Whatta Fiasco

This morning I got email from my mom that my sister now has an official diagnosis. It’s bad. Not as bad as it could have been, but not good at all. It’s not my story to tell though. When there’s something that directly affects me I’ll most likely write. Until then I’m still getting over the shock part.

In the meantime I managed to sew up all the loose ends at work today, although it was a struggle. By the time I left the client had logged onto the system and seen what we had provided but hadn’t actually used it yet. It looks like we’ve fulfilled our obligation and kept my boss chain happy.

I left work a little bit earlier than usual (if not as early as I had planned, no suprise there) and got most of the stuff done that had to get done, except my doctor’s office dropped the ball and didn’t phone in a refill on my prescription. Feh. Just annoying and an inconvenience and instigated by my own distraction and lack of prior planning, but still. I’ll pick it up when I get back from the tournament.

I stopped by the library afterwards to drop off a book that was due today. I have another one out that will be due before I get back but can’t be renewed because it’s a new book. Decisions. I nearly went and bought a new copy for myself, but decided that paying the fine to return it two days late was not a horrible sociopathic thing to do. I still felt like a criminal walking out with yet another book in hand while planning on deliberately returning another one late. The horror! But I couldn’t resist.

I wandered over by the Daniel Bennett I’m studiously avoiding reading still (Darwin’s Dangerous idea) and somehow follwoed a chain that led me to the other side fo the library where I found Douglas Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau de Marot, which I had never seen or
heard of. Now, of course, I want to drop everything else and read this big, fat, and very informal book on translation. Except that I noticed while flipping through the volume that the typography and design of the physical book are an obomination. Awful, terrible, no good, hard on the eyes, and so bad was it that I dug through the fine print to find out who was responsible.

Oops. The book was designed by Hofstadter himself. The man has written some wonderful books but someone (I’m looking at you, Harper Collins) needs to keep his fingers out of the virtual type box. It’s still going to be a wonderful book and I’m looking forward to it.

And now I’m off to pack for Summer Nationals. I’ll chatter again in a few days. Have a good weekend.

It looks as though I’ve solved the hot sauce problem, for now. Declaring one cabinet off limits was insufficient. I had to put my chili garlic sauce in a cabinet above the refrigerator in order to stop the depredation. And, lo, someone else started buying his own hot sauce.

Less happy is that Max is working himself up to a major fit of depressive self-pity. He can’t get a job, his parental units all think he’s horrible and worthless, and the world is simply unfair. I’m worried that he’s building himself up to react dispropriately to perceived problems in a bid to run away from them. I suspect he could really use an adult to talk to, someone he can trust to be objective and someone he can trust.

In the meantime, this afternoon at work turned into a serious stress fest. Something about not being scheduled to be at work on Friday meant that everything had to break late this afternoon. I think everything will be in hand and in control tomorrow morning but it made for a stressful lead-in to tonight’s practice. Crappy mood. And then I decided that sanity meant going home instead of getting a fifty percent discount at the tapas place. Maybe next time.

Whee. I had the opportunity to give a This Is Reality talk to one of my internal customers today. *(The rules are there to protect you, not to hurt you!) After scrambling all day to do the silly thing, when I pushed a list of must-be-answered questions at them, there were no clear answers forthcoming. But all is well and there will be testing and we won’t be pushing a new application to production the same evening that I leave town. This is a very good thing. I can just see getting a phone call as I’m driving through Dallas when there’s not a darned thing I can do. No no no. This is much better.

Is it only Tuesday? I’m doing a little better. I cleared one item off the plate this morning. I’ll clear at least two others tomorrow and a third will fall (partially) this evening if hubby doesn’t remember it this afternoon. I volunteered to babysit Ms. K. this evening but instead I’m going to be metting her and Kernat at a get-together downtown later this evening where I can help be a baby tender while socializing. That will also leave enough time to get some errands done and grab a healthy bite to eat before I drink too much coffee.

There’s no word on my sister yet. Maybe tomorrow. In the meantime, the head archer’s surgery to remove another tumor was only partially successful. Not good. And another renfest friend was in ICU this weekend but I haven’t heard the details. And one of my great uncles is in the hospital with heart problems. Too much.

On a happier note, fencing practice went reasonably well last night. Seven of us fenced a round-robin tournament to prepare for nationals. My foot didn’t hold up as well as I would have liked, but neither did it give out. Still, it’s getting measurably better. It’ll hurt this weekend, but knowing that I only need to fence one day and will have more than a week afterward to recover and rest will help immensely. I came in last in our mini tournament, but–once again–this isn’t a bad thing. It wasn’t bad fencing. There were small mistakes but many very near misses. And I came within about one-half second of mental concentration of beating hubby in a five touch bout. The bout that I won was against the person who fences most like the fencers I saw at the DivIII event in Arlington this spring, and the win was decisive and clean. I felt very good about the evening when all was said an done. Now if only I could reliably learn to take steel.

Four of us went out after practice and did the soon to no longer be traditional beer at Jilly’s. Not only is Monday night jazz night, but the Coleman Hawkins Jazz festival was this weekend and several of the participants were invited down to sit in with the regular Monday night band. Lovely stuff. Jazz oboe? A little wispy for my taste but she did a good job. The vocalist had the magical it but was insufficiently miked, sadly. The trumpeter (I never did catch his name) was playing a bit out of his league (I’d hate to be his lips this morning!) but managed a respectable gutbucket growl. But it was the flutist who stole the show. She’s done all her rudiments and scale studies, and she knows her double and triple tongueing. The flashy runs and cascade of notes was expected. The way she twisted and contorted her lines through the chord changes was not. Lovely stuff and her ovation was well earned.

We saw prairie verbena, Indian paintbrush, common milkweed, deadly nightshade, wild indigo, mullein, thistle, queen anne’s lace, yarrow, compass plant, sumac, sunflower, catclaw sensitive briar, echinacea, ground plum, choke cherry, buffalo gourd, fleabane, primrose, gumweed and more besides, including a pretty legume but the name escapes me. Wind on the corn and wheatfields with turkey buzzards overhead. Kansas has its own beauty.

We ate steak, ribs, potoatoes, buffalo burgers, salad, made-to-order omelettes, homemade icrecream, aebleskiver (ABLE SKEEVER: a delicious little globe-shaped Danish pancake with fruit inside and I can’t believe google figured out what I meant based on the botched way I typed that the first time), piled-high deli sandwiches with fancy mustard, baked elephant garlic, peach dessert wine, delicious mixed fruit with mystery melon, chicken sausages, onion buns with butter, breakfast cookies, chocolate-dipped strawberries, s’mores, and more besides.

If I didn’t go splashing about in the creek it was only because I was busy busy laying in the sun and reading or just watching the wind blow the hummingbirds around.

The threatened chaos did not descend while we were gone, so nothing to complain about there. Max is still being statically Max. Nothing much has changed but I’m feeling dissatisfied and uneasy this afternoon. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Some of it is having just finished a weekend away from home (however nice it was, and it was very relaxing when all was said and done) and staring at another trip at the end of this week with no intervening decompression time. Part of it is the uncertainty in schedule and organization involved in the upcoming trip, and to some extent that in the previous trip. (Which isn’t to say that I’m not enjoying and/or looking forward to these trips but it’ snot my ideal in scheduling.) And then there’s my house which needs to be gutted and hosed out, but which I won’t have time to do much with much earlier than August. I need to make some time.

If you’ve been wondering about it you’ve probably already guessed that I didn’t get a health club membership. Not yet. And it wasn’t the money that did it; it was the time. It doesn’t feel as if I have a lot of spare time as it is, and convincing myself to commit a big slice of it to going to the gym? And then I was doing some reading and looking around and realized that I had a decent set of dumbells at the house (with plates and everything, not the pastel-colored frou-frou things) which were enough to get me though a decent weight routine for at least a few months, even if I made huge progress. Combined with the aerobic workout I was getting with the jumprope, it seemed to make more sense to stick with what I had. Now, of course, I’ve had to temporarily put away the rope, but this week I finally started using those weights. So far, so good. (Hello, triceps!)

We put a new application into production at work last night after extensive testing for the past two weeks. It inevitably blew up in our faces. Then I spent a couple of hours this morning on the phone with the developer, walking through the code to eliminate possibilities. Sadly, it wasn’t a coding error at all. Instead it was one of those nigh inexplicable database corruption errors masquerading as a coding error. More worrisome is that there’s a good chance it’s related to our development servers having been upgraded to Domino R6 while the production web server is still on Domino R5 and awaiting a cut-over date. Ugh. It took most of the day and we’ll probably still find a few problems, but the application went live. Now I just have to get caught up with all the other things I didn’t get done while messing around with this problem.

Dang. I just realized that I need to finish my zine up and get it in the mail before I leave for Summer Nationals. I’ve got a decent start to it but I want to add a few more pages. Not this weekend. Too busy.

Louise has set up some potential chaos for this weekend while we’re gone. That we’re going to be gone is a big part of the chaos but it means we won’t be directly dealing with it. I’m still very unhappy about it but to the point where doing anything is going to make it better. Not this time, but I’m going to be thinking about reasonable ways of dealing with it in the future because it’s likely going to happen again.

It was a generally good day yesterday, but yes, a little rough around the edges. Fencing practice went fine although the humidity has been high enough that it saps my energy very quickly. Sopping lumps of sodden fencer. But the fencing itself is going well. Some of my recent lessons are beginning to integrate, even when fencing squirrels and bunnies. (Ahem.)

To top things off, our club patches came in and they’re just gorgeous. Now I need to snag some velcro and get it affixed to my fencing jacket so I can put on the patch without forcing it to go through the wash. We also decided on (grumble) navy blue warm-ups for competition. I don’t like navy blue. I don’t own any navy blue and I don’t wear navy blue. I’ll wear pink before I’ll wear navy blue, but it’s a club identity thing. So I’ll need to find some navy blue warm-ups before next week.

When I got home from practice, the trash had been taken out but the dishes hadn’t been touched. Max and his dad had made an agreement a week or so ago that Max would be helping around the house as requested in exchange for getting a grocery allowance. He’s been getting the allowance but the doing the chores part seems to be slipping. Dishwashing had been requested earlier in the week. It didn’t happen. We didn’t sweat it, just reminded him and added the trash removal to the list.

So finding him sitting in front of the computer, listening to a CD and watching the Cartoon Channel while the dishes still sat there and there was more mess from where he had been cooking, it was a bit much. The agreement is between Max and his dad so I decided to just do the dishes and wipe down the kitchen. When hubby got home and asked why things hadn’t gotten done, Max turned sullen. No voices were raised, no snide remarks or accusation were made; hubby just wanted to know why it hadn’t been done. Max stayed balky. It also came out that he hadn’t been job hunting yesterday either. In fact, the minute or so it took to haul the trash downstairs and out to the bin seems to have been the sum total of his productive activity for the day.

He’s in a funk and discouraged. Understandably. It’s not that easy to find a job in this town but it’s not that hard either if you’re serious about wanting to work. Instead of treating job hunting as a job itself, he’s still acting as if the perfect employment position should fall out of the sky and land in his lap, and he’s getting impatient. It’s funny how railing at the unfairness of the world does not remove the responsibility you have for yourself. I don’t mind discouragement and anger and frustration, but if he gives up and insists upon not helping himself then this arrangement will be ending sooner rather than later. It doesn’t help that as of this week he has turned twenty and is officially no longer a teen.

While Max was busy arranging to go elsewhere to sulk about not being yelled at I got a call from my mom. My sister is scheduled for some surgery today. The surgery itself doesn’t sound as though it will be unusually risky but the knowledge gained as a result could change everything for her. At least she should have some answers. I’m hoping they’re good ones. She should know more next week.

There are plenty of things I need to get done tonight after work. I need to try to get to the DMV branch (assuming they’re open this late–otherwise it’s a case of get up early tomorrow morning) to see about getting a copy of the title for my little green car so that I can transfer ownership and cancel the tags and insurance. Or at least the insurance. I ought to see if I can scare up food to take with us to the camp out this weekend. I expect that will be sandwich makings or things to be grilled and fruit and evil snacks as well as drinkables. That most likely means diet cola and beer and whatever I want. Oh, and I should pick up one of those reusable coffee filters. Not for my coffee; it’s for straining yoghurt. Cheese and whey.

New word for the day: voxel, the three dimensional equivalent of the pixel. Cute.

Hubby and I went out last night and saw Bend it Like Beckham at the new to us Glenwood Arts theater. They’ve done a great job of renovating what was for many years a seedy little dollar movie theater that charged more than a dollar, naturally. The renovated theater also charges more than a dollar. Big city slickers can snicker but eight bucks a pop elicited a bit of sticker shock. But the concession stand prices helped make up for it.

The movie was fun. The music was great. (How can you not like Indian pop music? Now, really.) Keira Knightley I found less than impressive (she was in Phantom Menace? ugh, I guess she was), but not terrible. And did I mention that it was fun? Nothing too deep to get in the way. But compare and contrast the explanation of how ‘paki’ is a derogatory term but ‘gordy’ is passed right over. And no, I don’t think it was passed over because it as considered more acceptable or because it was overlooked. Did I mention it was fun?

My name is up on the USFA web site as an officially registered competitor for the 2003 Summer Nationals. Whee. We’re still trying to figure out the logistics of getting everyone down there… next week? Good heavens. It’s coming up soon. And my foot is far from being completely healed yet, but it’s been holding up well and I keep taking my ibuprofen and doing extra stretches. It’ll all work.

Is this month going faster than last month? It feels like it. Max’s driver’s license just officially got quite a bit more expensive. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who managed to get their learner’s permit suspended without driving. A no-seat-belt ticket he got as a passenger back in February and promptly ignored has now collected court costs and a reinstatement of license fee. That added an extra zero to the bill. Hubby was bummed out about it because he’d been meaning to drag Max down to the courthouse to find the appropriate clerk to pay but hadn’t managed to find the time. But based on the date on the letter, by the time we heard about the ticket, it was already too late to just go pay it and seeing as how Max is over eighteen, it was his responsibility. And he flubbed it. It’s not the end of the world. It’ll get paid and he’ll eventually get his license , but I’m going to be lobbying to have Max pay off at least a significant portion of it if not all.

Another busy weekend. My family reunion was Saturday and that was fun. There were lots of faces I recognized and many more I didn’t, and many names I remembered. Putting the right names with the right faces in many cases was a bit more problematic, but it was still fun. It was warm out in the sun but the breeze made it cool under the roof of the park shelter, while blowing paper plates around.

And someone (who was without a doubt a relative of mine) had thoughtfully supplied the kids with water balloons and squirt guns. This was all fun and games until some of the more elderly relatives got hold fo the squirt guns and started going after each other and my grandfather (sans squirt gun) tripped and landed with a knee on the concrete. That was scary, especially as he’s just recently had one knee replaced and needs to get the other done as well. We got him sitting down and got ice on the knee. He was able to walk out to his truck just fine when he was ready to leave but I bet he’s sore today.

Remember that mention of Louise and her half-hearted mention of possibly dropping Lisa on our doorstep this weekend? Well, that escalated Friday afternoon into a full-blown emergency and her insisting that hubby drop everything and immediately drive down to Nowhere to pick up Lisa and keep her here for at least a few weeks. Some discussion turned up that she had been planning on going to the Highland Games here in Kansas City this weekend, but that her mother had declined to let her borrow the car for the trip. Hubby explained that even if he did as asked, that didn’t mean Lisa would get to go to the Highland Games because he already had other plans, and the initial emergency de-escalated a bit.

But it wasn’t gone. This morning we got a call from one of Louise’s friends who had also talked to her this weekend and heard the sad story. Based on information from that conversation, said friend was trying to decide if a rescue operation was in order. The problem with a straightforward attempt is that Lisa and the friends’s little boys don’t get along well at all. From there it just gets screwier and who knows what’s going to happen. Except that we’re going to need to make plans to have yet another kid living in the house for an indefinite period, which brings in more complications quite aside from the obvious ones. But we’ll wait to deal with those once they land on our doorstep.

The class is finally over. In the end , it wasn’t as bad as all that and there were a few interesting exercises. And the instructor managed to come up with a little information that wasn’t in the text.

Did I forget to mention Finding Nemo? We saw it Tuesday night and it was fun. It’s marred by Disneyesque writing but full of Pixarliscious animation and character. The seagulls were a riot and the sea turtles weren’t as obnoxious as I’d thought they’d be based on the trailers I’d seen. But my very favorite scene was in the belly of the whale. I’m not entirely sure why though. Maybe it was the exaggerated sense of a rocking motion.

And I’ve spent the money so I’ll be jaunting up to the northeast to visit Jon next month. I’m looking forward to that, even if it will be July. The return flight is absurdly early in the morning, but I couldn’t see spending an extra couple hundred dollars for the privilege of sleeping in a few extra hours. But travel is good. And I still want to find a weekend to make it out to Colorado this summer too but I’m going to have to get it on the schedule soon or the summer will be gone.

Max has been busy applying for jobs again. Louise may be dropping Lisa off on our doorstep for the weekend. I have a family reunion to go to tomorrow afternoon. I want to play bridge sometime tomorrow, or at least this weekend. I want to get the last bits of coding and testing done on my current toy project. I want to sit in the sun and read for hours, but I always want to do that.