~Tuesday~ I parked at the Avent Ferry Park & Ride in anticipation of heading downtown after work for the End-of-the-Semester SIGDOC gathering at Flying Saucer.
There was only a handful of folks on the bus, and several of the kids on it were studying en route. It is exam week after all.
In an unusual occurrence on the university bus, there were three gray-haired people aboard this morning—me being one of them. I’d guess one of the other two was a student and the other a faculty or staff member.
I had an incident happen on the bus that reminded me of the age-old question, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one was there to hear it, did it make a sound?” This is not an exact analogy, but it was close enough to make me think of it. A girl listening to her MP3 player with earbuds sneezed, and I said, “Bless you.” Since she clearly didn’t hear me, is that as if I’d never said it?
I had my weekly staff meeting with my manager, to which she brought some unbelievably delicious “White Texas Sheet Cake.” Yum. Yum. Yum.
At lunch time, I met Tracy, the student leader of our Alternative Service Break New Orleans Habitat Trip, out behind my building to get some CDs from her on which to transfer the pictures everyone took while we were on that trip, and which I’d collected at our layover in the Atlanta airport on the way home.
The CDs held 700MB of data each, but it turned out we had 5.3 GB of pictures, so instead, I zipped up each person’s folder of pictures and sent them to my website, from which everyone can download them.
I was looking at the “Wake County Arrest” report, and found this one interesting for obvious reasons:
I wondered if that’s possible genetically, or if she has one of those color contact lens in, although it looks like you can now change your eye color surgically.
Driving to the Flying Saucer after work, I got behind a car that was taking forever to accelerate and then drove under the speed limit the entire time. It’s especially annoying to me when people drive big-ass cars with V6 or V8 engines, but don’t take advantage of them. She had this bumper sticker on the back of that tank she was driving:
At which I shouted, after following her slow ass for way too long, “Someone in North Carolina hates you!”
I parked at Flex and walked the block over to Flying Saucer, where only Sarah McKone had yet arrived. Shortly after that, Jen arrived, and over the course of the evening the following folks: Susan and her partner Paul; Sarah’s boyfriend Matt, her mom and dad; Mark; Desiree; Sarah Egan Warren; Brad; Neal; and Anna.
The waitresses (I would call them servers, but they’re all women) at this place wear the shortest skirts ever. At one point, I asked three people at our table if they think it would be better (and by better, I really meant more effective, and by more effective, I really meant tip-wise) if they had on (assuming they wore any at all) black undewear or flesh-colored underwear.
I was surprised that all three of the other people said black. I would have thought flesh-colored would be more titalating (so-to-speak). The soundbite of the evening was from Anna who said about the short skirts, “They don’t want their crotches to be overdressed.”
For some reason all this talk reminds me of this Facebook status update that one of my friends posted:
I wouldn’t call it the funnest gathering ever—in spite of my being there—but it was a fun night.
It got a little more fun part way into the night, when I switched to doubles of my bourbon and diet drinks. The ultimate was when I got my check at the end of the evening and it listed 2 well drinks @ $5.50 each and 2 well drinks double @ $5.00 each. Huh? Needless to say I didn’t argue about it.
Back home I read some more of The Color Purple. I’ll give it this; it’s quick reading.
Oh yeah, and I appreciate that Wikipedia refers to it as an epistolary novel, as I’d never heard of that term, and of course, love knowing it now.