Of Moose And Men
The Best Laid Plans Of Both Often Go Astray

Spent much of the past two days moving furniture around in my living room. Decided I could use the trunks sitting in my bedroom as a make-shift entertainment center until I save up a few pennies to get a real one, so I dragged them out and proceeded to make the rest of the room fit around the layout I’ve been wanting to set up. It works, now that things have been moved. I do have to get rid of the tall bookshelf that went with my old desk (which is currently disassembled and sitting in my front hall for a neighbor to come claim). It’s too tall for the space I’m in now, and while it worked well at the Woodner it doesn’t work at all here now. The depth is right, though, which bodes well for shorter replacements on that wall.

Am very glad to have all the books up off the floor now, too. This would’ve been easier were my new stove and microwave not in the middle of the room (still waiting to get scheduled to get those put in), but I managed to get around them. I have to re-hang some of the art, but that’s the least of my worries right now.

I shouldn’t be surprised at the amount of dust on/behind/around some of the furniture, but it was still a bit shocking to see all of it. The vacuum cleaner got a lot of use the past two days, and I’m sure I’ve still missed some of it.

The best part of the layout now is that I can actually sit on the couch and watch TV without having to move it half way across the room. And play the Xbox or the Wii from the couch. The really fun part was having to relocate the cable for the internet/cable TV back to where I had it originally installed. It’ll be well-hidden behind a real entertainment center, but for now it’s hiding behind a (thankfully pretty tall) picture. Sort of hiding, that is – it’s not like you can completely hide a big white cable coming down the middle of your wall, even with a picture frame over a good chunk of it.

WTF? Hot lawyers, and they’re all straight, and married, and that’s the story of my life.

Cookout at my friend L’s place in SE DC with her and her husband and their friends from the DOD. She’s one of 2 people, perhaps three that I’ve stayed in touch with from undergrad. It was good to see them both and their friends, and I enjoyed seeing them all.

I swear, I can’t get my father’s words out of my head, “We wish your attention span were longer.” That was so cutting a comment, and felt so true. Seeing people my age with kids 7 and up didn’t help. It would likely be easier if I didn’t get along with kids so well, either. I do sort of miss that, even if I don’t particularly want to raise children of my own. I wish I were closer to my nieces. i do miss seeing more of them as they grow up.

There comes a time when you can no longer pluck the gray hairs from your beard without causing it to look like you shaved really, really badly.

New piercings have this deLIGHTful way of reminding you they’re there, mainly by catching on clothes, bedsheets, shower accoutrements, etc. Ouch. Though they’re doing quite well this time around, all things considered.

Email outage at work may be cyber attack from a foreign gubmint, not that the CIO’s staff is saying much about it right now.

The older guy wants a new agency to deal with the financial crisis. And his is supposed to be the party of small government? How about we just empower the ones we have now to actually to their jobs instead?

Dinner “date” tonight (though not sure how much of a date it is, hence the quotes). Someone I’ve known, off and on, for years now, but our contact is usually fairly sporadic.

Limited email today. My inbox at work hasn’t looked that good since, oh, early February 2004 (i.e., right after I started there)? Evidently we had a “catastrophic cascading hardware failure” in our network stuff which killed off all email access. Whee! Still feel sorry for the CIO types. Explaining this all to management will not be fun. Especially since as of now we still have no crackberry service.

The peanut thing in the slow-cooker worked pretty well. I added water, thinking there wasn’t enough liquid, but it seems there actually was, after the veggies sweat out and shrunk down. So it was “stewier” than expected, but still good. It’s definitely been worth it to have dinner waiting for me when I get home. Now I have a bunch in the freezer for later, again, easier than trying to come up with fresh food every evening, and better than processed stuff as well.

Otherwise more splicer killing in Bioshock, and now it’s zombie movie time, before I crash.

I will say this about the economic news: at least it’s stopped people from commenting on the other inanities which the two campaigns keep spitting out. Though I’d not wish this nonsense on us any day of the week. Re-regulate the markets, tax the hell out of the salaries these fuckers made while screwing the rest of us over and bringing ‘value’ to their companies (which are now defaulting on everything they did), and to the extent necessary, let the market ‘correct’ their actions without bailing their asses out. They so love the market, then live by its rules and don’t expect the rest of us to bail out your poor choices.

I feel very, very sorry for our IT folks today. Our network connections (email, internal drives) went down sometime right after lunch, and stayed down all day (and, from the lack of email on my work crackberry tonight, looks to still be down). Not fun, and I’m sure they were sweating buckets trying to get it all back up.

In the meantime, with no access to pretty much anything I need to actually write things, I worked for a brief while on a presentation I have to give next Friday (before that program seized up and refused to play nice, thankfully after I’d saved my work to the desktop), and then I ended up leaving early along with most of my coworkers since there wasn’t a hell of a lot we could do. I played a lot of Bioshock once I got home (needed to just kill time & monters), and enjoyed the fruits of the slow-cooker’s labor all day, a garlicky chicken stew, which needed a touch more salt and a lot more garlic; eight cloves was not enough to make something ‘garlicky’ in my book.

Cleaned up the slow-cooker and prepped veggies for another batch of stew tomorrow, this time a peanut sauce, after I’d bagged up today’s stew for the freezer. Saved one serving for tomorrow’s lunch.

Finally updated WordPress this evening, both on the main CountFour home page and on the /legalmoose site. Got tired of the constant “a new version is out, update today!” warnings that have been there for a while now. Also popped in some more plug-ins, to make viewing the site friendlier for mobile browsers (thank you for that example, Brian), and to be truly obnoxious and make Twitter go off when I post new things here as well (thank you Brian and Fredo). Put in a new cross-poster for LJ which seems to work better than it had before (since my preferred one stopped working a couple of iterations of WP ago), even if the text box is a bit much. I suspect that’s editable, but I’m not going to worry about it tonight.

And with that, I’m off to bed.

Caught up on bills today, and worked through a backlog of mail and magazines (mostly by just tossing the unread magazines since it was highly unlikely I’d actually read the back issues now). Cleaned some in the process, clearing off the couch and the dining table for the first time in a while. Unboxed the new oven and microwave, in hopes the maintenance folks will be able to get to them this week or next (and in any case they look better without the huge boxes around them now), provided we can connect on the phone soon. And actually did some work (for the BGA) today as well.

Otherwise the day was pretty blue for me. Today was the Nation’s Triathlon, which was to be my last race this season, and what I hoped would be the capping race to what started out as a pretty good darned season. As it was, I couldn’t even bring myself to go down to watch it, or do any of the club events surrounding the event. The fact that I can’t run has weighed very heavily on me this year, and it’s not been pretty, nor very easy to deal with. I miss it, a lot. I didn’t realize how much it affected my entire being to be able to get out and just run. The fact that the lack of running has been the fault of fairly consistent pain in my right foot (which just brings the fact to the fore on a daily basis) contributes to this, I’m sure.

The foot’s actually been more sore, which the aftercare guidelines says is normal for the first couple of weeks after the zapping. Hopefully it’ll get better as I get closer to the follow-up appointment on the 3rd, I’m really getting tired of having pain when I get up in the morning and take that first step (or if I end up walking a bit too much during the day, which is pretty much every day for me).

Anyway, what will happen will happen, and I’ll keep working with the podiatrist until the foot’s back to normal, but in the meantime I’m not much motivated for tri stuff.

Oh, and I finally withdrew formally from the IM race in November, too, so I can get the minimal refund they’ll send for it. Much sadness there, I really wanted to finally do one of those and I thought this was going to be the year for it. Guess not.

Well, the foot is doing better. The ankle finally went down, and stopped being sore. The bottom of the foot hasn’t really been sore, though I had a twinge this morning after not wearing the night brace last night.

Work has started to pick up now that we’re fully into the last month of the federal fiscal year. It’s going to be nuts until early to mid-October, but that’s the norm for me. We’re doing drafting assistance like crazy for the CR that’s coming up in October. Still not sure how long the thing will be for, probably at least 3 months, but it depends on when and if Congress wants to come back for a lame duck session to pass real appropriation bills or just fund the gubmint through to after the inauguration. This is no way to run a government, but it’s what we’ve got.

I’ll write up the last bit of the trip to SF this weekend, promise, but first a foot update.

Got myself zapped yesterday afternoon at my podiatrist’s office. The worst part of the whole procedure was getting anesthetized by the doc, since he had to jab a needle in either side of my ankle to get to the nerves there and numb the bottom of the foot completely without affecting the rest of the foot. The inside took a while, where he found the outside right as he stuck the needle in. Regardless, I was pretty sore today from the jabbing around inside. I was especially annoyed at the “this should last for about an hour” when I was still mostly numb at midnight when I finally went to bed. Was back to normal this morning, aside from being very, very sore around the ankle.

The zapping itself was easy, I just sat there (and knitted) while the machine send sound waves into my foot, and the technician made sure my foot stayed in place for it. Not exactly exciting, which was fine by me.

Was slow going this morning, and I actually ended up leaving work a bit early today as well. Got a little nauseous, and had a nasty headache. Couldn’t take anything for the headache because the aftercare says no anti-inflammatories for the next month if they can be avoided. Part of the ESWT is to induce inflammation so the body will heal the foot, so negating that would be bad. So I left early and came home to do laundry. Well, came home after I got a replacement iPhone for the one I dropped while in SF and cracked the screen on. But that’s for the next update.

Arrived at SFO with no hiccups. We did have one weird wing dip & over-correction coming in over the Bay, but otherwise the flight was quite nice. Got an exit row seat on the aisle, and managed to get 2/3 of the way through another hat (navy this time) before we touched down.

It’s somewhere in the low 90s here in Oakland where I’m staying with Dean, which actually means it’s warmer here than it has been in DC for pretty much the entire month of August. Hanging out shirtless on the deck has been nice, as was the much-needed post-lunch nap.

We’re debating options for this evening, but I expect to see my friend Mark tomorrow for breakfast, then catch Ray to hang out some as well. Rice is out of town, but there are certain other people whom I shall have to take more aggressive measures to bug soon if I’m to catch them. Not to mention someone else who is here visiting. And of course my lone family member who’s on this side of the planet. I think a good night out at a bar or two tomorrow is in order!

Chatted briefly with my parents. I forgot to tell them I was going out of town. Whoops. Was fun to chat with them about the job search stuff and catch them up on how that’s going.

Until then, we’re going to hunt down some food, and perhaps a bar later this evening.

Got myself packed, just about ready to head out the door for SF this weekend. As usual I packed, unpacked, packed more, unpacked more, etc. Did remember to bring a light jacket this time, so hopefully I won’t need to buy the usual tourist sweatshirt.

4 a.m. will come all too soon, but that’s needed to get to Dulles on time tomorrow (7 a.m. flight). Looking forward to the escape, and catching those folks I can catch while I’m there. Most of all I’m looking forward to completely unstructured time away from home, without my parental units, and without worrying about a race. Pure vacation, something I’ve not done in far too long (years?).

Should be fun.