Unimatrix Two

Trying this at home

My coworker Lee B. was joking about heading to PiChiTa for lunch – the local Pizza Hut / KFC / Taco Bell combo. I responded that he’d best be careful, because if he said “pichita” too loudly over there, it would end up as their newest menu item.

Then I got to thinking. Take some lightly seasoned diced chicken. Put it in a taco shell, cover with a little pizza sauce, add a judicious amount of your favorite topping (crumbled sausage, chopped pepperoni or shrooms, whatever), and melt some mozzarella atop the whole thing.

Frankly, that sounds pretty good. If Starr’s brave this weekend, we may have to experiment a bit. If it’s good, I’ll give Lee full credit.

Brief updates

• 09:31 @meiran Awesome! Very well done! Are you going to shoot for “Elder” in the last couple days you have left? #
• 09:44 A 32-degree morning seems much balmier compared to the 12-degree ones last week. #
• 10:05 Dangit, I have just accidentally spammed Starr’s work address with the invite to the Shadowrun tonight. Hurr, me use computer good. #
• 11:47 @meiran I picked up the coins for all of Kalimdor yesterday (not counting capital cities). The Horde outposts were a bit exciting 🙂 #
• 12:01 I think the guy two people ahead of me in the lunch line was trying to pay in Euros or something. #
• 13:15 Wish I could leave early. I still have dishes and laundry to put away before gaming. And the Xmas tree should come down someday too. #

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Late celebration

Freaky: We have, on the downstairs TV: the satellite box, the DVD player, a PS2, and now a Wii. I have been thinking all week about getting a switch box so as not to keep yanking cables from the TV’s two RCA left-right-video connections. Yesterday morning, I mentioned this casually to Starr. Yesterday night, Starr’s sister gave me for Xmas an RCA input switching box that she’d purchased days ago, thinking maybe I might find a use for it.

Whoa. Telepathy.

Awesome: Starr is in the dining room playing “Hey Jude” from a Beatles piano book I’d given her for Christmas. This is one of the best “sit down, take a deep breath, and stop fretting about stuff because fretting’s the best way to blow it completely” songs ever written. There’s a lot going on in my life right now, much more than I’m used to trying to keep track of, but I just can’t get too messed up about it all when “Hey Jude” is drifting in from the other room.

Gonna make my award-winning mashed potatoes this afternoon to go with the pot roast Starr started last night at 1am. Should be an excellent Fauxmas dinner.

Inside the Borg Studio

Yes, it’s Interview Meme time again. kittenchan asked the questions, and I provide the answers. For those who wish to play along at home, the rules are (c’mon, you know this by now):

1. Reply to my post asking me to interview you.
2. I reply to your post with five questions.
3. You post your answers and this meme on your LJ.

1. What’s the craziest (PG) thing you’ve ever done?
PG, huh? Probably in my teens, when I used to attend USS Heimdal meetings in Lynchburg, the other car in our convoy would race us there and back. 110-120 MPH speeds were known to occur. I wasn’t driving, but I didn’t exactly try too hard to talk the drivers out of it, either. I’m glad that we all grew out of that before something terrible happened.

2. Why did you first join VTSFFC?
It wasn’t really on purpose! When Tom Monaghan started attending Tech, he invited me along on a VTSFFC trip to Stellarcon. I rode with Scott Gosik, whom I had not met before that day, and weathered a barrage of cryptic anime references; witnessed a car accident in our convoy and spent an evening in an Emergency Room with a delirious Rosethorn (also a total stranger); and entered the con costume contest on five-minutes’ notice, using random items I’d happened to pack. The general consensus was that I had passed the initiation whether I’d intended to or not.

3. Do you still draw?
I have not drawn anything in 2008, I fear, besides some crude notebook sketches of my Legion of Liberty superhero. I have several drawings in my head, though, and 2009 will not be artless.

4. Do you ever miss working at the TN?
I miss a lot of the people I got to work with at the TN, but I don’t miss the late Tuesdays (even the abbreviated ones) or the desperate deadlines! Honestly, I wish there was a NASA facility in Blacksburg; the work I’m doing now is great, and I still enjoy causally saying “oh I work for NASA” when asked, but I miss my friends and family up there a lot.

5. What’s your favorite restaurant of all time and why?
After lengthy thought – there are two close runners-up – I’d have to say Sakura, over in Salem. The prices are moderate, the service is very good, the decor is attractive and simple, and the food is addictively good. I can name restaurants that have been better in one or more categories, but this is the all-round winner. I think a certain someone’s impromptu reception dinner was held there, as well 🙂 Stinks that I’m 5 hours away, now.

We got a real small convoy…

I feel guilty when I let Twitter do most of my LiveJournal updating for several days. It doesn’t help that my DSL, which was working fine for a while, died again over the weekend. They’ll come by on Friday to look at it. Cox Cable, folks, I’m telling you now.

So, what exactly was I up to with all that driving? It’s an epic tale…

We left Chesapeake early on Friday morning, heading to NoVa to see Owen. On the way one of my tires sprang a leak; we pulled into a White Tire to have it fixed. It turned out that the tire was fine; something I’d hit on Xmas eve had bent the rim a bit, and that was letting air out. They hammered the rim back into shape, re-balanced the tire, and refused to charge me. Happy Holidays indeed!

To say that Owen was charged up to see us might have been an understatement. He wore us out just talking to us! He received a glow-in-the-dark NASA Langley shirt from us, which he wore all night; his parents gave us an elegant hanging candelabra and an Elfin Tree Door (which is already installed on a suitable tree in our yard).

When we left for the hotel, Owen’s folks sent us to a French cafe for dinner. I’ve never eaten French food before, and was surprised at how tasty a charred, bloody cut of meat could be. (Look at dish, and mentally sigh. Put forkful of dish in mouth, and mentally jump at the flavor!)

The HoJo’s we stayed at that night was clean and cheap, and the bed mattress might as well have been a solid slab of wood. I kid you not, Starr found the floor more comfortable.

We went back to Owen’s place for breakfast, and he and I bonded over some Lego. Eventually, we had to leave; Starr’s mom took her by a neighborhood yarn store, though, and we ended up losing another hour to their 25%-40% Off Sale. No problem for me, I had Solitaire and MahJongg on the cell phone. The drive from there to Christiansburg turned out to be the least fun of the trip, though; crossing the Appalachians on Lee Highway was tense and a bit nauseating, and our reward for reaching the other side was I-81. Yippee-doo.

Finally, though, we reached C-burg and we saw Mom waiting for us outside the facility where she’s staying. Mom ordered me to stop a yard and a half away, and walked that distance from he wheelchair to my arms as Starr steadied her. Wonderful! She gave me the best Xmas present she possibly could right there; the Red Lobster dinner that followed only added to the celebration!

We spent Saturday night in the Microtel, which did its intended job of being cheap, comfortable, and a provider of wireless Net access. I know that lots of folks in the New River Valley would have put us up, and I would have loved the chance to socialize, but we’d have been rude guests: coming in late, going straight to bed, and waking up early the next morning for a quick e-mail check and a return to Mom’s place.

After a Cracker Barrel breakfast, Mom took Starr to Mosaic, her favorite yarn store, where we met Benny, Cathy, and Jamie Williams; I passed the time proving to Jamie that I am totally old and lame when it comes to anime and Final Fantasy games, and Starr ended up with a couple more bags of crochet yarn. (I had given Starr yarn money for Xmas. Starr asked and received permission to buy herself other gifts with that money, as she’s now stocked up on yarn for a few weeks.) We said a sad goodbye to my mom, and began the six-hour drive home. I have to say, that used me up. We finally arrived around 8:30 Sunday night, and I was done. Kaput. Over.

Still, it was a lovely weekend, and time and gas well spent. I only wish that I could fly to Technicon Last instead of driving. Or perhaps portal there, if all that ‘cake’ stuff’s been worked out by now.

The Secret Ingredient is silicon

So Christmas has begun early – as it often does in my house, for some reason. Starr got me the Wii I have been waffling about since its introduction: I wanted one, but couldn’t really justify one (which makes it an awesome gift, if you think about it).

As I mentioned on Twitter, she also picked up the Iron Chef America game, which I found surprisingly entertaining, and potentially Repetitive Stress Injury-inducing. I think it’ll go over well when we have friends over, as it’s fairly easy to pick up and a round plays fast. Plus it’s got the voice acting talents of the Chairman, Alton Brown, and Masaharu Morimoto, so you can’t go wrong.

Now that I have this new console, a quick poll for purposes of future wishlisting: what games on the Wii are the most awesome and should really be in our library?

Feasting quietly

As I am most years, I’m thankful that I didn’t get up at oh-god-hundred to stand in line for a discount on a piece of merchandise that will be out of stock by the time I get in the door. As it is, I did leave the house before sunrise, but on the other hand, I was treated to quite the spectacle as the sun came up over the Bay. So, hardly all bad.

Last night, I managed to cook a 3-pound turkey breast perfectly, without doing anything but defrosting it in cold water for two hours and then tossing it into the oven on a roasting pan for ninety minutes. The homemade mashed potatoes came out exactly as I wanted them, and even the brown-and-serve rolls browned properly for once. “Unexpected Thanksgiving dinner” went over quite well to a weary R.N. last night 🙂

Sadly, I’m reading that some of my LiveJournal friends have had to return briefly ‘to the closet’ just so they could spend the holiday with family and loved ones. This makes me angry and sad simultaneously. We still live in a world where I still have to filter certain harmless posts to my own journal; but far worse than that, these awesome people have to filter their own lives. I don’t dare to hope that I’ll live to see this burden fade away… I only hope that maybe the next generation will.

The Obligatory Holiday Post

I can think of several things for which I’m thankful today:

Everything is out of the apartment now except for some random cleaning supplies, and a couple of lamps and a vacuum cleaner that wouldn’t fit in the car last night. This will be taken care of this weekend when I drop off the keys. For this I am very thankful to Starr and, well, me. We’ve both put no small effort into all these boxes.

I am thankful to Starr for many things, in fact; but they’re all mushy and I’ll save that for some other time.

I am thankful to Starr’s parents for allowing us to use their house for the next year or two. We’ll be very comfortable here, and we’ll be able to save up some money which we’ll need to get our own place. (Midori is thankful to them for the gas fireplace, which is one of the best things the furless monkeys have invented since domesticated catnip and the chewy kitty treat.)

I’m thankful to NASA for giving me the opportunity to show me what I could do for them, and to rattrap for encouraging my developing Macintosh skills in the first place. I’m also thankful to the designers of the Apple Newton, whose long-cancelled product inadvertently provided me with some “hardcore Mac expert” cred in the most recent planning meeting.

I am thankful to the grocery store owners and workers who allowed their stores to be open this morning, so I could acquire the remaining bits of a quiet Thanksgiving surprise dinner to serve Starr, who once again works a holiday.

I’m thankful to the creators and operators of LiveJournal, without whom I’d never be able to keep track of what’s going on with all my friends. My peeps are a complicated, intelligent, opinionated, goofy bunch – which is exactly how I like it, and my life would be horribly diminished without them.

I’m thankful to all the people that I like and love that my emo side is awfully disappointed this holiday. I’m supposed to be, and fully expected to be, horribly dissatisfied with my life at this age. Problem with that is, there’s so much good in my life right now… how can I let the few speed bumps slow me down?

Nativity

I had a good, if exhausting, birthday weekend.

Starr bought me the delivery pizza I like (which we don’t get often, because they don’t have much that she likes) and a couple of this year’s Trek ornaments for our Xmas tree. Some new clothes and a Barnes & Noble card rounded out my birthday. I confess that I’d rather be 30 than 40, but I’d rather be 40 than dead. Besides, my life doesn’t exactly suck right now. 40 ain’t so bad. Thanks much to the people who wished me Happy Birthday on the last entry! My friends absolutely rock, and I’m fortunate to have folks like you in my life. *group hug*

Of course, we also moved furniture and unpacked stuff at the house, and made another run to the apartment. The front room’s full of empty packing boxes and stuff to be Freecycled, and the kitchen and full bath are just about clear; we still have the half bath and the bedrooms to do, though all three bedrooms are at least partially done. I had hoped to clear them this weekend, but that turned out to be unreasonable. We’ll work on them this week instead.

However, because of the dust we kicked up and the wacky weather, I was sneezing furiously all weekend – I know it was driving Starr crazy. I had to take two Benadryl before bed to ensure that I could breathe all night; it worked, and I got a good night’s sleep, but man, I’m still feeling those Benadryl this morning.

Tunnel drive

In general, I like living in Hampton Roads, I honestly do. Last night did not provide a good example…

There are three bridges in my Metro area that can take me from work to home. Assuming no heavy traffic, the Monitor-Merrimac bridge-tunnel does so in about 40-45 minutes; the James River bridge adds about 20-25 minutes to that; and the Hampton Roads bridge-tunnel adds about 20 minutes to the MMBT. (I have a bad tendency to refer to them as the Mimbit, the Jerb, and the Herbit.)

Unless it’s 1am, though, there’s probably going to be an additional 10-30 minutes of heavy traffic on the Herbit, and the Mimbit is a crapshoot: sometimes I fly straight through, and sometimes I sit waiting an extra 15-20 minutes. We have handy electronic signs alerting us to congestion on the Mimbit and Herbit, but because of geography, by the time I see one, the Jerb is already out of the question.

Yesterday, the signs warned me that the Mimbit was blocked by an accident – based on reports I’ve heard, an idiot trying to cut off a fellow driver. I had a quick decision to make – wait in blocked traffic there, and hope the accident is cleared within an hour (it usually is) or join all the additional traffic to the Herbit, probably incurring a 90-minute delay. I joined the queue of blocked traffic.

I took 2 hours to reach the tunnel entrance for the Mimbit, only to find that the tunnel remained blocked and that traffic was being forcibly rerouted back to the other two bridges. I don’t know the Jerb route well enough to ensure I wouldn’t get lost, so I joined the crowded line for the Herbit. 90 minutes later, I was finally home. 3.5 hours to make a 45-minute commute. (Turns out that the Jerb was just as bad.)

Starr, aware of the situation thanks to cell phones, had pizza and chocolate waiting. I love this woman.