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The wonders of spring

Spring brings us many different things:

  1. A heatwave that only lasts one day but is amazingly hot. Opening the windows didn’t cool the house off yesterday because it was still hot out when I got home. So I actually turned the air conditioning temporarily, but by the time the house had cooled down, so had outside. Freakish.
  2. Spring cleaning. We had a party at the house on Saturday, so we needed to clean the middle floor. So of course, in order to get the middle floor clean, we had to make room for some of the stuff that was lying around, which meant cleaning other parts of the house to make room for it, and it kept chaining. The net effect was me reorganizing furniture in my room, buying a new bookshelf and DVD rack, gaining complete use of our kitchen table for the first time in years, seeing the patio floor again, and throwing away so much trash that we couldn’t park one of the cars in the garage over the weekend because the trash took up too much space.
  3. Birds. Graceful and beautiful when observed from a distance in your leisure time. However, they are neither when they are repeatedly running into my bedroom window at 6am every morning for the past week. Like clockwork, this stupid bird keeps flying into my window, waking me up, flying back to his branch or whatever, then flying into my window again for anywhere from two to fifteen minutes. I have no idea why, but it’s driving me crazy and making me all sleep deprived. And on Friday, it interrupted the song and dance number in my dream. With Neil Patrick Harris. I give no explanations for my subconscious.
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The world at a 90 degree angle

So, last week I had a pain/pressure in my left ear. I was pretty sure it was an outer ear infection, a.k.a. swimmer’s ear… but of course in order to get some sort of relief I had to go to the doctor. He confirmed that it was, in fact, what I thought, and prescribed an antibiotic anti-inflammatory ear drop. Hooray for having to pay full price for a 10 minute doctor’s visit and medication… but $110 total is worth it for being able to actually sleep through the night and not worry about it getting worse or something.

However, having to hold my head sideways for 5 to 10 minutes three times a day is an odd additional price to pay for this relief. At least it got better after a few days. Sadly, as it is an antibiotic, I have to keep taking it for a week even though there are no symptoms anymore.

In other news, I’m in the midst of reorganizing the furniture in my room. I removed the table and moved the dressers to the foot of the bed where the table was, now I have enough wall space for one, maybe two more bookshelves. Vertical storage is sort of a necessity now as I’m accumulating more and more books and other stuff. More bookshelves also means more tops of bookshelves to put Star Wars legos on, as I was already one bookshelf short.

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The post I keep forgetting to make…

… since last Friday.

I made it through passover this year, it was made easier when I realized that El Pollo Loco was fair game if I didn’t get tortillas and I got the correct sides.

It turns out I’m getting money back from the government this year. This was a welcome surprise.

Today is the last day of one of my coworkers, a fellow back-end engineer. He’s going to work at Gaia Online, in a weird twist of fate.

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Today’s random waking thought

Every once in a while I have the most random thing stuck in my head when I wake up in the morning. Most of the time I forget to post it but this is what I had this morning:

GPS driving directions in the Indianapolis 500. “At the next turn, turn left. Drive straight for 1 mile. At the next turn, turn left. Drive straight for 1 mile. At the next turn, turn left. Drive straight for 1 mile…”

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Wave motion

Driving through L.A. is always an excercise in frustration. The traffic does not follow rules of normal traffic, it bunches up and lets up and bunches up and lets up ad infinitum, which is probably more frustrating than just traffic all the way because every 10 minutes you get your hopes up that it’s over. I’m guessing it has something to do with the extremely aggressive tailgating “can’t let anyone in front of me so I zoom up to the car in front of me as fast as possible” behavior that most SoCal drivers have.

So besides downtown to the Orange County county line taking twice as long as I expected, the drive was mostly uneventful. There were just enough people on the road who understand how to drive a two-lane highway and only a handful who didn’t, but most of them were going faster than me so they just zoomed past in the passing lane while I was in the right lane.

My mom, stepdad and I went to an Islamic Chinese restaurant, which had a customer base of the ethnic type you’d expect. My parents aren’t used to being an ethnic minority in a place they go to. I’m used to it by now.

This is also your friendly reminder to go see Meet the Robinsons if you haven’t already. I haven’t seen it yet, I’m going now. But you see, this guy, who has the “Adapted by” credit happens to be my cousin. I mean first cousin, share grandparents type of cousin for all you out there who water down the meaning of the word “cousin.” This means he didn’t write much of the screenplay that made it into the final film, but he was responsible for the overreaching story. (The original book the movie is based on has no semblance of story, it’s just a picture book that introduces you to the guy’s wacky family.)

So somethings odd with the wireless here, so I’m having to do this on my mom’s computer, hopefully I can figure it out…

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Subvocal

I’ve noticed that people are somewhat polite around here, if you hold a door open for them, they’ll says “thanks.” The weird thing is that it’s become so common that the “thanks” is getting abbreviated and quiet and all you hear is “ks” so it sounds like a hiss of appreciation or something.

In other news, I’m going down to the O.C. for the weekend, driving down tomorrow and back on Tuesday. Hooray road trip!.

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So for the last week at lunch, the TV in the cafeteria has been showing the cricket world cup. Cricket, the game which Americans are genetically incapable of understanding. I know it has something to do with wickets and bowling and possibly the golden snitch. I just had to stare at it for a few minutes today to see if I could figure out what was happening. I’m even more confused than I was before.