Well, it appears that the little man's method of fixing the flaming socket problem is to turn off all the electricty in the house and replace the light bulb.

We've kept the old bulb with the soot on the outside of it, and James was kind enough to call the landlord.

Welcome to world of the slum denizen!
2/28/2001 12:02:02 PM

Monday, February 26, 2001

How our week has been going:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 23:04:15 -0500 (EST)
From: Eva Crider
To: James Reffell
Cc: kladson@XXXXXXX
Subject: Re: your mail

Spoke to Frank. I think he did not understand about the FIRE part before.

He asked me if the lights were out, and I told him:

"No! FIRE came out of the light socket."

This caused a small pause, then:

"Fire?"

"Yes. It's not burning now, but we wanted you to take a look. Can you
come tomorrow? Someone will be here in the morning."

He said he'd come by.

(I actually find this hilarious, but only if the house doesn't burn down. You have to understand that Frank is this Chinese handyman who works for our absentee landlord. He's very kind, very odd and seems moderately competant if you get through the language barrier, but I'm not confident that he can do wiring. James called him on Sunday, and he seems to have thought that we'd blown a fuse. It is common to wait weeks for him to actually come by to fix something, if it is minor. James and I tolerate it because we'd rather JWT not be forced to remember us. Karen is a lot less tolerant, I think. I gather her dad was a property manager.)
2/26/2001 08:05:58 PM

Friday, February 23, 2001

This is like something out of Monty Python. (link stolen outright, shamelessly, from rebeccablood.net.)
2/23/2001 08:46:49 AM

Thursday, February 22, 2001

Reasons to take public transit to work.
2/22/2001 11:34:31 AM

crush was saying in her blog (url omitted to protect the innocent) that she'd run across a blog in which the writer constantly listed what she was wearing and things she'd bought for her apartment. I don't think that I paid that much attention to what I wore even when I was gothclubbing all the time.

In fact, the last time anyone asked me to describe what I was wearing, was in 1989, a year I spent installed in my college VAX lab, writing english papers in wordperfect, reading JMU's bb and having random bitnet conversations with people around the country. There was a guy at psuvm (which is to say, Penn State University, Altoona), lestat, who was constantly asking me to describe clothes. In retrospect, I wonder if he was trying to initiate bitnet sex. If that was the case, he certainly missed the mark with me; at 19, I was far too naive to reciprocate. I presumed that he just wanted have a mental picture of me...

as for what I'm wearing: a purple v-necked knit dress, black hose, black heeled shoes, a hair band around my left wrist ( because my hair, which I am growing out long, isn't quite long enough for a pony tail, but I keep hoping it will be, and logic says that it will be long enough at some perfectly random moment, which I'd like to catch), heavy pewter colored metal rimmed glasses (because my eyes have rejected contact lenses lately, and I'm very, very blind), no makeup (because I'm lazy).

not very interesting, is it?

but then, it still wouldn't be interesting if it were vinyl boots and fishnets.
2/22/2001 09:09:28 AM

Wednesday, February 21, 2001

SFCARSHARE is alive!
2/21/2001 08:21:14 PM

It's astonishing how I don't feel free to really air problems here, as someone I'm complaining about might read it. (Not that I get much traffic, but when you complain in text, you're usually complaining about people you know.) I'm having roommate troubles over housework and territorial issues - though I think the housemate in question would say that the argument was about my defensiveness about the housework. On the other hand, I think it's very rational to be defensive about being pinned with all the responsibility for cleaning up after both James and myself. Last time I checked, fiancee wasn't synonymous with Mom, or housewife. (Note: nowhere is eva saying that the house is pristine. We do not, however, live in a pigsty.)

I think perhaps I am too old to live with an unrelated roommate. James and I understand and tolerate eachother very well, and our other roommate is in the uncomfortable position of being the third person in the house. I've been there, and when I was there I complained like a harridan about the housework. Of course, when I did that, I had a job, so I could ultimately move, and put Karen and Reed out of my misery. I know they were grateful that I left. Things are less clear for James and I, since we can't actually afford the rent for 15B without a roommate, and would have to move into something considerably smaller if we wished to live alone.

Other issues here are also at work, but as I said above, I don't feel free to air them here.

This weekend, James and I took advantage of the hospitality of my cousins Robert and Monica, who live in Hermosa Beach, near LA. We saw the Getty (gorgeous garden and building and great experience, but I prefer the actual collection at the National Gallery - but that might just be my bias...), walked up Hollywood (the Chinese Theatre is cool once, but otherwise *snore*), and spent the rest of the weekend hanging out with my cousins, who are good conversation, and walking along several beach towns (Venice, Santa Monica, Hermosa Beach), which were very pleasant. I'm unconvinced about the virtues of LA overall, because it isn't a city you can walk around very well. I'm addicted to seeing things from a pedestrian view.

I enjoyed seeing my cousins, but getting out of LA was a struggle.

Robert dropped us off at LAX at 3:45 on Monday. We found that United had cancelled our 5:00 pm shuttle to SFO because of rain. *RAIN*. Whatever. They had rescheduled us for a 5:30 shuttle was delayed until 6:35 -- 7:05 -- 7:10. They offered us no meal tickets and no damned drinks; we remedied this at Wolfgang Pucks, because there was nothing else to eat except greasy fast food burgers or sausage. I longed for a soft pretzel to no avail. After 2 hours - changed our gate to another halfway across the airport. LAX has no people moving devices. The distance from gate 77 to gate 69 is really long.

Finally, United let us board a new, larger plane (to accomodate 2 cancelled flights) at 8:00. Then they held us on the ground until 9:15 or so, so that they could load a third flight onto the airplane. We reached San Francisco around 10:00, and then were forced to circle in a holding pattern until 10:30. We gave up on Super Shuttle around 10:45, and caught a cab ($30) home to be in bed just after midnight.

James and I could have driven to LA (for less money) in that amount of time. Even more infuriating is that fact that the 6:00, 6:30, and 7:00 shuttles (which were booked), left on time for SFO. Injustice is GREAT in the world.

Someone here would probably say that we were lucky to get home at all. But it wouldn't be me.
2/21/2001 07:59:39 PM

Friday, February 16, 2001

AAAAARghhhhh.
2/16/2001 12:15:30 PM

Thursday, February 15, 2001

Well, I'm being kidnapped today for a staff retreat focusing on teamwork. No internet. No freedom. No escape. Wish me luck.

Actually, until the end of April, I really should be paying so much attention to work that there won't be any blogging...I guess we'll see.
2/15/2001 08:05:49 AM

Tuesday, February 13, 2001

Had lunch.

Feel somewhat better.

Am going to hold my complaints until there's a significant problem to tackle.
2/13/2001 02:42:24 PM

So the pressing problem about a proposal I have been working on is beginning to be resolved. As someone who's done about 1/2 of the work on the thing, I'm relieved. But. I am distinctly unhappy about how the Chief Development Officer just treated me in the meeting we had about it. After interrupting me 2 or 3 times (once when I'd actually raised my hand and been acknowledged by the ED), she corrected me for interupting her. Rudely. As if I didn't know my place (and apparently I don't)

I didn't say much else for the rest of the meeting. I feel really humiliated, and I don't know whether I should say anything about it to her. I don't know how I am supposed to deal with these kind of things in the office...in the real world I'd complain, but I don't know how to deal with it at work. Perhaps I was out of line saying anything to begin with.

On the other hand, revisions will be made to the proposal. So I guess we come out ahead.
2/13/2001 11:51:27 AM

Monday, February 12, 2001

Does anyone besides me think that someone should do a send-up of Slate at stale.com? I have neither the skills nor the time to do it (and I actually like Slate), but I think it would be amusing if someone with a passion for satire did.

My hands are cold (here in sunny San Francisco), and it is STILL raining outside. Everybody, pray for March, eh? Apparently there's no excuse for February anywhere in the country.
2/12/2001 08:29:51 AM

Thursday, February 08, 2001

I'm crosseyed from staring at various spreadsheets and trying to make them say the same things.

I have to say that the Jon Carroll book I read two days ago must have been pretty good, because I managed to devour it in 3 or so hours, while I keep trying to read a Charles de Lint in the last couple of days and I can't get past the first 50 pages.

2/8/2001 12:21:38 PM

In many ways, meth is the crack cocaine of the new millennium . . .

Funny. From last year's press, you would have thought that everyone in the entire country had switched to ecstasy.

2/8/2001 07:44:33 AM

Tuesday, February 06, 2001

I am actually next, but this email from my friend Kym made me giggle anyway:

When I was younger I hated going to weddings.
It seemed that all of my aunts and the grandmotherly types used to come up to me, poking me in the ribs and cackling, telling me, 'You're next.'
They stopped that shit after I started doing the same thing to them at funerals.

2/6/2001 04:09:53 PM

Nick Cave will be performing a series of solo live shows in the USA in March.Along with him there will be: Warren Ellis (violin) and Jim White (drums) of Dirty Three, and Susan Stenger from Big Bottom on bass.

26/03/2001 - San Francisco, Palace of Fine Arts
27/03/2001 - San Francisco, Palace of Fine Arts

The question is who's selling the tickets and when?
2/6/2001 08:01:17 AM

So, in the ultimate being punished for your boss's bad management, Green Mountain Energy (James' and my electric company) "let us go" last night because of California's deregulation troubles. So now we not only get a free market that charges us $390 a month for electric, but we also don't get a choice of vendors.

I'm sure you can imagine my bile on this front.

2/6/2001 07:56:34 AM

Monday, February 05, 2001

It took me 20 minutes at lunch and two and a half hours just now to start and finish Jonathan Carroll's most recent fantasy, A Marriage of Sticks. It's one of those books with a rippling, windblown, faerie cover by Thomas Canty. I'd like to say that I chose this one because of Charles de Lint's paragraph on the inside flap, but it was actually the Canty cover. It usually is, if I'm in the mood to read fantasy.

Carroll's novel is the first person diary of an old woman recalling events that happened to her in her early 30s. The book is contemporary (set in the New York of the 1990s, although I certainly don't know NYC well enough for a authenticity check), mundane (Miranda, a book dealer, is dissatisfied with her life and has an affair with a married man) and mystical (Miranda is confronted with ghosts, a series of unsettling magical trials and an important decision). It's a spooky novel. I came away from it not thinking about the main plot of the book, but about the fragility of life. I know I'm morose to think this way, but it is so easy to remember that no matter how happy you are, everything can be swept away in an instant.

That's spookier to me than any sort of ghost story, and I have to supress thinking about it too much (or people start looking like hollow-eyed ghosts).

I should spent more time outside in the bright air

James shouldn't have night classes until 9 pm. I didn't buy cat litter.
2/5/2001 10:01:45 PM

So I'm sitting here in a Monday morning "oh, my god, I left my mind at home in bed" kind of haze. I can't think at all, and can't for the life of me remember what I'm supposed to be doing this week, and I'm afraid to touch the spreadsheet I've been updating for the chief boss...

I need focus, but I'm substituting a cup o tea instead. I also need to grab litter and pet food for the cat who will be very annoyed with me if I don't drop down to petco after work today.

Sherry has put up pictures of her exciting extension process. If you go to look, note that the extensions (and Sherry) look a hundred times better in real life than in that pic. And the pic doesn't look half bad, either. I watched the final touches of her hairmistress putting them in, and let me tell you, I felt so bland that I could have disappeared into the walls! *sigh* So be it, since despite my extension envy, I prefer be a (natural) darkish blonde than to have to maintain any kind of haircolor...

(this pointless post brought to you by eva, who ought to go try to work now)
2/5/2001 09:37:27 AM

Friday, February 02, 2001

Heh. I'm famous.
2/2/2001 03:35:50 PM

Thursday, February 01, 2001

This economic turn (which I've been dreading, for the sake of my friends) has been coming for a long time. Nearly every techie I know in San Francisco is working for a company that has been doing layoffs. It's frightening to watch people forced to think: well, I have a job today, and my company is here today, and I have a paycheck today. Lets not think about tommorrow.

I haven't been thinking critically about it, but Pyra, who produces blogger as a free service, has taken major hits. Ev has been forced to let his staff go, and although blogger still exists for now, the world is very uncertain.

I
h a t e
m o n e y.
2/1/2001 10:22:50 AM

Office is speeding up (no, the political issues are not abating at all, but it's only been a week). I have work that I actually have to concentrate on (*the horror*), which keeps me from writing as much here. Add to this that James' computer is wrecked at the moment, which means we have to use my old-reliable-but-incredibly-slow one, and this makes Eva not much of a blogger.

Have got tickets to LA to see my cousin Robert and his wife, Monica for President's Day weekend. I've never been to LA, and I can't imagine what it is like.

Was reflecting yesterday on a few things:
First, THIS article on Slate (you know, I always typo that by accident as "stale"...) makes me feel a bit better about ordering books from Amazon when the local stores don't have them in stock, and also makes me wonder why other companies can't treat their laid-off (is that layed-off?) employees with more respect. Yes, Fran, I do still try to make a point of shopping independent first; that's pretty easy to do in San Francisco.

Second, I noted one great advantage of modern bathrooms over Victorian clawfoot tub. The former are warmer, making it more likely that I'll shave in the winter, instead of shivering and just deciding to wear pants to work all the time. Of course, it's almost never really hot here . . . especially not in our rather ramshackle bathroom.

Finally, I had a dream last night (with James having long, scar-ee strawberry blonde dreadlocks) that he and I were meeting Rachel and her family for a picnic in Wisconsin (which was inexplicably urban) and that being unable to find a nice, woodland spot, were having the picnic on the gravelled shoulder of a highway (with trucks zooming by at full speed). It was her father's suggestion, in the dream. Goodness only knows what that signifies.
2/1/2001 09:05:31 AM