Author: lintqueen

A series of near misses

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We’re in the final stages of household reorganization, and as such are dealing with *big* project things. Last weekend we got the rest of the stuff out of aklikins apartment 1 , which involved disposing of many things, amongst them two long fluorescent lightbulbs. Which I placed *gently* in the dumpster (I know those things are dangerous!), but they ‘sploded anyway, flinging glass shards all over the place. Somewhat remarkably (and thankfully) neither of us were hurt, save a tiny scratch on my chest.

Then last night we had to move the Mustang from the apartment garage to the storage unit: which turned out to be an equally traumatic, but also not permanently harmful process.

Rules of Thumb

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If you’re close to running out of gas and you have the time to stop and fill up, go ahead and do it.

It’s tempting to think:  “I’ll just do it tomorrow,” or “Ew, it’s cold” or “Gee, I’d rather not miss MythBusters,” but the fact is that if you don’t fill up now, tomorrow will be
cold
and rainy
and you’ll be running late for a meeting
and you’ll have just painted your nails.

(And you’ll be that much closer to being stranded on the side of the road.)

9 things I’ve learned about roller skating

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aklikins and I went skating again tonight, and (being one who overthinks things), I’ve cataloged:

  1. Check your wheels.
  2. Duct tape is your friend.  I can’t remember where I’d originally read about long-distance runners taping their feet with duct tape, but given that I’m just about the blisteriest girl on the planet, I figured it couldn’t hurt.  I covered the bottom of both feet with tape (which is surprisingly easy since you can tear the tape to make little “darts” for arches and whatnot), which looked ridiculous (and elicited many amused comments when everyone was de-skating at the end of the night), but — hey — not a blister in sight!  This is, for me, a minor miracle, as I can wear “so-comfy-they’re-ugly-euroshoes” (like Merrills or Monroes) and STILL get blisters.
  3. Tighter laces are not always better.  I’ve always tried to lace the boots up really really tight as it made me feel more secure (and helped prevent rubbing and therefore blisters).  Now since I’ve solved the blister issue (two words that are kinda fun to say in a row… try it), that is unnecessary, so I tried looser lacing.  To my amazement, with looser laces it didn’t feel like my arches were cramping and my shins didn’t hurt.  (This is one of the reasons I don’t like inline skates or skiing… the boot holds your foot at an angle, which makes my arch cramp up.  Apparently my foot needs to flex.
  4. Your feet belong under your body.  The analogy that I finally came up with is that it’s like walking in really high heels (or a catwalk walk), where your feet need to fall in a line as opposed to parallel.  This is, of course, an over exaggeration, but it helped to think of it this way when I was trying to get the hang of balancing and shifting my weight.
  5. Your weight is shifted forward compared to where it is when you’re standing normally… you can’t stand up straight, as that leads to flailing (which leads, in my case, at least, to falling).
  6. The boots do help — the ankle support is useful.  I had tried some “tennis-shoe style” skates and my ankles were way too loosey-goosey in them.  I suspect that with practice this would not be so much of an issue (or maybe even if you don’t have little toothpick-ankles), but as a novice, Use The Boots, Luke.
  7. You don’t have to hold the skates on your feet, they are already laced on and aren’t going to fall off, so relax. I realized after about a half hour that I was clenching my feet (sort of like you do in order to keep a pair of flip-flops on), and this was leading to exhaustion and cramping and whatnot.  aklikins pointed out that I really didn’t need to ***GRIIPPP*** the skates and he was right.  I loosened up and things got better.
  8. You will fall.  You will look stupid.  Get over it

Which leads to

  1. Fear is not your friend.  It’ll make you fall faster than anything.

Sometimes I shouldn’t be allowed out of the house

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Splash!
The sound of an almost-full Diet Dr. Pepper makes as it spills all over my desk, keyboard, mouse, chair, floor, etc.
Crash!
The sound of a big glass vase shattering when a chair hits it (was dragging chair out of way of more of the soda).
Squish!
The sound that velvet pants make as they get soaking wet. (ok, a stretch, but you get my point).

Dare I drive home?

Walking disaster

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1) I don’t like a single cereal1.  That would be too simple.  No, I like a one-of-a-kind, limited-edition cereal mix: granola, Heart Healthy, Barbara’s little hexagonal things that remind me of wheat chex, some sort of pine-needle-bran-thing, etc.

2) I make the mix in a giant tupperthing.

3) My kitchen is a mess (all part of the massive house reorg happening at the moment) — boxes all over the place, things in sink that don’t belong in sink, etc.

4) The only place to make the cereal mix was with the tupperthing balanced on the side of the sink.

5) You see where this is going.

6) Yah Dyson!

1 Actually there are several cereals that can “stand alone” in my book; unfortunately they’re all “sugar bombs”:  Coco Puffs, Golden Grahams, Cap’t. Crunch, etc.   I just can’t get past the guilt that would be involved eating a bowl of straight sugar in the morning, hence the “healthy mix” (and a load of Splenda on top).  Yes, I know that the result is probably just as unhealthy as the oh-so-nummy-sugar-bomby-goodness would be, but the perception… (/guilt)

Goodbye, Mr. Chips

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Last summer my neighborhood had a salsa walk (it was probably June-ish, I imagine?).  In anticipation thereof, I bought a bag of tortilla chips from Target (Archer Farms brand), but since *everyone* had brought chips, mine mostly went uneaten (though I confess I did get lost trying to find the right street and busted the bag open as sustenance for the finding.  I have ZERO sense of direction.  Or maybe negative sense of direction, if that’s possible).

So, the chips went home again with me.  And they got brought out again a few says later when some of the folks on my street decided to congregate for hanging out and drinking wine (I *love* my neighborhood).  A couple more chips got consumed at that point, but mostly we had wine.  :-)

For the next month or two, every time I’d get that “want-salty-and-crispy” craving thing (which happens roughly once a week), I’d go and have a chip or three.  Strangely, the chips seemed unaffected by the passage of time in between the cravings, remaining crunchily delicious from one eating to the next.

Fast forward to September-ish when it dawns on me that I’ve now been noshing on the same bag of chips for three months.  At that point it seemed like the chips had some sort of “survivor gene” going on so I didn’t feel like I *should* chuck them.  Plus, honestly, they were still  really tasty.

It’s now March of the year after and I am somewhat sad to say that this afternoon I dumped the last of the chip crumbs into my mouth.  The chips are no more.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

(Yes, I do understand what an oddling I am that I would develop some strange respect/admiration for a bag of tortilla chips.  So much so, even, that I felt compelled to immortalize them on LiveJournal.  Sigh.)

Say Hello to the LOVE bean:

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aklikins gave me this for Christmas.  Upon unwrapping, it seemed just like a wee can covered in Japanese and Engrish; however, upon sprouting the following was revealed

Awlp

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OLPCI keep forgetting to post about my little XO laptop 1 — so far he’s really fun to use, and now that

[info]aklikins

has reconfigured my wireless (to use some other security protocol, I think (?)) I can always connect from my living room. This means that (if nothing else), I now have a handy, small web browser in the living room, which is convenient. 2

I honestly haven’t done much of what the XO is supposed to be best at (the mesh network stuff), just because there hasn’t been a lot of opportunity. I did go to a XO session at FUDcon, but spent most of the time trying to get an update of the software load, so I didn’t get to play much.

[info]aklikins

has one, but, quite frankly, he’s usually sitting beside me on the couch when we’re using the XOs. so it hasn’t made much sense to focus on “connecting remotely.”

When I was in Vegas for the Nortel Sales Conference, I used the XO as a word processor to type my entries for the blog that I was co-authoring (had to transfer with SD card, as there was no open intranet connection, but it still worked fine). It was sorta nifty to carry Awlp around at the conference, since the Nortel sales people often recognized the XO (we’re a corporate sponsor of the project). Of course, before leaving for the sales conference, I had to make a fuzzy bag for Awlp, which I posted about over at the XO Forums (so far not a lot of response. Feh.) 2

1 I’ve named my XO “Awlp” 4 because I bought him in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, and OLPC is pronounced “Awlp” in my head.
2 The BIG TV is connected to the media server, which is connected to the home network, so technically, I’ve always been able to have the interwebs in the living room, but, honestly, it was sort of a pain in the rear to switch the source on the TV and find the wireless keyboard and remote, etc. etc.
3 Yes, the bag matches my outfit. Your point? ;-)
4 I named him, so I had to give him eyes! (Or maybe I had to give him eyes, so then he needed a name?)


Only in my odd little world…

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Remember how I made antlers for my Meep for a Christmas costume?
Remember how I lost an antler?

Someone wrote about finding my antler in a News & Observer article!!!:

[snip]
“WHAT THEY FOUND
Here are a few items the Crabtree Rotary Club found on the side of Glenwood Avenue on Saturday.

  • A business card for a Raleigh police sergeant
  • A bag of rotten celery
  • Reflectors torn up from the roadway
  • A pint-size drinking glass
  • A wrench
  • A reindeer antler from a car-top Christmas decoration
  • Two losing lottery cards
  • Crust from one slice of pizza
  • A pair of sunglasses “

[/snip]

I am sure it is too late to recover the lost antler (though that didn’t stop me from leaving a message from the guy quoted in the article) but GEEZ!  What are the odds?!?

Random bits

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OK, who had the genius idea of putting a major concert & sports venue on one of the two main roads into Raleigh?    I was stuck in Hurricanes (hockey) traffic for almost 40 minutes last night trying to get to trivia — yecch!

By the way, I will be in Toronto next week on business. Two business trips in three weeks, not having traveled for work in 5 years!  Big kudos to AmEx who overnighted me a card so I could actually book the trip within corporate guidelines!