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.

Executive summary: Was told to wear my contacts with the incorrect prescription in before my eye-doctor appointment so that the prescription could be corrected, so I put in the lenses I can't read with that give me headaches and nausea. Got a call from my boss as I was walking to the T saying our entire environment was down. The train I was on was stuck for 15min behind a disabled train (getting progressively more crowded, since the doors were open). Got in, my boss said everything was back, but it all went down again. Spent a long time on the phone with fileserver tech support (trying to read with my bad contact lenses). Stumbled across something that seemed to work just in time to turn the call over to David and go to my eye appointment (I though) with an only lightly spotted conscience. Got there and discovered that I'd misread the clock and I was actually an hour early. Saw the eye doctor, but he actually had a record of the correct prescription and didn't need to examine me again. Here's where things start to turn around. The optician's agreed to take back the incorrect contact lenses I hadn't yet opened, so I'm not out all that money, and my new hopefully working lenses will be in in a few days. On my way back to work, I passed the Hello Kitty store, so now I have a couple of Hello Kitty glasses (one for work, one for home) and a Hello Kitty condom/lube/sex-toy case. [Seriously! It’s like a slightly smaller shaving case, but transparent and sparkly and with a picture of Hello Kitty on it! What else would you use it for?] When I got back to work, I threw out the lenses I was wearing and the nausea went away when I put my glasses on. Things *are* working again at work, and we don't know exactly what causes the problem but we know how to fix it if it happens again, and the vendor is working hard on figuring out the bug. And tonight I get to go over to [chienne_folle]'s for a games night. Yay!

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.