A Pretty Big Pile Of Concrete

Well, the work on my driveway has finally started. Of course, in true Murphy's Law fashion, it got delayed long enough to happen just as I'm about to go back onto night shifts. Sigh. But I'm very, very glad it's finally getting done. And I'll be even gladder when it's finished and I can mark it down as one less thing to worry about.

Here's what has become of my old driveway:



[ETA: Apparently the photo wasn't showing up for anyone but me, because Google Photos does really annoying, non-obvious things with permissions. Sigh. I miss Picasa. Anyway, it should be visible to the world now. Right? Right?]

Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

I still don't have a new driveway -- apparently there were some delays, and the most recent word I heard was that maybe they'll be here Monday or Tuesday -- but I do have a new mattress.

And, man, mattress shopping got weird since the last time I had to think about it. (Not that I thought about it very much, then. It was basically: I need a bed, this affordable bed frame/mattress/box spring/headboard combination at the local furniture store seems fine, end of shopping.) It used to be a mattress was a big rectangle full of springs, and all you had to do was pick one that seemed to have the right firmness, but while I wasn't paying much attention there was, like, this bewildering explosion in mattress technology.

Anyway. I got a traditional spring one with a cushiony pillow top on it. Which, after sleeping on it for a couple of nights, I am thinking may not have been the ideal choice. The top is foam, and while I'd heard foam beds retain a lot of heat, I figured one layer of it, which supposedly also features some kind of gel to help keep it cool, would be okay. I can definitely feel the difference in how warm it is, though. It'll be great for winter, but is less than ideal in July, when we haven't had a day that hasn't hit triple digits in over a week. Still, if I replace my comforter with a lighter blanket, I think I'll be fine. (I can't sleep without some kind of a blanket. I feel too exposed, or something.) It's also waaaaaay thicker than my old mattress, which is going to take some getting used to, if only because it means I have to adjust my aim when groping for my glasses on the headboard shelf in the morning.

Unfortunately, I'm also not sure it's helping with the fact that my back often tends to feel a bit stiff or achy when I wake up, which was kind of the point of the exercise. (Although, honestly, the old one did need to be replaced, regardless. It was 15 years old, and becoming noticeably concave.) Likely said stiffness has more to do with my poor posture during the day than it does with my sleeping position. (The ergonomics at work aren't bad, but I have noticed I tend to slump a lot when sitting in front of the computer at home. And I do a lot of sitting in front of the computer at home.) I'm also a little worried, though, that in my paranoia about ending up with a mattress that's too firm -- hard mattresses being the source of some unbelievably miserable nights I've spend on hotel beds -- I might have ended up with one that's just a little too soft. Sigh. How on Earth can the human body possibly be so sensitive to such things? Didn't we evolve to sleep on beds of leaves or something?

Tired But Happy

The Night Vale show, predictably, was super awesome. Although it's a weirdly strange experience when what you're used to experiencing as a disembodied voice on a podcast is coming out of an actual human being standing in front of you.

Now I think I'm going to take a bath with some of the expensive bubble bath my mother sent me for my birthday. All in all, not a bad day. Not a bad day, at all.

Another Spin 'Round The Sun

Happy birthday to me! I am 45 today, which... Well, I shall not dwell upon that too much, I guess, except to be glad to have made it this far.

Mostly, I am busy feeling excited about going to the Welcome to Night Vale live show tonight! Although it's also maybe a little bit awkward, because people -- mostly my relatives -- keep asking me what I'm doing for my birthday, and I keep saying, "Oh, I'm going to Albuquerque and seeing a show," and then they ask me what it is, and then I have to try and explain what Night Vale is, and... Yeah, good luck with that.

But! It is going to be very awesome, and I am super-psyched about it.

Now, if I can just finally get my driveway done, it will be a terrific week all the way around. (I was told it would be in the morning, one day this week. Given that the week is slowly running out of mornings, I am beginning to get nervous. But, eh. It'll happen! And that will be one less giant thing hanging around for me to worry about. Which will be an excellent present, so, yay!)

Space Stuff

Also an eensy bit belated, but hearty congratulations to the Juno team, who are all set now to do some really awesome science at Jupiter. Let us know if you find any monoliths, guys!

July Currentlies

Happy belated Independence Day to my fellow Americans! And congratulations to us, I guess, for managing that e pluribus unum thing more successfully than our parent country. Ahem.

Right. Time for the currentlies!

Current clothes: Blue shorts. A Doctor Who t-shirt with the 10th Doctor's (in)famous "big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff" quote on it. White socks.

Current mood: Pretty good. Got lots of sleep today.

Current music: Nothing much.

Current annoyance: They told me "some time in early July," and it's early July now, but I'm still not sure exactly when the contractors are going to be here to do my driveway. Which is understandable, and probably not a big deal. My boss even very kindly re-arranged the schedule so I'm not on night shifts next week, so I'm not faced with the possibility of trying to sleep while people are using jackhammers outside my house. (Unless they end up doing it later in the month, I guess, on the Monday after my night-shift weekend, but that'd probably be more deal-withable, anyway.) But I get really, really antsy when I can't get things pinned down so I can make plans.

Current thing: So, I did finish playing Undertale again, and got my happy ending reward for not killing people. You can also get a very different kind of play-through if, instead, you kill everybody, but there was no way I was going to do that, partly because I didn't want to go through it again, but mostly because of the overwhelming guilt. So I found a YouTube video that'd show me what happens if you do that... and the game still managed to make me feel like a terrible person, just for watching it. Well played, game. Well, played. Anyway. That was definitely worth the ten bucks I paid for it on Steam, because even being done with it, thoughts and feelings about it seem to be lingering in my head and bouncing off each other in interesting ways. Arguably, when you play it as a pacifist, its response is a little too preachy and saccharine, but overall it's a well-aimed commentary on the largely unexamined way that games expect you to progress through violence. And when you put the various possible paths together, there's some fascinatingly meta stuff going on. Also, it has funny skeletons.

Current desktop picture: Still the same 12th Doctor wallpaper.

Current book: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. A good (if perhaps slightly over-hyped) book about a super-depressing subject.

Current song in head: Some of the stupidly catching music from Undertale.

Current refreshment: Nothing, but it's gonna have to be lunchtime soon.

Current DVD in player: I just finished disk 3 of season 2 of Community. Which is slightly weirder than season 1. I am not complaining about this. Truth is, despite the occasional musing about whether perhaps our popular culture is spending a little too much time gazing into its own navel, I actually do love the meta. (With or without funny skeletons.)

Current happy thing: I've been taking a little extra time to relax lately. It is good for the soul.

Current thought: Speaking of funny skeletons, I think I'm going back to the Discworld Death novels next. Hmm. Come to think of it, Discworld is also pretty meta. There seem to be some strange, strange patterns in my media consumption at the moment...