I had a good meeting with Cassandra and Jean today demo-ing the QMX databases. Randy was home with a sick child, so couldn’t attend, which was fine with me, as she’d probably ask a gazillion questions, half of which I wouldn’t have been able to understand.
We had book club lunch, which was fun. Everyone showed up, and Suzanne told us a hilarious, riveting, and emotional-reacting (from the members) story about Christopher and his off-roading, speeding ticket, and retainer incidences. Kids! I’m so glad I won’t ever have to raise any. It seems like such a crap shoot. Two kids from the same family, raised the same way, one turns out just fine, the other one tries you to your core.
I stopped by the “Key Making” office after lunch, to have the guy who made my spare office key check to see why it won’t even go into the lock, much less unlock it.
I’d called him about it a month ago, when I first received it, and he’d said, “Bring it by my office and I’ll fix it if it was something I did wrong.” He stressed the word “I” as if it were an extremely unlikely chance that it was. A few weeks after that, I took it to him during lunch, since he’s in another building that I only go to once a week for lunch, and he was substituting in Badge Making that day. He asked that I come back another time when it was more convenient for him.
By all means. Let me, the customer, accommodate you, the provider. Dork.
This time, I actually stopped by the key office before lunchtime, and it was locked anyway. I looked in badge making, and he was in there again. He evidently helps out in there, and last time when he asked me to come back at another time, he said not between 11:30 and 1:00, because he often is in badge-making. So, this time I made an effort to get there between 11 and 11:15, but evidently he’d gone over there earlier. I went to eat, with just a little steam coming out of my ears.
I stopped by again after lunch, and the door was still closed. It’s one of those doors cut in half, so he can open the top half to be a “window,” through which he can help you. I heard music in there, and knocked. He actually answered the door.
“I have a key here that I got about a month ago, but it won’t even go in the lock.”
“It was probably cut blahdy-blah (some technical key-cutting vocabulary word). Let me took a look… Oh yeah, it was cut incorrectly.”
Ah, the good old no-blame passive voice, “It was cut incorrectly.” As in, “Mistakes were made…” Whatever.
He disappeared, I didn’t hear any noise like you hear in K-Mart when they’re cutting you a key, but he returned very quickly with a new key. I said, “Thank you,” reluctantly, because I think he really should have been thanking me, and I had to make sure I heard him correctly say, as I walked away, “Sorry about that.”
Not that I’m a stickler for customer service, but I do think that SOMEWHERE in the exchange, he should have used the word “I.” As in, “I made a mistake,” or “I’m sorry about that.” Maybe he’s taking a 12-step customer service course, and he’s only on step three. Then, again, maybe he’s just a dork.
I left work at 6:00, and stopped by the HT on the way home. I got a cucumber, a red pepper, sliced mushrooms, celery, a CPK Jerk Chicken pizza (for Robert), some salad dressing (one regular, one fat free, which I’ll empty into a mixing bowl, mix together, and pour back into the containers) yogurt (apple pie and very vanilla – yay), and some milk. As I chose the milk, with an expiration date of Mar 21, I thought, “I’ll bet that milk I have at home is Mar 21. I thought it was Feb 21, but now that I’m seeing this, I think it is Mar 21. Oh well. I’ll get this anyway and freeze it if I have to.”
On the way home, I noticed two things: 1) my gas light was on, and 2) it was five until seven! Class starts at 7:30. I had completely forgotten about the time, proceeding like I had left work at 5 instead of 6. I cooked a quick, non-fabulous dinner (which was the Zesty Cajun Chicken entree — I’ve never had it, and probably will not re-order this item), and rushed off to class.
I was fully engaged in class tonight, with so many thoughts and ideas swimming through my head in terms of comparing architecture of buildings with architecture of websites, and with thoughts of the “ME” gallery (our semester project), and what artifacts I want to put in it.
I missed Michelle in class tonight. Me, Bobette, and Jenny had a brief conversation about thongs on the way out of class. [Butt floss, indeed!]
At home, I found a note from my neighbor stuck to my front door that said something to the effect of, “I need to talk to you later, if you have a moment. It’s nothing bad, so don’t worry.”
What did worry me was the stationary. It had a bible quote, from Isiah, I believe, on the bottom of it. About a month ago, I had left her a note asking her to pick up a package for me if it came over the weekend, in which I also said, “It’s no big deal if you don’t get it, as my boyfriend will be by Saturday night, so it’ll get picked up by then, the latest.”
Though I’ve just assumed she knows I’m gay, we’ve never talked about it, and this was the first explicit comment that would confirm it to her. I was hoping she was not now going to try and save me or anything. Ultra-religious people make me nervous for some queer reason.
I was very, very hungry again tonight. I’m not sure what’s up with this all of a sudden, but I don’t like it. Sometimes, it’s very difficult to behave when I’m there all alone. I did succumb to some Kettlecorn Popcorn.
I diced up the red bell pepper. I peeled a cucumber with this deluxe peeler Robert (the sweetest, most thoughtful man on earth) bought for me after hearing me complain that a recent (cheap) one I’d bought sucked. That (deluxe) peeler is the deal. It shaved those cucumber peels like “hot buttah, Barbra.” I then cut it up — first in thick slices, then three at a time in quarters. I cut up the sliced mushrooms. (Sound redundant, I know, but I like them in smaller bits than slices.) Bless my particular mess.
I got a great email from Erin today. I so like her. She may be working out at Carmichael with a friend soon, so I hope to possibly run into her there. I advised her, “Please, no thongs.”
I also got an email from my sister today, a response to one of mine. She’s in DC for a conference, and returning Thursday, at which time she’ll email me. She is actually trying to swing the Alaskan cruise with me, mom, and dad. That would just be so awesome if she did. She will, at the very minimum, triple the fun factor of the trip.
My neighbor called, and we had a rather long (for me), perhaps 15-minute, telephone conversation. We have only spoken on a few occasions, but I really like her. I thought she might be calling me about how loud I’ve been playing my Miss Saigon Soundtrack lately, but she wasn’t. Some time over the weekend, one of the clowns in our townhouse area there burned something in the parking lot. I could never figure out what it was; it looked like a piece of clothing, perhaps a jacket or something, though I did have fleeting thoughts that it might be an animal, perhaps a dog. These thoughts I kept pushing out of my mind.
She told me that she looked at it “up close,” and it looked like a pair of jeans to her. She said that there was also a little bracelet in the ashes, as well as some little button or snap, that looked like ones that were on the fly of jeans. For a few seconds, as she was telling this story, I was thinking, “Oh my god, she’s thinking it might have been a person.” Later I mentioned this, and she says, straight-faced, “I watch those CSI shows as much as anyone else, and I know this wasn’t a body. There were no bone fragments at all in the pile.” She cracks me up the way she just deadpans shit.
We talked about a party that was going on last weekend there in which “that one house” had a keg and actually had a fire burning in front of their townhouse. I remember seeing that and thinking, “They look like homeless people,” but then went out, not thinking any more about it.
Well, it turns out that after I left someone called the fire department, who came to address the situation with the tenants. She said she was watching the whole drama in her window, and she wondered if they saw her and figured that she was the one who called the fire department, and so burnt this “effigy” of her in front of her house. This had me dying, as I do think that it was a total coincidence that the burning took place in front of her house. Funny how people think. I mean if it had been in one of her two parking spots, I might be suspicious, but it was in the road part of the parking lot. She had me rolling.
She also told me that these kids seemed totally unfazed by the fire department being there basically to tell them they were breaking the fire code or law, so unfazed that when they pulled up, she heard one of the women at the party say, “Ooooh, firemen!” and then, two of them said to one of the firemen, “Would you take a picture with us?” Which he did. This tells me that she not only was watching in the window, but had her window ajar, listening, too. I like her.
Before hanging up, she also told me an hilarious story about the neighbors on the other side of her. They sound like they might be goth folks, or role-playing (D&D) gamers. She had me laughing like crazy again. I’m going to have to have her over on my deck for some drinks when the weather gets warmer.