Month: August 2013

Random 10 8-23-13

Last week. This week:

  1. “Go it Alone” by Beck
    Climbin’ up on the back porch fence

  2. “Benz or Beemer” by Outkast
    From alligator belts to patty melts
  3. “Shave” by Enon
    Save up your story in your mind container
  4. “The Old Days” by Dr. Dog
    No birds in the birdcage
  5. “Danny Callahan” by Conor Oberst
    So stop reading the weather charts
  6. “Brilliant Disguise” by Bruce Springsteen, guessed by random passer-by
    The gypsy swore our future was right
  7. “Dancing With Myself” by Billy Idol, guessed by Clayton
    ‘Cause it’ll give me time to think
  8. “Time Has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers
    I’m thinking about the subway
  9. “My Shepherd” by the New Pornographers
    We’re tossing lost arts out windows
  10. “The Midnight Special” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, guessed by Betty
    Umbrella on her shoulder, piece of paper in her hand

Presumably you know how this is supposed to work. Good luck!

Back on top

My new laptop arrived today. Or maybe it didn’t. It’s hard to tell what Dell wants me to believe.

I know it’s here — I’m physically typing this post on it right now — and customer support both called and e-mailed to tell me that it had been delivered. Then again, I never received any notice that it had been shipped prior to this, and when I log in at their website to check on the order, it still comes up as in production.

Adding to the confusion, it actually says the order “is partially delivered,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. I joked over Twitter that I’d ordered Schrodinger’s laptop, both here and not here simultaneously, but as near as I can tell everything I ordered arrived. I followed up with Dell’s customer support, and I’m sure I’ll get a half dozen more phone calls and e-mails from one or two gentlemen in India before this is through — they have been persistent even when they haven’t been helpful — but so far I’m quite pleased with the computer that came by FedEx today.

Then again, I was quite pleased with the last one, and that caught fire and quit working. If this doesn’t do that — and I continue to not be charged for those first two orders that didn’t get processed at all — I’ll be happy. The laptop’s a little weird, a little different (because I didn’t want to tempt fate and get the same exact model), but it’s shiny and new, which makes up for a lot of things. Living in the cloud is all well and good, but there are some things it’s just a lot easier to do on a laptop than on an iPad or iPhone. (Like purchase this laptop for one.)

And yes, I know that’s like the epitome of first-world problems. You should have seen me the other day, when I couldn’t find the remote control to my air conditioner. The servants’ collective heads rolled for that! I joke; I don’t have servants. I do have a remote-controlled air conditioner, though, thank you very much, and woe betide the servant that comes between me and its temperature control. (It actually has a wifi option, too, but that’s apparently an added attachment we didn’t buy.)

Anyway, all this is to say I have a new computer, and in the three hours or so that it’s been on thus far, it hasn’t caught fire or disappeared in a puff of Schrodinger logic.

My back, on the other, was kind of terrible today, although this I think was a pulled muscle — probably connected to but not exactly the same thing that happened to me last week. I think this because it’s on the opposite side, and I was pretty much fine until I bent a weird way in the shower this morning, and also because it seems to be getting a little better this evening. As always, walking helps, even when walking at first makes you want to cry, is the very thing that makes it feel worst, and so I went to work. (Also, while I have some sick days left, I neither want nor really can use them so soon after using two last week.)

Honestly, I don’t want to whine about my bad back, particularly as it does seem to be getting better this evening. I’m getting some comfort out of listening to David Mitchell’s Back Story on audio book (in small part about his own bad back). And I did I mention I have a new computer that hasn’t caught fire? Things really are looking up!

Sunday

Just an ordinary Sunday. I wrote this:

They were refugees, and for that reason potential carriers, undocumented and assumed infected. If they’d come across the desert, it might just be to die here, Jer thought, waiting to be processed outside the city gates while their symptoms started to show or their supply of water and food ran out. There were stocks of food inside the city, as well as medkits and cure-alls, replenished by the Corps every forty or fifty days, but Jer and the rest of the guard were under strict orders to share none of this with the new arrivals, to interact with them only insofar as was absolutely necessary. Let the bots do the processing, they were told; let the bots take the blood, take the risks, herd the refugees into the makeshift camps that continued to spring up along the city’s edge. The city’s resources were limited and precious and costly, and there was nothing to be gained by wasting those resources on men and women who were very likely to die.

“Lead-lined clouds surround stars,” Cole, his immediate supervisor had said, and if his meaning was at first obscured by the metaphor, it was underlined by Jer’s knowledge of what had happened to guardsmen who in the early days had disobeyed this directive. Men who had been taught to learn first-hand how the refugees lived. The city guard, Jer knew, was the cloud; the city was the star; they surrounded it in darkness so that it might hold in more closely its light. If that meant that some would die in the cold shadows that they cast…

Jer watched these two: a man and a woman, perhaps only a few years older than himself, although it was difficult to tell from their dark and heavy garb. Both of them were wearing face masks as a ward against infection — not that that was a guarantee of anything. They could be carriers and not know it, or they could succumb after a few nights of life in the camp. They had the look of northeners, Jer thought, which would serve them well in the camp — everyone feared the dark whispers of the north — but might make their passage into the city difficult for the very same reason.

And that’s about it, really, but don’t think I’m complaining!

Dog days of summer

August continues to be something of a let-down. I’d suggest that it outright sucks, but I worry it maybe reads this weblog and would try to get back at me out of spite.

This past Monday, I finally got things sorted out with Dell, in so far as the third time I placed my order for a new laptop I received a confirmation number and estimated delivery date. Of course, my bank decided to flag that transaction for some reason, leading to much confusion. Not on the bank’s end — I was easily able to confirm, in about a minute, that I’d made the purchase and this wasn’t fraud — but again at Dell’s. I finally called them to clarify, and the laptop has now moved out of pre-production into production proper, but it’s a little ridiculous how difficult giving them my money proved to be. I’m still getting phone calls from customer service — mostly just to follow up, tell me things the automated e-mails and Dell website have already told me — but I hope this will stop once the new computer is actually in my hands.

That, of course, won’t be for another week and a half.

This past week, I also went through two days of terrible back pain, enough to keep me from going into the office on Wednesday and Thursday. I actually think this was the worst it’s been since 2008, when my herniated disc was first diagnosed, before I had any physical therapy or spinal injections. (It’s questionable whether either of those truly helped, but either way I’d learned to cope and usually don’t feel much pain.) It hurt just to get out of bed this week, and I spent most of the day hobbling around the house, taking pain medication (just Tylenol, or the generic counterpart) and watching episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The impulse was to lie in bed, since that’s where I most free of discomfort, but I think it was a mistake. Certainly it was harder to get up afterward, and lying in bed seemed to undo any progress I’d made. I spent most of Thursday sitting upright instead, where at least I had some lumbar support, and that seems to have helped considerably. I still missed the live Rifftrax show I’d planned to attend — to say nothing of the team meeting at work where everyone made pitches for “book of the year” — but I was back to the office on Friday.

I decided to work a full day. I could have left early, thanks to summer hours, and I only would have needed to make up 90 extra minutes. (Summer hours means you work 45 minutes extra Monday through Thursday.) So I could have left at 2 or 2:30. But that would have meant working straight through to that, without any lunch. It was a quiet day — most everyone who wasn’t on summer hours was at the company’s summer outing at Great Adventure — so I didn’t mind so much.

Today my back’s doing much better, and I’m just delighted to be able to walk, bend, stand, et cetera without real pain.

Then again, this evening I watched AVP: Alien vs. Predator, so maybe there was a little pain left over for me in the week.