering the plants, though, and somehow managed to overwater the plant that hangs above our patio table. So it immediately started dripping on the table and splashing the laptop and small stack of books next to it. It was closed, at least, so no harm was done, and the day was so dry that by the time I finished with the other plants the table was already drying out.

We don’t have a view of the horizon — there are too many trees and buildings in the way — but the high cloud cover meant a very nice sunset, and the parts of the sky I could see turned fantastically gold, orange, and finally pink before fading.

Now it’s dark, and while I don’t need to see to type (and the screen casts plenty of light for that anyway), one of the things I was doing was typing in the quotes we collected at Comic Con. The balcony light really doesn’t cast enough to read at this end, so I’ll probably have to either go over to the bench by the light, where there’s nowhere to put the notebook, or go back inside, where it’s still uncomfortably warm.

On the other hand, I won’t be able to hear my neighbor hocking loogies on his patio. He started about halfway through this post, and I hope he’s finished. Blech.

Current Mood: 🤔contemplative

Lunchtime observations

All the “meadows” (i.e. weed fields) I noted a while back have been mowed down and just look like dead brown grass. The one where I stopped and watched birds and butterfies has a few flowers that have popped up since then, but is otherwise pretty much dead.

Speaking of dead grass, the traffic island where I took the picture of the Grass Under Renovation sign is almost completely dead now.

Jamba Juice gets really loud when they’re making lots of smoothies.

A green tea boost turns mango smoothies green. I’d hate to see what it does to a berry smoothie. With luck it’ll look sort of like a mocha… but it sure won’t taste like one!

I suspect the local schools are out, since there were a lot more teenagers than I’m used to seeing on a weekday. That’s part of why Jamba Juice was so busy.

As I was leaving with my smoothie, a pair of girls waiting to pick theirs up suddenly hugged each other and started dancing in circles for no apparent reason.

Many of the trees along the path from the building where I work to the Spectrum shopping center are purely decorative. The sidewalk along Irvine Center Drive is lined by trees on both sides, but only a few shadows managed to touch the sidewalk. As for shade for someone walking at high noon? Not a chance. Maybe in a few more years they’ll be useful. Or maybe if the city doesn’t trim them back so far next year.

This lack of shade may be connected to the lack of pedestrians. Today, for instance, I encountered no one on the way to lunch until I reached the office building across the street from the center. On the way back there was one guy carrying a soda and a bag from fye, and a woman jogging with an iPod. And they were both on the first block out, before the first signal.

Speaking of that first signal (second if you count the one crossing the street from the Spectrum itself)…drivers don’t expect pedestrians there either. A truck was turning right in front of me as the light changed, and another car zoomed right behind it despite me stepping forward into the street. By the time I got three steps in, the “don’t walk” signal was already flashing… and this is nine lanes worth of street.

Account of the bank

At lunch I stopped by the bank to pick up some rolls of quarters for laundry. (The next time we move, a washer/dryer hookup will be part of our criteria.) For some reason, the teller was acting really nervous. When I asked to withdraw two rolls of quarters, she stammered that I should swipe my card while she went to get them.

This in turn made me nervous. I watched her talking to one of the other tellers, wondering what was going on. Did I have a doppelganger on the FBI most wanted list? Was I acting suspiciously without knowing it? Was I just really jittery from all the coffee I drank this morning? Is there some unwritten rule about how many rolls of coins one may reasonably withdraw at a time? Was I going to spend 20 minutes talking to the security guards before they were satisfied that all I wanted to do was withdraw some cash from my own account?

She came back with the quarters, I evidently managed to mistype my PIN, but I got it right on the second try, and the transaction went fine (except for her pronouncing my name wrong)—though I decided to keep my hands in plain sight, just in case. All told, it was an odd experience.

Current Mood: 😕confused

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.

Sleeeeeeep

Up too late repeatedly this week. (What else is new?) Tuesday night it was writing down ideas for a joke website (which will remain nameless until it’s a bit further along). Sometimes when I’m trying to go to sleep my mind will start writing. Often it’ll be some rant about something that’s been bugging me, or sometimes it’ll be about something I found interesting, or an email to send someone, or ideas for my website. The problem is that I generally don’t pick these up again the next day, and I had some good ideas. I’m still kicking myself for completely forgetting what I was absolutely convinced would be a great stand-alone website idea, so obvious I wouldn’t have to write it down, and… well, I should have written it down.

So Tuesday night I got up and wrote stuff down.

And last night I finished the taxes. I’d done a rough draft a few weeks ago, just to confirm we were getting a refund that could significantly finance our vacation, but put off finishing the federal taxes and doing the state taxes, which are usually simpler… only the rules about deducting interest paid on student loans are different. CA only lets you deduct interest payments during the first 60 months of repayment, and I graduated in 1999, so I had to track down exactly when the loan went into repayment in order to figure out whether I could deduct the whole amount, or whether I had to estimate 11 months, 10 months, etc. In the end I had to run everything through another 1-page worksheet that exactly cancelled out the decuction, so it didn’t really matter when the 60-month cutoff date fell.

Sometimes I think tax preparers must have lobbyists in Congress and at the state level, trying to make sure the forms are as complicated as possible. I know it’s mostly about incentives, encouraging or rewarding certain types of behavior, but taking a different cut from every type of income seems a bit extreme.

Anyway, about a half hour ago I realized I was staring dumbly at the monitor here. The energy rushes from morning, breakfast, and lunch had each worn off, and when I finally got around to heading for the lunch room I was very glad to find there was still coffee. (I can’t even remember the last time I had work coffee.) It reminds me, actually, of college, when the class I was most likely to fall asleep in was generally the one mid-afternoon. Of course, now that I think about it, the only classes I can remember sleeping in on a regular basis were Early American Literature (with the exception of Ben Franklin’s autobiography, it was a slog) and, a class on Old English. It doesn’t fit the pattern, because it was mid-morning, and the subject was fascinating. And I really hated falling asleep in there, because aside from the interesting subject matter, it was a 10-person class held around a conference table in a tiny office.

Well, I guess it’s back to battling with server hardware.

Current Mood: 😴sleepy
Current Music: does the jet engine on my desk count?

Actor’s Nightmare

I haven’t done any acting in years, but I still occasionally get the Actor’s Nightmare. (When I saw the Buffy episode where Willow dreams she’s in the play that doesn’t quite make sense, I sat up and said, “I’ve had that dream!”)

Last night I dreamed I was in a community theater or children’s theater production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It seemed to be only the songs from the movie, not the entire play. It was opening night, and there was a certain lack of sufficient rehearsal.

The canonical actor’s nightmare is like the clasic final exam nightmare—the final exam in the class you never actually attended, for instance. The play makes no sense, you don’t know your lines, you’re not even sure how the scenes go together, but everyone else knows what they’re doing. (I never did figure out what the tanks were doing in Oklahoma in one of my dreams.) This was different: I hadn’t just missed rehearsals, there hadn’t been enough rehearsal. There were scenes we hadn’t even blocked, never mind actually practiced.

So it’s opening night, it’s a makeshift theater (basically a conference room with a pair of doors near one end, one going to the descignated green room and the other outside), and the audience is arriving. We’re all “backstage” (i.e. in the next room), I’m running through songs (OK, we havent rehearsed this part, but I know most of the song anyway…), and for some inexplicable reason I’ve been cast as Gaston (it didn’t make sense in the dream, either), and I’m running through the song, when I realize… who’s playing LeFou? I start asking the other actors, and nobody knows. I ask the stage manager, and he doesn’t know.

Did I mention I have the vague sense throughout that this is the theater troupe from Something Positive?

So the audience is here, the lights (room lights, we don’t have any actual stage lighting) are up, and people are out there starting to sing, and we don’t even have the entire show cast yet, never mind rehearsed! I’m trying to figure out just how much I can muddle through the opening scene without someone to play off of, and I’m not even certain we have anyone playing Belle out on stage…

…and then I woke up with “Going Through the Motions” running through my head.

Current Mood: 🙁restless
Current Music: Going Through the Motions