~Thursday~ I wasn’t sure how, but I woke up at about 6:45, and about a minute later I heard a short piercing chirp coming from my hallway area, which sounded about every 30 seconds.
After about the third one, I got up and looked at the two detectors in my small hallway, one being the smoke detector that came with the house, and the other being a joint CO2/smoke detector that I got as a Christmas gift one year and that my friend Casey installed for me on one of his visits.
The battery indicator on the smoke-only alarm burned red, so looked fine. The indicator on the other detector was off, and I waited for it to “chirp” again and when it did the light flashed green.
I’m not going to get all into the rhetorical use of color here, but oddly, I associated a steadily burning red light as a “good” thing, and an intermittent green light as a “bad” thing, and changed the battery in the CO2/smoke detector. Fortunately that did the trick.
I arrived at the city bus at 6 8:16, where I found a witch nearby.
It was a beautiful 71° this morning, which made for a most pleasant wait for the bus, which arrived at 8:23. Who’s counting?
A student boarded at Gorman and Conifer, and he had both a laptop bag and a suitcase with him. I wasn’t a fan of how long it took him to get his wallet out of his pocket and then to rifle through way too many cards to find his fare-card. People. Can we use our waiting-for-the-bus time more efficiently?
A guy who boarded at Sullivan and Gorman placed his banana between his legs and wrapped his fist around it, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.
In the category of little things in technology that make a big difference, I upgraded the Weather Channel app on my phone, and the new version displays the current temperature as its icon, which means I don’t have to open the app to see it. Sweet!.
I had a really challenging eating day today. It was a bad combo of being hungry and there being a lot of goodies around the office, brought in by various people.
We had our monthly staff meeting at my boss’ boss’ level, and I gave an update to the group about our media metrics that our department put in place at the beginning of this calendar year, and recently—with a great deal of work by our fabulous intern, Vanessa—had done some analysis on the data collected to date.
I ended up having dinner, using the end of one of my Christmas gifts cards, at Applebee’s, where I had one of their “under 550 calories” meals – the Asiago Peppercorn Steak. That’s the second time I’ve had that there, and once again I found it absolutely delicious. It came with a side of baked red potatoes and steamed broccoli. Delicious.
The bartender sat me and putting me facing the bar said, “This is a good seat. You can see the most number of TVs from here.”
I resisted the urge to broadcast the headline: “Area man hasn’t owned TV for 9 years.”
“Anything in particular you’d like to watch?” he asked.
Having the emotional intelligence that I do, I knew that an honest answer of, “You” wouldn’t go over well, so I just said, “Nah, I’m good, thanks.”
I got to the gym on the late side, where I did 300 (15 sets of 20) ab crunches, follwed by 40 minutes on the elliptical machine. At about 20 minutes into the cardio, I changed the time setting on the machine from 40 minutes down to 30 minutes. At 29 minutes, I jacked it back up to 40. Fickle. Mental conflict. Decision FTW.
I did a load of laundry before heading out to Trailer Park Prize Night at about 11:30. None of my “regular peeps” were out, so I didn’t stay very long.
I left shortly after the show started, which was being emceed by Ebony Summers.