Tag: slice of life

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