Trip or Treat!

I really was going to hand out candy tonight. I even have a full bag left. And then, at the last minute, I realized that the entryway looks like this:

And this:

Whatever am I going to do with all the extra candy?

The Mother of Invention's Little Helper

Apparently Brandon had plans to use his level someday.

The Mother of Invention

The lock on the bedroom door was having issues today and couldn't be locked from the outside. When I expressed concerns about the cats getting in and messing with the freshly painted walls Brandon left it like this:

Yes, that's a gigantic level that is bungee corded to the handle.

Whatever works...

Write Out

Halloween is just around the corner, and though I haven't quite finished off all the candy I'd planned to give out to the non-existent trick-or-treaters that means there are only a few more days before the beginning of NaNoWriMo.

"The World Needs Your Novel" is pretty much the funniest lie I've ever heard, but I'll be working on my own 50,000 words along with a whole bunch of other people. In the past year or so I've made an effort to make it a more social thing because... why not? I've planned write-ins at the local coffee shop a few Saturdays and of course I was the only one to ever show up. All this is to say I have a history of leading the world's loneliest write-ins.

The county's NaNoWriMo municipal liaisons asked me if I'd be willing to continue doing write-ins during November for people in my fair city. I'm sure the vast majority of the people doing NaNoWriMo in this county are attached to the university ten miles away, but there are probably a couple in Woodland. I agreed. They were already having write-ins in Davis on Saturdays, so I agreed to move mine to Sundays to give people more options.

Then I looked at the NFL schedule and it turns out that there are two home games that I need to be working during November and they are both on Sundays.

So, yes, I may actually be hosting write-ins that absolutely nobody, not even me, attends.

Bow down before my awesome social skills!

Just Make It Pretty!

As part of my job I wrote a web site that includes the layout of a convention center. Apparently (and multiple people have told me this is true, so I sort of have to believe it) people pay money to join large crowds of idiots and visit both the Super Bowl trophy and some rings. Seriously. I despair for the human race.

Anyhow, the web site allows the engineers to monitor a bunch of things so they can make changes if something goes wrong. (Or at least, if something went wrong fifteen to twenty minutes ago -- it's not exactly real time...) It has colors and numbers and all sorts of things to make it useful. For monitoring, you understand.

Now my boss is much more concerned with aesthetics than I am. If I make a chart of some data it will be correctly labeled (with units!) and have useful axes. If he makes a chart of the same data it will be correctly labeled, have useful axes, use a soothing color scheme, and have a nice font. He has been known to call my charts ugly. I'd definitely use his charts if I had to do a presentation. On the other hand, both charts say the same thing, so who really cares? (Answer: he does.)

So when the engineers asked me to indicate on the convention center where the stupid trophy and rings would be, I added two labels. One said "trophy room". The other said "ring room". I thought that was the end of it... but no.

Boss: Can you make them icons? Put a picture of the trophy here and the ring there.

Me: There's no room. It will end up on top of the text. You know, the text that actually does something useful on the page.

Boss: Just move the text down a little bit.

Me: We can't put a picture of the ring on there. The Super Bowl ring has the winning team's logo on it, so we don't know what it will look like until after the game is over. (I googled this ahead of time -- I went into this argument prepared!)

(A five minute discussion follows about which team logo would annoy the top brass the most. Now there are six guys standing around talking about which team they hate the most. I reflect on the good fortune that I have no immediately available method of suicide.)

Boss: Just use a picture of a wedding ring.

Me: I'm not putting a picture of a wedding ring on there.

Boss: Engineer A will send you a picture to use.

Me: *rolls eyes and walks away*

February can't be here soon enough...

That's _Dr._ Magoo To You

One of the great things about my dog is that she's easy to make fun of and I don't have to feel bad when I do.

When she jumps three feet sideways and bruises my leg because she didn't hear a jogger coming up behind us, I get to laugh. And that time she went on alert and tried to attack a rabbit lawn ornament -- pure comedy gold.

But you know that saying about people and their pets resembling each other? Yeah... Today we were on our morning walk and I saw a woman with a big dog crossing the street at the corner a few houses away. So I did my usual routine of stopping and distracting the little dog who is intent on proving how tough she is as long as I've got a leash on her to hold her back. Sit, treat, touch, treat, point, treat, down, treat, etc.

Meanwhile the woman ahead of us has finished crossing the street, but she's just standing there, presumably letting her dog sniff all the wonderful smells at the corner house. Now if you have a dog you know there's an unspoken rule that if you see another dog and they are clearly waiting for you to get further away, you're not supposed to dawdle. So I'm getting a little irritated when thirty seconds have passed and this damn woman is still standing there. I've run out of tricks for the little dog to do, and I'm about to run out of treats as well.

And that was the point that I realized I'd been waiting for a bush to walk away. In my defense it wasn't fully light yet, it was a tad foggy, and I wasn't wearing my glasses, but still...

Yeah.

Freaks

Since this remodel involves a lot of wall and door moving, there has been a fair amount of sawing. Generally there's one guy inside the house telling one guy outside the house how long to cut the next piece. Then the guy outside makes the lights flicker for a minute or so. Finally, the guy outside passes the correctly-cut board through the window and starts working on the next one.

All of this means that they've set up a work space on the side of the house. I do most of the tree trimming, so everything is cut back to the point that a person of reasonable height (i.e., 5'5") can walk from the gate all the way around the house without stooping.

However, for the freaks who had an oversupply of growth hormone during childhood (i.e., everyone over 5'5" which includes every single one of the contractors) there are a few spots that are a little challenging, most notably right inside the gate where the looks-like-a-juniper-but-isn't-one grows and right outside the master bedroom where they've chosen to set up the table saw (or band saw or whatever the heck it is -- we didn't have a shop class at my high school and if we did they probably wouldn't have allowed girls to take it).

So for three weeks now they've been bringing boards through the gate and then going through various contortions to get back to the spot they've chosen to use as the work space. And my computer is set up three feet from the window that overlooks the gate so I'm sitting right there watching.

As amusing as this has been, today I decided to take pity on them and cut back the not-a-juniper. I mean, I hate that tree. It's ugly and it drops brown needle-leaves that get tracked into the house all year long. I'm planning on having it taken out the next time I have the trees professionally trimmed.

It really has been fun to watch, though...