another tough week

[Kragen Sitaker]

Tuesday I brought five bookcases home.

I'd bought the bookcases from a Mountain View friend who's moving
out of town with her husband, and stored them at another friend's
Sunnyvale house, and Tuesday I borrowed a third friend's truck to
drive down to get them.

Drove down late, running into Silicon Valley rush hour traffic jams.

Didn't count on rain, and didn't have enough rubber straps.  The
bookcases didn't fall out of the truck bed (although they fell over
before I was out of the parking lot, so I redid the rubber straps) but
they did get rather wet.

My space blanket, an aluminized sheet of Mylar big enough to keep me
warm in emergencies, served as a sort of impromptu tarp, although the
60MPH wind eventually ripped it into aluminized Mylar confetti;
nevertheless, it kept the bookcases much drier than they would have
been.

One bookcase got destroyed by rain on the way up --- its back was
cardboard.  Another fell out of the truck as Beatrice and I were
unpacking it, smashing on the sidewalk.  Three more bookcases (and
quite a bit of bookcase rubble) now inhabit our hallway.

Beatrice dropped one of the bookcases on her toe.  She was in pain for
the rest of the evening, but fortunately, the injury wasn't serious.

Beatrice and I had been sleeping on a queen-size mattress and
boxspring and metal frame.  Monday we bought, brought home, and
assembled a douuble-size loft bed, giving us much more space in the
bedroom.

So, after bringing home the bookcases, I hauled the mattress and
boxspring up to her parents' house for storage.

I had really hoped to go see Charlie Bachman speak about the
Integrated Data Store at the Computer History Museum at 19:00 that
night, but unfortunately, I got back from returning the truck at about
midnight.  I was very disappointed.

Got tax extension filed Monday.  My estimated remaining tax liability
is quite low, a few hundred dollars --- I've been doing basically just
enough paid work to make ends meet since September, so the
withholdings from my jobs last year almost exactly covers my income
tax.

The birthday party in Socorro for my mother Carolyn last weekend was
excellent.  It involved tree-climbing, hammock-breaking, salsa-making,
finger-slicing (oops!), music-playing, singing, dancing, and lots and
lots of talking, hugging, and snuggling.  Beatrice and I decompressed
in a hot tub afterwards.

Breakfast the next morning (extending into the afternoon) consisted of
tasty waffles with optional green chile, raspberry jam, molasses, and
standard supermarket syrup, and Polish logicians telling Tarski tales.

I seem to have remained around the same mass: 92 kg, measured in
Socorro.  My mass before I got fat in 1996-97 was about 86-91 kg, so I
guess I have lost all the weight I put on that year --- not all the
fat, though, as some of it still persists.  Either my fat is
differently distributed than before or I've lost muscle mass which has
been replaced by fat.

I have jury duty.  I hope to be able to write about it.

Beatrice and I haven't turned on the heat in our new house even once.
We haven't needed to.

I've been cooking at least once every day, even if it's just making
myself some miso soup (which I just did.  Yum.).  It's amazing how
much this matters for my budget and my waistline.


Anyway, Wednesday, I caught up on my sleep and email from Tuesday and
paid my bills.

In world news, Israel is the latest country to show that the Holocaust
can happen anywhere, to anyone, even in a country populated by
Holocaust survivors and their descendants, and the genocide there
threatens to spawn the third world war; our president's foreign policy
is so badly managed that Arabia threatens to align itself with Saddam
Hussein instead of with us; democracy is restored in Venezuela, much
to the chagrin of the US government, and as a result, probably not for
very long.  As a side note, the coverage of the Venezuelan coup in the
mainstream and underground media shows that the mainstream media are
no longer very reliable; see the insufferably self-promotional "Three
Days That Shook the Media" at http://www.narconews.com/threedays.html
for details.

Ice shelves are collapsing in the Antarctic.  Hard to know what that
means.  I've always feared that the next big earthquake could hit San
Francisco and put a major squeeze on its way of life --- but maybe now
it'll be rising sea levels.

More likely, it'll be wartime conservatism.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08.  Hurrah!
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>
The power didn't go out on 2000-01-01 either.  :)