public diary 1999-08-23

[kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker)]

Public diary, 1999-08-23

This weekend was good.  

Saturday morning, Marilyn and I took Lora (our sister-in-law) and
Michael and Shannon (our nephew and niece) to some garage sales.  I
picked up an Escher print (of Oog, the picture with the skull in the
pupil of an eye), a Cuisinart clone, a $15 laptop computer for Marilyn
(probably a 286-12; from 1989 we think), and a big filing cabinet for
my computer room.  Lora, Michael, and Shannon bought a single item
among them, a tank top for Shannon.  At noon, we all went to see "The
Iron Giant", which was really quite good.  (Does it strike anyone else
as odd that a movie in the afternoon is called a "matinee"?)

Later, RLK and Matthew came up; we moved the filing cabinet up into my
computer room, browsed my bookshelves, went to Amar India (discovering,
to our shock, that Ambar is part of a chain), chatted, and played air
hockey.

In the evening, I hacked a bit on a streaming audio system.

Sunday morning, I tried to sleep.  There was a fly in the bedroom
(Marilyn likes to leave the windows open, despite the noise and insects
that enter) that didn't think that was a good idea; it would land on my
face and walk around whenever I tried to sleep.  Despite this, I
managed to get in quite a few Z's, mostly by covering my face with
pillows and sheets.  Eventually I opened the blinds for a while and let
the fly out.

I hacked a little more on the streaming audio system.

That morning, I tried to unclog the kitchen sink.  I succeeded in
getting very dirty and ruining my plumber's snake by pulling it too
hard when it got stuck, and in pulling up lots of guck, but the drain
still didn't.  I also managed to cut my hands up a bit with all the
broken glass in the guck.  (I was surprised to discover there was
broken glass down the drain.  What next?  Grass in the yard?  Clouds in
the sky?  Now I know why the Roto-Rooter guys wear leather gloves when
they do this stuff.)  I fully extended the snake, so the clog is
further down than I can reach with it.

To try to clean up, I showered in the basement beneath the
sawdust-filled spiderwebs (the termites *are* all dead, aren't they?),
truncated all my fingernails to zero, and vigorously scrubbed them with
a hairbrush and soap to try to prevent the guck bacteria from holding a
fertility festival there.  Having done this, I went with Marilyn to a
human festival called "Mountain Days".

"Mountain Days" is ostensibly a celebration of Appalachian culture.  So
there were cloggers dancing all over the place, people selling walking
sticks, fried Italian sausage, barbecued pork, Fricker's barbecued
chicken (which was nasty), homemade ice cream with Special Extra Large
Ice Crystals, and RC Cola and 7Up.  It is unclear to me what Italian
sausage and 7Up have to do with Appalachian culture, but I had some of
both anyway.  I nearly fell asleep on the ground (busily digesting)
while listening to the Ohio River Minstrels sing old Appalachian tunes,
while cuddling Marilyn a bit.  (I hope I didn't pick up any chiggers
while lying on the ground.)  We went off and talked with a Norwegian
film preservationist and photographer called Lars Westgaard, who is
taking a road trip across the US, and bought one of the photographs he
was selling.

The cloggers made the whole thing worthwhile.

Marilyn and I then went to go see a movie (driving down to the Dayton
Mall area for some inexplicable reason). We considered "Bowfinger" and
"Mystery Men", and eventually decided on "Mystery Men".  It was really
quite funny, although not exactly a comic masterpiece, and it was a
little more inspiring than your usual superhero film. "The Iron Giant"
blows it out of the water for ideas, humor, and realism.

Then we went home; I finished the streaming audio thing and posted it
to kragen-hacks.

This morning, I took out the garbage, called Roto-Rooter (who said
they'd call me at work when they could send someone out -- I requested
an after-work thing if possible), then headed to work at 10:00 or so.

Once I got to work (10:40), I read my email and wrote this shit until
11:20 or so.

Brad is out at The Perl Conference, which is unfortunate.