July 2006

Yesterday I wore a shirt inside out. All day. Until Roommate tugged on the tags.

The heat has completely flattened me, wrung me out, smacked me over the head and threw me in the dumpster. I’ve come home every day this week with a crashing headache and very little will to live. Today I woke up, dragged out of bed, ate a bagel, and slept til 4 pm. My sinuses throb incessantly when I’m awake.

Now it’s nearly midnight, and finally, the nighttime temp is in the 70’s, and it looks like I’ll be able to survive summer after all.

I prefer mine tolerably cool. Something in the low 90s would be a nice change.

Today I noticed the strawberries were wilting something fierce, so I stepped out to water them and stupidly did not put shoes on my feet. I burnt the bottoms of my feet on the patio. That was hours ago. They still hurt.

I have drunk about ten gallons of water so far this week. I have lingered in various air conditioned places and added about ten minutes of walking to my journey across campus to an appointment by walking through classroom buildings I didn’t have to enter.

It’s supposed to be in the 90s soon. I am so ready for that. Not soaking my shirts the instant I leave the front door would be good.

I keep hearing about rolling blackouts. When I got home, there was a blackout, all right - only it stayed for a good six hours. No traffic lights, no anything. The power had been out long enough before then for my laptop to get down to less than 2% of a charge. The temperature outside was 111F; inside it was 92F.

When Roommate got home, he found me sprawled out and reading in the dying daylight. We went out for Thai food — beyond the perimeter of the blackout, of course, it was only a couple of blocks wide — and stuffed ourselves on fresh naan bread, chicken curry, samosas and all sorts of other wonderful things. Then we bought bags of ice to take home to stuff in the refrigerator.

By 10:30, we had the windows open and were trying to get the inside temp to shave off a few degrees. It got to 95F and the fish tank was in danger of becoming a bowl of poached fish. The cats were doing great imitations of carpets. So was I. And then, in a gush of hot air followed by flowing currents of cold, and the flicker of clocks and aquarium light and several other lights, and the sudden hum of the refrigerator, the power came back. And from outside I heard people shouting ‘yaaaaaay!’ And pretty soon, we had everything back to normal. We fell asleep around 11:30.

And then the random fax machine that leaves beeping on our machine every so often woke me up at 3.

Grrrr. I have two obligations today, and my car is in dire need of attention, and there are other things I should do but probably won’t - I think I will be in need of a nap somewhere in there. I was already tired from working 8 hours and driving back and forth without AC.

All this, and PMS too. Yesterday was a bitch. I’d like to slap it.

I’ll try to make it nonspoilery. Certainly, no one could possibly expect any surprises in this, anyway. Take the first movie, add in tentacles, loads of barnacles and mussels and assorted sea creatures all spackled together in humanoid form, magically exploding barrels that ignite like dynamite when a lead ball hits them, impossible ships that get where they’re going in no time at all, faux cannibals, and an undead monkey, and there you go. Oh, and the really daft hamster ball/wheel nonsense. Throwing a bunch of people into a huge sphere and rolling them down miles of cliff, hill, jungle and rock/dirt faces, only to have them emerge without broken bones, concussions and crushed internal organs? Right. Wasn’t even funny when I saw in in Mortal Combat, and became less so with every stupid movie that tries it. The best version I’ve seen was in the Incredibles. And that was SUPPOSED to be a cartoon about people with impossible super powers doing impossible things. So it worked.

What am I saying? PotC is in fact a live action cartoon, except, after the fact? when I am not under the spell of Depp’s jazz hands and wild mascara festooned eyes? I can only shake my head. I didn’t like Elizabeth this time, and I didn’t care much for Will either; they’ve lost the naivete that made their characters interesting the first time, when it was all about figuring out how to make it in the pirate world. Now they’re jaded and confront the circumstances they are thrown into with a sort of ‘here we go again’ air. The end of the movie was a big fat HUH? and not of a good sort. Instead of looking forward to the third, I am now also jaded, and recognizing that yes, I will see it, and yes, it will be somewhat enjoyable, but I’ve seen it before - in the first two movies and in other movies.

I guess there are spoilers here… but not so much. You’ll probably enjoy the movie anyway because it’s not about predictability, it’s something you see because you like Jack Sparrow and the idea of PIRATES! and the Kraken! and arrrr, me hearties….

This apartment hosts two laptops, two desktops, four cell phones and a PDA.

I have a Treo and a Pocket PC that Geekfarm signed out to me. I also have my laptop and personal cell and old moldy win98 desktop. The Treo plus a PDA would seem to be overkill, but the PDA was solely for the purpose of bossgeek “beaming” his notes to me from his PDA so I can then invoice people for the hours he spent anti-virusing and updating and installing stuff.

Of course, the Pocket PC and Treo do not speak to my Powerbook. They do speak to my personal cell in Bluetooth, however, and to each other. Roommate’s laptop doesn’t talk to anyone, so far as I can tell, nor does his antiquated desktop.

I’m having to put my head back into geek mode, and also into helpdesk mode — a customer brought in her desktop today saying it wasn’t booting, but was putting horizontal red lines on the screen. Of course, my first thought is, that’s a display problem - and the pc booted fine and displayed fine. And then I thought, I ought to run antivirus — then promptly got involved with three other tasks, and wala! the customer comes back, and I explain, and she says she’s going to pick up a flatscreen LCD and that should fix the problem. And then as an afterthought, she asks about a message that pops up about windows backdoor.

Ooooooh, should have run that antivirus. Because messages don’t pop up about the actual windows backdoor that’s part of windows, and there are trojans with ‘backdoor’ in the name.

It figures that after I spend thousands of dollars on an education in my ideal career, I can’t find work, or even a good volunteer gig, in that field - and then find a decent job in a different career path I’d given up on. AAAARG. I’m so far behind in geekery that I feel pretty dumb listening to the guys talk in shorthand about networking crap.

That’s what it is?

In my car with no air conditioning, on the way home yesterday, every other stoplight was out - which only happens when it’s really hot, and around here that means not 100F but more like 110-115F. And so not only is my AC dead, my work clothes on, and my lungs collapsing in agony, but my car is heating to core-of-the-sun temps and traffic is backed up for miles because of all the brainless wonders who can’t manage to parse the notion of “take turns moving through the dead stoplight” and play chicken or stop-and-start until everyone else lets them go. A fifteen minute drive turned into half an hour. And the heat’s not going away for a while.

1. TOO MANY KLINGON EPISODES. TNG, DS9 and now VOY pummeled me with Klingon this and k’apla! that and bloodworms and pain sticks and par-mach-kai blah blah blah and pointy armor and Worf angst and now I’m riding the Barge of the Dead and AAAAGH! TODAY IS A GOOD DAY FOR KLINGONS TO DIEEEEEEE! DIIIIIIEEEEEE!

2. SHUT UP, NEELIX!

3. Captain Ransom = Henry Scudder. Heeee! Also, the captain of the Relativity looks just like Dutch from The Shield. Hee! And I can’t remember where I saw the one playing Max Burke, but it was fairly recent….

4. *smacks Neelix*

5. Borg. Overdose. The only thing that would make Yet Another Seven Flashback Episode palatable would be if the Klingons invaded Borg space en masse and they all killed/assimilated each other, leaving hordes of Klingon drones yelling and swinging bat’leths. And then there would be an invasion of dentists, because Klingons need that sort of intervention…. And then there would be Klingons with clean teeth and prosthetic arms naming their children after Kohlgate and Khrest, those valiant warriors who vanquished the evil Tuuth D’Kay.

6. I still don’t have any idea how they keep making shuttles. I think the shuttles must be mating on the hangar deck, having litters, and each time a shuttle falls apart they feed one of the babies extra shuttle chow until it’s big enough to ride in.

7. I liked the time travel episodes. Ooooo, bendy. *pours milk over a big bowl of paradox flakes*

I’ve ingested a lot of sci fi recently, what with the minimal work schedule, and noticed a few things.

1. Recycled props. For instance, in TNG’s Dark Page there is a scene supposedly showing Troi’s bedroom when she was very small. There’s a tall red riding toy that looks like it might be an art deco giraffe with the head of Annubis. The toy shows up at the beginning of Voyager’s Mortal Coil, when Neelix goes to tell Naomi a bedtime story - it’s standing prominently in the background.

2. The Inner Light episode. The original was TNG, but DS9 has its time distortion planet where the whole crew of the Defiant breeds and populates a world, and VOY has episode after episode of alternate this, alternate that - Kes lives her life backwards (which doesn’t turn out to be her life at all because the very act of living it backwards makes her change her mind about some things and then of course she ‘ascends’), the one where everyone’s mindwiped and turned into tech slaves and Kathryn gets involved with someone. . . . Being a fan, I adore AU’s, but if they’ve got to hit the reset button and go back to ‘normal,’ I find the original Inner Light to be the most poignant and affecting, because Picard wakes up from the dream and realizes that the family he had died long before he was born, that he won’t have that again, and it’s just so sad and understated by the end when he’s returned to his life as a starship captain without them. Adding in entire ensembles of crew and rolling the dice is a very different animal, emotionally, because then it’s not about their having something they can’t really have - it’s just the novelty of it all and not so much a sense of loss that one can connect with.

3. The Square Peg. Seven of Nine grated on her crewmates’ nerves for a while. Barclay was just mental, and semi-creepy with his holo-images of everyone, but that didn’t mean he was bad, and eventually he gets somewhat better socially. Data and his android quirks sometimes filled the role of square peg, other times he was just one of the main characters. Sometimes characters are briefly nominated square peg to suit the plot; Neelix did that a lot. Bashir helped a lot of genetically engineering square pegs, without being much of one himself.

4. Sanctimonious Phony. The EMH. Dukat. The Kai. Arrogance isn’t their only flaw, or their only trait, but it’s right out there in front where you can hang a coat on it.

Item 1: Part time job at computer geek shop acquired. Geeks urged me to further my career by acquiring certifications, because “you have a lot of what we’re looking for and you could go somewhere.” This, despite my protestations that I’d rather be a therapist.

Item 2: I appear to have been issued an intern number already. Big Government Entity (They Who Determine Licensure) shows me on their website. It’s a good thing I have no stalker issues, they also slapped up my home address, which I will be changing promptly once a real workplace has been made real.

In other words, slight movement from prior state of “complete standstill.” Stay tuned.

Grammar check in Word is only marginally helpful, and each time it mistakes a noun for a verb, this perception shifts ever so steadily toward ‘useless.’

glarkware :: khaaaaaan

one red paperclip

In 14 trades, a guy manages to get a house just trading item for item for item.

Starting with a paper clip.

If only I were that good at networking.

It’s been a while….

40+ pages of fic written. Not the fic I should be writing, but a new one. But I believe that it will assist in completing previous WIPs… such is the nature of a series. I have a habit of starting new fic to help me work through blocks, which is both good and bad - if I ever had a hope of completing the series to my satisfaction each new fic means I’m that much farther from ever finishing.

NO ONE is wanting interns. This is a bad thing. I will now be reduced to interning for free and having a side job, which is what burnt me out in the first place…. I plan to stick it out for a couple more months at least, in hopes of finding paid work locally. I really really really do not want to pack everything up and move, really, and I want to do it even less while it’s in triple digit temps here.

I have two saved drafts of posts, one of them over a week old. You would think I had no time, but it’s just the fic that ate my brain, taking over. And going out yesterday to see a movie, and lunch, and going to a friend’s house and watching all the illegal fireworks go off. The cops kept going on the tv news, threatening a major crackdown on those, claiming they had a task force specially for catching folks with their rockets, but I sure didn’t see anyone and I was in a really active neighborhood. There were no less than six houses within a block of friend’s house shooting off rockets for hours. Apparently there is someone local who runs fireworks up from Mexico and makes a living selling them — I can believe it. There were some mighty purty sparkly things going off.