Beowabbit

I thought my day was full and interesting before the six datacenters in my building (along with a big chunk of the rest of Cambridge, and most of the rest of MIT) lost power. That happened around four thirty. Power came back around six thirty, and we all dived into bringing servers and services back up. I got home around eleven thirty.

One of the highlights of the time while we were waiting for power to come back was watching my boss and another of my colleagues pry open an elevator door so that the people who’d been trapped in it for about an hour could get out.

plumtreeblossom’s building on campus lost power too, but since she didn’t have to babysit a whole bunch of servers as they eventually came up, I think that meant she ended up going home earlier than expected, rather than later than expected. (The T was running during most of the power outage, I gather.)

It was an adventure. I like my adventures in moderation.

Behind the cut, why you should always wear safety goggles when using a weed whacker.

( Why you should always wear safety goggles when using a weed whacker. )

That’s something analogous to a bruise or a blood blister on my eyeball, from a piece of grit getting thrown into my eye at high speed. Whee! It hurt right when it happened, but almost immediately felt completely fine (and still feels fine now several hours later). If it had been a couple millimeters over, though, that might have been a very different story.

Don’t try this at home, kids! Wear eye protection!

PS — And of course after this happened (and I’d taken a look and satisfied myself that the damage wasn’t too serious), I went and found the safety goggles I’d been too lazy to look for before starting.

Four years ago today, after meeting through surrealestate (and following each other’s journals for some time), plumtreeblossom and I had our first date, a dim-sum dinner at Empire Garden in Chinatown.

For a couple years, we went back there to celebrate our sweetieversary; then we decided we liked eating pasta out on a patio in the North End better, and that’s what we’ll be doing tonight.

Thank you, beloved, for four years of joy. I’m looking forward to many more!

I just got back from a fabulous little trip to New York with plumtreeblossom to find large quantities of presents from silverlibre and ka9sqb in Illinois and bcat1 and spacechicken in North Carolina on my doorstep. And an awful lot of them are the edible kind!

An one very special thing was in the box from Illinois: a photo album of baby pictures of me, depicting a typical day in my life as a baby. Yes, there will be scans.

But not tonight. Tonight bed. I am happily exhausted and need to go curl up with a kitty cat.

The good news: Thanks both to time and to the meds plumtreeblossom brought over, I’m doing much better. If you ignore the cough, I’m pretty much well. I went out of the house today. There’s this bright yellow thing in the sky that makes you warm. It was a little weird.

But the bad news is very bad. My housemates have this (darxus started feeling bad last night; cathijosephine realized she was sick early this evening). And so does my poor honeywuzzle. She seemed fine this morning, but by this evening (after I dropped her off in Davis) she was really sick.

I hope all of them get better very quickly, and I feel really really guilty. :-(

Yeah, yeah, according to the political spectrum quiz all the cool kids are doing these days, I’m a left-libertarian¹ non-interventionist cultural liberal. We all knew that.

I agree with the criticism somebody on my Friends-list (not identified because s/he posted it in a locked post) made: A lot of the questions were in two parts, like “22. Laws regulating private behavior are put forth by the weak, who prefer security to freedom.” Well, what if you think that laws regulating private behaviour are put forth by the strong, who prefer security to freedom? Or that they’re put forth by the weak, who prefer Cocoa Puffs to freedom? Or that they’re put forward by the strong, despite preferring freedom to security, but that they are still an Abomination in the sight of the majes? There were a lot of two-part questions like that where the answer I had to give probably obscured rather than clarified my actual political beliefs. (And of course there were a lot of “No, really, it’s an awful lot more complicated than that” questions, but that’s sort of unavoidable.)

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¹ I originally mistyped that as “libertartian”; I think that’s actually a better description of me.

I haven’t done one of these in a long time, but coraline encouraged people on her F’list to, so I decided I would. I had been planning on taking a new picture with the wonderful new camera plumtreeblossom, eisa, beetiger, docorion, mrpet, nex0s, and angeltigriss got me for my birthday (THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! IT ROCKS!), but it’s late and I have a very big day ahead of me tomorrow, so I’m just going to reuse an old picture from the mid ’90s or so of me swimming at the Ledges in Vermont. It shows off my best assets: my smile, and my joy in being among people I love. (sionnagh, zzbottom, and his then-wife whose LJ name I’ve spaced on were there with me.)

Me at the Ledges Me in the water at the Ledges (Harriman Reservoir, Vermont), probably mid-’90s.

Hmmmm. I look a lot different now, but I think I’m still that happy pretty often.

By request. Let me know if you want this lj-cut; I figured it was small enough that wasn’t necessary.

(Sorry no Rabbit Hole Day post this year; I don’t have enough brain cells to be creative right now. You get the following by virtue of the fact that most of it was written yesterday on the T.)

So last long weekend was Arisia, and I haven’t stopped having fun since. On Tuesday, I ended up at dinner at the Cambridge location of Addis Red Sea with cathijosephine, ragingamazon, and a bunch of other people in what was sort of an impromptu farewell dinner for ragingamazon. I had never tried their new location, and I hadn’t had Ethiopian food since Meskerem in DC with plumtreeblossom, bcat1, and spacechicken. It was the yum, and the company was lots of fun.

On Wednesday, plumtreeblossom and I went to a gathering at The Burren for members of the davis_square community. The bar gave us free food, and they certainly recouped their investment; there were about 30 or 35 of us there. There were lots of Theatre@First people there, among them the wonderful surrealestate (f/k/a pheromone) and joyeous, but there were also a lot of people we hadn’t met in person, and a lot of people we (especially I) didn’t know at all. It was a great time.

( A few more days, cut for length. )

As I was telling jadia over dinner yesterday, as a child I was an introvert, more or less out of necessity since I was sick a lot (and therefore out of school a lot, and often unable to run and play with other kids). Clearly I am no longer an introvert, but it’s only been in the past few years that my mental image of myself has caught up to reality. I used to think, “Hah, hah! I’ve got everybody fooled; they think I’m an extrovert, just because I get energized by spending lots and lots of time with other people!” and it was only fairly recently that I realized that everybody who thought I was an extrovert was actually right. (I am, though, an extrovert who needs a lot of quiet alone time.) Anyway, if I had lingering doubts, this past week should lay them to rest.

(Current hip status: beowabbit is currently very hip.)

Going to work was a really stupid idea. My theory was that if I’m going to be in pain and discomfort anyway, there’s no real advantage to not being at work for it. What I didn’t count on was it taking almost two hours for me to walk from the parking garage to my office building. (Admittedly, I’m counting the three times I sat down on benches.) That normally takes 10min if I stop to buy an apple and a coffee on the way.

However, the campus police were very kind and sent over a Safety Patrol van to get me back to the parking garage from my office when I left (early), and the drive back to Quincy was uneventful and less painful than the drive from plumtreeblossom’s to work had been.

On the way home, I stopped by the drugstore and got crutches. I’m not sure they’re an improvement over the cane. They’re better for standing still for long periods of time, and they’re much quicker, and they’re more stable, so there are fewer of the nasty surprises, but they are much clumsier to handle, harder to keep from falling when I set them aside because I can’t hook them on things (and bending over to pick anything up is not so much happening at the moment), and while the cane basically left me fine most of the time with occasional moments of serious pain when I stepped wrong or had to rebalance, the crutches basically hurt just a bit on each “step”. I think the crutches are probably net worse on my hip. If I feel like I can go out tomorrow, I may buy a second cane, and try the two-cane approach. (Assuming, of course, I’m not magically all better tomorrow.)

I left a message for my doctor’s office as soon as I got in to work today, but haven’t heard back yet. At this point, I don’t think it justifies an ER visit, because my best guess is that medical science is going to tell me to suck it up and wait, and in the meantime keep my weight off it and take lots of painkillers, which I am already doing. (Well, modulo the stupidity of trying to go in to work today, but I’ve learned my lesson. Thanks, plumtreeblossom; you were right. On the other hand, I got lots of sympathy from my co-workers.)

In other news, my flowers are still beautiful, and my kilt still makes me very very happy.