Tag: strange

Sweet poison

Woke up with a sore throat this morning, almost certainly the same thing Katie’s been fighting all week, so I’ve been drinking tea today. Our lunch room at work has a basket of sugar, Sweet-n-low, and Equal packets which someone has thoughtfully arranged in three wide stripes, making it look oddly like the French tricolor.

When the receptionist cleans the coffee maker, she puts a post-it note on the urn labeled “Poison,” often with a skull and crossbones, to make sure that no one absent-mindedly pours himself a cup of cleaning fluid. (And face it, if you really need the coffee, you won’t notice!)

Disturbingly, someone had set that post-it note on top of the sugar packets.

Now, I’m sure you can find nutritionists, dietitians, and the occasional conspiracy theorist who will agree with that assessment—and throw in aspartame and saccharin as well—but it’s not a label you want to see on something you’re about to put in your own drink. Even when you know it’s safe!

Whoa! That’s real far!

I walked to lunch at the Irvine Spectrum today. On my way back, while waiting at a red light, a 20-ish guy with headphones and a student-sized backpack asked me for directions to UCI — on foot. As it happened, the directions were simple: Take Barranca to Jeffrey, turn left, and keep going.

But 7 miles is a long way to walk!

He did ask if there were any buses that went there. I said there were, but I didn’t know where the stops were for that route.

If he kept walking, he might be just arriving around now.

3-day weekends can really mess you up.

I’ve spent the entire morning anticipating the monthly release of patches from Microsoft. The lack of announcements or even commentary struck me as odd, until I realized that while June 1 was the second day of the work week, it was actually Wednesday. Today isn’t the second Tuesday of the month, it’s the first.

Back to web development….

Current Mood: working

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

Collection of interesting links

Roads Gone Wild: a traffic engineer discovers that, in some circumstances, if you design the road right, you can actually make it safer by removing signs, lane lines, curbs and the like. The comments at Photomatt.netare interesting as well.

The History of Mathematical Symbols. Some of them are more recent than you might think.

Top 10 cheesiest movie lines—though they should probably be renamed the top 10 high profile cheesy movie lines. I think “I’m just the cook” in Under Siege (or was it the sequel?) is at least the equal of “No, I’m a postman” in cheese level. And once you get into the realm of B movies, there’s a wealth of cheese to be found.

Ursula Le Guin doesn’t like what Skiffy did to the Earthsea books. She really doesn’t like it She really, really doesn’t like it. She really, really, really doesn’t like it. And she’s not alone.

Daniel Handler, however, seems okay with the screen adaptation of his books.

They really do come in threes

Saturday night: Driving home from a day with parents & grandparents. Two blocks from home, we made a left turn, and someone coming sideways ran the red light. They slowed down, we sped up, and disaster was averted.

This morning: After talking, for whatever reason, about car crashes and why you shouldn’t stop on the side of a bridge if you can help it (the chance of being hit and knocked over the edge, which happened to the younger brother of someone I knew in high school) during the carpool section of the morning commute, I watched an SUV plow into the center divider, hitting its right front wheel and, I’m fairly certain, knocking that wheel off.

This evening: Driving home from work, the right front tire went flat while we drove over a bridge.

Overall damage: I need to buy a new tire, and my shoes are scuffed up. But the level of coincidence is disturbing.

Current Mood: 😉weird

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

From the department of… huh?

Last night I dreamed that John Ashcroft was following me around the cereal aisle in the grocery store. After a bit he introduced himself: “Hi, I’m John Ashcroft. We met briefly in a shopping mall in Washington, DC ten years ago.” And since this was a dream, I started remembering the previous meeting. Which was essentially the same as the other one. Just about the point that I started to say “Oh, yeah, I remember now!” he was gone.

Current Mood: 😕confused

Irony, Luck, and Coincidence

Irony: Walking through Trader Joe’s and hearing “It never rains in California” on a day that really soaked.

Luck: The rain and clouds cleared up in time for a great view of the lunar eclipse (when we weren’t in a store or eating dinner). Post-eclipse, it started up again.

Coincidence: Watching Lost for the first time (fully aware that Merry Brandybuck and Lt. Matheson/Gavin Park are both on the show), and at the first commercial break, Buffy’s mom pops onto the screen to talk about painkillers. Tons of genre connections surrounding an apparentely non-genre show.