Yesterday in list form:
+: cathijosephine locked herself out of the house. This is a plus because she came over to get the spare key I have, woke me up early, and took me out to IHOP for breakfast to thank me, which means I got to see her unexpectedly, I got a free eggs-and-bacon-and-pancakes brunch, and I got to work on time.
+: Met devoken for dinner. Was great to catch up with her. I got to tell her all about plumtreeblossom’s and my New York trip.
+: In conjunction with the preceding, I discovered how easy it is to walk from work to Coolidge Corner. This will be useful.
±: Because I got in to work at an unexpectedly reasonable time, and devoken works till 9, I had a very long day at work. That would have made me happy if I’d been more focussed for it.
-: I have a cold. Over the course of yesterday it became clear that it's a real cold rather than just allergies or dry air. This morning it included a bad sore throat, but that got better when I was up and around. Oh, well. Maybe I caught it on the bus.

(Current hip status: beowabbit is currently very hip.)

Going to work was a really stupid idea. My theory was that if I’m going to be in pain and discomfort anyway, there’s no real advantage to not being at work for it. What I didn’t count on was it taking almost two hours for me to walk from the parking garage to my office building. (Admittedly, I’m counting the three times I sat down on benches.) That normally takes 10min if I stop to buy an apple and a coffee on the way.

However, the campus police were very kind and sent over a Safety Patrol van to get me back to the parking garage from my office when I left (early), and the drive back to Quincy was uneventful and less painful than the drive from plumtreeblossom’s to work had been.

On the way home, I stopped by the drugstore and got crutches. I’m not sure they’re an improvement over the cane. They’re better for standing still for long periods of time, and they’re much quicker, and they’re more stable, so there are fewer of the nasty surprises, but they are much clumsier to handle, harder to keep from falling when I set them aside because I can’t hook them on things (and bending over to pick anything up is not so much happening at the moment), and while the cane basically left me fine most of the time with occasional moments of serious pain when I stepped wrong or had to rebalance, the crutches basically hurt just a bit on each “step”. I think the crutches are probably net worse on my hip. If I feel like I can go out tomorrow, I may buy a second cane, and try the two-cane approach. (Assuming, of course, I’m not magically all better tomorrow.)

I left a message for my doctor’s office as soon as I got in to work today, but haven’t heard back yet. At this point, I don’t think it justifies an ER visit, because my best guess is that medical science is going to tell me to suck it up and wait, and in the meantime keep my weight off it and take lots of painkillers, which I am already doing. (Well, modulo the stupidity of trying to go in to work today, but I’ve learned my lesson. Thanks, plumtreeblossom; you were right. On the other hand, I got lots of sympathy from my co-workers.)

In other news, my flowers are still beautiful, and my kilt still makes me very very happy.

Just got home from a fabulous date with plumtreeblossom. We were going to see each other yesterday, but she had a bad cold. :-( Tonight was great, though. Among other highlights, we ordered Chinese takeout and watched Primer with her housemate, which film had been on my list to see for some time. I really enjoyed it, despite (or perhaps because of) its extremely low budget and non-professional actors. It was a movie about engineers, and so it reminded me a lot of people I know.

I had a wonderful time reconnecting with plumtreeblossom. We’d seen each other for dinner on Tuesday, but not for very long (and I was kind of out of it, having just gotten back from Hawai‘i that morning), so we were due for some together-time. She rocks.

Other pleasant recent occurrences include The Best Pastrami Sandwiches on the Planet with cathijosephine, followed by hanging out at her place and cuddling Chickenfinger (her cat), and a lovely phone call from eisa. Oh, and this morning I went to my housemate mynext_boldmove’s brunch and had fascinating conversations with fascinating people, not least her.

At work, I’m moving offices to the one vacated by our sadly departed Windows admin. This means I now get sunlight (which my sleep specialist has assured me I need more of), and a bit of a view of the MFA.

So, life is good!

But first the bad stuff: For those of you who aren’t in the area, it’s cold in the northeast! The sort of cold where my fingers in the nice thick gloves plumtreeblossom gave me hurt by the time I get to the the T station. The sort of cold where the couple times recently I’ve needed to run to catch a train I feel like there are needles in my chest. The sort of cold where my cheeks stay red and painful for a long time after I get to work. After long deliberation, winter has finally decided to come.

Now some good stuff: On Wednesday my lovely plumtreeblossom and I got together, intending to go to the Finnish steam bath in Quincy, but it turns out they’re closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so we just went to Kagawa for yummy dinner. It had been a very stressful day for her (and a much less stressful but still somewhat frazzled day for me), but we had a warm and delightful time together and the cares fell away. And (as always happens when we see each other on a “school night”, and never happens otherwise) I got in to work on time the next morning. If any of my coworkers had been in, they would have been astonished.

And more good stuff: Yesterday I got to go over to darxus’ house to help him and cathijosephine clean (mostly by keeping them company) and have dinner, which was yummy potato pancakes and bacon, and brownies for dessert. I like the way cathijosephine cooks. Then we watched some Star Trek: TNG before I went home. A lovely and productive evening.

And even more good stuff: I feel kind of conceited telling this story in public, but it made me feel too good to escape notice here. Yesterday at work I got a phone call from an ex of mine whom I haven’t stayed in very close touch with over the past few years, although I still consider her a good friend. She said she was calling just because she’s been complimented a lot recently about how well she takes care of people she loves, and how well she takes care of herself — and she said she feels like she learned a lot of that from her relationship with me! So she was calling to thank me. That made me feel really, really good! We got to do some catching up on the phone, and we’ll get to do some more in person soon.

So I guess I can deal with a little cold weather. :-)

I’ve had lots of wonderful stuff going on since I posted last, and I’m not going to bother trying to catch up. But I wanted to post about seeing plumtreeblossom last night, which was lovely. I brought over dinner in my crock pot, a pre-marinated turkey tenderloin which I had cooked according to a recipe cathijosephine had come up with: cooked for about 5hrs in soy sauce and apple juice, along with lots of quartered small potatoes. I threw in a few spices, too, but I don’t remember exactly what they were. (Pretty sure there was some ginger.) I cooked it on high and it came out amazingly tender, and the potatoes sucked up all the soy-sauce and turkey flavour and were quite yummy themselves. For dessert we had the remainder of a cheesecake plumtreeblossom had made the last time I was over and it was still yum-m-mee. And we had some red wine (don’t remember what kind). Lovely, lovely dinner.

I stayed over at her place last night, and it was the first time we’d tried that on a “school night”, and also the first time I’d taken my CPAP machine away from home. Success on both counts! I admit, waking up at 6:00am is not exactly something I’d just happen to do on my own, but I didn’t complain, and plumtreeblossom made me coffee. :-) I’d been worried that without my humidifier in the room (which makes a huge difference) I’d get completely dry the way I did a few times the first week I was using the machine, but plumtreeblossom has a really pretty lighted ultrasonic humidifier (sort of a cross between a humidifier and a decorative fountain) that she had brought into her room, and it seems to have done the trick.

I’m going to take this opportunity to comment about how much of a difference the CPAP machine has been making. A couple days recently at work I’ve been able to start working on a project in the morning, and just keep working on the same project for the whole day, and not get sidetracked, and not get overwhelmed, and remember what I was working on even when somebody comes in my office and asks me a question. I remember being able to do that! And it’s so good to be able to do it again. The same thing is going on, to a less dramatic because less easily quantifiable degree, in the rest of my life. There are a lot of things (like finishing unpacking) that I’d basically been stalled on for a long time that I’m seeing myself start to make some progress on again. There are all sorts of things — often trivial little things — that I used to think of and think, well, maybe I’ll do that someday if I have the energy, and now I think of them and (sometimes, anyway) I just go ahead and do them, or at least start them. And I’m still absent-minded and spacey sometimes, but my memory (and especially my ability to keep track of things) is clearly much improved. And my alertness and sense that I’m catching what’s going on around me is better. Yay!

Oh, and tonight’s Poly Boston dinner at Bertucci’s was well-attended and full of interesting conversation. (For instance, I learned a lot about the history of Islam, and about particularly flammable radio transmitters.) I think I may make that a monthly thing, since it seems like a venue that works really well.

Here are some odd interview questions from ironrose. (The even ones will be filtered.) ( Interview meme. ) Let me know in a comment if you’d like me to come up with five questions for you. I don’t promise to come up with them in a timely fashion, but I’ll come up with them eventually.

First, the morning from hell. For background, I got a new prescription for contacts a few months ago, which turned out to be incorrect, although the sample lenses the eye doctor had given me to try out were correct. So I had an eye appointment scheduled for today to get the prescription fixed.

I’m too tired to do a fully-fleshed-out write-up, so I’ll just tell you about my morning by copying and pasting from mail to cathijosephine. ( Here’s what I wrote. )

So, the three good things: Thanks in large measure to mud_puppy, I went to a fundraiser/rally for Deval Patrick at the Hynes Convention Center on Thursday. Introducing him was Barack Obama, who of course was a really good speaker, but who did a very good job of not stealing Patrick’s thunder. I’d heard Obama’s DNC speech and a couple other sound bites, so I knew what to expect from him, and I got it. But I’d never heard Patrick speak; at most, I’d read short quotes. And wow, he is a kick-ass speaker! Inspiring, entertaining, honest-sounding, impressive. He gives the sound bites, but he also connects them and uses them responsibly. He doesn’t just assert or imply something, he explains why it happens. His speech made me simultaneously really confident in him as a politician and really confident in him as an officeholder, and you don’t get that combination very often. (Even people who are in fact going to be good at both often do only one or the other in their speeches.) So that was amazing. And it was nice to see mud_puppy and a couple co-workers of hers, docorion, and lilbjorn and M. there.

After that, I met cathijosephine at Sarsfield’s, our local Irish pub, for a pint and a half each, which made up in caloric value for not having had dinner. :-) We had a really good time. While I’d seen her a few times recently, this was the first time we’d had a chance to just chat one-on-one since before I went to Hawai‘i, and it felt really good.

And tonight I went over to chienne_folle’s for a night of text-adventure games with her and her husband and a bunch of their friends, which was really, really fun. Makes me want to put some text adventures on my Treo to play on the subway; evidently there’s a lot out there. We played a game called Ad Verbum (if I’m remembering correctly), which was interesting in that it was largely about verbal puzzles. For instance, there’s a room in which all the descriptions use only words that start with S, and you can only use words that start with S in your commands. Atypical, I guess, but lots of fun. I left before they started the second one, because I was starting to get too tired for that kind of brainage, but I had a great time, and seeing queenofhalves there was an unexpected pleasure.

So, all in all, life is good! And soon I will have new contact lenses that don’t give me headaches and with which I can actually read computer screens!

beowabbit sleep now.

...but today, more of the grump.

My vacation was wonderful! Relaxing, refreshing, invigorating, and therapeutic. (And I picked a good week to miss, since New England had enough rain to produce major flooding while I was gone.)

I came back, underslept due to night flights but happy, did some organizing of my pictures (some of which will hopefully be forthcoming soon), and walked into a couple of crises. One of them was engendered by this dreadful article in the Herald and the unfortunate fallout it generated for the nice people who work at Diesel. I’m happy to say that last I heard (I wasn’t able to go tonight, and got a phone report during the evening), no creepy clueless people actually showed up tonight, but a number of them called the Diesel and threatened to. And it sort of threw a bunch of us into a flurry of damage control and planning.

(Note, by the way, that the tone of the actual quotes in the article does not match the tone of anything around them, including statements generally attributed to the interviewees but not inside quotation marks. I’m really glad I did not get quoted.)

So that was one little crisis.

The other one was at work. On Friday (while I was still on O‘ahu with sionnagh), an important server died with a hardware failure. So I knew I was coming in first thing on Monday to rebuild it.

Well, “first thing” would have meant not sleeping through my alarm due to jet lag. And for various boring technical reasons, rebuilding the machine was complex and is still not quite done to our satisfaction (and probably won’t be for a while). Anyway, I left work at a reasonable hour yesterday feeling optimistic about finishing this morning, and had a lovely time having tea and catching up with ragingamazon in Harvard Square and came home to sleep.

Only, more with the jetlag. Around 6:00am I realized if I actually did fall asleep I’d probably sleep through my alarm again, and got up to work on Poly Boston stuff and some other things. So I ended up going in for my second day of server rebuilding with no sleep, and stressed about what tonight’s Diesel social might be like. (Again, it seems to have turned out fine, not that I know from personal experience.) And I was slow at work because of that, and having lots of “Wait, what did I come in this room to do?” experiences. And at the end, I discovered some unpleasant complexity that I needed my boss’s help with, and we had a productive little ad-hoc debugging session together, and finally decided that we’d done all we could do today and most things were working well enough to leave... just about too late to make it worthwhile going to the Diesel (which by this time I knew would have been fun and not work).

OK, none of this sounds tragic, and it’s not, but the thing is that I’ve come home from vacation and I don’t have that relaxed “I’m home in my sanctuary and happy to be back” feeling I usually do. And probably going from warm sunshine to grey chilly drizzle doesn’t help, although I am very glad my new house is a lot drier than my old one.

I’ll feel a lot better when I’ve gotten more sleep, which I should try to do soon. Probably going to watch a movie first, though.

And I have awesome friends. Yay!

Yesterday in lieu of my regular work day I went to Linux World Expo, along with my boss. It was fun and I certainly learned some interesting stuff, but certainly not something I would have travelled for. Nice to have it in Boston, though. I heard a nifty (and well-attended) talk at the O’Reilly booth by Jesse Vincent on his company’s new (free) web-application development tool, Jifty.

So last night I met chienne_folle for dinner and a movie in Arlington Center. We had dinner at a restaurant called Bangalore. My experience was better than hers; my malai kofta was very good. Her muttar paneer, which she ordered mild, was too spicy for her to eat. Fortunately, the garlic naan had cilantro on it, so I couldn’t eat it and she got all of it. I always forget to ask for no cilantro at Indian restaurants, because not all of them use it.

Then, after a walk because we had a lot of time to kill, we saw Mrs Henderson Presents, which I really really enjoyed. The plot was pretty straightforward and unsurprising (although quite sweet), but it was just charmingly crafted and full of very good lines.

On the way home after the movie, I was listening to a BBC Newshour piece on WBUR on the discovery and translation of a manuscript of the Gospel of Judas. One of the guests made the point that the canonical New Testament gospels leave us wondering what Judas’ motivation was in betraying Jesus, and that the new manuscript might shed some light on that. Then ’BUR went to a station break, and the local announcer started talking about the benefits of underwriting and what was going to be on their flagship call-in talk show On Point the next morning. But I noticed that the background music for the station break was a bit unusual for public radio. It was, well, peppier and more whimsical than one usually expects even the incidental music to be. The sort of thing you might expect on commercial TV, for instance.

And then it struck me. It was the theme song from The Price Is Right.

Whatever ’BUR sound technician chose that music is my new hero!

Well, I just got home from work. (To be fair, I stopped for food on the way, but still...) Normally, things get quiet around 6:30, and if I’m still there I’m getting stuff done. At the beginning of the semester, if I’m still there at 6:30, which I am because I’m hoping to finish pounding backups into submission, that’s when a dozen students with account problems show up, because their class just let out. Or when the TA who’s about to teach stops by because his cardkey doesn’t work in the lab door. Or whatever — you get the point.

Anyway, it actually feels good to be busy in a getting-things-done way, and I’m actually feeling particularly good about work qua work these days, but getting home so late the last few days has cut into my Arisia packing and planning quite a bit. Oh, well, I’ll get there and I’ll have a great time.

On the T on my way to and from work, I’ve been watching the original Little Shop of Horrors, which I got from http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/. Much fun.

Time to go cycle laundry and look for my suitcase... Yay, Arisia!