overt.org

Over the long weekend, a friend of ours took us up to her home town about 2 hours north of SF, Sebastopol. The highlights included picking and eating massive quantities of fresh berries, eating pies and cakes made from said berries, enjoying said berries over home-made waffles, and staining jeans with said berries. Also there were lots of cute pets, from bipolar dogs to slutty cats, and a guest house née water tower that served as abode for a couple of nights.

On the 3rd we watched Sebastopol’s lovely fireworks show while gorging ourselves on peanut butter M&Ms, Jolly Ranchers, and Goldfish. On the 4th we threw a show of our own in the back yard, the highlight of which was the dog that interpreted the fireworks as its mortal enemy, to be eaten and pawed at all costs.

I’m back at work now, my third-to-last week, tying up loose ends and generally explaining to a lot of people why I’m leaving. Its not so bad. overt’s new look is almost done–I’ve got the stylesheet all done, and now I just need to write a script to copy all the entries over from postnuke to wordpress.

Yesterday at the climbing gym I fell a bit funny off a boulder problem and twisted my ankle. It’s not severe, but it sure does make it a pain to walk. Immediately after I hit the ground and felt my ankle going all wonky, I tried to crumple up into a ball to minimize the injury. I think it worked. After hopping flamboyantly over to the front desk to get some ice to put on it, i lay down on my back for a good 10 minutes holding my ankle up in the air, contemplating the fate of the impending long weekend. I checked out my ankle and didn’t notice too much swelling, so I went, kangaroo-amputee style, to my car for a dangerous drive home, using my heel on the brake and gas, praying that I wouldn’t be called upon for any sort of evasive maneuvers. And I’ve been trying to keep it above my heart and iced ever since. This is, believe it or not, the most serious injury I’ve ever had climbing, in the 11 years or so I’ve been at it.

So, needless to say, with my 8 remaining sick days and 3 weeks of work to use them in, I’m at home today resting. My plan is to try to tackle the CSS for the new site, and (who knows?) maybe try to get it up today. I wont bore you with the geeky minutiae. Suffice it to say that my web programming knowledge is crusty and old fashioned, and all the kids today with their divs and their stylesheets are starting to make me look bad. Like a pathetic middle-aged man tinkering on an ’82 firebird parked conspicuously far out on his driveway, trying to recapture the mechanical wizardry of his youth, I will force upon my readers yet another revision of overt in an effort to prove that I still have The Right Stuff. Look out.

That’s us. Leslie just got her eyes lasered yesterday and she’s already posting at 20/20. I tried to get her to go in for the 3X optical zoom and memory upgrade, but she was too cheap.

My week thus far has involved a trip up to Pleasonton on Sunday with Phil to eat with some of his friends at a place called “Stacey’s Cafe” that’s co-owned by Scott Adams (who Phil told me is picky about his food). I got something called “Scott’s favorite pasta.” It was pretty good–walnuts and capellini and tomatos in a pesto sauce. It had clearly suffered under a heatlamp for a good 15 minutes, which didn’t help.

Monday I lazed away playing UT2004 and reading Dune. You might call it “getting in touch with my inner geek,” except my geek is not hiding on the inside. I had a great day at the climbing gym on Tuesday, first climbing a couple of hundred feet on the computerized “treadwall” that makes for a great warm-up, then spending a couple of hours bouldering with a nice guy I met there named Al. We even swapped phone numbers so that we can meet up at Castle Rock in the future.

Yesterday George joined me for dinner and I cooked up the classic spinach-mascarpone stuffed salmon. We didn’t have any breadcrumbs so I improvised by throwing a couple slices of ciabatta into the oven to crisp and then flogging them with the cuisinart. The result was some supremely tasty bread/butter/parmesan coating for the fish, and only a few more dishes to clean.

Today’s not over, but I think it’s big event will be the ticket I got on the way to work this morning. There’s a very long light that you have to wait at to make a left turn. As an alternative, you can go straight through the light, pull a U, then turn right. You can only do this if you studiously ignore the giant “no U turn” sign. Anyway, I got nailed. Just like my one previous ticketing experience, I didn’t even bother trying to argue about it. Him: “Did you see the no U turn sign, Sir?” Me: “Yeah.” The upside of the encounter was that he pointed out that I still had a blob of toothpaste on my face.

I’m going to see if I can take care of the ticket without ever interacting with a human. The courthouse has a call-in line where you can pay the fine and sign up for defensive driving (or “traffic school” as the hippies here call it), and I assume that DefensiveDriving.com can help me out like they did last time.

Fun was had this weekend. George arrived in Cali with Clare (surprise!). We spent Friday night on trivial pursuit, taboo, and ultimately Shrek. Jeff and Phil joined us. Saturday was spent shopping for books, seeing the third harry potter movie (fun but unfocused. I don’t think i would have enjoyed it w/out having read the book), and going to the end-of-year TFA “party” at Pixar. The venue was swank, and so was the food (free sushi!). There were several speeches given by both ’03 (Leslie’s year) and ’02 (they’re finished now) corps members. It was a long drive to/from Emeryville (near Berkeley) for the event.

Yesterday morning, I carted Clare and George back to the airport. Clare is headed back to Texas, and george is at West Point being a bad-ass as usual. After they left, I came back home and cleaned the bathroom and did a few other chores (such as churning out another 6 DVDs from netflix). Then I hit the climbing gym for stress relief and exercise. I also spent some time on the little eliptical strider thingy–a feature of the gym that might be enough to entice Leslie to join me there once school is out. I went home and promptly dozed until dinner. Dinner itself was beautiful: Leslie got some “sashimi-grade” ahi, which we seared on the stove and glazed in a ginger-garlic-honey sauce. Mmm… half-raw fish.

After dinner I was inspired to rebuild our apartment network by turning our linux server into a router, and relegating our commodity netgear wireless router to the status of simple access point. I did this mostly to give me more control over the firewall after learning that some netgear routers have a back-door administrative account that can’t be disabled, and also so I could easily run an internal DNS server. Yes, I spent hours working on it just so that I could refer to the music server as “music” instead of “192.168.2.74.” Think of it as geek redecoration.