nosrednayduj

A package was allegedly delivered by FedEx. But it did not come to the front porch. We went online, and they had taken a photo, and we discovered that it was in our garage. A white package on a white plastic chair, and so we had not noticed it, not really expecting somebody to put a package in the garage. (The garage door was open, so it wasn't totally crazed placement.)

Those photos are pretty useful! It would've been a long time before I found it there.

They are forgiven for this strange placement, because we are having a section of our roof replaced, and so there is a giant dumpster next to the house, and probably at the time of delivery, there were a large number of worker bees scurrying about, and possibly a truck or two parked in the way.

In college, I was a pretty big fan of Meat Loaf. So I was vaguely sad when I learned that he had died. Then I read a bunch of Twitter, and I was pretty sad that it turned out he was a Trump supporter. But, still, I had enjoyed his music.

So with a little help from Ken, Friday night I dusted off the record player, which we haven't used in some years and required some fussing with the speaker and amp wiring, found Bat Out Of Hell, and played it as a tribute. I'm sure that I was not the only aging hippie doing that very thing at that very time. Turns out I can still sing all the words to Paradise by the Dashboard Lights and Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad, and most of You Took the Words Right Out Of My Mouth (including the spoken intro to that song, but not the sportscast in Paradise). Kind of vague on the rest of the songs on the album.

I explained to my housemate that if Elton John dies, Yellow Brick Road is a double album and they will have to listen to all of it :-)

So there's this Saturn and Jupiter conjunction on solstice. Unfortunately, it's going to rain and snow on solstice, and generally be cloudy, which is going to make us sad about "making a fire from the sun", and also it's going to make the conjunction difficult to see. So, tonight it was clear, and the next couple of nights are predicted partly or mostly cloudy, so we decided to take a look. Turns out, it's close enough now that both of them will fit inside the view of our telescope! Well, it's cold, and also snowy, and in order to actually see the conjunction, we would have to carry the telescope over the snow a ways so it wouldn't be obscured by trees. Thus, we had the brilliant idea that we could leave the telescope indoors! It's not exactly indoors, because it's an unheated porch, but at least there's no snow. There is window glass, but it wasn't terrible.

Unfortunately, I can't get a picture through the eyepiece, so you don't get to see what I saw. Instead you just get to see the setup:

Yesterday morning we found a unopened can of "vanilla orange zero-sugar Coke" on our front lawn near the street. Then, on my bicycle ride, about 2 miles away, I saw another one next to the curb. Also unopened. I didn't actually stop and read the can to verify it was the same flavor, but I could tell by the orange strip around the top. Valerie posted about these two finds on a local Facebook group, and two other similar cans have been described in town!

So, WTF? If it was just litter tossed out a car window, you would have expected the cans to be empty, or if somebody wanted to chuck their whole sixpack (I certainly wouldn't want to keep that flavor) you'd think they'd be all in the same place rather than scattered about town miles apart.

Today, my work said we could all come in and get our stuff which has been sequestered for three months, and also we could borrow equipment from our desks. I borrowed my chair, my docking station, and my monitor (although I recently purchased a new monitor, so I'm not sure if I'm going to use the one I borrowed.) I also brought home all my personal stuff, because who knows what's going to happen, and if I have completely cleaned out my desk, then if they want to reorganize the office space, they can just do it. If they lay me off, or if I quit, you would think that would also make it easier, but presumably I would have to return the borrowed equipment in that case, so I'd have to go there anyway. Hopefully neither of these things will happen; I'm unlikely to quit, because getting another job would be quite the pain, in addition to the fact that I really hate working full time. I've been working nearly fulltime -- 6-7 hours a day, and that's really all I ever had in me. Maybe normal humans also are like that, and it would be considered full time anyway. I really don't know.

Anyway, it required a trip up to Waltham, 45 minutes each way, and I got to listen to the radio. I kind of miss listening to the radio while commuting; I never really wanted to do it for as many hours as I always did each week, but once a week is good. Once a month is too little.

On the way home, I stopped at a friend's house, and sold her a Black Lives Matter sign (prearranged). We still have four left, and I think we're going to just keep them, although it's probably better to get them out there, than to keep one for theft remediation.

While I was away, we had a lightning strike near home, and it fried two things: the Comcast modem, and our home server. So for a couple of hours we camped on the neighbors xfinity, and then Comcast got us a new modem. Meanwhile, Ken was researching the options for replacing the server. We had hoped we would be able to just plug in the disk and reboot, but the guy at microcenter said that would not work. So now our hope is to get linux on it, and get it to read the other disk. This is not trivial, because windows machines really don't want you to run anything besides windows… Anyway, I had another nice drive up to Cambridge, listening to the radio. There was some concern about getting there before they closed, but I had 15 minutes, and was not the last customer checking out.

So Boston pride was canceled. So we had a local pride parade, in what seems to be our go-to technique: in cars. We live on a major road, and so all of the car parades end up going past our house. We went down to the road wearing tie dye and waving rainbow flags as the parade drove by. I swapped out my usual bicycle safety flag for a rainbow flag, and had some idea that I would try to follow the parade on my bicycle. However, it took about a minute to get my act together and get on the road, and by then they had driven a ways down the road, and they were going faster than 15, so there was no catching them by me.

So I had my own private pride parade, randomly riding around town, mostly looking for "black lives matters" signs. One person did yell out "happy pride", so they had noticed my flag and my tie dye. Anyway, the point about the "black lives matters" signs is that after we bought 10 more after the latest thefts, and the town was having all these vigils and protests, we offered some up on the local facebook group, and sold them all! So we bought 10 more, and sold five of those so far. (We're taking a small loss, to make it an even $10.) Anyway, I wanted to see some of our signs. I saw one that I already knew about, and another "in the wild". Somewhere there are 13 more…

Pictures from the parade:

So I went to the site recommended by the recent dw_news. I found an interesting fact: It claimed one of my email addresses had been compromised. However, the password I've used at that account for years, it claimed had never been seen in any breach. So, whatever data they have, it isn't connected. Maybe it's some site where my username for the site is that email address. Anyway, I'm not really worried. I have very little to hide. I suspect that if someone tried to steal my 401k or something I'd be able to get it back, and they're welcome to my purchase histories.

Many people came, though not nearly as many as our summer party. One person expressed interest in boating, but since he was not an accomplished boater and wouldn't have been safe alone, it didn't happen. Not as much board gaming as other random activities, but I did get to play several games, some of which were new to me.

I had made the aforementioned ton of food, and many people also brought food, and so now we still have a ton of frozen hors d'oeuvres because I never got them out. We also still have a lot of chips and stuff because people brought chips and cheese and crackers. Half my cheese came out because there were two different cheddars out, and someone mentioned "which is sharper" and so I had to get mine out so we could have a three-way taste-off. And some of my chips came out because I seeded the party with two bowls of chips. Probably more could have been eaten if I'd been paying more attention to refilling bowls. But there was a ton of other food besides chips for people.

I really like huge masses of people singing, especially when some of them can really sing. "Happy Birthday" was beautiful with 30 voices! Way better than just a few people singing, half of whom are off key.

The birthday cake came out a little too late -- because I'd eaten too much for dinner and needed to digest! So some people had to leave before cake. Thus, we have lots leftover. I'll probably bring some leftover desserts to work tomorrow, and the leftover chili can be frozen.

Tomorrow it's going to be my actual birthday so we'll go out to dinner at one of those japanese grill-at-table restaurants, just a few of us. And the temperature will ALSO be 60, so maybe I'll ride my motorcycle to work!

I took Valerie to a local pedicure place, because she'd never had one, and I thought she'd like it. (She did, but probably not enough to go on her own in the future.) Turned out, we went on Chinese New Year, and they were having a celebration. At the end, after I paid, I was handed two little red envelopes. Opening them at home, they turned out to contain these:



Now the question is, should I unfold and spend it?

I didn't go to the first sendoff, but Valerie did. About 100 kids from the high school walked up to the train station, were met by people from the UU church for a mini-rally at the center of town, and then took the 9:03 train in to town. My theory was that the rally didn't really start until 11, and so there was no point in going that early, so I took a bike ride around town first, and then got my stuff together and took a shorter bike ride to the train at 10:30. (No way was I taking a car, even an electric car, to the climate strike!)

I tweeted this, but for those who don't follow me there:
Fave sign: "let us pause for a moment of science."
Also: "Losing Nemo. "
And: sad polar bear saying, "all my friends are dead."