Fascination Place

A very productive weekend. I:

1. Replaced the burned-out bulbs in the front post light on one side of our complex’s driveway. This included trimming back bushes so I could get to it.
2. Bought and installed a new showerhead.
3. Bought and installed a new double light switch in the master bathroom. For some reason one of the switches only works if the other one is on too, which isn’t how the old one worked, but I can’t figure out exactly what I did wrong, and the way it works now is good enough, since I always turn those two on at the same time anyway.
4. Figured out which of our complex’s sprinklers is busted and gushing water in the morning, and shut it down until we can get it fixed.
5. Played some Spore. Did I mention that I bought Spore last week?
6. Bought cat food. This one is very important - just ask the cats!
7. Talked to my Mom.

Plus various little chores around the house.

The downside is that I payed bills tonight and noticed a couple of charges on one of my credit cards which were not mine. It sounds like someone got hold of and used the previous number attached to my account (and which is auto-forwarded to the new number). So I asked them to close the account and open a new one. And dispute the bogus charges, of course. Hopefully it will all go smoothly and I’ll be up-and-running again in a couple of days with a new card. But I always get all stressed out whenever something like this happens - I wish I didn’t, but I don’t know how not to. Debbi told me to take deep breaths, since there’s nothing I can do until the new card arrives - I’ve done all I can do. But I’ll be on edge until it does arrive.

At least this time it didn’t happen right before I went away on vacation.

So yesterday Debbi gives me a call near the end of the day: She’d gone home early due to a slow day at her office, got home and was puttering around the house, when the power went out. No idea why, but she called PG&E and was told that it was targeted to be fixed in the next two hours.

I got home an hour later, and we went out to dinner and did a little shopping. We got home after the 2-hour window, and the power was still out. So I called PG&E again and they said the outage was due to an equipment failure, and it would be fixed in - yup - the next two hours.

Fortunately, 20 minutes later the power came on again, saving us from having to figure out where else we could go to watch Michael Phelps win his 7th gold medal of this year’s Olympics.

Unfortunately, when I opened my laptop to check baseball scores I learned (after running around the house a couple of times) that our phone service was out, both voice and DSL. So I called AT&T and learned that they didn’t have any service appointments over the weekend, and only a 12-hour appointment available on Monday. Grr. (Naturally, I didn’t actually talk to a human during all of this, and it took me nearly 8 minutes to navigate their phone menu system along the way.)

Half an hour later, I checked the phone again and lo and behold it was working again, Intarwebs and all.

So this morning I called AT&T to cancel the appointment.

You guessed it, I’ve been on hold for 30 minutes waiting to cancel an appointment.

Fortunately, shortly after I typed the previous sentence, I got through to a human and within 2 minutes she’s routed me to the right place and I cancelled my appointment. Yay!

Though along the way I learned that I could have cancelled the appointment on-line.

Sigh.

Here’s hoping the rest of the weekend goes more smoothly.

No, not computer bugs. Okay, those bug me too, especially the ones I wrote myself and have to fix. (But at least they pay me for that.) No, I mean actual insects, which were the sources of some annoyance over the weekend.

First of all, we got the results of the termite inspection for our complex, and the inspector says he found signs of infestation in my unit, and recommends we tent and fumigate the building. This is weird because I was home when he came by, and he didn’t say anything to me about it. I’d have expected that he’d at least have called me over to see what he found and be able to recognize the infestation from first-hand experience. He apparently noted some issues with other buildings, too. However, in one case we think it was an infestation which was killed off years ago, but the damage (which was cosmetic) was never patched up. So now we’re not sure whether we’ve got an active infestation or not. So we’ll likely ask for clarification and/or get a second opinion.

Getting our place tented would be a big pain in the ass, mainly because of the cats, since we’d have to figure out where to put them while it’s going on, and how much cleaning up we’d have to do afterwards. The problem with cats is that you can’t really give them to your friends who already have cats, since cats and other cats often don’t mix. And friends without cats often don’t have cats for a good reason. So we might have to board them, which we’d like to avoid.

Still, termites are rampant in the valley, and as annoying as this would be, I’m sure there will be several house-tentings in my future while I live here. So I shouldn’t kvetch too much.

The other bugs vexing me this week is a colony of wasps which has taken up residence inside my redwood bench which also houses my vegetable planter. I see them crawling in and out through a single spot in the planter. Yesterday, one of them landed on my shoulder, rode me into the house, and stung me through my shirt. Ouchie! I killed it, and fortunately it didn’t leave its stinger in my arm, but it hurt like heck for an hour or so. Today I can barely tell I got stung, which I guess means I’m not allergic to wasp stings - good to know.

Anyway, the wasps are getting pretty annoying, so I want to find a way to take care of them - preferably without tearing the bench apart. So I’ll go to OSH after work and see what I can find.

These wasps have been lurking around the area for a couple of years, and their nests seem to move each year. I guess they die off over the winter and then come back and reestablish themselves. I don’t intrinsically object to their presence, since they do some useful things, but I don’t really want them taking up residence where they see me as a threat which needs to get stung. So I’ll see if I can encourage them to take up residence elsewhere.

Sigh. It’s always something.

All things considered, this has been a pretty crappy week:

• A couple of last-minute, difficult projects landed on my shoulders this week, resulting in a great deal of stress for me at work. I managed to finish one today and make progress on the other one, but man, it was a rough week. And of course the things I’d planned to work on got deferred in the meantime. Sigh.
• Debbi has her own job stress, since the majority shareholder of the company she works for has made an offer to buy the rest of the company. I’ve never been part of a corporate buyout, never mind one of this magnitude, but I’m sure this makes everyone who works there uneasy, since who knows how things might change if the buyout takes place?
• We’re painting our townhouse complex soon, and I realized that my vegetable garden runs right along one of the exterior walls, so now I’m stressed out that I might need to pull out the vegetables just as they’re ripening in order to allow the painters access. Gah! Maybe I can cover them with tarps for the days they’ll be painting there, or maybe I can offer to paint that section myself after the growing season is over. Sigh.

So I’m really glad it’s Friday, because I’m exhausted and frazzled.

On the bright side:

• I upgraded my journal to WordPress 2.6 and started having a couple of problems with it. But I eventually discovered that one problem was due to having the wrong bookmark to access the admin pages of my journal (I’d bookmarked the login page rather than the admin page), and the other was because I’d been editing some old entries recently which explained why Akismet’s “automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month” feature seemed to be broken - editing the entries apparently re-set their age counter, so I’m getting a little more spam in my spam trap than I used to. But, it looks like it’s all good in the end.
  
  (All that said, I am really looking forward to using the “live preview” feature of WordPress 2.6, as I’ve wanted to switch to a new journal template for FP for months now.)
• I got to play poker last night with friends, and finished up a few bucks in our low-stakes game. All of my profits came from a single hand when my set of Jacks beat pocket Aces. I also managed to get away with losing the minimum when my A-Q hit top pair on the flop, and I folded to two bets - correctly, as it turned out as I was up against Aces again. I’m far from a great player, but I seem to be holding my own in this group.
• And Debbi and I went to my favorite Italian restaurant for dinner tonight. Yay!

I think we’re going to have a low-key weekend. We have a few chores to do, but otherwise we need to empty our brains and de-stress.

Here at Casa del Rawdon we have a nice patio out back with some pretty trees which shade the place in the late afternoon. They’re also home to numerous squirrels - seemingly more every year. We usually see them running on the fences and drinking out of the pond, and occasionally I find that they’ve buried a nut in one of the pots on the upstairs porch.

This year, though, we have Squirrels Gone Wild. More squirrels, chasing each other about, and making more noise than ever before. Sometimes one of them sits on the fence and looks at the house, making chitting noises, and driving poor Blackjack nuts. I suspect one of them also likes to run around on the upstairs porch, as I sometimes wake up to skittering noises and see fascinated kitties looking out the curtains to the porch.

Yesterday the squirrels were running all throughout the trees, and I heard something in one tree making cooing noises. At first I thought the squirrels and found and disturbed a bird nest, as we’ve also had a couple of birds (morning doves, maybe?) hanging around the fence this spring as well. But eventually I decided that it must be squirrel mating season. That’s right, Squirrels In Heat! No wonder they’re so rambunctious lately.

It’s all very amusing until Blackjack gets so worked up that he leaps through the screen door or something, I guess. Actually it’s probably going to be fine unless we end up with progressively more squirrels each year, as the ones we have now seem like plenty to keep everyone entertained. Hopefully this is just a banner year for squirrel production, and things will get back to normal next year.

Otherwise I may have to see if I can interest Animal Planet in filming a new series in our backyard.

The days have been just flying by, lately! I realized this weekend that I never wrote an entry about last weekend, partly because I’d been busy catching up on posting photos from my Dad’s visit!

The bittersweet part of last weekend was going to two Red Sox/Athletics games, which I’d been excited about since this is a rare year in which my Red Sox visited Oakland twice in the same season. Unfortunately, we ended up seeing two games of a three-game sweep by the A’s, with the Sox losing 8-3 on Friday, and then 3-0 on Saturday. The Saturday game was almost very exciting as Justin Duchscherer came two baserunners away from pitching a perfect game. But he hit Jason Varitek leading off the 6th, and David Ortiz singled in the 7th. Huston Street replaced Duchscherer for the 9th, and that was it. Bummer. On television we watched the A’s finish the sweep by winning 6-3 on Sunday. Alas.

On the bright side, the Sox have gone 4-2 since then, and they still have the second-best record in the American League (behind the Rays, who seem to finally be capitalizing on their substantial talent base).

Sunday we also had Subrata and Susan over for the day. We hadn’t heard from them for a few days and we’d figured they might be going stir crazy waiting for their child to arrive. (As I wrote over this past weekend, he arrived last Thursday.) We met at The Counter for lunch and then came back and played Magic (Subrata and me) and dominoes (all four of us) for the afternoon, winding up having dinner at Marie Callender’s.

The Magic session was interesting, my second time really playing Shadowmoor. We played a sealed deck game. Subrata had two viable builds from his cards, while I thought I had three or even four, but part-way through one game I realized I just didn’t have the right mix of stuff to make a white-blue deck work; it kept wanting to be write-green. So I did that instead and it worked quite well, better than the black-red deck did. The red-green version might have worked, too, but I didn’t try that. Anyway, it does feel like Shadowmoor is a slower format than Lorwyn or Time Spiral were. But since I enjoy creature-based decks, that’s not really a bad thing.

This weekend as I said we went to the hospital to visit Subrata, Susan and Ajay on Friday evening. Saturday we went out and did some shopping, including buying a new cat bush (half-height cat tree) for the downstairs. Even though it’s nearly identical to the old one, the cats still had to sniff it all over. But it seems to have passed muster!

I also went by a sale at Illusive Comics, an area store which I hadn’t visited before. (Well, I might have visited them years ago under their previous incarnation and previous owners, but I honestly don’t remember.) The owners are very enthusiastic, which is a great thing in anyone doing small retail! I’ll probably go back every so often, even though my I already have a regular shop I patronize (Comics Conspiracy). As most stores today do, Illusive seems to be focusing on new books and paperback collections. Unfortunately I’m an outlier among comics fans: the main thing that brings me back to a shop is a good and constantly-changing back issue selection, and the comics retailing biz has moved away from back issues over the last 15 years. And every store has pretty much the same set of paperback collections, so you don’t really need to go to multiple stores for those.

Anyway. Comics retailing is hard enough without listening to me moan about how comics shops aren’t like they were back when I was a teenager, so enough about that.

We spent a good chunk of Saturday doing chores around the house: We did a whole bunch of long-awaited cleaning, throwing away the little things which stack up on bookshelves and in the garage and in nooks and crannies elsewhere. I put up a bike hanger so we could reclaim some floor space by hanging Debbi’s bike above mine. Now Debbi wants to hang the step ladder and our spare folding chairs, so that may be another project soon! Debbi fixed up the shadowbox with my old Mardi Gras beads and coins, and it looks great!

Sunday we had a quieter day. I spent a lot of the afternoon and evening up in the study paying bills, putting together some Magic decks, and doing some cleaning up (though not nearly enough). We also cooked dinner and watched Sunday night baseball.

So that about covers it. We have some more projects to take care of around the house (for instance, replace the long-broken kitchen dispose-all), and I hope we can get a bunch of it taken care of this summer. It ought to keep us busy!

Meanwhile, happy June, everyone!

An exchange while eating my home-made tacos tonight:

Me: I could make these more often, you know. They’re scrummy!

Debbi: “Scrummy?” Is that, like, scrumptious and yummy?

Me: Yup.

(pause)

Me: It sounds better than “yumptious”.

The taco recipe, by the way, comes from an ex-girlfriend. “Fitzy’s Special”, she called it. It’s ground beef, refried beans, browned onions, and spices, served in tortillas or taco shells. If I ever hear from my ex again, I’ll have to tell her how much Debbi loves it. (Okay, maybe that wouldn’t go over so well.)

The tacos are one of the few things I cook which I can make in 30 minutes or less. A lot of recipes I make take several hours, especially the Indian food which takes 30-60 minutes to prep, and then 2-3 hours to simmer. It’s scrummy, too, and makes several meals’ worth of food, but I pretty much have to make it on the weekends.

Gee, I oughta make some sometime soon!

This weekend we’re doing something we should have done long ago, indeed should have been doing regularly since I moved into my house: Steam-cleaning the carpets.

I borrowed a Bissell 9200 ProHeat 2X from my friend James, set it to the “Heavy Traffic” setting and went to work on the bedroom shortly before noon. It works really well! Since it’s been years since the carpets got serious cleaning, I ran over it twice before putting it on the “Rinse” setting and doing it a third time, and at the end the carpet looked so much better than it did before. I did the upstairs hall afterwards, too.

It’s amazing how much cat hair and carpet fuzz I picked up with it - despite having vacuumed the carpets before using the cleaner. It also took me a little while to realize that the thing uses a lot of water and cleaning formula, though I bet it would use less if it weren’t set on Heavy Traffic. We used the whole bottle of formula that James gave us, so we went out and bought several more, since doing the living room and stairs is likely to take at least one full bottle. (Incidentally, the bottles were cheaper at Fry’s than they are at Amazon.) And we might give it all one more pass next weekend (did I mention the carpets haven’t been cleaned in six years?). And I know that it’s worth emptying out the waste-water and cleaning out all the fuzz whenever the clean water tank runs out during cleaning. It’s a little extra work, but everything runs a little smoother if I do that.

I always have a good feeling when finishing a project like this. Okay, I’m not quite finished, but I’ve done a lot of it, and I can see real results. And that’s case for happiness.

Here’s what my garden looked like a month ago:

(click for larger image)

And here’s what it looks like now:

The snapdragons have finished their first blooms and a couple are getting ready for their second go-round. The marigolds are in full bloom. The three tomato plants are doing great (and two are fruiting already), and the cucumber plant (middle cage) is starting to take off. Only the pepper plant (far left cage) is taking its sweet time.

All the herbs in the pots are doing well, too. The rosemary and thyme are held over from last year, but we picked up some new Italian parsley and sweet basil.

Here’s what my yard around the patio looked like a month ago, too:

The stream, incidentally, starts in the little pool on the right, runs behind the red cowbells, and falls into the pond whose edge is on the left. The plants surrounding the head pool on the right got clobbered by our cold winter weather, but they’ve completely recovered by now - rather to my surprise, because they didn’t look good.

I need to clean up the patio, and then we can start having weekend breakfast out there, and I might start doing some writing outside in the evening when it gets a little warmer.

April has been a little less busy then March, but the difference is that it hasn’t been due to a bunch of things all scheduled well ahead of time; instead I’ve been keeping busy with more spur-of-the-moment (or at least spur-of-the-week) activities.

Last weekend Debbi invited some people over to dye eggs for Easter. She likes to do this every year. Josh and his girlfriend Lisa came by first, and then Susan and Subrata came by around the time they were leaving. I’d already dyed all the eggs I’d wanted to, so Subrata and I ended up playing some Magic instead.

Before dying eggs, I went out to the nursery and picked up some plants and flowers. (While I was out I got a snootfull of the fire at the scrap yard in Redwood City which stunk up peninsula and valley air for part of the day. Eew.) Then on Sunday I turned over the dirt in my planter and put them all in. This year we have three tomato plants, a cucumber plant, marigolds and snapdragons. I was happy to get the snapdragons; it seems like I can rarely find them this early in the year, I don’t know why. I love snapdragons. We also have space for one more vegetable plant, but we’re not sure what to plant yet, if anything.

We’ve gotten some rain this week (it’s raining right now, actually) which is helping kick-start the plants. The tomatoes are taking off right away, which they always do, and the snapdragons are starting to bloom. Hopefully the looming drought won’t deep-six my growing plans this year.

Wednesday evening we had our annual homeowners association meeting, which was quite routine this year. We’ve got a few projects in the planning stages, so we were basically just talking about how they’re going, and that was it.

Debbi came home early Thursday afternoon since we had cleaners coming in. Neither Debbi nor I are very diligent about cleaning the house, especially deep-cleaning it: We keep things reasonably neat and it’s not like the place is a sty, but we do accumulate more dust and cat hair then we’d wish, and we do hate cleaning (say) around the stove. So Debbi finally convinced me to get some cleaners in, and they really did a great job! The kitchen is cleaner than it’s been in years, the bathrooms look great, and all the bookshelves are dusted. So the place is virtually gleaming for my Mom when she arrives next week. And we’re considering having them come in monthly to keep the place clean.

Thursday night we played Magic. There were six of us who gathered at Lee’s for another Time Spiral/Planar Chaos draft. At the end of the draft portion of the evening, I felt like I had a very strong green base, but mostly a big pile of cow flop as far as an actual deck was concerned. After starng at my cards for a while I realized I needed to give up on my first overall pick, The Rack and any hope of building a discard deck, and instead create a green/white/blue deck with my three Search for Tomorrows to make the extra colors work.

And boy, did it ever work.

The backbone of my deck was Verdant Embrace combined with Gaia’s Anthem, which resulted in an incredibly fast 2/2 creature generator (these are, in my opinion, two of the very best cards in the Time Spiral block so far). I had another creature generator in the Benalish Commander (the creature generators combine well with Essence Warden, too), a card drawer in Aeon Chronicler, a wacky all-purpose creature in Stuffy Doll (combining it with Ophidian Eye is just ridiculous), and a variety of good supporting creatures. I ended up winning all three matches I played, despite not drafting a single flying creature, or any creature removal. I basically just beat my opponents to death.

I got incredibly lucky to assemble this combo, really, although I do take credit for figuring out how to assemble them into a decent deck. But whether it ws luck or skill, it did result in a very fun evening of gaming for me.

That catches us up to today, where Debbi is busy at a scrapbooking event with her friends, and Subrata is hosting another Magic day. Which is not a bad thing to spend a rainy Saturday doing.