An archive of my old LiveJournal
Have you ever had a nightmarish roommate? What made you incompatible? How did you eventually resolve your conflicts?
This isn’t technically a roommate from hell story. It’s a story about the ex-roommate who (I’m 99% certain) stole my credit card, then convinced his friends that I’d been going after him.
A tale of theft, compulsive lying, police, and not covering one’s tracks.
I’ve been meaning to run by the UCI bookstore and pick up some new license plate frames (the original plan was to just move the old ones, but when we took them off, we realized they looked kind of ratty) — if possible, before the plates arrive. Around 11:30 or so I decided I’d run up on my lunch hour, then drop in at the Apple Store at Crystal Court (excuse me, South Coast Plaza) and see if they could give me any pointers on some weird stuff my iPod is doing. (The Googles, they do nothing.)
I hadn’t been in the bookstore in several years, and it was mostly familiar, with only shelves and departments rearranged, but this was my first visit to the new Student Center. It was actually kind of eerie, since what I’d seen of construction made it look like they’d razed the entire old building except over at the bookstore/Cornerstone (sadly, now a Starbucks) end of the place. And yet the landing in front of Crystal Cove, the hallway below it, and the landing above, all looked strangely familiar. (And I could swear the only thing changed about the restrooms was the auto-flush sensors and the graffiti.) It turns out they actually kept most of the building below the terrace intact, in some cases moving stairways or adding partitions, and mainly built around it.
Most eerie: In the checkout line, I heard “La Vida Loca,” which for some reason I associate with the Student Center Zot-n-Go.
While I was there, I remembered a photo I took of the old Student Center from the top floor of what was then the Humanities Office Building. (10 years ago, as it turns out.) I had enough time left on parking that I figured I’d run over and try to match the shot. On the way, I pulled up the website with my phone and looked at the original photo so that I could match as closely as possible. I’ll try to post the before and after photos tonight. Edit: I’ve posted the before and after photos at K2R.
By then I figured I didn’t have enough time to deal with the iPod, so I’ll just wait until the Spectrum store is done remodeling and drop in next week.
Friday: rain, at last! Clouds were clear in the west just before sunset, producing a really impressive red rainbow towering in the east. Did some work on my Superman-Flash Races page, restructuring it to make it a bit more accessible to the sudden influx of visitors more familiar with Lost than the Flash.
Saturday: Went to Wayzgoose at UCI. Spent some time at the CHP booth catching up with Susan, katyakoshka & Dave, wayens and others. Missed sekl, non_seqvitvr & company, though. Wandered around the School of the Arts on the way out, getting a sense of what had changed. The last few years I’ve mostly seen it at night, on the way to or from plays. Remembered I had a camera, & took some shots of the campus, but wished I’d taken some pictures back at the CHP booth. Also wished I’d taken more pictures back in college. At the moment, I can think of one roll taken my senior year, plus stuff from trips — Ren Faire, camping, etc. But not much in the way of random pictures of friends.
Stopped at the market on the way home and ended up with pizza ingredients. alenxa made pizza, and we watched the Heroes marathon.
Incidentally, this weekend confirms that Saturday evening, if you happen to be home and have to share a laundry room with other tenants, is an excellent time to do laundry. There’s no competition.
Sunday: Mostly random stuff. Errands. Watched the first few episodes of Drive, with Nathan Fillion and some other Jossverse alumni (Tim Minnear’s a co-creator, and Amy Acker shows up from time to time). More interesting than it sounded from the description. Will probably watch the new episode tonight (fortunately, it’s on before Heroes, not during). Also spent way too much time reading Lostpedia.
Spent Thursday and Friday at home, sick. What started as a “mild cold” ramped up to a more moderate cold-like thing, which refused to disappear after 2.5 weeks. So, stayed home, went to doctor, got prescribed stuff. Spent two days alternately sleeping and lying on the couch reading, chugging water and juice (I went through two bottles of Trader Joe’s pineapple juice in two days), checking my temperature and taking tons of medication. Since I gave up my lunch hour to resolve the near-disaster on Wednesday, that means I still haven’t taken care of the errands I was planning to do in the middle of the week.
Half the office has been out over the last week or so, probably with the same thing. When I emailed in sick on Friday, my boss wrote back a note along the lines of, “you should hear the people who *did* come in!”
Meanwhile, UCI Drama’s doing a production of Sunday in the Park With George, one of my favorite plays. Reprise Theater also did a production last month, and I considered going to both… until I found out the cheap seats at Reprise were $70, and I could get tickets to UCI’s production for $14. So back in January, I bought tickets for Saturday night.
Amazingly enough, I managed to keep the coughing under control until we walked out of the theater after the show. (Which was quite good, though they made some really odd choices for “Putting it Together.” Everyone was dressed in some costume from an iconic 80s movie, and instead of propping up cardboard stand-ups of himself in all the different conversations, George removes an article of clothing and leaves it with each one. And it was kind of unnerving that they managed to cast leads with similar vocal qualities to Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters. They had distinct voices, but especially in Act 2, as Marie, the actress could have been channeling her.)
OK, I’ve finished my tea. Time for bed.
I received an email from the UCI donation-seeking apparatus, and the wording just seemed a little off from my own college experience.
I went to see my allergist this morning for a re-eval. I was actually supposed to go in during the summer, but I forgot about it and misplaced the “you’re due for an appointment!” postcard until earlier this week. As it turned out, she had a medical student from UCI shadowing her today, so I got to be both patient and teacher’s aid. (They asked me up front whether it was okay.) It was an odd experience, partly because there was an extra person, partly because she looked like she was close to my age or maybe younger, and partly because my allergist was narrating everything.
While I was there, I got this year’s flu shot. I don’t remember having to sign a waiver last year. Actually it wasn’t so much a waiver as a “Yes, I’ve been informed of the possible side effects, and I know it’s produced using eggs, so if I’m allergic to eggs, I’ll just stop and not get the vaccine, thank you very much.” It may be explained by the fact that the flu vaccine has been added to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. I didn’t know this program existed. (Ain’t the intarweb grand?)
Heard “1985” at lunch today and finally got a chance to listen to the lyrics. It was followed up with “Dreams” by the Cranberries (whose heyday was the mid-1990s). The two songs together got me thinking. I’m fine with the fact that it’s been more than 10 years since I graduated high school (1994). But it still weirds me out that it’s been more than 10 years since I started college. They’re only a summer apart, but for some reason one feels more remote.
Of course, I still haven’t gotten used to the fact that I’ve now been a college graduate longer than I was a college student.
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.
In the footsteps of alenxa, maldis, and sekl, LiveJournal proudly presents:
TEN THINGS I HAVE DONE THAT YOU PROBABLY HAVE NOT:
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.