I know why they're round, too.
Aug. 28th, 2005 01:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonne"That neighbor guy is out in the street. He's staring at the manhole." That was exactly the kind of impression I wanted to leave on my otherwise oblivious neighborhood this morning. Ah, nimrods. Are they justified in staring at my staring at a manhole? Am I simply out of things to blog about? Read on and decide for yourself.
I am working my first weekend shift for Rational. This means any ClearCase issue on Earth that is clearly "customer site is down" comes to my phone. Leaving the apartment to do anything had proven to be implausible until 10 pm last night.
Couple this with some crazy, crazy bee ess going down back in Binghamton (where I went to college) meant my apartment was a stream of three ringing phones. To say I was stressed out and drained would have been an understatement. I was buggin'.
I did have one major reprieve: Geillan was in Providence visiting a friend of ours. She IM'd me Friday night suggesting I come down for a drink. I wished I could. She proposed coming up to visit me. I am eternally grateful she did.
She gave me a big long hug when she walked in the door. It centered me. I couldn't even say a word to her because I was stuck on a conference call and my home cordless phone has a mute button of questionable reliability. I felt like a Borg being embraced by humans.
I eventually got off the phone enough of the time for us to talk. In between screaming calls about "my site is down... well, I can't get updates from the guys in Hoojistan and that's like being down", we found time to chill and make dinner.
I have had this giant zucchini I got from a coworker. I wanted to make it into part of a lasagna. I had built a recipe from reading other, sillier recipes. The zucc was large enough that I could slice it diagonally and have slabs of zucc the size of lasagna noodles and use them as layers. I had concocted a layering scheme, written it all down -- two weeks ago. Then I stalled on making the lasagna.
Since Gigi was here and she cooks like I do, we got into it. She came up with a couple great additions, such as adding some milk and a little black pepper to the ricotta. She tested the sauce base for the right spice point and even sliced the zucc, which was how I expected to screw up. In the end, we put the thin slabs of zucc onto cookie sheets with a light veneer of oil and spices, broiled each for a minute or two to evaporate just enough water, and then built the layers and baked the pup for 45 minutes at 350F. We ate like kings and still had a ton left over.
By the end of the day, Gigi had received some revelations and I was there to comfort her. Customers got back to work and eventually their weekends. I finished the evening with a round of "sort your damn MP3s", a game where I freed up about four or five gig from my hard drive removing duplicate music files. My plan is to set up a home music server such that I will be able to keep one repository (and a backup) of all of my music organized by artist and album, complete with decent ID3 tags including year of release. The server will allow me to play music with having to make redundant copies: if I want Rare Air on my laptop, I can get it from the Samba share.
I got to sleep but was awakened by what sounded like a modern fire alarm. It was not inside my apartment, so I assumed it was in the hallway. I open the door to the back hallway then the front but neither was host to the loud wail I expected. I thought maybe it was someone's forgotten alarm clock and tried to go back to sleep. Every time I was about to drift, part of my brain said "that could be a phone, you have to get it."
I should mention that I developed a bit of a shell shock (PTSD, as the kids call it) from my years at the bank. If I heard a phone, I had to answer it. Any time a phone rings, I jump. Almost every job I've had involved a phone. I grab a phone on the first ring just to stop that noise from making me want to shriek. I have had to train myself to wait for the caller ID to kick in so that I can tell whether the call is necessary.
Since I am on shift, I cannot put in earplugs to ignore this barely liminal sound. So I read a book. I start to drift. Then it happens again.
Finally I get tired of it. I put on clothes, grabbed my keys and a phone and walked out of my apartment. The sound was not getting much louder. I left the building and walked down the block. The volume faded. When I curled the corner and got to the opposite corner of my block, the noise got clearly audible again. Some people were out and about but no one seemed to notice the noise. As I walked up the block, it finally got loud enough to feel I was close.
I saw a guy taking a break from mowing his lawn. "Am I the only one hearing that alarm?" I asked.
"Oh I hear it," he replied. "These people must've gone away for the weekend," he says, pointing to the next house, "because it's been going off since 8:30 this mornin'. I called the police and we all learned there are two batteries on the alarm, wired in series. Dumb, huh? That means one's dead and it's tripping the whole system but it would be trespass to cut the power line."
I sympathized. We talked a little and I wished him luck. I was walking back to my place and turned the corner. I see an older husband and wife and cannot tell whether they are talking about the annoying alarm or something else. I stop in the middle of the street to eavesdrop and also to figure out what was engraved on the manhole. Part of the manhole cover was covered in asphalt but I came out of my grogginess enough to make out "M S".
Just as i figure that out and that it means Melrose Sewage, the husband I'm eavesdropping says: "That neighbor guy is out in the street. He's staring at the manhole." Keep in mind that his wife is standing a few feet from him and that she may not be looking at me looking at a manhole cover.
Still, I felt chagrined. I wanted to say "yes, and now that he figured out with the letters mean on the public manhole cover, this neighbor guy is going back to his life and blogging this boring incident because he cannot figure out what kind of people you are when you think out loud."
I don't want to be "that neighbor guy." That sounds too much like Senor Cardgage. I want to be a wacky neighbor. I want to walk up to a neighbor's house, say my catchphrase and go back to stabbing computers. I have more evidence that I need to leave this neighborhood.
-off to a barbecue to avoid that damnable racket, Dante
I am working my first weekend shift for Rational. This means any ClearCase issue on Earth that is clearly "customer site is down" comes to my phone. Leaving the apartment to do anything had proven to be implausible until 10 pm last night.
Couple this with some crazy, crazy bee ess going down back in Binghamton (where I went to college) meant my apartment was a stream of three ringing phones. To say I was stressed out and drained would have been an understatement. I was buggin'.
I did have one major reprieve: Geillan was in Providence visiting a friend of ours. She IM'd me Friday night suggesting I come down for a drink. I wished I could. She proposed coming up to visit me. I am eternally grateful she did.
She gave me a big long hug when she walked in the door. It centered me. I couldn't even say a word to her because I was stuck on a conference call and my home cordless phone has a mute button of questionable reliability. I felt like a Borg being embraced by humans.
I eventually got off the phone enough of the time for us to talk. In between screaming calls about "my site is down... well, I can't get updates from the guys in Hoojistan and that's like being down", we found time to chill and make dinner.
I have had this giant zucchini I got from a coworker. I wanted to make it into part of a lasagna. I had built a recipe from reading other, sillier recipes. The zucc was large enough that I could slice it diagonally and have slabs of zucc the size of lasagna noodles and use them as layers. I had concocted a layering scheme, written it all down -- two weeks ago. Then I stalled on making the lasagna.
Since Gigi was here and she cooks like I do, we got into it. She came up with a couple great additions, such as adding some milk and a little black pepper to the ricotta. She tested the sauce base for the right spice point and even sliced the zucc, which was how I expected to screw up. In the end, we put the thin slabs of zucc onto cookie sheets with a light veneer of oil and spices, broiled each for a minute or two to evaporate just enough water, and then built the layers and baked the pup for 45 minutes at 350F. We ate like kings and still had a ton left over.
By the end of the day, Gigi had received some revelations and I was there to comfort her. Customers got back to work and eventually their weekends. I finished the evening with a round of "sort your damn MP3s", a game where I freed up about four or five gig from my hard drive removing duplicate music files. My plan is to set up a home music server such that I will be able to keep one repository (and a backup) of all of my music organized by artist and album, complete with decent ID3 tags including year of release. The server will allow me to play music with having to make redundant copies: if I want Rare Air on my laptop, I can get it from the Samba share.
I got to sleep but was awakened by what sounded like a modern fire alarm. It was not inside my apartment, so I assumed it was in the hallway. I open the door to the back hallway then the front but neither was host to the loud wail I expected. I thought maybe it was someone's forgotten alarm clock and tried to go back to sleep. Every time I was about to drift, part of my brain said "that could be a phone, you have to get it."
I should mention that I developed a bit of a shell shock (PTSD, as the kids call it) from my years at the bank. If I heard a phone, I had to answer it. Any time a phone rings, I jump. Almost every job I've had involved a phone. I grab a phone on the first ring just to stop that noise from making me want to shriek. I have had to train myself to wait for the caller ID to kick in so that I can tell whether the call is necessary.
Since I am on shift, I cannot put in earplugs to ignore this barely liminal sound. So I read a book. I start to drift. Then it happens again.
Finally I get tired of it. I put on clothes, grabbed my keys and a phone and walked out of my apartment. The sound was not getting much louder. I left the building and walked down the block. The volume faded. When I curled the corner and got to the opposite corner of my block, the noise got clearly audible again. Some people were out and about but no one seemed to notice the noise. As I walked up the block, it finally got loud enough to feel I was close.
I saw a guy taking a break from mowing his lawn. "Am I the only one hearing that alarm?" I asked.
"Oh I hear it," he replied. "These people must've gone away for the weekend," he says, pointing to the next house, "because it's been going off since 8:30 this mornin'. I called the police and we all learned there are two batteries on the alarm, wired in series. Dumb, huh? That means one's dead and it's tripping the whole system but it would be trespass to cut the power line."
I sympathized. We talked a little and I wished him luck. I was walking back to my place and turned the corner. I see an older husband and wife and cannot tell whether they are talking about the annoying alarm or something else. I stop in the middle of the street to eavesdrop and also to figure out what was engraved on the manhole. Part of the manhole cover was covered in asphalt but I came out of my grogginess enough to make out "M S".
Just as i figure that out and that it means Melrose Sewage, the husband I'm eavesdropping says: "That neighbor guy is out in the street. He's staring at the manhole." Keep in mind that his wife is standing a few feet from him and that she may not be looking at me looking at a manhole cover.
Still, I felt chagrined. I wanted to say "yes, and now that he figured out with the letters mean on the public manhole cover, this neighbor guy is going back to his life and blogging this boring incident because he cannot figure out what kind of people you are when you think out loud."
I don't want to be "that neighbor guy." That sounds too much like Senor Cardgage. I want to be a wacky neighbor. I want to walk up to a neighbor's house, say my catchphrase and go back to stabbing computers. I have more evidence that I need to leave this neighborhood.
-off to a barbecue to avoid that damnable racket, Dante
