Intersection Logs

There I was, settling back down to work after dinner and Doctor Who, when the lights started flickering wildly in time with the laboring AC, and then the power went out.

It was a very local outage -- the covered parking nearby still had power, and the apartments across the courtyard, but my immediate neighbors didn't. I fumbled around in the deepening dusk, extricating candles from a cupboard full of badly-stacked plastic boxes by the light of a keyring flashlight (gravity was definitely still on) and extricating the apartment management number from an old phone book likewise. Then I settled back down to work, at somewhat reduced efficiency because it seems I need at least some peripheral visual cues to type accurately, and angling the laptop screen to illuminate the keyboard reduced the visibility of the screen, but I did get a few plots done.

The power came back a few minutes ago, and distant cheering was heard.

And I still have to finish this poster tonight, I think.

We've had about a third of an inch of rain today, and none of it came through my bedroom ceiling. I just hope my end-on neighbor can say the same.

On closer inspection, that necklace turns out to include a moss-agate bead that wasn't supposed to be there. Call it an oasis in the desert.

That was ... rather more epic than usual. To be fair, it was three weeks' worth of laundry rather than the usual two, and including several pairs of winter-weight pants, but I still wasn't expecting it to be that hard.

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Today ... didn't work out as efficiently as usual. ( Read more... )

Nearly half an inch so far this morning. About a quart in the receptacle under the drip in my bedroom between 6 and 9am. Two dreams in which leaks were bursting out all over the ceiling and I was running around trying to catch the water.

No Shuttle launch this morning, so no SDO launch on Tuesday. Two M-class flares yesterday; it's past time we got that thing up there and working!

Oof. Today I picked up groceries, traded in $30 of small change, did a supernumerary load of laundry in the hope (not fulfilled) of unwrinkling some pants that got in a slightly-too-hot dryer last time, cleaned the kitchen -- including the floor -- and parts of the bathroom, vacuumed, dusted and polished the bedroom, cooked dinner, and did a pile of ironing.

I think I won't bother again with catfish still on the bone. I did with it pretty much what I always do with catfish -- baked it in foil with a squirt of lemon and a good sprinkle of ginger and black pepper -- and then scraped it off the bones in the kitchen, but I still got a mouthful or two of spiky ribs.

I'm not clear why the "steam in bag" package of frozen broccoli, carrots and cauliflower was so insistent that it had to be thoroughly cooked. People eat those raw all the time, don't they?

I have acquired a mini-muffin tray -- a heavy duty, non-stick affair that is rather overkill for a yearly batch of mince pies, but that's all there was. Also beef, instant coffee, cereal, and fish, but not piecrust.

The laundry-room key remains stubbornly missing, and as soon as I sat down from turning the apartment upside down looking for it, I realized that I didn't actually have the energy left even to watch a movie this evening. I think I'll drink a little half-and-half eggnog (I dilute it with 2% milk) and go to bed.

On the positive side, I have taken out two large bags of trash, picked up the mail, mostly packed my suitcase, dropped off the signed lease, dissuaded the laptop from bluescreening when I touch the flash-card slot, printed out my boarding pass for tomorrow and talked to my mother.

On the down side, I just came back from an emergency dash to Target for socks, because I had no clean black ones and, after sorting the laundry into piles on the bedroom floor, I couldn't find the laundry room key, I have not acquired any groceries, and sometime in between my picking up the lease on Thursday and dropping it off today Management had helpfully left another copy on the floor just inside my door. (The current lease expires at the end of February.) I won't be at all surprised if, come January or February, they forget I signed the thing and start pestering me again -- that's what happened last year.

I know I'm trying to do too many things at once when I pour myself a cup of coffee, put it down, and ten minutes later wander past the kitchen and do the same thing again -- only to find the earlier, undrunk cup sitting looking reproachfully at me.

This afternoon's mission is chaos reduction and de-grungification, with particular focus on the bathroom. Now that the tub is no longer filling with other people's dubious waste water on a daily basis, I am somewhat more motivated to try to do a decent job on it. I have also acquired a nice new shower curtain, liner, and mat. The old mat was pretty much past it anyway, the rubber backing having gone the way of all rubber that sits around for long in the desert, but the workmen completed its demise. As soon as the floor and fixtures are clean, the new stuff can go in, and I'll have a respectable bathroom again, albeit still one with a messy book-sized patch on one wall.

Yesterday's big project, which wasn't meant to be, was the backing-up of the newly-Sevened desktop computer. I can't tell now whether my initial hypothesis that Win7 was being pickier about mixed-up permissions than Vista was correct, or whether it started with a bit of corruption on the destination drive; I just know that laboriously making everything in my personal directory inherit the top-level permissions didn't help, and CHKDSKing the drive (which found ONE 32kb spot of trouble) finally let it finish. (The other grump about 7 is that there isn't a working driver for my HP laser printer yet; otherwise it seems to work fine.)

And I can't find my small straight-nose pliers.

I made pomegranate chicken tonight, fairly successfully.

My new cords are nice and warm for a chilly, windy day. On the other hand, the color is distracting: is it a very very dark brown, or a slightly rusty black? The shoes I was wearing weren't really the right style to go with them, if indeed there is a right style to go with pants that are (horrors!) slightly tapered in the leg and about ankle-length.

Vista on the desktop seems to think that the Appdata folder contains about 150Gb of stuff, and that it will take upwards of all night to copy it to an external drive. I'm not sure whether those really count as "my files", though, given that they're supposed to be in a hidden folder. (I routinely unhide the system folders and poke around in them; I have just about enough confidence left over from the simpler days of yore to feel comfortable doing that.)

HP claims I should expect my copy of 7 for the laptop by Thanksgiving or so.

The Gathering Storm is now the thickest book on my to-read shelf; the Erikson has more, but thinner, pages.

The feeds on LJ seem to be working again -- and for once without blurping a week's pent-up content all over my flist.

On the other hand, my bathtub drain is still blurping away, despite Maintenance's ministrations yesterday. (I've been having trouble with it for a while; after a month or so of blissful free-draining peace in the summer, it started gurgling again, and eventually spitting up, at intervals seemingly unconnected to any water-running activities of mine, quantities of dirty water into the tub.) This time the ticket left on the door has checked boxes for "Unable to complete job because" and "Contractor called."

I think I'm going to Florida in February, to see the SDO launch. If it actually gets launched this time ...