Death of a Sealsman

This weekend a bunch of friends and I went to Ano Nuevo reserve to look at the elephant seal weaners. (When baby seals are born they are pups, then when mom cuts off their milk supply the pups are known as weaners. I suppose after they go out to sea for the first time they become young adults, but I'm just guessing about the last bit.) If you've ever been to Pier 39 to look at the harbor seals, then you've seen weaner sized elephant seals. I suppose if one is going to grow up to be between 3 and 5 tons, one doesn't want to start out too small.



During the walk we had to stay at least 25 feet from any given seal. This rule wasn't to save the seals from us, nor was it to protect us from attacking seals. Apparently, according to our initial park ranger, elephant seals can move surprisingly fast for about 15 feet. Nobody likes to be in the way of 3 tons of motivated animal. (According to our tour guide, elephant seals get squished by other elephant seals too. When we passed a particularly stinky ex-seal, we asked how it had died. Our guide said that she had probably been crushed during "some particularly enthusiastic mating.")




Because of the 25 foot rule, taking pictures of the seals would have been difficult without my realization that I can take pictures through my binoculars. It works surprisingly well, and I'm told that I should try to market the idea to Cannon or to binocular companies. I was continually impressed with the image quality, though i was awfully hard to zoom the camera, focus the binoculars, and press the shutter button with only two hands. The strain of concentration shows on my face.




Unfortunately the fact that I didn't wear any sunscreen also shows on my face. It was overcast and ever so slightly chilly all day. I guess the UV rays were going incognito. I have some rosacea on my cheeks, and I've been trying to put this cream on it to make it go away. The instructions say to put it on the affected areas, but at this point it's a little hard to tell where those areas are. It looks like someone has put a giant flashlight behind my head, or perhaps like I'm lit from the interior.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll peel. What better way to woo the ladies than by looking like a tomato who fell in a bowl of parmesan cheese.

Talking

I'm not a big talker. If I don't know you I might not talk at all, and if I do know you I may only talk slightly more than if I didn't know you at all. I recognize that not all people are this way. Some people like to talk, as was illustrated by my final 5pm delivery today.

Generally delivering something takes about a half hour. I got to his place at 5 and didn't leave until 6:30pm. This lady seemed very nice, but I really just wanted to get home. During "our talk" we covered:

-Healthcare
-The U.C. System
-Guns on campus
-Students of the U.C. system both former and current
-Professors at the U.C. system
-Terry Schiavo (Whose last name, by they way, comes up with 5,170,000 search results in Google. Yikes.)
-Insurance companies
-The FBI
-Why I should join the FBI to fill their diminishing ranks of agents
-My future career goals
-Continuing education
-The Pacific Northwest
-The pronunciation of Oregon (Or ah gun)
-The pronunciation of the Willamette Valley (will am it)
-California Politics
-The differences in weather between Syracuse, New York and Irvine, California
-The history of the founding of Irvine, California
-Various friends and family members who have ever been in or near a hospital
-The ledged of the Best Visiting Nurse Ever
-The fact that she hates Mexicans

Yeah, the last one threw me off too. As I was trying to escape to my van, she followed me out. I commented that the apartment complex seemed very child oriented. (I.E. there were a ton of kids running around.) She opined that it was a dump and infested with Mexicans.

Earlier in the ordeal she told me I was very nice and seemed very smart. It was akin to having someone compliment your cooking and then nibble on some cat poop.

Dude

I remain besieged by messages from dudes.

My Yahoo! personals profile says that I am a man in search of a woman. It goes not say "and by women I mean dudes." The fact that I want to date women is pretty straight forward. (No pun intended.) If I were in the market for transgendered people, I probably wouldn't be on Yahoo! where that isn't a check box.

The first dude that emailed me actually looks a little like a lady in his picture. I would have though he was just an unattractive girl if his profile hadn't included that phrase "trans gurl from SF."

The second dude said nothing about his dudeness. He hadn't posted a picture before sending me an icebreaker, and I read through his profile where he announces that he's 5'11", athletic, and a woman. 5'11" is a tad tall for my scant 5'10" frame (unless the bond is strong and you sell things on eBay), but all in all she looked like she might be fun to hang out with from reading her profile. Then she posted a picture.

When the picture is small, she looks like a girl. When the picture is bigger, one starts to become suspicious of the jaw-line and broad shoulders. When the full body picture comes up, one becomes suspicious of the fact that he is obviously a dude with long hair, lipstick, nail polish, and uggs.

Maybe I need to take another look at my profile. Maybe I have a typo someplace that says I'd like to meet someone with a sense of humor and a penis. Strange though, I don't usually accidentally type the word penis.

Horking in a Field

Today I saw a cow with the dry heaves on my way to Travis Air Force Base. At first I thought she was nibbling the fence, but as I drove closer I noticed she had her head down, her tongue out, and her diaphragm was heaving. She was trying to chunder near the fence so it wouldn't mess up all the nice grass. What a thoughtful cow.

Also, Travis AFB requires a printed order to get on base. Our orders are paged to us, so I stayed at the depot until the order was paged, and then sent it to my email and printed it out. When presented with a printed email order, the guard said, "I'll let you in this time, but we usually don't let anyone in with an order that looks like it came from a computer."

Um, how do you get a printed order that doesn't come from a computer? Our individually placed letters typesetting printing press is on the fritz. The military is very strange.

What Happened to the Last Week?
(The Longest Post Ever)

I'll tell you:

All those who read this were probably relieved to see that there was no pub quiz update on Wednesday. I didn't not post one to save you the boredom, it turns out that I went through the whole of Wednesday thinking it was Thursday. Since none of the other pub quizzers heard from me, they assumed I didn't want to go and didn't go either. So when Thursday actually arrived it was triply disappointing to discover that I had missed pub quiz, that it wasn't Friday yet, and that I had to do Thursday all over again.

Thursday (which was distinctly not Friday) and Saint Patrick's Day mostly involved an enormous headache and the discovery that Louis Rich (which is now Oscar Meyer) turkey-dogs wait until 2am, and then mount an all out war on my digestive system. Though to be fair, it wasn't entirely Thursday's fault. I accumulated evidence over the rest of the week's turkey-dog and stomach cramp jag.

Friday was spent driving to Lake Tahoe, or to be more specific, Truckee. Since we left San Francisco at 8:30pm, there isn't much to in the way of Friday news. Mostly it involved packing, driving, arriving, and playing the guitar. My one moment of note was somebody requesting that I play Contemplating Banana Bread. It is always fun when somebody requests an original song.

Saturday began by taking the world's coldest shower. I usually take slow showers, so I was trying to take this shower super, extra quick since 6 of the 9 other people in the house hadn't showered yet. (And I wasn't sure how many planned to.) So I turned on the water all the way to hot, waited a minute, and climbed in. It remained cold. I flipped the dial all the way to the right thinking that maybe this was some crazy backwards knob. The water switched to ice. So I went back to the left and took the most comprehensive shower possible keeping in mind that every time a droplet of water touched my skin it would make me twitch and gasp for breath.

The rest of my Saturday was divided fairly evenly between skiing (9-12) and hiding in the lodge from the weather (12-4.) I hadn't skied in something like 10 or 12 years, and I was surprised to find that I didn't immediately slide down the mountain on my face. In fact I remembered how to turn, wedge (pizza), and go straight (French fries) almost immediately. However, after lunch the weather grew windy, snowy, and icy. Having paid almost $100 for the equipment and lift ticket, I was bound and determined to ski some more. But the ice on the snow made me slide down the mountain on my face twice, and it was waaaay too stressful trying to avoid all my fellow bunny-slopers who had given up and were sitting in the middle of the run waiting for the weather to clear.

Sunday involved cleaning up the rental house, sledding, and driving home which I shall talk about in three corresponding sections.

Cleaning: We cleaned the house and made a bag for random things which no one had claimed including: a set of keys, a towel, 3 toothbrushes, quite a lot of change, a swim suit, and a pair of very small socks.

Sledding: Being all skied out, a friend and I went out in search of a sledding hill. We found such a hill behind the Tahoe City Superior Court building in amongst the trees overlooking a stream. Since the snow was fresh and undisturbed, I went down the hill first on a river tube, trying to blaze a high-speed sled trail of excellence. Unfortunately, river tubes have quite a lot of traction on the bottom, so what I actually did was build up a big pile of snow in front of me as I slowly scooted down the hill, butt dragging through the center of the inner tube. The plastic snow saucers were much faster, though the numerous trees and trail butt-lumps made the trail both overly exciting and jostling. When sledding got to be too bruising, we switched to playing stack the snowballs and then I played shake all the show off a tree. All in all it was an excellent time.

Driving home: We left Tahoe City at 5:30pm and arrived in San Francisco at 12:30pm. That's 3.5 hours to get to Truckee (15 miles), and 4.5 hours to get to San Francisco (187 miles.) Oddly enough, a cooler of beer saved us an hour or two between Tahoe City and Truckee. Our friends behind us decided they wanted the cooler of beer in my trunk. They had jumped out of their car to come look for us in the (mostly) stop (and hardly ever) go traffic, but hadn't realized we were in front of them. So my roommate jumped out and brought the cooler back. On his way, he saw what looked like their silver car and waved. The people in the car waved back, rolled down their windows, and said hello. It turned out to be some friends of my roommate from work. They happened to know the cause of the traffic jam, and a short cut to avoid it that was coming up in less than 50 feet. It was a very King's Quest way to save 2 hours driving home.

Monday was mostly spent being tired because of Sunday.

Tuesday, today, was only eventful because I really had to go to the bathroom. I was kind of dehydrated from the amount of alcohol available over the weekend. (Not what you think: I don't drink, and because there wasn't anything but alcohol to drink, I only had a little tiny bit of tap water and a 16oz bottle of squirt.) So today I bought two big bottles of water and tried to consume them throughout the day. My last pickup was in Napa, and I had to go a little bit when I got there. But I didn't, and drank more water as I set off on the hour or so drive back home. As I approached the bridge my bladder was at about maximum capacity, at which point traffic slowed to a crawl. Drumming on the steering wheel, pushing my legs together, and loosing my seat belt weren't reducing my panic, so I started to look for other alternatives. The only one available: my empty water bottle. I didn't want to use it, I didn't want people in SUVs to be able to look in my window on the Bay Bridge and be able to see me relieving myself into a Safeway Select Refreshe bottle, but it came down to that or wet myself. My choice became clear.

Unfortunately one can only tip a water bottle at a very shallow angle when driving, so I had to stop before I was done for fear of over filling and having to deal with slosh. (A fear made all the more real by the stop and go traffic.) Luckily I seem to have sufficient control, and the operation was completed successfully, complete with still having the water bottle's cap.

The lesson to be taken away from this? Do not take water bottles out of the trash to recycle them. Somebody threw them away for a reason.

Land of the Camouflaged

Starting at 1pm today I had to be at Travis Air Force Base to help show off our fine suite of products to all the doctors and nurses in the various oddly acronymed medical units in the med center on base. (MICU, NICU, SICU, Pediatrics. What the hell is pediatrics?)

Before going through security*, I had lunch at the Subway across the street from the base entrance. Since it as 12:15 when I got there, everyone else was getting lunch there too, but I was one of only a very few not dressed in fatigues.

While I was waiting in line, a huge guy gets in line behind me. He was sporting the very model of a military hair cut, he was wearing combat boots, and he was standing waaaay too close to me. Every time he crept forward, I would do the same, sometimes throwing in a little creep sideways to keep my distance.

Anyway, while the line was oozing forward, I hear a little, but surprisingly loud, midi version of assembly coming from this guy's pocket. On most phones you can press almost any exterior button, and the ring will stop while you check the readout to see who it is. This guy didn't want to do that. It played the song once, then he realized it was him that was ringing, so he picked it up and perused the caller ID to see who was calling while assembly played through again. Finally he answered:

HELLO? WHAT? NO, NOT RIGHT NOW. NO, I'LL HAVE TO DISCUSS IT WITH YOU LATER. I'M GETTING SOME SUBWAYS. WHAT? YEAH, I'M GETTING SOME SUBWAYS. YEAH, I'LL CALL YOU BACK.

1 minute later:

Assembly plays twice through while he rummages for his phone and then inspects the front display. Then,

HELLO? WHAT? WHO? OH, CELINE DION? YEAH, I LIKE HER VOICE A LOT. SURE, THAT SOUNDS GOOD. LETS SEE THAT TONIGHT.


* Getting through security involves showing the begunned guards at the gate my ID (which is a little card with my name typed on it, my signature, my company logo, and a picture I took (and cut with scissors to the right dimension) which is all laminated and hung on a lanyard) and showing a printout of an order (which in that case was a screen shot of corporate's ordering software. Since it's a demo, it wasn't even a real order). I hope they aren't doing anything super secret there, because the security regime is terrible. My company ID is real, but I feel I could make a much more professional looking ID by going to office depot armed with $50. My company ID would look a lot more professional if I was wearing my uniform in my picture and not a gray t-shirt that says South Wales Borderers Scooter Club.

I Have Great News

I just saved $250 every six months on my car insurance. No, Geico had nothing to do with it. Apparently driving a company car to work has more benefits than I thought.

In other news, if I can pry myself out of bed in time, take a fast enough shower, and propel myself out the door by 7:30am, I shall try to get my scooter learner's permit. It's actually a Motorcycle learner's permit, but my intent is to get a scooter.

I'm sure this news will vastly disappoint all those people who think motorcycles are the best thing ever, but I don't have any great urge to be prescribed any of my company's fine family of products just yet.

Other disappointments for readers who talk to me in person: Having a learner's permit means that I can't take any passengers or ride around at night. Or at least not until I can demonstrate to the DMV that I won't fall off if I go around corners really slowly.

Cell phone Safety Tip

Don't stash your phone behind the sun visor. When you accelerate it might jump out and land on your nuts.

Not Now

At some point I plan to:
-Do my taxes.
-Switch some bank stuff around.
-Write an overly detailed account of my trip to Albuquerque and post it here (with pictures and everything.)
-Do laundry.

But not right now. I've just worn myself out by writing and recording a song ("Ordinary"), posting it on the internet, fixing my blog sidebar to link to my solo music, and bracing myself for the embarrassment of having the outside world hear me croak out my songs.

If you'd like to send me money for the pleasure of downloading them I accept paypal. Also acceptable: Pink elephants, dreams, Heffalumps And Woozles.

Yikes

Since I'm at work, I thought I would post a quick work related snippet:

I delivered a mattress today to someone in the Napa Valley on hospice. From past experience, I know that when I deliver things to people on hospice in Napa, they don't last very long.

So I set up the mattress and had the caregiver sign for it. I culdn't read her signature, so I asked what her last name is and she responds, "Graves."

Yikes.

Thirsty for Third

... was our pub quiz name tonight, yet we came in second. This might be an accomplishment if there had been more than 3 teams. But alas, there was not, and so there was no prize for best name nor was there a prize for second place.

In other news, leaving me in charge of picking bathroom colors is perhaps not a good idea. Light blue was voted for, and light blue was what I thought I chose. But when put all over that walls and ceiling, the blue was not as light as I thought it would be. We may need a reading lamp on the toilet tank. (And in regard to the voting for a new toothbrush, mine is a Sonicare and is therefore far too expensive to not suffer through a little tile dust for.)

And lastly, being the swell roommate that I am, volunteered to get my roommate from the Oakland airport tonight from his late-ass 11:50pm flight. But since it's him, his plane has been delayed and is now coming in at 12:52am (3 minutes later than when I checked 5 minutes ago. Bad sign.) I'm going to be one tired guy tomorrow.

I'm only glad that I'm not going to be two tired guys.

(Since spell checking this post his plane has gained a minute. Go Jet Blue! Fly like the wind!)

Color?

I have some exciting news for me, and some boring news for everyone who isn't me and/or my roommate: my bathroom is getting remodeled. The tile that I poked through the shower wall has turned into brand new tile work, the showerhead moving a foot and a half higher up, and the bathroom being repainted.

So here's what I need: you all to vote on what color my bathroom should be. If I finally hear from my roommate, you'll all be ignored, but since I'm having such trouble getting through to him, there's a good chance democracy will rule. Please vote for solid and reasonable colors. My landlord will not do stripes nor polka dots, and he probably won't paint it black. With that said, vote away.

I’m voting for I-don’t-care-urple but my landlord wants me to choose a different color. And we already have one vote for light blue, for calming, soothing trips to make a poopie.

(And all votes must be in by 8am west coast time. I'm sure this means I'll get no votes, but I didn't get a whole lot of warning.)

Update (8:45pm): I've just realized that they pulled up my nice caulking job. I guess the moral of the story is that if you are a good tenant and scrub the black stuff off the tub once a year, the third time you do it you get a brand new bathroom. However this must be weighed against the issue of having your toothbrush covered in tile dust. (I washed it and put it in the refrigerator, which I feel is probably safe from dust.)

The Amazingness of my Landlords

Because I just got back from Albuquerque and want to go to bed, I shall give everyone a super quick wall update (See a couple of posts back).

That's it. You have the whole update: Nothing happened.

When conjecturing with my Mom about the possible wall outcomes when I arrived home, she asked if I had any duct tape and plastic sheeting in the event that nothing had been done. I said that I didn't, but I did have packaging tape and plastic bags. However, when I arrived home there was a small pile outside my door consisting of 2 rolls of duct tape, a utility knife*, and a square of plastic sheeting.

My theory is that my landlord brought stuff over to do a patch job but couldn't get past my cunningly locked door. I guess I could live here forever rent free as long as I didn't let him in.

* I pondered whether to put an or a in front of utility knife. I seems like an is technically correct, but a sounds better and spell/grammar check agrees.

Empathy? No?

Have you ever tried to take a shower using the tub spigot, but only with equivalent water flow of a lackadaisical drinking fountain? I just did, and I don't feel very clean.

I couldn't take a shower because a) I re-caulked the door last night and b) there's a big hole in the shower wall. I couldn't take a bath because the drain plug doesn't work and the only other thing I could think of to clog the drain has food bits on it.

With no other course of action available, I turned on the tube faucet to a trickle and mashed my face up against the drain handle to try to get water to run over my hair. This of course made my hair a little wet, and the rest of me slightly damp and very cold. I often bring the space heater into the bathroom with me, and why I didn't do it today is a mystery for the ages.

Caulking Up the Bathroom

I decided that this weekend I was going to be a good tenant and re-caulk around the shower door.

The shower door leaked when I moved in, but during one of my Mom's visits* she filled in the holes with caulk. Alas, after a few months it started to leak just a little bit. So this weekend was going to be the big repair weekend. I'm going to Albuquerque tomorrow, so I won't be taking another shower until Monday, and my roommate is in New York doing pre-law school things. That gives the caulk the full recommended 48 hours to set.

With all these big plans, I decided to take things a step further and scrub my tub. (After eating grub, going to the pub, and examining my chub.)

I'm going to skip to the end of the story here and tell you that the caulking came out swell. I did a masterful job, and no water shall leak under the shower door ever again.


(The lines you can see on top are on the metal door guide. The pure and excellent slope of the caulk bead is imperceptible in the picture.)

Back to the middle of the story: While I was leaning on the wall scrubbing my tub, the wall gave up. It decided that the years of mildew and soakage were too much for it, and the drywall quit and walked off the job leaving the ill-grouted tile to fend for itself. The tile did a commendable job of pretending to be a wall for quite a while, but my leaning on it was simply too much to bear.

The end result is that my shower door is water tight, but the gaping hole in my wall may leak just a bit.



* vis•it (vĭz'ĭt) pronunciation
v., -it•ed, -it•ing, -its.
v.tr.
1. My Mom coming to San Francisco to see me.
2. The prime opportunity to buy me shirts/slacks/sweaters
3. To fix and clean my apartment. (Including doing dishes which may or may not be mine.)
4. To try to instill in me the knowledge and motivation to cook.

Curiosity Killed the Cat

I think my ass is too small for my work pants. Err, I suppose I should say that my work pants are too big for my ass since I'm not working on any ass increases at the moment.

I was noticing today that during the best of times it looks like I have no ass. Like I lost it in the war or something. But during the worst pant arrangements, it looks like a have short tail, or perhaps an extremely curious turtle.

What I need are low rise Dickies, but I don't think they make those. What more can I expect from wearing a pair of pants below my belly button that are designed to sit just below my eyelids.

On the subject of things that are sure to gross you out (extremely curious turtles), click below if you want to be weirded out for the rest of the week, and possibly most of next week. I almost didn't have a personal Trader Joe's pizza (with added olives) after I saw it. But then again, I see some disturbing stuff what with all my visits to hospice patients and nursing homes, and I was hungry.

I warned you.

Who Flung Poo?

That's what my t-shirt decided our pub quiz name should be. I still voted for Marissa, Queen of the Irish, but alas, everyone else thought the words on the front of my shirt were best.

And how's this for nerdy? Before the last round we graphed our points per round vs round and came up with kind of a sine wave. It turned out to be a fairly good graph. We looked at what it predicted for the final round and were dismayed to the graph's suggestion that we would do abysmally. We did abysmally, but still came out in 5th place.

I need a shirt that says "Marissa, Queen of the Irish." I guess then everyone might start calling me Marissa, and I'm not sure how funny I would think that was.

I'll Let You Know

When I'm at home I'm either in my room, where I can see my computer, or in the living room, where I can hear my computer. So whenever I get an email I get the little outlook noise (or the gmail notifier noise depending on the email address) and I wander in to see who emailed me. As a result, I'm often the first person to reply to Evites.

I'm not sure if this is good or bad. Being the first one at the party seems like a bad thing. But do others worry about being the first to respond to an Evite? Maybe I'm getting the ball rolling. Then again, maybe others decide whether or not to attend on the basis of my response. "Will Mike be there? Yes? Oh, then I have someplace else to be. I can't stand another evening of watching him get all drunk on sprite and shuffle around not talking to anyone."

Whatever. The party in question will have food made by one of the party throwers which fully justifies my yes response showing up within mere seconds of the Evite going out.