Unmitigated Disaster...

This week has been just ridiculous. Simply absurd.

Last Sunday afternoon I left for Roswell, NM, yet again, because my customer "didn't have time" to install the latest version of our software. I was there for less than 24 hours. I landed at 8:00 pm Sunday and left on the last flight out at 3:45 pm Monday. I sat down at their computer at 7:00 am Monday, installed the latest version, and it worked without a hitch. I was so mad about being there that I couldn't even be excited that it worked. After all, I had spent days and days in our testing lab making sure it worked, but they couldn't even bother to install it to test it themselves.

When I got back, I had three days to write some code for a HD video capture card (it was supposed to be more, but I wasted all that time getting ready for and traveling to Roswell). In this case, the capture card came with a software development kit (SDK) from the manufacturer that we had to pay 5000 bucks to use. For 5000 bucks, I figured that it would probably be the easiest thing I'd ever done. Well, the SDK consisted of about 40 pages of documentation and about a dozen sample applications -- none of which came close to doing the very simple thing I needed. On top of that, the sample applications very devoid of any useful comments. The comments that were included said things like, "//bill was too lazy to fix this, so I'm going to hack around it too", and my personal favorite, "//NOTE: convert ignored for now do [sic] to excessive laziness."

It took 3 twelve hour days to get it figured out. Talk about cutting it to the wire. On Friday afternoon, the co-worker who needed the capture card stuff spent the afternoon in my office as we integrated his code with mine. He left at 6:00. I left at 10:00. Enough said about that.

And then, something not about work at all. This afternoon, I decided to fix my bathroom sink. About a year ago, the puller that raises and lowers the drain stopper stopped working. In my own extreme laziness, I just pulled out the stopper altogether and have been operating without it for about a year. Not a bad deal, really, except that I've dropped a lot of pills down that drain that I might have been able to rescue. I'm guessing the fish downstream of me are well medicated.

So, for whatever reason, I picked this afternoon to fix the stopper-puller-thingy. I remove all the junk from underneath the sink. I fiddle with the stopper mechanism for about 30 minutes, and then it's off to Lowe's. I find the part I need. I buy said part and return home. At home, said part does not work with my old drain stopper. "Universal" my eye. Shoot. I go to Dick's Hardware (yes, it's really called that), and find another stopper. I buy said stopper. This one works. Whew.

I am reassembling the sink drain, specifically the p-trap, when one of the pipes breaks. This isn't cheap plastic crap people, it's chrome plated galvanized drain pipe, and it cracks and splits apart as I am tightening the connectors. Sigh. As sewer gases waft out the open drain pipe, I realize that I have to go to Lowe's again. In contrast to the stopper, which you can live without, the sink is basically unusable if the drain isn't hooked up, and I'm going to need to buy a new p-trap.

Fortunately, the new p-trap installed without incident. I'm still not sure it was worth it, though. Why is it a universal law of home repair that every task will require at least 3 trips to the hardware store? Well, I hope the world sleeps better knowing that I now have a functioning drain stopper puller thingy.

Up In The Air

Boy, what a debacle this week has been:

Wednesday:

• Boss walks into my office at 1:30 PM. "I know you're busy, but can you travel to Akron Ohio?"
• "When?"
• "Today."
• "Today? They're two hours ahead of us. That means I need to be on a plane, like, now..."
• "True..."
• I'm in Layton at this point, so I race home, pack a bag, and haul to the airport. I get all the way to the TSA check in when I realize that I don't have my wallet. So, I run back out to the parking garage and somehow, amazingly make the flight.
  

Thursday:

• My flight from Atlanta to Akron leaves at 8:30 AM. I get to work around lunchtime in Akron, and spend my day working in a freezing cold aircraft hangar.
• There are basically no flights back home, so I'm booked on a 6:30 AM flight Friday morning, but the folks I'm working with want me to come back in Friday, which I decided I should probably do.

Friday:

• Another day in the freezing hangar. I was supposed to fly home early that Morning, so the secretary does her best to get me rescheduled to leave that night. Well, the east cost is buried in snow, and the travel system is a total mess across the board. The best they can do is to move my flight to Saturday morning.

Saturday:

• I wake up in a panic at 5:50 AM, 30 minutes before my flight. Luckily, I checked in the night before, and I make it to the airport with enough time, I hope, to make the flight. Except there's one problem. Atlanta was "buried" in three inches of snow, and both flights to Atlanta that day were canceled. I get my rental car back, get my hotel room back, and spend most of the day catching up on the sleep I missed.

Sunday:

• Not wanting a repeat of yesterday's near miss, I wake up at 4:50 (ungh!) I get to the airport promptly at 5:40. (I remember, I checked.) I get to the check in kiosk, and it won't let me check-in. WTH? I look at my itinerary, and I realize, with total dread and disbelief, that the Sunday flight leaves 16 minutes earlier than the Saturday flight had been scheduled to leave that day before. Of course, if I had checked in earlier, that wouldn't have been a problem -- one thing, though, the agent who rebooked me the day before had told me check in with him in person. Bah, if only I hadn't listened.
• Well, I try to make a gamble. I have a copy of Saturday's boarding pass. I figure that if I can get through security somehow, they might still be boarding (It's 5:55 now.) Well, in what is surely a sign of the competence of TSA, my boarding pass from the previous day totally gets me through somehow. I get to the gate, but just like the ticket counter, NO ONE IS THERE. (What airline is this?) After about 10 minutes, someone finally wanders by. I milk my situation for all it's worth, and they get me rebooked, With only one extra stop now.

So, there you go, a total mess. Some of it caused by the airline, some of it because of the weather, and some of it, my own fault (though I still really think that airlines need to list the check-in time on the itinerary instead of the flight time - especially if no one is at the gate.)

Hopefully I'll be home sometime today. Happy Valentine's Day all!

Sponge

I'm a sponge. No, not that nearly lifeless sea floor inhabitant (though there are similarities, I suppose), but a figurative sponge. I remember stuff. Tons of stuff. Stuff not really worth remembering. For example, today I read an article on the different types of electrical outlets around the world. And I know that some years from now, in some random conversation, I'm going to remember that it's only North America and Japan that use 110V-60Hz power. And people are going to look at me funny for knowing that.

It's my curse.

Of course, you're saying, it's really not that bad. In fact, it could probably be a talent. Well, I suppose you're right. But you see, I don't seem to have much control over what I remember. You'd think I'd never lose my keys or leave the milk out on the counter over night, but I do that kind of stuff all the time. There's no assurance that what I remember is going to be useful in anyway.

But the real problem is when I'm NOT supposed to remember stuff but I do anyway. It happened a month or two ago at a party. This girl walked past and I said, "Hi Abby!" She looked at me suspiciously and said, "How do you know my name?" At which point I had to explain that I wasn't, in fact, some sort of stalker, but that several years before we had lived in the same apartment complex in Logan. We only talked a handful of times back then, but for some reason, I remembered her name. What I didn't realize though, was that I wasn't supposed to remember her name. Instead, I should have pretended that she looked somewhat familiar, and asked if she went to Utah Sate then if she lived in the complex, and then me recognizing her wouldn't have been weird at all.

And the situation is totally exacerbated by Facebook and Twitter and blogs. Now people are posting all sorts of things online about themselves. And if I happen to read it, it may just stick in there, connect itself with other random facts, and tumble out of my mouth. So, I have to remember to filter what I remember. And I still can't find my keys.

Ward Ski Night

Being a single Mormon in Utah has its share of peculiarities above and beyond the general oddities of LDS life. Take, as example, the church sponsored and oddly named activities in which we are expected to participate. Activities such as "linger longer", "ward prayer", and "etiquette dinners" are cleverly engineered to get us together so that we can merrily and married-ly copulate and torture a new generation of young Mormons with unrealistic expectations.

Tonight, my ward is engaging in just such activity; the ward ski night. And I, suffering from a minor cold and severe writers' itch, am here to mock it. Like so many church activities, ward ski night seems full of promise but is in fact fraught with peril. We live in Utah, home to the greatest snow on earth, and so it seems serendipitous that we are able to gather at a local ski resort one or two nights each winter with our ward-mates. Surely this is the perfect recipe for the Mormon marriage martini: one measure ward boys, one measure ward girls, shaken well with food, physical activity, and a "For the Beauty of the Earth" moment in all of nature's frozen splendor.

With that combination, surely the engagements will start sprouting up. But after years of Ward Ski Nights, this is the reality:

• Many people don't know how to ski, even in a place like Utah. While this travesty warrants another separate post, it also has the odd side effect of making it so that very few people actual ski at Ward Ski Night. It all comes down to this: if you give a skier a choice between skiing on a bitterly cold night or watching non-skiers learning to ski, they will probably opt for watching the non-skiers learn to ski -- not surprisingly, watching beginners fumble about on 6 foot planks is far more entertaining that skiing in the cold dark.
  

• Night skiing is cold. Seriously people, IT'S COLD. Right now it's 6 degrees on the mountain. (I am not making that up.) And guess what? Girls don't like cold generally. They especially don't like the snotty noses and the freeze dried mascara tears that result from such tundra like temperatures. And, on the male side, night skiing requires cold weather foods like chili, stew and sloppy joe's, which may be among the pantheon of Mormon and Scout Camp foods, but they certainly raise intestinal issues in mixed company, particularly if the resort area is location up some winding canyon road.

• Finally, Skiing isn't really much of a couple's activity. It's at least as mutually torturous as it is mutually edifying. Sure, there may be moments of cuddling on the lift (depending on sloppy joe consumption), but what about the ride down? Odds are that one person will be much better than the other person, so the slow person worries about slowing down the fast person, while the fast person doesn't want to seem insensitive by going too fast. Or, alternatively the beginner silently curses the intermediate for depositing them on the top of K2 with the admonition, "It's not that bad...", while the intermediate mentally screams, "What is SO HARD about the the making a pizza/french fry?" Don't believe me? Two weeks ago, I was riding a lift at the Canyons with an older gentleman and his recently engaged son. They were talking about the mechanics of skiing as a married couple, when the father wisely counseled, "When you're married, you can't just tell her to meet you at the lodge at 4:30. That'll get you in trouble. That's also why the happiest day of my life was when your mother decided she didn't want to ski anymore."
  

So, I tip my glass for another Ward Ski Night and bid it farewell till next year. I can't wait for the Ward Etiquette Ski Linger Longer Auction.

Irony Redux

The day that I canceled-my-credit-cards-just-hours-before-my-wallet-was-returned had even more ironic surprises for me. That morning, out of concern for the lost wallet and identity theft (or at least having to explain to some credit card company employee that I did not, in fact, buy a go cart, a goat, 20 inch rims for my Honda, or whatever it is that identity thieves buy), I woke up early, earlier than that night's sleep should have allowed. Given my fatigue, I threw a warm can of Dr. Pepper from the pantry into the freezer's ice bin. The goal was rapid cooling, so that when I left for work, the can would be prepped for the mid-commute consumption. I was well aware of the potential consequences.

In case you have never frozen your favorite canned and carbonated beverage, let me explain the physics* involved. First Fact: Water is magic. It expands when it freezes. This expansion is what makes ice float. Second Fact: The main ingredient of any soft drink is water. Q.E.D: when you freeze a can of soda, the can will expand. Since the contents are already under the pressure of carbonation...viola, the can may well explode in an icy inferno.

I know this. I've done this. I've gleefully watched it happen to the unsuspecting. I specifically told myself, when I put the can in the freezer, that I needed to remove it before I left for work, or the consequences would be dire.

Imagine my shock and self loathing, then, when I was greeted with the following site when I returned home that night:

Yes, gentle reader. I am an idiot. What you see is indeed frozen Dr. Pepper sprayed everywhere. And I mean EVERY-WHERE: in the gears of the ice maker, all over the frozen vegetables, and the ice cream in the door. As you can see, the poor ice maker took the brunt of it.

And this is what happened to the can:

To be honest, the whole situation was so hilarious that I couldn't even be mad, even though it took probably half an hour to chisel frozen soft drink from my freezer walls. Why wasn't I mad? First: I knew better, and remembered that I knew better, but forgot anyway. And second, how can you be mad at physics? The outcome was inevitable. It's like being mad at gravity. There's no point. And, look at what happened to the can! Isn't that COOL?



*Yes, I oversimplified. If you can endure some nerdiness, here's some thought into exactly what happened with the can.

WARNING: SCIENCE FOLLOWS

At first, I was surprised that the can exploded quite so violently and stuck to the walls. I mean, if you freeze a bottle of water, it doesn't explode, it just distends. The key, I think, lies in the combination of sweeteners and carbonation in the soda. The sweeteners lower the freezing point of the water, just like anti-freeze. This means that the can must cool below 32 degrees before much expansion will occur. Most freezers are at 0 F or colder, so no big deal there. What this means, though, is that the liquid is super cold when the can ruptures. When the can finally does rupture from expansion, the carbon dioxide that is dissolved in the water (the carbonation) quickly "boils" out of the water. The CO2 is very anxious to escape because of the additional pressure of expansion. It is this rapid release of gas that sprays the soda everywhere. Finally, as the C02 evaporates, it takes energy with it, leaving the soda even colder than it was in the can. This means that the soda hits the freezer walls as a nearly frozen slush, explaining the artful and rock hard Dr. Pepper all over the freezer.

Irony

Ever have a string of bad luck? You know, those times when the fates combine and life just gets weird? Now, I'm not talking about truly bad stuff -- that kind of stuff is just hard. What I'm talking about are the random things that are equal parts irritant and divine humor.

My latest bought started last Tuesday at work. Being last to leave, it was up to me to lock up. I had just armed the door when I realized that my wallet was still on the desk. The alarm system gives you a minute from the time its armed until the door needs to be locked. For that minute, it beeps incessantly like a movie bomb, which really added to the suspense as I rushed back to get the wallet. But I made it! Door locked and wallet retrieved, all without the security guards dispatched.

Several hours later though, I couldn't find the wallet I'd pseudo-heroically retrieved. I didn't think much of it, since wallets usually go AWOL for a few hours at a time, all the time. But Wednesday morning, wallet still missing, I began to wonder if I had imagined the scene from the day before. At work, I still couldn't find the wallet, and after two hours of searching, I decided to face facts that somewhere in the 10 feet from the door and the car, I'd lost it. Resigning myself to fate, I made the call to cancel my cards, and realized that for the next 3 to 5 days, I'd be trying to survive without plastic.

On the phone with the banks, I had this surreal sense that my wallet would be returned only if I canceled my cards. You may think I'm a pessimist, but I'd prefer to think that I have a highly developed sense of irony. Well, my ironic sense was completed vindicated when, less than two hours later, some random guy walked in off the street with my wallet. Contents completely intact.

Oh well, such is life. I guess I'll have to remember how to write a check.

A question to my readers. Should I have given some cash or other reward to the person that returned my wallet? What would you have done?

The Vomit Comet

There we were, pulled over on the side of I-15 on that clear and starry Idaho night, (it really was an amazing view), with spew everywhere and on everything. Fortunately, it was so frigidly cold that my nose utterly froze, making it possible for me to suppress my gag reflex as we went about the unfortunate business of cleaning my car. You'd think I'd be more bothered by this whole thing, but, to be honest, I had nothing but sympathy for my sister. There are few things worse than throwing up. Combine that with throwing up in an enclosed space, all over your clothes/brother's car, when you're supposed to be on plane in 4 hours, and you easily have the trifecta of vomiting.

It's times like these that I am simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by the digestive processes (or lack thereof) of the human body as well as the sheer volume of your average stomach. How is it that certain foods (hot dogs, anyone?) can exit the stomach looking pretty much the same as when they entered? In this case, it was garden salad and thousand island dressing. The thing is, I was sitting next to my sister when she ate that salad six hours earlier. It was a very small salad, but it had easily tripled in volume. I'm also pretty sure that carrots are indigestible.

In the end, it cleaned up moderately well. (Note to self, keep paper towels in car at ALL TIMES.) The rest of the ride home was a little awkward/smelly, as she sat in the back while I sat next to the thousand island dressing stain. I tried to cover up the smell with a vanilla tree I had stashed in the glove box, but resultant odor was only a marginal improvement. Through a little cajoling and three calls to Delta, she was able to get her flight changed. So, she got to crash at my house and get a good night's rest instead of jetting across the country in what would have certainly been the most uncomfortable flight in history as the stomach flu made it's inevitable transition into two-ended intestinal torture.

In the end, I'm glad I was there. Had she been alone, or gotten sick on the plane, that would have been much worse. And as for the car, I let the guys at the detail shop take care of my fry sauce colored seat. Let's just say that the seat and mats were still wonderfully wet and pungent when I delivered the car to them the next day.

New Years

The transition from 2007-2008 is one that will go down in infamy. I'm moderately surprised by this; New Years is traditionally one of the most lackluster holidays. Even holidays that offer zero vacation time (like Halloween) easily trump New Years. In general, I wonder if instead of comparing New Years to Christmas or Thanksgiving, we should compare it to something like Arbor Day to keep our expectations more realistic. At least then you'd be able to say, "Yeah, that was a great New Years -- almost as good as the Flag Day of '99."

But, let's face it, the best New Years you ever celebrated wasn't that much better than the worst New Years you've celebrated. When you're young, you were so excited to stay up late and eat junk food that you tired yourself out well before the ball dropped. And when you get old, you're so tired that you celebrate New Years in EST even though you live in MST. And of course, let us not forget that News Years is second only to birthdays in marking the relentless march of time, just without the presents.

So, how do you celebrate a day such as this? Do you go to a dance? Ick. To a party? How passé. If you do go to these places, you'll inevitable find that one third of the people there are hooked up and anticipating that triumphant New Years kiss; the other third are looking for someone (anyone) for that New Years kiss; and the other third don't know why they are there (in the case of a Mormon party), or just realized that they were only invited to be designated drivers.

That's why I celebrate with the family every year. They've never let me down. Dad slices up the Pepperidge farm beef stick from his stocking, mom makes a veggie tray with enough olives to cover our fingertips, and the sparkling cider flows freely, while we bicker our way through the dice game, Settler's of Catan, Uno, and Scrabble.

This year, however, was a little different. I arrived home the day before New Year's Eve to find the family in various stages of illness. A virulent stomach flu was ravaging the clan. Yet, we soldiered on with our dry toast, green jello, and gallons of sprite, and ended up having a good time in spite of ourselves.

And all was well until the evening of the first day of 2008, when I, the healthy one, was attacked by 2007 while driving home from the holiday. It was terrorism in it's worse form: sudden, unexpected, and demoralizing. It was then, at 85 MPH, on that frigid and clear winter night, somewhere near the Idaho/Utah border, that my sister ralphed ALL OVER the passenger side of my car.

Happy New Year! (to be continued...)

We meet again Trebek!

I've been thinking today about my brain -- about all the stuff that's crammed in there. For example, I know where the word stiletto comes from, the meaning of quixotic, and what a Stradivarius is. I also know all kinds of gee whiz science things like why the sky is blue, why water expands when it freezes, and why you can't ice skate when it's very cold. I know weird medical things, like how MRIs, CTs, and SSRIs work. I also have the typical manly knowledge, like the difference between carburetors and fuel injection, 2 stroke versus 4 stroke, and why you want a limited slip differential. I also do okay when it comes to literature: I can quote a little bit of Dante, Dickens, and Demosthenes. I've read Austen, as well as Aeschylus and Asimov. I can also quote, at length, parts of the Princess Bride, Top Gun, Sneakers, So I Married an Axe Murderer, and several SNL skits. Give me an actor, and the odds are good that I'll be able to name at least one movie that they've been in before.

Now, before you shake your head in disgust, please know that I'm not trying to paint myself as a Renaissance man. Just knowing this random stuff doesn't mean that I'm actually intelligent (or would be successful at Jeopardy, as my mom thinks), but it may certainly give that illusion.

There is a very real irony in what we call intelligence, for in the last three months, I have not once, but twice, left my check card in the ATM and driven away without it. So much for being smart.

Unrequited Love

A friend and I have been exchanging e-mail lately about our experiences with “unrequited love.” If you don’t know about unrequited love, then you’re not old enough to read this blog. Bookmark this page and come back in a year or two.

Unrequited love stings unexpectedly, well after you thought you had moved on. A scent, a song, or an old friend’s innocuous question can resurrect memories of what might have been. You carry those memories like badges of honor, passport stamps of the places your heart has been. Their dull ache is as comfortable as it is painful, a reminder of how good things can be.

So, as bittersweet as a love unrequited can be, I wouldn’t wish my memories away. How else will I know what I’m looking for? And how else will I recognize when I've found it?

Wooter's Remorse

Do you Woot? I woot. A lot.

In case you weren't aware, woot is a website that sells one item per day, every day. Every midnight (PST), a new item is listed for sale. When that item sells out, there's nothing to buy until the next day at midnight. You're thinking to yourself, what's the point of that? Well, the items are usually heavily discounted, frequently some piece of technology, and everything ships for $5.00, even 200 pound HDTVs. It's an ingenious scheme on so many levels; from the pithy and hilarious product descriptions, to the weekly Photoshop contest.

Frankly, I don't know why I'm drawn to it, but I'm an addict. I'm conditioned so that every night at 11:00 pm (I'm in MST) , I feel this need to go online and check tonight's Woot. Frequently, items will sell out in a matter of seconds, while some crap never does. Because you never know what tonight's woot will be, and if it will be in high demand, you feel compelled to be right there at the computer, clicking refresh until the next tantalizing item is listed.

I really shouldn't like woot. It promotes, and is even modeled on, everything I hate about consumerism. They count on our appetite for the latest and greatest gadgets, and they rely on the fact that most people will buy something they really don't need as long as it's cheap enough and there's a pretense of scarcity.

As a result of my bizzare woot compulsion, I am also frequently a victim of wooter's remorse. This happens after you buy a woot, and you realize that you don't really need, want, or have room for whatever the thing is.

Of the 20 item's I've bought from woot in the last 2 years, here are some of the worst:

Yes, I actually bought three of these things. It's called a leak frog. I grew up in a house where interior flooding always seemed imminent due to bitterly cold winters, malfunctioning toilets, or overflowing water softeners. It never occurred to me that these conditions weren't universal to all homes, but that we were the victim of DIY plumbing. Plus, the red eyes just look creepy.

I bought one of these things on the left. It's a combination vacuum mop thingy. I hate mopping because of the time it takes to do it right. This gadget did not help. It mostly squirts watery floor cleaner about.

I bought 2 pair of these headphones. I honestly thought that I didn't care that much about color, I just wanted some behind the ear headphones. Well, it turns out I do care about color. Lime green is just not a suitable color for most things. These headphones scream "Star Trek Nerd" in a place where you might just see a spandex wearing hottie.

So, this is really a partial list. I probably didn't really need half of the stuff I've bought on Woot.
And my latest woot? A GPS for the car. I get lost ALL the time, so this should be a good purchase.

Cankles?

I have a cankle (calf + ankle = cankle). It happened about 1000 yards from the campground at Havasupai. I was 10 miles into a 10.5 mile hike through a canyon on the southern rim of the Grand Canyon with 40 pounds of camping gear on my back, when I took one wrong step and rolled my left ankle. The irony is dizzying. Sometimes I think my cankle is mocking me.



Once your laughter has subsided, check out my album of Havasupai photos. Even considering the cankle, it was one of the most amazing places I have ever been.

Falling in the shower is so embarrasing!

I'm not sure there's anything more embarrassing than falling in the shower. One minute you're lathering up, singing, and enjoying the magic of the hot water and steam, and the next thing you know, you're on your ass on the cold tile floor, wrapped in the clingy wet shower curtain that you vainly clutched on your way down. As I lay there, wedged between the tub and the toilet, legs in the air, awash in polyurethane sheet, all I could thing of was, "I'm not done. The shower ritual isn't over yet."

And it's true! In this process of showering, I can't just admit defeat, towel off, and change into my clothes -- I'm still covered in soap and now somewhat cold. Instead, I have to get back into porcelain container that had so rudely ejected me just minutes before. So, I propped up the shower curtain and climbed back into the shower. With my serenity shattered, I found the remainder of the shower to be much less soothing.

I think I'm going to have to get some of those rough pads that adhere to the bottom of the shower. It's either that, or resort to baths.