Loopy

Last Saturday, Tom and I took BART to Walnut Creek, had brunch at Hubcaps Diner downtown, and went to ride our bikes up and down the Iron Horse Trail. Tom rides a lot faster than I do, but I decided to try to keep up with him for once, and succeeded for about an hour and a half, riding pretty much at top capacity the entire time. It was hot out there, and there is no shade along the trail, so by the time we turned around to come back, I was close to expiring, and the 3 o’clock wind from the west was just starting, so I asked Tom if we could go on to Dublin BART instead of riding clear back to Walnut Creek BART, and he said that was fine. He’s nice.

Back at home, I had dinner with C. at Papalote.

Sunday was for cooking green split peas and quinoa.

On Monday evening C. came over to do some research on his upcoming trip to El Salvador for the children’s poetry festival.

Tuesday I heard a radio on at the worksite outside my living room windows, which project will have been underway for a year as of October 18, and called the fellow at the city who has been so great about making it stop ASAP (speaking of learning to live with things as they are). Once again, the radio stopped within minutes and then I overheard the workers saying something about having to make it through the day without music. They must have concluded it could not be done, because they turned the radio on again, and I called the guy at the city again, but then decided it was time to go do my own dirty work, and walked around the block.

There I found the owner himself and told him I don’t mind the construction noise, but that gratuitous noise arouses strong ill feelings. The foreman was also there and didn’t realize anyone had turned on a radio and strode off to silence it. Meanwhile, the owner gave me his cell number and that of the foreman. Tom (being of a reasonable temperament) doesn’t mind the radio, but is irritated by the power tools and construction noises themselves, so he’s had the harder time of it.

In the evening, I went to Howie’s.

On Wednesday I took a lovely bike ride to Golden Gate Park at lunchtime, and in the evening, Tom and I watched the first debate between Obama and Romney. I don’t see Obama often, but thought he looked markedly worse than the last time I did. I even wondered if he might be ill. Certainly he looked like he hadn’t slept the night before, while Romney appeared to be just back from a month at the spa. Romney sounded entirely reasonable, entirely like a good guy, and I kept waiting for Obama to point out that he’s not, but he didn’t! Romney very clearly won the debate, and if Obama ends up losing, that is probably why. And if Obama loses, I can probably forget about being able to buy an individual health insurance policy.

At work on Thursday, the helpful list guy gave me a great tutorial on the phone on how to use a research tool, and I wrote a Windows command line for-loop to do DNS lookups and print some text at the beginning of each new chunk of output, which was satisfying.

In the evening, it emerged that Lisa C. was in town for work, so we had dinner at Herbivore.

Friday was another dismal Excel day at work, as I’d received another massive data compilation project, from one of the fellows I met in Roseville. It was humbling to have to importune the Excel master yet again, though I felt better when he took a look and said I’d almost had it.

I felt very stressed out that day, and the earsplitting racket of the Blue Angels overhead made it definitely worse. At the end of the workday, I went to do laundry, and when I got home, I returned to my VLOOKUP task, because I didn’t want there to be anything left to do on Monday morning. It was 12:45 a.m. before I got to bed, making this a contender for world’s crappiest Friday evening, First World category. I know it was an incredibly great Friday evening by the standards of many. But by my standards, it was lousy.

I’m sorry this is the extremely boring blog now. Once the full-time telecommuter has told you about her dental floss, her cat and her spoons, there isn’t much else to say.

On Saturday I went to have my hair trimmed and was turned over by Max to a young lady shampoo artist who had extremely strong fingers and who scrubbed away with impressive vigor and endurance. I finally had to ask her to please stop. I returned to the haircutting chair and, just as I realized Max was nowhere in sight, the same young lady came to offer me a complimentary scalp massage while I waited. Her fingers were in top form after the limbering up they’d gotten during the shampoo, and it was somewhat painful; I politely asked her to cease these efforts, as well.

When Max finally came along, it was 35 minutes after our appointment time, which he didn’t mention. I (passively and aggressively) said, “I’m not sure if I still have time to do this,” which was only about twenty percent true, and he retaliated by cutting the very top of my coiffure off, which took him just ten minutes and set my hair growing back by four or six months. My hair now looks like a very tall flattop with random portions of a fright wig dangling from the edges. I in turn retaliated by tipping only ten percent, because I’m not brave enough not to tip at all.

That night, Gen and I had dinner at We Be Sushi and saw Looper, which is violent but which we both liked.