Archive for the ‘Nonclassified Nonsense’ Category

Jonah should be here to amuse me, but she elected to contract a viral infection from her employers. I decided I wanted to be not-sick more than I wanted to see her, I told her to stay home. Normally, I view my immune system as impenetrable, but I don’t think it’s worth the risk right now. I won’t be able to make matza ball soup for her from Canada, though.

I woke up some time this afternoon, canceled my health insurance, showered, and caught up on my google reader feeds. I’ve gotten some good scrabble playing in, but consuming the internet is troublesome during the day because it’s so slow. Now that it’s 2:30am, I have it all to myself, and I can do things like stream Pandora. (Only after I tricked it into thinking I was in the U.S. because it’s apparently not available outside the U.S.) Usually I’d rather just listen to Radio Paradise, but they seem to be on some sort of reggae kick this morning.

My sole foray outside of my hotel room today involved a trip down to the Foggy Dew. I had several beers, “fries supreme”, and a “steak and Guinness pie”. This turned out to be an absurdly large amount of food, and I consumed all of it, even though there wasn’t any good reason to do so. I just can’t stand to throw away good food. The “fries supreme” turned out to be a sort of west coast poutine. French fries, covered in “a variety of Canadian cheeses” (at least, that what the menu said), bacon, sauteed onions and the whole thing was topped with gravy. I’ve never actually had poutine, and wanted to try it while I’m here. Maybe I’ll find the real thing somewhere while Joanna’s here.

The steak and Guinness pie was perfectly acceptable, though this sort of Irish food is never terribly exciting. I’m sure I’d do a much better job of it.

I’m considering deleting my Facebook account. I’m not sure I can explain why. Sometimes I toy with the idea of canceling my internet connection, too.

It’s funny, as recently as 5-6 years ago, I didn’t have any trouble staying up until 4am and sleeping until the afternoon, regularly. It was my natural sleep pattern–the only thing that seemed to change that was working at the air force academy. Some times I find adjusting my sleep schedule to be easier than others. I’m not having any trouble sleeping, but I am finding that I’m not alert at all alert at 4am like I need to be. Last night in the sim, while I was non-flying pilot, I felt my brain disconnect. I was completely unable to comprehend the things I needed to comprehend, in a very basic way. At one point I looked at the HSI and couldn’t tell which way we were flying in reference to the VOR that was tuned up. I just couldn’t figure it out. I’m not sure how much of that was simply that I’d been in the sim too long, and how much of it was due to the time of night.

I’m a bit worried about the next sim session which doesn’t start until 1:15am, and I’m slated to go second. That means I don’t start until 3:15, and don’t finish until 5:15. Yeah.

So, even though I could have gone to bed, and probably fallen asleep at midnight, here I am, awake at 4:30am. But I think that’s about all I can take for now.

The trick to E-Baying is to sell a bunch of stuff all at once. That way you won’t get discouraged when stuff doesn’t get a single bid, because you’ll be racking in so much money from officer club ashtrays.

The exception to this, of course, is selling identical items. If two people want the same thing, they’ll both drive up the price, whereas if there are two items, they can each get one for themselves cheap. As a guy at the fur auction said, “All’s you need for an auction is feller with money and another with guts.”

Michele’s been cleaning out the basement. A quarter of the basement is now lined with new shelves from Home Depot with a wide avenue between them. Until recently, it was tricky to walk in there at all. A lot of what was in there has ended up in the trash. A lot more has ended up in the downstairs hall. She threw out all the empty boxes I was collecting to ship the things she has me E-Bay. Then she told me to E-Bay three things.

One was a waterproof sock that you put over your leg cast and then pump it to make it watertight to you can swim in it. It didn’t work for her. It didn’t sell on the first try but then went for 99 cents on the second. Fortunately, I had a box the right size for it stuffed under my desk.

Have I mentioned that I compulsively save empty boxes? I have four on my desk at the moment, plus another one with an unknown number nested inside it, plus peanuts. I have a large box full of small boxes out in the outside storage room, but Berck has blocked it in, so I can’t very well get to it. I’m in charge of selling things on Amazon (which is even easier to use than E-Bay), and it’s very frustrating to be furiously searching for a box the size of one that your husband just threw out when you have to SOLD, SHIP NOW.

The two identical items Michele had me sell were two Iceman cold therapy units. They’re not cheap, so she was hopeful they’d bring in some cash. Only one of them had a power adapter, but I managed to find one that worked out of the power adapter drawer. I spread out a sheet, took pictures of both ensembles, and put one of them up to end on a Sunday night. The next Monday morning, it had sold for $29. I sent out an invoice, got paid, and shipped it out. Michele had been kind enough to save two boxes the right size for them. Got good feedback too!

Then I listed the second one. A week later it had sold for $73! Identical item. If I had sold it a week earlier, they probably would have both gone for $15. Or maybe $28.

Auctions are weird.

I have to say that E-Bay has made it a lot easier to ship things these days. Used to be you had to figure it all out for yourself and hope you weren’t losing money. Now you can just put it into the embedded shipping calculator. And when it’s time to ship, you just head over to PayPal, and it gives you a postage paid label to put tape on your package. Then you just drop it off at UPS or USPS.

I hope the last package gets there. I sent it to Canada, and the guy at the UPS store wasn’t sure how to handle the customs situation. We ended up taping a photocopied piece of paper on the side of the box listing the contents and value, which is all you should have to do.

Dad is in town. We went to a recording at New Life tonight.

Berck is in Vancouver. His sim partner failed his oral exam, but they’re letting him go through the simulators anyway and retake his oral exam afterward. Berck isn’t using his phone in Canada, as it would cost $.69 a minute, but he has Internet access. If you really wanted to call him, I can give you his hotel number.

It’s official: I still have a job. My salary will go to 75% of what it currently is, but I’ll get a 10% take of whatever Bremer Associates brings in. I currently get 4%. If we do as well as we did last year, I’ll make 5k more this year.

…and couldn’t figure out why the place was packed.

On Thursday Michele yelled up the stairs to me. We have an intercom system on the phones, but she can never remember how to use it. So she walks from one end of the downstairs to the other to yell up the stairs to me whenever she needs something. My desk is at the top of the stairs, and I can hear her fine from there.

“Joanna?”

“Yo.”

“Have you been having trouble with your applications this morning?”

“My applications?”

“I’ve been having horrible problems with Firefox and InfoSelect. Do you think it’s the wind?”

“Uh, why would the wind…nevermind.* Have you restarted your computer?”

“No, I probably should have done that first.”

“If you’re still having problems after you restart, I’ll be happy to try to fix them.”

I didn’t hear of any further problems after that until the next morning.

“Joanna?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m having horrible problems with Firefox.”

“Firefox just installed a new update, so you should be better soon.”

“Okay.”

I sat down at my computer for the first time. On Fridays I clean the house, so I hadn’t been doing my usual scouring of the Internet. Sure enough, the load times on major sites I visit every day were unreasonably sluggish. I checked my bandwidth, which was much slower than usual.

So I called Qwest. I hate talking to tech support people. He had me turn the modem off and back on again, which worked remarkable well, once I plugged the Ethernet cable back in after it had become unhooked from the modem to the router when he had me turn the modem around to find out what model it was. I really should replace that cable.

“What was wrong?” asked Michele.

“We had to turn the modem off and back on again.

“Everyone had to get out of the car and get back in?”

“Exactly.”

She was referring to this joke. There are three engineers in a car; an electrical engineer, a chemical engineer and a Microsoft engineer.

Suddenly the car just stops by the side of the road, and the three engineers look at each other wondering what could be wrong. The electrical engineer suggests stripping down the electronics of the car and trying to trace where a fault might have occurred. The chemical engineer, not knowing much about cars, suggests that maybe the fuel is becoming emulsified and getting blocked somewhere.

Then, the Microsoft engineer, not knowing much about anything, comes up with a suggestion “Why don’t close all the windows, get out, get back in, then open the windows again, and maybe it’ll work!?”

Here’s a conversation I had with Duncan recently:

“Joanna, Outlook isn’t working right.”

“Did you restart the computer?”

“Yes! Three times!”

I wasn’t sure I should be happy he’d restarted it before coming to me or to tell him the definition of insanity. Instead I just sighed and fiddled with stuff until it started working again.

Yes, I am the IT department.

*The house is in the middle of nowhere, and up until recently the only broadband we could get was either satellite or line of sight. Our line of sight antenna would jiggle whenever it was windy, making our Internet connection go in and out. In March the Chinook winds come. This whole last week the wind was blowing at about 40 miles per hour constantly.

But we’ve had DSL for 2 years now.