Out of Office Message

Well, I don't actually have an office. But I'm going to be offline for a couple of days. I'll be checking email, but don't expect any posts. I'll be back in a few days, and I'll update my readers on all my exciting adventures!

Bwa-ha-ha-ha! Victory is Mine!

One of my readers requested a new jammie cam photo of me; well, I've been up several hours so it will be housecleaning-attire cam today.

So, for a brief update of my doings:

Saturday, I did indeed spend a few hours at the evil genius/mad scientist symposium; fascinating stuff, what these men and women are doing. I won't give specifics, I'll just say that plans for world domination are proceeding apace. Several women from the community were participating in the evening's prenuptial celebrations, so we ventured from the abandoned missile silo in North Dakota to Jazz Alley and enjoyed a wonderful performance from the ever-delightful Eartha Kitt. 81 years old, and she still belts them out like there's no tomorrow, and still really does enjoy her audience.

Sunday - more cleaning of the kitchen, and then an informal dinner at the mad scientist's place. I'm sure some of my readers think that this has settled into some semi-permanent relationship, but that would be a mistaken impression. We're still discussing methods and SOPs, and it has yet to be determined whether conditions are right for the experiment to be conducted. {I think I spent too many years in ISO documentation.} So I'm not holding out on my readership; we had dinner, we talked, we watched some 'Futurama' (totally my fault), we talked more, we separated for the evening. Yes, I enjoyed myself immensely.

Yesterday - more cleaning, only to discover that the drain in my kitchen sink slowed to nothing. I had suspected yesterday was going to be a bit crappy when, early on, I had the Great Toothpick Disaster of July 2008. See, the Japanese make really cool toothpicks. I'm sure some forests are devastated so that these toothpicks might be made, but since I only buy toothpicks every few years, I don't feel as if I'm a major contributor to the problem (these were purchased in 2003). However, the little flimsy soft plastic holder they come in fell off the cabinet shelf yesterday, and the toothpicks took the opportunity to escape their imprisonment in hopes of achieving freedom. Fortunately, my counter was newly cleaned, so they simply got swept into a plastic cup.

The kitchen sink problem was the next disaster on the schedule. I plunged and plunged and plunged; I resorted to my emergency chemical supply; I plunged and plunged and plunged. All to no avail. So I thought I'd better take the trap off. I've never done that, and although it looked simple, I thought I'd better call someone whom I knew would be able to provide salient information. Yes, I called my mad scientist friend. He offered to come over and wrestle with the problem. I was reluctant - plumbing help is an ugly thing to ask of someone - but agreed. The trap was clean. Next it was snake time. After a fair amount of time wrestling with the snake, plunging was again resorted to. No progress was made, though - time to admit defeat, despite the valiant effort.

We repaired to Malabar, a very good Indian restaurant in my neighborhood (very good for Seattle, at any rate), to recover from our defeat, and the tasty curries did indeed improve our moods. Having commandeered a large part of his evening, I sent him on his way. Since the repair people hired by the apartment management are like bulls in a china shop, I'm waiting until next week to seek their assistance on the pipes. I can make do until then.

At this point, I'm sure you're wondering to what victory I refer? Mamluk Sultan Baibar's at the Battle of Antioch, perhaps? No, no. We're talking yogurt. Oh yeah, baby, yogurt. The shelf was fully stocked this morning; the 4 for $3 special was still in effect. I took home every carton of vanilla on the shelf, all twelve of them. Twelve cartons of my beloved vanilla. MINE! ALL MINE!!! BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Saturday

Clever title, eh? Ms Wilde is never at a loss for clever titles, pithy remarks, or astute observations. (What's even better is that I didn't spell it correctly the first time I posted it - duuuuuh.)

In providing my link to the Wikipedia definition of 'steampunk' the other day, I rediscovered a world I hadn't visited in three years or so (in 2005 I wrote a little steampunk vampire adventure for a friend of mine's entertainment). I found so many wonderful things. One of the coolest is SteamPunk magazine's "A SteamPunk's Guide to the Apocalypse", a wonderful book on how to live after we run out of oil and civilisation collapses. Certainly not something that most of my readers will appreciate, but I have spent my morning reading it. After all, I'm unemployed; I may yet end up living out of a 40' shipping container, probably sharing the yard with the amorous goats. And those goats better not get any ideas about me - I stick to my own species, or alien species that can easily pass for human (I had to add that; I swear, some of the men who've asked me out were indeed from other planets).

Speaking of men I've dated, I haven't really sussed out the mad scientist's attitude toward steampunk; I suspect that if I can successfully blend it with Star Trek, I just might have a chance. He still hasn't passed the Geiger counter test yet...I suspect I've been quite lazy about capitalizing the word Geiger. Yeah, well, whaddaya gonna do, as Homer Simpson would say.

Mad Sci Guy and I did not meet up for the symposium last night, but we're scheduled to rendezvous at noon to spend the afternoon there. To be honest, I'm not sure I'm up to matching wits and skills with the evil genius/mad scientist set, although I did promise a friend that if he ever got an advanced degree in biochemistry, I'd get one in bioengineering or some such thing so that we could create our own Gojira (Godzilla, to you unbelievers)...but neither one of us ever acquired those degrees. So I might be full of bright, if mad, ideas and brilliant observations, but I'm not at all sure I'm up to actually participating. I'm a huge coward, if you must know. Some days I wonder how I ever make it to the mailbox. Oh, I hear lots of laughter out there - not caring is not the same as being brave, my dears. Regardless, you'll be regaled with tales of my humiliations on the morrow, to be sure.

And this evening a few of us girls are going out to celebrate a friend's upcoming nuptials; we're going to start the evening by catching an Eartha Kitt performance. Man, I don't know how she does it, all the touring - she must just love performing!

Bibliophile

I spent yesterday afternoon hanging out in Suzzallo Library on the UW campus. Being a lifetime member of the Alumni Association, I have access to the UW Net setup so I can go to campus and steal wifi internet access. Free wifi is one of my great pleasures in life; being unemployed, I can't exactly afford $100 plus a month for phone, cable, wifi, robotic monkeys, etc. The nice thing about the U district is plenty of wifi. I do miss being able to steal it from the comfort of my own apartment, but still, I don't have to travel very far to enjoy it.

Most of my time there was passed in the stacks where the oldest, mustiest, weirdest books are. It's like a tomb there, and I get all squishy inside every time I walk past them. I do love old books, I really, really do. And this section is chock full of them. Just the spines feed my imagination, whether I feel as if I'm visiting some learned scholar's library circa 1890 and looking for the latest tomes on dirigibles, or looking for a book on forbidden magic and alchemy so I can free my brother from the horrible family curse...anywho, as they say, I wandered the stacks in search of books on whaling, particularly the use of nuclear submarines for whaling. There were submarines in the 19th century; I'm writing a (nuclear) steampunk whaling novel. Get over it.

I was pleased to discover that my friend the mad scientist haunted the very same stacks in his time at University; perhaps he was having fun in the alchemy section, or looking for the lost papers of Nikola Tesla. He called this afternoon when he realized I visiting his old haunts; he invited me to accompany him to a symposium being conducted this weekend by the evil genius/mad scientist community. Of course, this rests upon the assumption that his experiments go well and are concluded in a timely fashion. Hopefully he won't end up with any citations for practicing physics without a license. I wonder if there is a Physics Officer out there somewhere, handing out citations for physics offenses. {Noisy, you may want to expand your jurisdiction...}

Here's a photo of me enjoying myself in front of Suzzallo's famous stained-glass windows:

Of the boni attendant upon being a member of the Alumni Association, the absolute coolest is the library card. Yes, it's even better than the email address and the free wifi on campus. So I also took the time to renew my alumni library card, and brought home four lovely tomes on 19th nuclear whaling practices.


Today I'm making some soup and cleaning the apartment a bit, as soon as I have a cuppa or two. If my evening at the symposium falls through, I'm running down to Nordstroms to pick up a pair of hose - girls night out tomorrow night!

Oh yes - I have to give many Thanks to George Gordon for providing the means by which I was able to acquire my lovely little shuffle. I understand why people love these things! Thank you again, Lord B.

PS - You may recall from a previous entry that one of my regular readers recently suffered a goat invasion at her home. Amorous goats, no less. Yes, they're rather like rabbits - I've seen goats in action many times at the fair over the years. And they've set up house in her front yard, if you will, entertaining the neighbors with their love play. How sweet!

Nightmares

Firstly, the maple-flavoured yogurt disaster has temporarily abated; I did manage to pick up four cartons of my dearest vanilla yesterday, but that won't last long, and there's still another maple in the fridge just waiting to ruin my morning. ::shudder!::


I did indeed go to my writing group last night. I've already forgotten my training as an admin - I brought no hardcopies, so I had nothing to present. Hey, I brought my computer - and I don't have a printer, so bringing hardcopies requires much more planning than it did at work. The others' writing was interesting and entertaining, but I was relived to find no blossoming Samuel Becketts in the group. I don't think I could deal with that. My talents, such as they are, can't hold a candle to the author of "Watt" (one of the finest novels ever written, if you can deal with the weirdness of the narrative).

Not much to report today otherwise, except I did dream about my fellow chair moisteners back at MegaDyneCorp Technologies. Y'all better hope this dream doesn't come true (except for you, Noisy - but hang on to your yoga ball!), because all the chairs were being replaced with these backless models that had plastic purple seats. No, they weren't stools, they were chairs with no backs. Cost-saving measures abound! The nightmare part was that I had brought my orchid to show off; I knocked it over in one of the labs and was trying to get the soil back in the pot and the plant stabilized again. There was this piece of equipment that should have been helping me, but instead it packed my orchid as if it were a brick of tofu and baked it. Yes, it baked my orchid. I started crying like a pony-deprived three year old. (Note to self - do not bring anything that could tip over when you go to visit your former coworkers.)

You may wonder why I am making a note to myself about something that occurred in my dreams. I did dream, several weeks before the impending layoffs were announced, that I had been laid off, and that Ms Prickly and I were both packing our offices. So beware of backless chairs, folks.

Today's activities will include stealing wifi from the University of Washington - woo hoo!

ETA: Oh yeah, I asked for comments on my geiger counter, and neither one of my regular readers made a single statement on the topic. Some help you guys are! If I ever put that electronic and mechanical stuff inside my robot to make him work, I'm not telling you - you'll just have to read about it in the paper.