What idiot would design a nursea uniform to make it more stylish, form-fitting, and ignore the fact that 2 separate machine temperature cycles are required to wash it effectively‽
Honestly, the rank stupidity of those in charge of big organisations never fails to surprise me.
How difficult can it be to choose one material that's hard-wearing, washes in one load? Like the scrubs my wife used to get.
Maybe there's a metaphor screaming to be let out here.
I've not blogged for a couple of days, hence this ragtag collection of unconnected thoughts. Incidentally, I've set a target of a minimum of 5 a week. Easy. Really, it is.
Valentine's Day tomorrow. My attempt at subterfuge failed utterly; my wife spotted the single red rose as I arrived back home. It's on the fireplace now, but at least she doesn't know what I wrote inside the card.
I must add an X on the envelope, it's been 11 years since her first flower, not 10.
Doh!
I'm finally on the verge of getting the the Raspberry Pi. My first task after connecting it all up, setting identities and updating and installing whatever I think I need: blogging infrastructure.
Of course I'm not going to be doing it the easy way.
Tip of the iceberg.
*I chose Gitlab in preference to GitHub – where most of my stuff still resides – because of the free private repos which will allow me to test Glynn with ftp passwords in plain text. Until I've figured it all out Gitlab is it, but I'm not averse to paying GitHub and taking advantage of its community and brand-awareness.
Decisions…
Dash app (Android) for App.net has been misbehaving for a while. I finally decided to uninstall it and use Robin (Drift no longer works at all well.) No notifications support means I've had to setup an IFTTT recipe to alert me via Pushover.
It'd be nice to have Dash's more stable timeline position.
I'll probably go back to Dash quickly, muscle memory and all that…
Tuesday will bring the first home visit by the behavioural specialist assigned to my oldest, autistic, daughter. I can't say I'm looking forward to it, I already feel under the microscope as it is.
Carlo sausage! You know.
It's 8:10pm.*
A couple of days ago I installed an application program on this thing in my hand. A thing, if not of beauty, then a 4.6 inches (diagonal) thing of awesomeness.
I opened the application program and searched across the wired and wire-less networks until… I found what I was searching for.
And then, then it got a little complicated.
'Amazon Prime Now' could deliver a thing I want between 10pm and midnight.
To my home.
Today.
A thing I want at a price I can afford, a price which is reasonable given market forces; but yet a price I simply cannot justify before (or after) payday.
It's a thing I've been waiting for all my adult life: on-demand music, movies, TV, cat litter, towels, chocolates, ski accessories, and something we already have; yes, food.
(sighs)
Got it all and yet I must still find something to complain about.
*It was.
Another Super Bowl (50, not ‘L’) over, the serious business of me choosing a team begins.
I was a fan of the San Francisco 49ers when they won it all a couple of times (plus the talk of a ‘threepeat’), followed the rebirth and ascendancy of the Jones’ Dallas Cowboys, and then, then… went off the boil a bit.
I still watched the games with friends, went to see the Scottish Claymores in the NFL Europe league, even participated in a peripheral manner in helping out an amateur youth team. And helped out with a fanzine.
2004 brought a trip to Ohio, to see the Wauseon high school team, the Bowling Green college team, and the Cleveland Browns play. An amazing weekend. And the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
And then bang; I got married, we had children, and my hobby time evaporated somehow.
So, which team?
Should I:
Maybe I should throw all the team names into a hat. One that Ruby dog hasn’t chomped yet.
I have 3 sweaters I wear at work; rotated in an unconscious pattern, washed to an irregular schedule.
Since I wore them regularly, last winter, all three have shrunk in the wash. In a drawer.
Next week, socks!
Not exactly a perfect storm of events, not by any means; nevertheless, we ran out of:
It's Ruby Dog's first birthday on Wednesday; a visit to the pet superstore is perhaps in order.
This, though I might refer to it in the store, is not a shopping list.
I'm sat on the toilet, right now.
Expecting a delivery from Amazon, needing a poo, I'd asked my mother-in-law if she'd keep an eye out for the delivery, mentioned that I'd left the key in the door, and finished by saying "I'm tempting fate here."
The doorbell rang the very instant I sat.
Is telepathy a part of the delivery driver training regime‽
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My Fisher Space Pen leaked; the brand's legendary status is in jeopardy! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
(Think calming thoughts Baz…)
On Tuesday I dropped my pen, thought nothing of it.
On Wednesday I noticed excessive smudging (I'm left-handed.)
Today I got my magnifying glass out after a particularly nasty blob of ink appeared on my planner. And transferred to my finger. And highlighter pens. A blob of ink that even after half a day resisted all attempts to cover by careful applications of white paper from an on-a-roll dispenser.
Now the magnifier is ordinarily almost useless, having a too-small, rectangular, lowish powered main glass and a tiny ancillary, but insanely-powerful inset magnifier. It's with this second, a lens having an extraordinarily shallow focus depth, that I found the end of the pen refill had split.
When it dropped, all-of 73cm onto industrial-strength office carpet, it must have impacted something hard-enough to break one side of the ball retaining sleeve.
Unprecedented.
Yes, I have got a spare refill.
Phew!
It – a fine point replaced by the new-year medium black – is about to run out.
Living on borrowed time now; it's probably the most excitement I'll have all week.
Let's face it, at work on an otherwise-unremarkable day, I managed to defeat the very best American engineering – a pen designed to write in zero-G, upside-down, underwater, in extraordinarily hostile environments – by dropping it on the floor.
Danger, it follows me everywhere.
Addendum:
It's a myth that the Americans spent squillions of dollars developing the pen whilst the Russians used a pencil. Snopes.com link.
If you've ever watched a Disney or Pixar film you'll know that cute little animals, hulking great animals, otherwise-inanimate objects such as teapots and desk lamps, and vehicles, all can occasionally spring to life possessed (I chose the word carefully) with human characteristics.
Characteristics such as speech, gait, actions, and faces.
There's something endearing about a nonhuman thing doing human things, and the film industry knows this. They don't always get it right, as has been discussed endlessly on the Internet.
A prime example in film is Cars. And Planes. Everyone knows the defining feature of a car's face is its eyes – the headlamps. Yet in Cars, and in Planes, the eyes are the windscreens. It's just wrong.
Earlier, anticipating only to extend my toilet seat streak, I walked into the gents here. After one slightly awkward conversation with a colleague entering behind – a chat about clenching and kids films – I sat.
Cold toilet seat streak preserved, yay!
But could I 'go'? The hell I could. Stage-fright?
The imagined ranks of too-big-and-unnaturally-positioned-eyed vehicles passing my minds eye entirely put me off. The forklift trucks especially, scurrying about, never remaining still…
I don't appear to have a poo-with-eyes emoji in my phone keyboard. Perhaps it's just as well.
Lunchtime.
Not a packet of potato crisps, for obvious reasons.
"Simple life good."*
Er… I shall stop talking like the village idiot now.
'Life' is now too complex for me, has been for quite some time, and it frustrates all my efforts to simplify situations.
Borrowing from a previous blog post, 'Paris':
"Life is complicated. Living it is easy. Put one foot in front of another, breathe in, breathe out, drink, blink, eat, pee, poo, sleep, work, play, laugh, cry. And then it's over.
There is more, of course. Aspiration. The latest smartphone, TV, games console, car, a house, family, friends, safety…"
I wrote on for a bit in a similar vein. Heck, there may even have been a point to it at the time, but all that's forgotten already – and by pretty much everyone who 'lived' the events of the day the post refers to.
Luckily for me we live in an age where life-expectancy is great enough that, for quite some time to come, I will be yearning for an age that might have existed before even I entered this world. I'm in my forty-eleventh year in this planet dontcha know!
It's an age of simplicity, this thing in my head, but one in which even the now-simplest-to-treat ailment (scurvy, for instance) could have propelled me in particular headlong into the cart on the way to that pauper's grave.
One small positive here; we have the choice where we end up nowadays. Ok, we've the illusion of choice; the family's wishes will surely trump mine. Whether it happens or not I've at least asked to be burnt when it's my time.
No cart for me!
*A conversation with myself, sparked in part by @tomas on 10Cv4.