The Farce Continues

Well, apparently whatever hopes we had to eke out operations another week or so into the shutdown have fallen through, and, as of five o'clock tomorrow, the observatory I work for is officially closed. Millions of dollars of beautiful, powerful scientific instruments that your tax dollars paid for will be sitting idle indefinitely, while hundreds of skilled and dedicated people sit at home twiddling their thumbs instead of doing science. For absolutely no good reason. Go, America.

Exactly what this means for me, though, is still very much up in the air. It seems I am considered essential personnel, at least to some extent. There's a nightly observation we do for the US Navy that absolutely must run, come hell, high water, or government collapse. Depending on exactly when that's scheduled, it could mean a couple of hours of work a night for me, at least for next week. But it's also possible our presence might be deemed necessary for the safety and security of the building, in which case I could be doing my regular shifts, albeit with a highly reduced workload. But that has yet to be decided, so, for now, I'm just waiting for somebody to tell me when and whether to come in on Monday. And then I guess I wait to see when I get paid.

Scenes From The Shutdown

Just got off the phone with my mother. She works stocking products on shelves at military commissaries, and as of today, almost all of them are shut down. Until this thing gets resolved, all the groceries in those stores are just going to sit there, slowly rotting. Even if the government is back in business by the end of the week, that's going to be a lot of expired dairy products going directly into the dumpster, with either the government or the food companies swallowing the losses.

Somehow, all that needlessly wasted milk, sitting there on the shelves of a dark, locked-up store slowly going sour strikes me as an apt symbol for this whole disgraceful thing.

Now, On To The Once Upon a Time Season Premiere!

On a happier note... I just watched the finale of Breaking Bad, since I had to work last night and didn't get the chance to see it then, and I believe I will pronounce myself satisfied. I'm already thinking that, one of these days in the hopefully not-too-distant future, I should sit down and rewatch the entire thing in one giant marathon, because I think it'd really reward that.

Mind you, "happier" hardly seems like a word to use about Breaking Bad in any context, but there is, for me, something perversely pleasant about watching stuff this dark and messed-up. During the previous episode, I found myself thinking: man, no matter what, I will never, ever be able to screw my life up as badly as these people. Not in a million years. Not if I tried. It's an oddly cheering thought.

Anyway, so long BB! It's been a hell of a ride. New Mexico is going to miss you.

Now, when does that Saul spinoff start?

I Don't Do This Often, But: A Political Rant

Dear Republicans: FUCK YOU WITH A PICKAXE. Seriously, if you care about jobs even a tenth of a percent as much as your hyper-inflated rhetoric claims, then stop endangering mine for the sake of a dick-measuring contest with the president or some delusional belief that providing poor people with access to health care is immoral and/or going to completely ruin the US economy. You know what will hurt the US economy? SHUTTING DOWN THE SOURCE OF MILLIONS OF JOBS, that's what. And you know what's immoral and indefensible? Using people's livelihoods as a political bargaining chip in a juvenile game of chicken.[*] Cut it the fuck out.

For the record, the NSF-funded organization I work for has stated that they expect to be able to keep paying us for a week or two, in the event. So I might well be able to ride through this with no problems. But I don't need the extra financial uncertainty in my life right now, and I'm sure there are a lot of potentially affected people out there who need it even less than I do.

I am getting so fed up with the crap that passes for politics in this country, I cannot tell you.

Aaargh. End of rant. Good luck, everybody.

(ETA: OK, I should correct that to "Dear some Republicans." More power to the saner voices in the party.)

[*] Yes, I am aware that this is a mixed metaphor. Shut up.

It's Random Shatner!

Someone, it seems, left a copy of this in my mailbox at work. Whoever you are, sir or ma'am, I am amused, and I thank you.

Rain, Rain, Go Away. Or, Well, Don't, 'Cause We Need It, But, Geez, Could You Spread It Out More?

If I had any doubts at all -- which I did -- about the drainage in my newly regraded yard and whether there was still any danger of water collecting around my house and leaking in, they are now fully assuaged, because, man, if I was going to have problems, I surely would have had them this week. We got over four inches of rain here on Tuesday, which is impressive when you consider that our yearly precipitation is only about ten inches, total. But my bedroom carpet is dry as a bone, and the few places in my yard where puddles of water accumulate are well away from the house. I am just so deeply, deeply glad I got that taken care of when I did, because otherwise the result would have been disastrous. Although disastrous on a very minor scale, it must be said, compared to the flooding that many people throughout the southwest (and, apparently, some people right here in town) have experienced. The effects in places like Boulder seem to have been particularly horrible.

And it's not over yet. We've had a little more rain tonight, and they're calling for still more overnight... and into tomorrow... and through Saturday. Around here, the saying "it never rains but it pours" has always been true, but this is downright ridiculous.

At Least There's Always The Currentlies!

Current clothes: A towel. This being one of those, "No, really, I'll get up and get dressed any minute now" kinds of mornings. Well, technically it's 1:30 in the afternoon, but I'm starting night shifts tomorrow, so it's morning for me.

Current mood: Generally not bad. Although there is a thin streak of irritation somewhere in the back of my mind due partly to not having gotten as much sleep last night as I really should have, and partly to the sulky voice in somewhere in my brain that keeps complaining that the weekend is simply not long enough to do all the nothing I want to do. But I'm hoping the former will diminish once the coffee finishes kicking in, and that the latter can be appeased by a few hours of lying around watching DVDs later in the day.

Current music: Nothing much. I think the last music I listened to was on the classic rock station while running errands yesterday, but they kept playing stuff I didn't like.

Current annoyance: Ants! Twice in the last couple of weeks, I discovered ants wandering around on my bathroom floor and crawling into my bathtub, probably looking for water. I'm not sure whether they're nesting in the wall or crawling up through a hidden crack in the floor, but either way, they really need to not do that. So yesterday I put down some ant poison. The good news is, they're all over that stuff! The bad news is... they're all over that stuff. Meaning my bathroom is currently host to some kind of mini Ant Jamboree. They really need to finish hauling it all off, eat it, die, and be gone.

Current thing: Trying to be mellower.

Current desktop picture: Some wallpaper I got from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for contributing to a kickstarter they did to get a new book of comics published. But I'm not allowed to share it with you. Because you are less awesome than me.

Current book: Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes by Stephen Jay Gould, one of his essay collections from the 80s.

Current song in head: Nothing at the moment, oddly enough, but for some reason the theme song to Deep Space Nine has been popping into my head at random moments over the last couple of weeks.

Current refreshment: I had some cereal and a piece of fruit a little while ago.

Current DVD in player: Just finished the first disc of season 2 of The Hour, featuring soon-to-be-Doctor Peter Capaldi.

Current worry: I really am trying to worry less about everything. I think I'm kinda-sorta succeeding.

Current thought: As is so often the case, Calvin & Hobbes said it best.

Still Here

It's been pointed out to me that I haven't posted much here in a while. I'm not dead or anything; apparently I just haven't had much to say. I'm not at all sure how it got to be September already, but August was pretty annoying and so far this month is shaping up to be less stress-inducing, so I'll take it. For the record, we've had one brief but reasonably intense little rainstorm here in the last couple of weeks, during which my house encouragingly failed to leak, so I think I'm about ready to declare victory in this round of Me vs. Water.

Other than that... Yeah, I got nothin'.

Man, I Never Noticed That Missing Colon.

All right, enough of me whining about my household problems for the moment. How about some humorous Trekkie snark instead? (Warning: spoilers for the latest Trek reboot movie. And some old classic series episodes, if anybody in the world still cares about that.)

Yes, You're Just Going To Have To Listen To Me Talking About All This Until It's Done. Hopefully, We're Almost There!

Annnnnnd, the landscapers have been and gone! We did have a bad moment in there, because they managed to break a hidden sewer cleanout pipe while they were digging around, resulting in me having a quiet mini-freakout and being repeatedly reassured that, honestly, it was OK, that's an easy thing to fix, they totally knew how to do it, it would be fine. All of which, as far as I can tell, was in fact true, but of course now I'm going to be mildly paranoid about it for the next few months. ("*sniff* *sniff* OMG, what's that smell?! Is that sewer gas?! Oh, wait. Never mind. It's the catbox.") But! My yard now has a nice slope to it -- leading away from the house. Lake Leaky Bedroom is no more. Those horrible trees that kept trying to grow in the corner of the house and which I had been unable to eradicate are gone. And, hell, I can now see the curb in front of my house for the first time since I moved in. It's always been overgrown with weeds and grass before. Anyway, hopefully this should solve a lot of my problems. I am optimistic enough that I'm going to put the carpet in the bedroom back down, anyway. Fingers crossed!

Next step: putting some more sealant on the gutters. Both the old ones in the back and the new ones at the front are leaking a little at the seams. Likely the latter is not the fault of the guy who installed them, as it rained a bit a few hours after he finished, at which point the sealant was surely not completely dry yet. The Weather Channel website swears that it will not rain at all today or tomorrow, though, so this seems like a good time to do it. Mind you, the Weather Channel website has been known to lie through its teeth, but if I don't try doing it now, I might have to wait for October for the rain to stop. This does mean no aircon until the stuff dries, since the runoff from the swamp cooler runs into the gutters, but these are the sacrifices I make.

Here We Go!

The landscapers are here! They arrived with surveying equipment and a general air of confidence, and are now moving lots of dirt around. They also removed my dead lilac bush for me, which seems to have taken them approximately no time whatsoever. I am currently feeling very optimistic.

Whining And TMI

Well, the landscapers are coming tomorrow to deal with my drainage problem. I'm more than a little nervous about this, honestly. There weren't huge amounts of local options -- I ended up having to get someone to come down from Albuquerque -- and to a certain extent I'm having to take it on faith that these guys know what they're doing. But hopefully all will go well, and then I'll have one less thing to worry about.

Which I could really use, because there always seems to be one more thing to worry about. The latest: I just got back from the gynecologist, and I'll spare you all the TMI-ish detail, but apparently I have fibroids. Which are benign growths that can nevertheless have annoying effects. The upshot: I've got still more pills to take, at least for a while. All these pills are making me feel really freaking old. In my mind, that's a serious old person thing, having a giant pile of pills to take every day. And even more fun, at some point I'm going to have to have a minor but really unpleasant-sounding surgical procedure. Plus, the doctor was cheerfully talking about future possibilities up to and including hysterectomy. Not that I'm particularly attached to that organ, having never had a use for it, but, dude, I had a little mini-freakout just at the idea of having my wisdom teeth removed. And I wasn't using those, either! Well, on the upside, one of the aforementioned annoying effects turns out to be anemia, so maybe that's part of the explanation of why I've felt so exhausted lately. (Mostly, I've been blaming stress.)

Still... I don't like this being-human gig. Sure, it's got its perks, but lately I am thinking longingly of the idea of being a disembodied intelligence floating around the internet, free of messy biology and the need for things like shelter. Sigh.

Come On, Gmail, Seriously?

Please excuse the language, but: Holy fucking Christ on a stick! So, OK, a while back, Gmail introduced their "new and improved" compose window. I tried it, I immediately hated it, quickly switched back to the old version, and blissfully forgot all about my brief, unpleasant experience with it. Well, apparently that is no longer an option, and we're all going to use the new thing, like it or not. And ye gods... I am not one of those folks who's quick to declare every change to a software or a service as a sign of the apocalypse just because it's different from what I'm used to. But this thing... Sweet zombie Jesus, is this a steaming pile of awful! All I can say is, well: what this guy said. In fact, every single thing that guy said. What in the name of every imaginary deity in the multiverse were they thinking?

Woefully Belated August Currentlies

Current clothes: Blue jeans. Brown t-shirt from Uluru, Australia. White socks. Brown boots.

Current mood: Stressy. There was a brief period where I'd sort of found my happy place again, but, alas, it didn't last very long. Well, at least I'm not the flaily, "Everything in my life sucks and will forever!" kind of stressy I was a couple of weeks ago. I just don't have enough energy to keep that up forever. So I'm back to a moderate, but persistent, level of stressiness.

Current music: I was listening to the classic rock station for a while in the car on the way back from Albuquerque. (I took my car in so they could erase the "Kill All Humans" subroutine in its software, or whatever that recall was actually about.) When I got home, it was in the middle of an elaborate live version of "Hotel California."

Current annoyance: Water, my constant nemesis. There are, of course, lots and lots and lots of other annoyances at the moment, but the water wins.

Current thing: Having to do way more responsible adult stuff than I remotely feel like. Also, Broken Picture Telephone.

Current desktop picture: Still the same picture as last month. I need to find something new. New, and soothing.

Current book: Shada, the novel version of Douglas Adams' "lost" Doctor Who episode, written by Gareth Roberts. I've only just started it, really, but so far it's delightful. Much better than I was expecting it to be.

Current song in head: It's been an insane musical mishmash in the ol' brain lately. I think right this minute it's "Hotel California," on account of the radio.

Current refreshment: I have some lemon mint tea brewing. Ooh, it should be ready by now! Hang on... *time passes* Well, crap, that was a whole saga, involving me not being able to find the tea and thinking I hadn't actually started it and then realizing there wasn't enough water in the kettle for a full cup... But I now finally have tea. Go, me.

Current DVD in player: I just recently finished season six of Burn Notice, which was so the kind of mindless fun my brain needed. I'm also still making my way through the final season of The Twilight Zone on the treadmill.

Current worry: Oh, mainly I'm worried about my home, my health, and my finances. Yeah, that probably about covers it.

Current thought: I looked for random bundles of money lying in the street while I was in Albuquerque today, but, sadly, I did not see any.

The Return Of The Wet

Fun fact: replacing the gutters, while necessary, did not stop rain from coming into my house. Maybe it's coming slower now, but it's still coming. And, once again, the key word is "drainage." I just went out and looked, and there's a giant puddle of water sitting right where the gas pipe comes into the house. So I suspect I've found the culprit. It actually looks like my shiny new downspout is depositing its load several feet from the house, and it's all rolling right back down to pool at the prime leakage spot. SIGH. OK, time to see about getting this puppy regraded.

Fun With Drugs!

In preparation for the final run of Breaking Bad episodes starting up again on Sunday, a couple of humorous BB videos.

First, Breaking Bad: The Middle School Musical! In case you're concerned that Breaking Bad isn't really suitable for middle school kids, don't worry. They're making "rock candy." Really.



And, next, Breaking Bad: The Honest Trailer. Which is tiny bit unfair to a couple of characters, if you ask me, but still funny:



Needless to say, both of these are full of spoilers!

A Visit From The Ghost Of Plumbing Past

In an "if you don't laugh, you'll have to cry" bit of timing... I just got a letter from my plumbers saying they've been going over their records, and they don't show any record of payment for when they fixed my pipe break, a year and a half ago. I suspect what happened is that that's the one time I asked them to charge my credit card instead of writing a check, and they didn't actually do it. Because now that I think about it, I don't remember it showing up on my bill. But I have to wait for the credit card company to send me the records to check, since I don't keep them that far back. If so, whoopee, that's another $300 I owe.

Which I can handle, honestly. It's just that... Sigh. I'm getting tired of all this having to be a responsible adult. I don't know why I ever took that gig in the first place.

Lucky Number Twelve!

The identity of the Twelfth Doctor has now been revealed! And, wow, for once the rumors I was hearing on the internet were actually right. I think that may be the first time that's ever happened. Seems like a pretty good choice, as far as I can tell. I remember really liking his performance on Torchwood, although not the specifics of why, exactly, meaning that perhaps it is time for a rewatch. And much as I love Matt Smith -- and I love Matt Smith to itty, bitty, tiny little Time Lordy pieces -- I'm pleased with the idea of having someone a bit older in the role again. I'll be interested, and am very excited, to see what he does with it!

And On My Homeowner's Woes...

I've now talked to the contractor, and I should have shiny new gutters in place next week. Yay! He also said that, yeah, he could see that I had bad drainage in the front yard -- it slopes for a foot or two, and then for a while it just doesn't. He seemed to think that even just getting that taken care of should help a lot, and, you know... that much, I'm pretty sure I can afford. So, assuming new gutters fix my immediate problem, which they should, I'll look into that next. And then I can start saving up for whatever else needs to be done. Now, hopefully my brain will just stop stressing out over it all. Right, brain?

Not that life doesn't keep hitting me with more annoyances, though. I just got a message on my answering machine saying there's been a recall on my car. Apparently it just needs some software updated -- and how 21st-century is that? -- so it shouldn't be too big of a deal, but that still means I'll have to make time to get it into the dealer. Oh, well, maybe I'll get the oil changed while I'm at it...

Doctor Who-The-Heck-Will It-Be?

Here's something much more fun than my (admittedly somewhat overblown) homeowner's woes! Brace yourselves for the internets (or at least the more fannish/geeky/British corners of the internets) to explode, because they are announcing the new Doctor this weekend! On live TV! I'm pleased to note that it'll be simulcasting on BBC America, too. Since it's on at 7PM in the UK, that should be 1PM for those of you in the Mountain time zone with me. The rest of you can do your own conversions. [ETA: Whoops, correction! It's on at noon my time on Sunday, not 1 PM! Good thing I double-checked!]

Needless to say, I am excited! Even if I do fully expect (and, even, honestly, rather hope) that they'll keep up their tradition of casting people I've never, or only just barely, heard of.