This Is A Test. This Is Only A Test.

Nothing to see here, just me testing the Blogger app I installed on my phone, because trying to use the Blogger website on a phone is ridiculously awkward and difficult, and it finally occurred to me that, duh, of course there's an app that's actually designed to be used on a phone. (Not that I update from the phone often, anyway, but, hey, when you went to, you want to.)

Anyway, This seems way easier. Yay.

I May Have Some Currentlies

Current clothes: Olive green sweat pants. My Doctor Who wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey t-shirt. White socks. Black leather boots.

Current mood: Not bad. Today has been that combination of relaxing and productive I most like to achieve on the weekends, marred slightly by the fact that my days off just seem to slip by faster and faster, and today has not been an exception.

Current music: I was just listening to random-shuffle stuff on the iPod while doing some housecleaning. Last song was something by the Goo-Goo Dolls.

Current annoyance: That thing about my time to myself going by too fast. Slow down for a sec, time! I have things I want to do with you! (Stupid wibbly-wobbly stuff. Sigh.)

Current thing: Some of that time (OK, probably too much of that time) slipped past while I was playing Slither. That game is stupidly addictive, I think mostly because it's one of those games where every time you lose -- and you will always, always lose - it feels as if you almost didn't, and all you have to do next time is not make that one stupid mistake, or be just a little bit faster... It's so hard not to just click "play again" to attempt to prove it.

Current desktop picture: Still the same Doctor Who one I've had for ages. I really, really should change that. Will it happen before I do this again next month? Probably not.

Current book: Pretender by C. J. Cherryh, book 8 in her Foreigner series. Someday, in the distant future, I will actually make it through all of this series.

Current song in head: "Temporary One" by Fleetwood Mac, which came up on random shuffle yesterday, and has been playing in my head ever since.

Current refreshment: Diet cream soda.

Current DVD in player: Crimson Peak. Which, like all of Guillermo del Toro's movies, is extremely visually impressive (albeit a bit gory in places), but, like most of his movies, I'm not sure how impressive it is or isn't in other respects. It's got its good points, but... Well, if it's a bit slow, a bit stilted, and more than a bit ridiculous, is that a flaw, or is it just really, really good at capturing the sensibility of the Victorian Gothic stories it's paying homage to? I honestly can't tell.

Current happy thing: No work today! And later I will have pot roast. Mmm, pot roast.

Current thought: Happy Mother's Day to all you motherly types out there (at least in places where it's celebrated today). Me, I'm going to continue spending today reveling in the inestimable joy of not having kids.

Game Of Spoilers: Or, I Would Rather Know Nothing About Jon Snow

I just finished watching season 5 of Game of Thrones on DVD. (And was surprised by how caught up in it I got, too. The last couple of episodes, there was a lot of very loud yelling at certain characters.)

Of course, being just about exactly a season behind, that means I got to the end of season 5 just in time to be hit by an avalanche of season 6 spoilers, everywhere I turn online. Honestly, what is it with this show? I thought Doctor Who spoilers could be tricky to avoid if you waited too long, but GoT fans and critics seem to go out of their way to make sure nobody can miss them. Years later, I'm still shaking my head in bemusement about the article I saw on the prevalence of GoT spoilers that had a spoiler in the title.

I'm seriously beginning to suspect that HBO is planting this stuff somehow, in an attempt to get people like me to subscribe.

Oh, Look, It's May!

And thus endeth the exercise known as Blogs-A-Lot April. I'm never entirely sure if said exercise feels like it has all that much of a point, but one thing I did notice, this time, is that it sort of forced me to pay attention to every day as it passed, which means that, unlike a lot of months lately, April did not pass by in a blur, but seemed to take its time and to go by in something that felt at least a little more like a steady, regular way. And, honestly, if I was going to pick any month to do that, April seems like a good choice. Despite a few oddly chilly days this year, it is, for the most part, a brief, beautiful respite between the major New Mexican seasons of Too Cold and Too Hot, and it's good to enjoy that while it lasts.

Anyway. It being May, you will probably hear much less from me now. You may breathe a sigh of relief if you wish.

I Guess It's Just Crappy Old Invisibility for Me

By the way, I forgot to mention it in the last post, but you know what's really annoying about having very poor visualization skills? My absolute number-one most desired superpower, with no question, is teleportation. I frequently long for the ability to just be places without having to deal with all the incredibly tedious, frequently expensive, and, in the case of cars, genuinely dangerous traveling in between.

And, of course, every time I've heard a description of how teleportation works in fiction, it inevitably starts out with, "OK, first you picture the place you want to go..." Sigh.

Maybe It's Because I Can't Put Glasses On My Mind's Eye

I recently stumbled across this article, "Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind", and got kind of a kick out of it, partly because this guy's realization, astonishingly late in life, that other people's brains are doing a weird thing his doesn't is strangely hilarious, and partly because it's incredibly gratifying to be able to say, "Finally! Someone who's even worse at visualizing things than I am!"

Because I don't get pictures in my head, either. Or not much. When I try, I might get something really vague. Maybe something a bit like seeing a scene through thick, not-quite transparent glass, where you can get a sense of colors and where things are, but not actually see any details? Except even that seems like too visual a description. Once in a very, very, very great while, I might actually get something like a photograph flashing across my mind, but it's always gone in a split second before I can really look at it, and it always leaves me kind of weirded out. I can imagine colors well enough, though. It's not exactly like seeing them, but I can remember what they look like, if that makes any sense. And other senses are no problem. I can imagine smells and tastes and touches, not perfectly, but well enough. And my auditory imagination is great. I can recall or imagine voices in great detail and at will: pitch, pauses, and everything.

But visuals? I took the quiz linked to in the article, and found it immensely frustrating. OK, I might be able to come up with something vaguely resembling a mental image for some of what they're asking me for, individually -- the color and texture of storm clouds and flashes of lightning are surprisingly doable, by themselves, although the sunset they start out asking me to imagine is almost just an abstract idea of a circle on a flat horizon -- but to ask me to imagine a picture, see it in detail, focus on those details and then change them? Yeah, I'm kind of with this guy: How do the rest of you weirdos do that? (The quiz, by the way, told me I was part of only 5% of the population who sucked this bad at visualization tasks and asked me if I wanted to be part of a study when I was done. I'm not sure if I do or not.)

I do think this is at least part of why I'm not great at faces and why I'm really, really bad with directions and navigation: I don't have a good visual referent in my head to match a person or a street up with.

He also mentions people asking him about whether he's a good speller, which seemed like a weird, out-of-left-field question to me a first, but apparently, when a lot of people are trying to remember how to spell a word, they see the letters in their mind? When I need to think how to spell a word, I imagine myself either typing it or writing it, often with my fingers twitching slightly. So, like the guy says, it's muscle memory.

And now, suddenly, all I can think of is how I read that book called What We See When We Read a little while back and spent the entire time indignantly going, "Whoa there, buddy, what do you mean we?!" Speak for yourselves, you mind-picture-makers, you!

Real Life Is Annoying. I'd Rather Just Sequester Myself Somewhere And Read.

I seem to have reached one of those not-infrequent points in my life when I've got a bunch of things that need to be done all at once, all of which have to be scheduled around each other and my weird work hours. I'm working on getting the ball rolling on my driveway replacement, and I need to get my swamp cooler up and running, and I have to make a dentist's appointment (because I still have a filling that needs to be replaced, and although I really wanted to just blow that off for a while after the root canal, the dentist is bugging me about it), and I have to go in for my semi-annual blood test before I run out of my thyroid medicine, and I've got the exterminator coming soon (because it's spring and attempted roach incursions have begun).

I'm trying to let my attitude be, "Yay, look how much I am getting done!", rather than "Aargh, too many things! Too much stress! Want to hide from the world!" I'd say I'm having maybe a 65% success rate.

Windows And Driveways

Oh, right, I forgot that thing Windows 10 did the last time it upgraded, where it kept constantly telling me I had to re-enter my "most recent credential" for my Microsoft account. I'm trying to remember how I dealt with that last time. I think, after trying everything the internet told me to try, I just finally told Windows to ignore the message. Oh, Windows.

In other news, I now have an estimate for my concrete work, and I'm possibly more surprised than I should be by just how close it is to my own rough guesstimate for how much this was gonna cost me.

WTF, Computer?

After all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that Windows 10 caused me last time, until I finally gave up and went back to 8.1, my PC has suddenly decided, with no permission and no warning, to "upgrade" itself again. What the hell, Microsoft. What. The. Hell.

Sigh. Dare I hope it'll behave itself better this time? Dare I?

Sunday Is TV Night

I've been watching the Walking Dead spinoff, and it's... Well, it's not awful, but, I have to say, some part of my brain is tempted to just skip it and watch the aftershow, because the episode they're talking about always sounds slightly better than the one I just watched.

Also, they keep showing ads for Preacher, which intrigues and bemuses me, because I'm pretty sure one of my main thoughts after reading the comics was that, of everything I have read in my life, that was the least likely to ever be filmed.

Maybe I Need A Beryllium Atomic Clock.

Speaking of Doctor Who... It was just brought to my attention that next month marks the 20th anniversary of the Paul McGann TV movie. Which I am having no small amount of trouble wrapping my head around. How is it that I am so constantly blindsided by the steady, predictable passage of time?

Welcome Aboard The TARDIS!

Although there's not going to be any new Doctor Who until Christmas -- *sniffle* -- the BBC has just announced that they've cast the new companion. (Apparently they made a big announcement during halftime at a soccer match, which seems a little odd, but, I guess, very, very British.)

They've also provided a little snippet of video for us, in which we don't learn a whole lot about the character, but do at least get to see that she is amusingly irreverent towards the Daleks:



I'll be looking forward to getting to meet her for real! Even if it won't remotely be soon enough.

RIP, Grunk. Or Not.

My half-orc barbarian only lasted a few weeks, after all. She went down last night, fighting an annoyingly well-armed vampire. And then, just to add oddly hilarious insult to injury, the creepy sorcerer in the party re-animated her as a zombie, so her corpse is still following us around.

I really need to finally bother learning how the magic system works in this game, so I can be the one standing in the back throwing fireballs.

I Ant That Impressed

Yesterday's viewing: Ant-Man. I have to say, I didn't find this nearly as engaging as most of the other Marvel movies. A lot of the humor felt like it was trying too hard, and the "dramatic" dialog was terrible. Plus, the whole concept is so silly that even acknowledging up­front how silly it was didn't make it feel less silly. Well, at least it did have one or two fun little action-y moments. Unfortunately, though, mostly it just made me think about how much I hate ants.

I really, really hate ants.

Random Things I've Been Up To

Some random things I've been up to:

Our team won the pub quiz last night! Apparently our perfect knowledge of fictional orphans made up for our pitiful inability to name more than three Denzel Washington movies from the last decade.

I watched the season finale of Better Call Saul yesterday, and it was fantastic. You know, on one hand it's not remotely surprising that a Breaking Bad spinoff, brought to us by the same people, would be really, really good. On the other hand, though, elevating your comic relief to the status of tragic anti-hero in his own prequel drama (even one that also features a lot of humor) seems, on the face of it, insane. So I'm still impressed that it works as well as it does.

I had to go into work today, on my day off, for a lecture on cyber security, which they require us to do periodically. So now I can warn you all: don't pick strange USB drives up off the ground and stick them into your computer. You're welcome.

This Just In: Customer Service Is Not Entirely Dead, After All.

So, I called the concrete company back, and they said they'd tried to call me but hadn't gotten through. I'd given them my cell number, and didn't have any missed calls, so I think what happened is they had my phone number wrong. This time, I was able to talk to the relevant person right away, and he actually apologized for not being able to come down today, because he had to go to Santa Fe. But he's going to come on Monday. Whew! Maybe I'll finally get this done, after all. (And then I can move on to all the other things that need to be done around this house.)

My Concrete Is Abstract

I've been needing to get the deteriorating concrete of my driveway and some areas around the side of my house replaced for ages now, and, needless to say, it's just getting worse with time. Last year, I tried calling a concrete contractor here in town. The guy told me he'd be around the next day to give me an estimate, then never showed up, and every time I tried to call, I'd either get no answer, or I'd basically get blown off with "We've been busy, I don't know who you are, the boss will call you back later." Which, of course, he never did.

So, on the basis that the rainy season was coming and that seemed like a bad time to pour concrete, I put it off until, well, about now. Last week, though, I finally got off my butt and tried contacting a different contractor. This one is in Albuquerque, but the person I talked to said she thought they'd work down here, and that someone would call me back about an estimate. That was Wednesday. It's now late Monday afternoon, and, guess what? Yup, nobody's called. Sigh.

I'm starting to entertain paranoid ideas about having been blackballed by the state's entire community of concrete contractors for some reason unknown to me. But when I mentioned this to a friend, he suggested an explanation that's, sadly, much simpler and more believable. Namely: "Eh, it's New Mexico."

And again I say, sigh. Well, I'll try calling them back tomorrow. But, really, you'd think it would not be this difficult to get someone to take a few thousand dollars from me.

Admittedly, I Read This Book 20+ Years Ago, So Mostly All I Remember Now Is That It Was Great.

Not much to talk about today, this being one of those weekends where I don't really have much time to do anything but sleep and work. But I figured, for anybody who might be interested and hadn't heard this yet, I'd pass along this recent bit of news that made me happy: Neil Gaiman has said he'll be wring a TV adaptation of his and Terry Pratchett's novel Good Omens. That article also talks about some other Pratchett-based adaptations currently in the works, which I am feeling pleasantly optimistic about.

Now, I just need to do start that Discworld re-read I keep saying I'm going to do sometime...

Our National Ordeal Is Over For Another Year.

I hope all my fellow USians got your taxes done in good time and in good order, and didn't encounter any nasty surprises. Me, I hate filing my taxes beyond the telling of it. Something about those forms just makes me feel colossally stupid, as if I will never understand money at all. Even though my taxes are really, really not that complicated.

I was afraid it was going to be even worse than usual this year, too, as I have an HSA now, plus the e-file site I used last year closed down. But it turns out that H&R Block has free federal and state filing for people who make as little as I do, and their interface turned out to be mercifully easy to use and generally really well put together. So it was at least much less painful than it might have been. Whew!

And now I am not going to think about this again until 2017.

No Images For You!

Fortunately someone pointed out to me that they weren't seeing the picture I included in my last post, or I might never have realized that, in the process of all my uploaded pictures being transferred automatically from the now-defunct Picassa, everything that was once shareable became inaccessible to anybody but me, as does anything new that I upload, unless I specifically put it into a shared album. Which makes sense from a privacy point of view, I guess, but, man, that was not a graceful transition. And figuring out what had happened and what I needed to do about it was just confusing, since the description made "shared albums" sound specifically like albums other people could upload to, not just ones whose pictures you share with others. Turns out, when you make one, it asks you if you want to allow that uploading by others as an option. Would have been nice if that were clearer upfront.

Anyway. I think everything is working now. If you have any problems seeing images here, though, including in older posts, let me know.

(P.S.: Anybody know how to correct Google's mistaken identification of lots of non-car things as cars?)