fauxklore

I’m leaving for Recouvery tomorrow, so I wanted to get caught up before then. Here is what I’ve been up to.

Las Vegas: Vegas is a good destination for mileage running as: a) airfares are reasonable, b) the distance is enough to be worth accumulating PQM but not so far as to be punishing, and c) you can entertain yourself there easily between gambling and people watching. So I did a quick trip over the holiday weekend, flying there on Friday and back on Saturday. The down side of the trip was that this is summer and the temperature was roughly like walking on the surface of the sun. My key people-watching observation was that it is apparently a thing now for young women to forgo carrying a purse and, instead, tuck their phone into either a bra strap or their cleavage. I feel old.

Knitting: I was home on Sunday so went to knitting group. I finished another of the large afghan squares, but I am still well off the pace I had intended. There was also lots of entertaining conversation.

Metro Woes: Monday morning was a mess, since Metro does not know how to handle irrops. I don’t blame them for the selfish person who decided that being struck by a train would be a good way to end his miserable life. But if you announce you are single-tracking through a station, you should not then send one shuttle train in 40+ minutes, have that train go one station and then sit another 40 minutes, and then offload everyone to wait for a train that is then too crowded for people to get on.

Thinking suicide?
Please find some other day to
Do it – not by train.

Aside from the impact to my commute (which, let’s face it, is what really matters), it isn’t very nice to inflict that trauma on a train driver.

Also, my experience on the overcrowded train I squeezed onto suggests that the residents of Fairfax County have stopped spending money on deodorant, using it instead to buy garlicky food for breakfast.

Story Slam: Last night I went to the Storyfest Short Story Slam in Silver Spring. I’m not really crazy about the competitive aspect of story slams, but I do like to know what is going on with all storytelling in the area. The theme was "Song and Dance" so I told my ballet story. Or, more precisely, an abbreviated version of it, since the slam has a 5 minute time limit.

The event was better than I had anticipated. The stories that had problems had the usual sort of problems with personal stories, e.g. no real idea of what the story was about, leading to a lack of a real ending. But, overall, there were several satisfying stories. From the standpoint of a teller, I thought the audience was a good, highly responsive one. I should also note a particularly high level of diversity among the attendees, which is (sadly) all too rare. I will definitely go again, schedule permitting.

I am tired and grumpy today, which is, I suppose, suitable for a Monday. I screwed up my sleep schedule yesterday by napping when I got home from walking. And then I couldn’t sleep well because the whole left side of my body was achy. I could have gotten out of bed and taken a Tylenol, I suppose, but that was more effort than I was willing to put in. I did eventually sleep pretty soundly – soundly enough for the alarm to wake me up. (Usually, I get up anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 hours before the alarm.)

My grumpiness is reflected in being annoyed at all sorts of little things today. Someone was already sitting in my favorite seat on the bus this morning, for example. Someone I work with (not from my organization) has a knack for trying my patience by going into excruciating detail in answering the wrong question. And someone from my organization decided that interrupting my listening to a telecom was very important despite my having told her at least 4 times that I was going to be on an important telecom during that hour. (She also has access to my calendar.) So, of course, once I got off the phone, she was on the phone. And she never puts anything on her calendar. Incidentally, it turned out that mostly what she wanted to talk about was her frustration with Mr. Excruciating Detail.

I’d like to get home early enough to drop off my dry cleaning, but I suspect the bus will be screwed up or something else will get in the way of that. And I really need to clear off the table so I can set up the menorah, given that Chanukah starts tomorrow night.

Oh, did I mention that today‘s prompt had to do with feeling overwhelmed? Some days I don’t need a prompt.

Celebrity Death Watch: First, a few celebrity obituaries to note. Peter O'Toole and Joan Fontaine were actors. Ronnie Biggs was a train robber. Al Goldstein was a pornographer. Janet Dailey was a romance writer.

There are two I want to note in a little more detail. Mikhail Kalashnikov designed the AK-47, the most widely proliferated firearm of all time. He appears to have died of natural causes.

Charles M. Vest was the president of MIT a bit after my time. He is notable for having actually listened and acted on the data re: discrimination against women faculty members.

A Brief Rant re: Coffee: Coffee is a magical substance, when treated properly. Being treated properly does not include being grown in bulk in unsuitable climates. Or being burned by overroasting. Most of all, treating coffee properly does not include adding flavoring agents to it. Coffee IS a flavor and should, therefore, not come in flavors.

A Brief Rant re: Winter Storms: Winter storms do not have names. I don't care if you think they should, but they don't and you do not have the right to change this.

A Brief Rant re: Midwestern Vowel Deficiency: Actually, this may be sheer ignorance, not the lack of distinguishing vowel sounds amongst people from the vast middle of the country, but it annoys the hell out of me. When you have the bare bones of an idea and you are elaborating on it, you are flEshing it out. FlUshing things out refers to exposing them, as in sendng the dogs after the grouses you are hunting, which is quite a different metaphor. (Interestingly, someone else at work was complaining about the same thing just last week.)

A Brief Rant re: Brief Rants: Frankly, life is pretty good when my grievances are about people abusing coffee, storm names, and vowels in metaphors.

Rosh Hashanah made this a quiet week, so I can finish catching up. This is all the odds and ends I have been saving up, including several mini-rants. Well, everything except the longer entries I have been planning on the subjects of politics, dating, and social networking.

5773: If it isn't obvious, I wish a happy, healthy and prosperous year to all. I may even manage to mail out cards this weekend.

Storytelling: I was part of A Sampler of Stories at Friendship Heights Village Center on Wednesday night. I had fun telling a personal story, about what I really learned in 6 years of ballet classes. There were two other personal stories and three folk tales, making for an interesting mix. Where else can you hear about Beowulf and the minor traumas of suburban childhood in the same evening.

Now I have to pull together the story I am telling at Better Said Than Done at the end of the month.

Work rant, part 1: If you send out an email to six people asking what their availability is for a meeting on Wednesday or Thursday, you should not then schedule the meeting for Tuesday.

Work rant, part 2: The correct time to close restrooms for cleaning is not during lunch hours or during peak departure times.

Work rant, part 3: When I rule the world, all documents sent for re-review will have all changes (including deletions) clearly marked. If they are sent as Word documents, one can often find this via "track changes," but that is not the case for PDF files.

Work rant, part 4: Why is it that any acronym I don't already know is the one that is missing from the acronym list?

Work rant, part 5: We've been getting new computers with Windows 7 on them. What child thought having a default font size of 8 points was a good idea? I had to change the font size in Outlook in 3 separate places to make my mail readable. And changing the overall display resolution required rebooting. I have things more or less functional now, but this was a waste of my time. (The thing that is not fixable is specific to our set-up. It now takes two steps to log-in, instead of just one. I reserve the right to gripe.)

One of my co-workers, listening to me kvetching about my disdain for Microsoft, said, "this tells me you don't want to learn new things." Uh, no, I love to learn new things, but I want to choose which things I learn. And spending time learning where they moved 28 separate buttons on an application takes away time I could spend learning to read hieroglyphics, which would be infinitely more amusing.

Work rant, part 6: We had a potluck brunch Thursday to "celebrate" our one year anniversary in our new digs. Aside from that hardly being an event to celebrate (small, noisy space and a bad commute for pretty much everyone), this was announced on Wednesday around lunch time. I managed to run into Whole Foods and buy mini-muffins, but with adequate notice, I would have made my famous mixed berry muffins. When I rule the world, all potluck events will have a minimum of one week notice.

Work non-rant: My promotion finally came through.

One final note on work: We got an announcement about a new program for charitable contributions. It included the information that United Way contributions had ceased in February. Maybe I should look at my pay stubs more closely, since I hadn't noticed that.

Why I want to retire: Aside from all the work ranting, the real reasons I want to retire sooner rather than later are: a) the horribleness of commuting to the Land that Transit Forgot, b) the events that I miss because they conflict with work (e.g. a two day symposium on Yiddish radio at the Library of Congress earlier this month), and c) the annoyingness of administrivia, especially this time of year when I am waiting for my badge and CAC renewal paperwork to get done and I have to deal with semi-annual and annual report inputs, in addition to the usual monthly and (two separate) weekly reports.

Celebrity death watch: Hal David wrote pop songs. Raindrops keep falling on his grave. Reverend Sun Myung Moon married his followers off to one another in exchange for having them sell flowers. Actually, until his recent death, I don't think I'd heard anything about Moonies in over a decade.

Note to myself: If I weren't interested in learning things, would I have scrawled the following in the margins of a planner page?
Language
Class
+ Dance
+ Everything Else

Odd ingredients: I was eating lentil-couscous soup for lunch yesterday and noticed that the ingredients list included "pineapple (dried)". Why?

Don't interpret this dream: I had a dream in which I was about to board a flight to Russia and realized I had forgotten to get a visa.

Trivia for the week: There was an interesting article in the Washington Post the other day about race and American Sign Language. Apparently, there is actually such a thing as Black ASL. I suppose it isn't surprising that there would be ethnic "dialects" to ASL, but I admit it's something I had never thought about before.

Baseball: There's always next year for the Red Sox. But the Nationals are in the post-season. I attempted to get NLDS tickets, but ended up waiting in their electronic virtual ticketing line for several minutes only to get a "this game is sold out" message. Sigh. (I could have tried for tickets to games that might not be played, but that isn't really my sort of thing. I hope to have the opportunity to try again for the NLCS and the World Series.)

I haven't gone anywhere. I've just had an annoying week, with too much time at work and too little feeling of accomplishment. (Four hour late afternoon telecons take a lot out of me, even if the subject matter is technically interesting.) I've made some progress on my list of things to do, but only because I went to the effort of writing down things like mailing my brother's birthday card.

Yesterday was the Travel Show at the Convention Center. (Well, it was today also, but I had another commitment.) I might have skipped it but I managed to snag a free ticket from one of the exhibitors. It is definitely smaller than it had been, though I think it was a bit better than last year's. There still tend to be too many vacation house rentals in the Outer Banks and too few dhow safaris in the Maldives, but I admit my travel preferences are atypical. I did pick up plenty of travel porn (i.e. brochures), as well as a few more canvas shopping bags and a t-shirt (plus some smaller gimmes). They added a culinary demo area, which featured embassy chefs. I am still puzzling over why the chef from the Norwegian embassy was placed in the "fiery foods" group.

Today's main event was the annual Voices in the Glen business meeting. I'll refrain from saying anything about it because: a) I need to write up the official minutes anyway and b) it's best for people not to see sausage being made, even when it is a dish as tasty as storytelling sausage. You may count that as my bad metaphor of the day.

Sorry to be so boring, but I am cranky and tired. I am hoping that the time change (and the additional daylight exposure that comes with it) will help my mood.

1) There are some very nice dresses for sale at various stores now. However, they are all sleeveless. I consider this inappropriate for work. And, even if I didn't, it is too bloody cold in my office (and nearly every other office in the known universe) to wear a sleeveless dress without a jacket. None of those nice dresses had matching jackets. Well, actually there was one that did. But it was pink, which is, of course, evil.

2) If I have to prep a senior level person for a meeting (and accompany that person as his tame technogeek), it would be really nice if the meeting agenda mailed out beforehand actually bore some relationship to the real meeting agenda.

3) Road signs in Washington, D.C. suck. I have a lengthy rant on Virginia road signs (the gist of which is that if they accidentally screw up and put up a helpful sign, they plant a tree in front of it so you can't read it), but D.C. signage is even worse. If the arrows along the way are pointing me to 295 north, the actual freeway entrance should not give me a choice between "295 South" and "95" and "East Capital Street." I had to loop back around in a moderately scary neighborhood. (Normally, I'd have gotten on 295 from Pennsylvania Avenue, but that exit from 395 was at a complete standstill, so I thought I was using a clever alternative routing. Of course, if D.C. had actual freeway interchanges, the whole issue would never have arisen.)

4) I believe it is not asking too much for a hotel to publish directions on their web site which don't tell you to turn onto a street that is closed. (This has to do with the "game day" directions from 295 to the Hampton Inn next to Camden Yards, which tell you to turn left onto Washington. There's this little detail of a row of traffic cones blocking the turn, aside from several hundred Baltomorons meandering aimlessly down the middle of all streets, including the ones that are open to traffic. So far as I can tell, there is not actually any legal way to get to the hotel during a game and I resorted to a turn of dubious legality at the other end of Washington.)

5) I also believe that hotel front desk personnel should be able to give basic directions to major roads. I think there was a more direct way to the Baltimore Beltway (695) this morning than by going back south on 295, but gave up when the desk clerk had apparently never heard of that road by either name. (She kept asking if I had an address I was going to. I'm not convinced that an address four counties away would really have helped.)

6) I was in Baltimore in the first place because it occurred to me on Thursday that it was not actually impossible for me to see my Red Sox play the Orioles this weekend. I have mixed feelings about John Lackey. His pitching was just okay, but he made some nice fielding plays. Both J. D. Drew and Dustin Pedroia had good offensive outings, but Youk and Papi both did nothing. It was an exciting game, even if the Sox did lose (in the bottom of the 10th). If I have to deal with traffic and the hotel directions fiasco, the Sox should really reward me by winning, shouldn't they?

7) The reason I stayed overnight in Baltimore was that I was doing a volksmarch in Manchester, Maryland today and it was just more restful not to spend an hour or more driving home and then an hour and a half back north. I was right about that. The walk was very pretty, but it was more difficult than I expected, with a lot of steep natural surface trails. Hiking boots (instead of sneakers) and/or a walking stick would have been good. It was also a bit tricky to follow the route (marked with ribbons on trees in the woods) at some points.

There are past tense verbs in the English language. Or, at least, there were. Some of them were used as adjectives. (I am sure there must be a grammatical term for this, but I can't think of it, nor have I found any helpful website on the subject.)

Hence, there used to be things like "whipped cream" and "iced tea." Apparently, this is a rather old-fashioned concept since I keep seeing menus offering things like "old-fashion ice tea."

This is sloppy English and will be cause for public humiliation when I rule the world.

I pick up puzzle books when I plan to travel. One of my favorite types of puzzles is kakuro (aka cross sums) and I will buy a kakuro book when I see one since they're not nearly as common as some other sorts of puzzle books.

One which I got not very long ago was compiled by Michael Mephram. Maybe it is just me, but the labeled difficulties for the puzzles in this book bear little to no resemblance to their actual difficulties. It's annoying enough when the labels use silly words ("gentle," "moderate," "tough," and "diabolical") vs. the more normal "easy" to "very hard" labels. But the only thing harder about the "diabolical" ones is reading the font on them.

I suspect I will be taking crosswords to Kiribati instead.

For the most part, I like having FIOS (fiber to the home) for the speed and quality of the internet service. The phone service is more problematic, but acceptable. But every now and then, the service goes out, with a busy signal on the phone line and no (or very very slow) internet connectivity. Usually, this fixes itself within an hour or so. But it was out when I got home Monday and still out when I got up Tuesday morning, so I called Verizon.

I had to make my way through the typical annoying phone tree. Their automated tests claimed a problem with my battery backup. So, when I finally talked to a human, she insisted the problem was that I didn't have power. Except that, of course, not only did I have power, I had not had even a momentary outage. (I can tell because the clock on my oven is very sensitive to power outages and was not flashing.) She insisted that I must have tripped a circuit breaker. I checked the circuit breakers and none were tripped. She then decided the problem was with a battery backup unit and I asked where it was. She said it would be in my basement or garage. Having neither a basement nor a garage (well, I have a spot in the complex garage), this was not exactly a satisfactory answer. She would not believe that I have a condo in a complex that was wired for FIOS before I moved in.

Anyway, I had to leave (with the problem unresolved). When I got home, I asked the condo management office where the battery backup is. They didn't know, but told me two of my neighbors were also having FIOS problems and called Verizon. And when I got back from the evening event I was going to, my service was back.

But I am convinced that Verizon has subcontracted their customer services to a call center on Htrea, the Bizarro world from the Superman comics.

The tortoise tourist herds are out in force for the inauguration. They stand on the left on Metro escalators and don't have the common decency to let people get off the train before they surge onto it.

However, this morning (which actually featured a relatively uncrowded commute), I encountered the dumbest of them all. As I was walking along the sidewalk of the Vienna Metro station, a woman called out to me from the parking lot. "Where's the Metrorail?" she asked. "I don't see any rail."

I had to explain that she was driving in the parking lot of the Metrorail station and that she needed to park her car and walk into the station.

By the way, the line for people purchasing fare cards was all the way backed up from inside the station to the Cue bus shelters at four this afternoon. The only events I know of tonight are a few balls. None of the people I saw in line looked remotely as if they were dressed for a ball.

I'm glad I can work from home tomorrow. I printed out several things to read. I also need to finish writing a research proposal (which has been lurking around for a few years but, thanks to management changes, looks like it will actually get submitted this time) and maybe work on a presentation proposal for an upcoming workshop.