We avoided Thursday by calling it our Friday. (We're conspiring, as a team, to wear Hawaiian shirts on Thursdays to rub it in that it's our Friday. We'll look like such complete dorks.) Friday, it caught up with us. Well, with me. I went into the office to schedule the garbage disposal being taken care of, and the office lady said that she'd noticed Cat. "Do we have to do anything special for that?" I asked. It turns out yes. $200 pet deposit; $10 pet rent/month. We can go in chunks on the pet deposit. I'm going to get back with them and see if we can forgo the pet rent since the pet is now no longer with us; it's perfectly fair for them to insist on the pet deposit since they don't know what kind of damage the cat has already done. (Little to none, I think, but they don't know that.) It won't be a hardship to come up with that, not with the new job, but it's still inconvenient. We had already decided that Friday was going to be the day, but I was wondering if we couldn't stretch it out a little more. That little interview made it plain to me that no, we could not stretch it out any more.
We had to run some errands.
hcolleen needed ink and a mouse, so we wound up at Fry's Electronics. She was wandering around pricing laptops, and I was wandering around looking at desktops and noting with dismay that each and every one of them, from the high-end gaming systems on down to the $300 computers intended for someone's grandparents, all had Windows Vista. Somehow or other, this led to us walking out of the store with their cheapest case, a decent motherboard, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM, a decent graphics card, a DVD burner, and .75 terabytes worth of hard drive. And no ink. hcolleen spent a cheerful afternoon putting them together, with intermittent swearing. First item on the agenda for upgrades: either find enough screws for that motherboard and hope that makes it sit right, or find some way of making it talk to the case better, or a new case. The lovely little TV tuner card that ubiquity's household had to spare would fit just fine in the motherboard, but it doesn't want to seat all the way because there's case in the way. Frustrating. I will have to compare stats with Darkside later, and see whose is bigger. (Even though his is his dad's.) I've worked with Red Hat before, and liked it, so that may be the flavor of the month. I think the machine says its name is Madman. I could be mistaken, though.
Called Darkside. Had about 50 minutes of good solid conversation, with bonus giggling and bad jokes. Thanked him for being such a good best friend. He's still of the opinion that he's a terrible best friend. Let him know that it would not kill him to e-mail me once in a while. He claimed that he does. I scoffed. "I do! It's just that there haven't been any blue moons lately." I must introduce him to Skippy's List. I related the story of the squid pie. There was cackling. All that system that can play all those computer games that have been going unplayed ... and no time to play them in! Frustrating!
Dawn called. It was good to hear from her again. (Talked to
amberfox on I think Thursday night; that was a good gossip session as well.) She needs to call ralmathon back. She's joining in the brigade that would like to send their wishes of effective justice in the direction of Hermione-cat's erstwhile quasi-Human. Saturday saw me out of bed before 8am. Amazing. There was laundry. There was mending. (Friday, there was vacuuming.) I need to wind up another bobbin of black thread, because this one has run out. I also need to fix my light blue blanket. If I keep on with the mending as it happens, soon I won't have to do much of it, because all the disasters waiting to happen will have happened and been fixed. I took cans to stuff in the clanking machine;
hcolleen wandered over to the computer shop to inquire after her ailing laptop, it of the long and complex repair history. (Glue. Angstloving Frank-tipping GLUE used to "fix" a broken hinge on a laptop.) It turned right on for the tech, of course. Fortunately, hcolleen has established a reputation for bringing in only sufficiently complex problems that it was diagnosed as technitis rather than end-user error. It would later be established that the laptop's screen must be within a certain range of angles in order to start up. Anime Afternoon featured some more episodes of that series where the guy travels back and forth between worlds by means of water, and then the first episode of Kimi Wa Petto.
hcolleen had introduced me to the first episode of that before. myrrhianna was giggling. A lot. We all were. Such good crack this is. There was a proposal for Organ Stop Pizza tomorrow night after work, but I have work after that. I don't want to overbook us. I proposed next Saturday, and starting the anime thing early and then going. Tuesday would be a bad plan because Wednesday follows it.
I keep expecting to see Hermione-cat where she has come to always be. I mistook my purse for her. ...I wouldn't feel right if it were easy to adjust. I've been prohibited from wallowing in anguish over this, but I think I'm within my rights to be upset as things remind me. It hasn't taken over my life (not like the grief that we try not to mention, the one that hit in February '05) but it's in and out. It means the world to me that they're going to get her checked out. I have a bright red candle lit for her and her chances, one of the ones that I call in my head "firecracker candles".
I finished reading Four and Twenty Blackbirds. It was a good read. I have a small stack of books to read. I've started packing some of the books in boxes, ones that I don't think I'll need between then and now. Eventually we'll be down to not much stuff around and more stuff in boxes, and then we'll move.
The saga of M and the rest of the writers group continues to grow. We value her creative presence in the group, but we do not value the choicer parts of her attitude, particularly not the parts where she has not yet realized the disparity between the way she insists upon being treated, and the way she treats others. The blanket hostility towards anything with XY chromosomes is not thrilling either. She has a social firewall against them that fails all of them right up front, and then makes exceptions for individual members of the class. This is what we call "discrimination", ladies and gentlemen, and it's just as ugly when it's reactive discrimination as it is when it's your garden-variety discrimination from the ruling elite.
Gods know I'm not perfect. None of us are. I just hope like fuck that I don't have a nasty gaping hole in my logic right out front in public like that one, and I hope I've treated my friends with enough courtesy that they'd prefer to let me know if they spot one rather than backing off and running away. I know I have my twitches and my preferences and my rude knee-jerk reactions, but I pray that if I've got a nasty prejudice it can stay inside my head where it belongs and not get loose to affect or infect more people. I've run into a few things that I've said and done that have appalled me in retrospect. I know I'll run into more. I fear it, but I know that unless I change myself, the world won't change around me.
I <3 our volunteer crew. I <3 my boss. I <3 our team spirit. I know I've been crying at the drop of a hat this weekend, but sometimes it makes me mist up.
Two things that I would like to point out: One, it is good to have people you can talk to in times of need. It is perhaps the most valuable thing someone can have, to know that at any time of day or night they are able to get in contact with someone who personally cares for their well-being not just from getting to know them as a person, but because they are a member of the team. Some people don't have families that stick together like that. Two, having contact information like your physical address in a private post in your journal has saved lives in the past and will save lives in the future. If someone should happen to be in voice chat with a friend, and they don't have that friend's full contact information, and that friend should suddenly start having a medical issue that means it's time to call an ambulance, who are you going to call? Where are you going to send that ambulance? Your friend is past being able to call 911 for themselves, and you don't know their address. I don't know about you, but I know who I'd call.
I e-mail myself my Daily Thoughts notepad file that I collect while I'm working the new job. There are some anecdotes from last week, but those can wait for tomorrow morning. I need sleep now.
