Tag: slice of life

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

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

Want…sleeeeep

Stay up ridiculously late, collapse in bed, drop off to sleep. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Not spend another hour-plus tossing & turning.

I “woke up” his morning unsure of just how long it took me to fall asleep last night, but somehow convinced that all I had to do was look at the modification time on the most recently changed files in… something. My brain, probably.

Then I went back to sleep.

Eventually I woke up and realized that the file timestamp thing was just plain silly. Kind of like the time a few years back that I half-woke up, convinced (probably from an interrupted dream) that I could manipulate reality by altering its HTML code.

Anyway, I know there are people on my friends list who have serious insomnia, and I just want to say: I salute you. I don’t know how you put up with it on a regular basis.

Current Mood: 😴sleepy
Current Music: A radio commercial put the Nutcracker Suite in my head. Grr.

Strange Sights of the Weekend

Driving along the toll road and spotting an earth dam that I suspect is the end of a trail I used to hike as a kid.

Sitting in a sandwich shop, watching the rain outside, and seeing a man walk down the street in jeans, denim jacket, a cowboy hat… and sunglasses.

Pulling onto the freeway just in time to see an SUV heading the wrong way, apparently attempting a U-turn despite the presence of a concrete divider. It was almost completely turned around when it hit, and I could swear the front right wheel actually fell off when it struck the barrier. The driver looked okay, and other people were stopping, so I continued on to work. I figured I hadn’t seen enough—like how the truck ended up going the wrong way—to be a useful witness.

Current Mood: 😉weird

A Tale of Three OCs

Well, the office is closed today for the company Christmas party, which for the first time in several years I’m not attending. (It’s out on an Indian casino/resort, and with our usual Dec. 24 holiday being unnecessary, they moved it around so people could beat the traffic.) But since alenxa’s office isn’t, and we only have one car, I had to get up early anyway.

I decided, on a whim, to go exploring a bit. I’ve recently developed an interest in local geography and trying to associate what landforms I can see at a distance with actual locations I can stand on or point to on a map. So I headed toward the mountains, looking for a way past Foothill Ranch. I didn’t make it up into the mountains, but I did find a beautiful drive through what I think was Trabuco Canyon, with twisty, oak-lined back roads, semi-isolated feed stores, random diners in the middle of nowhere, clear views of the mountains—all just a few miles outside my usual haunts.

It made me realize there are actually three Orange Counties: North County (flat and urban), South County (hilly and willfully suburban), and the canyons (willfully rural), which for some reason I’d been including in South County in my mental demographic map.

We’re definitely going to have to explore this further.

Random thoughts

One of our bathroom sinks drains slowly. We’ve had maintenance out time and time again, but no matter what they do, it’s always just a bit slower than usual. Meanwhile, everytime they work on the faucet, its flow increases.

Last night I concluded it must be a water-saving drain. By draining slowly, it encourages you to not to turn the faucet up too far, or to run it too long, thus saving water. Sure, the same thing could be accomplished by just limiting the flow from the faucet, but that would be frustrating. This way you’re involved in the process, so it feels less like you’re being limited.

And on a less silly, but still plumbing-related note, a few nights ago I had an interesting old-habit experience. After loading the dishwasher, I lifted the door while opening the cabinet to get the box of soap. In my parents’ house, these are on a corner, so you can’t actually open the cabinet under the sink without lifting the dishwasher door out of the way. It’s been about 4½ years since I lived there, and countless loads of dishes… and yet the old habit resurfaced.

Current Mood: 🤔contemplative