Spotted Dick

I couldn't tell which one of them sent me this, but either my father or mother was amused to find this at the grocery store.  I like it that the tab for my upload in Flickr says "All Sizes | Spotted Dick".  I knew what Spotted Dick was, so I'd have been more impressed if they had brought me a can to eat with my Durian Nescafe Ming gave me (don't order me any - it has to be truly random, otherwise I'm not as amused as I can get it myself any time if I was really that jazzed to try it).

What was cool was learning the word dysphemism.  It's like utopia and dystopia, but instead euphemism and dysphemism.  Interestingly, there are euphemistic dysphemisms.  So it's not really just opposite sides of the same kind, it's more fine grained than that and can involve being a euphemism for one group, but a dysphemism for another group, based on the context.  And, for example, it includes a minced oath were someone substitutes a word in a usual phrase that might be offensive: bowlderizes it.  So when Eryn used to say "Oh bommit!" she was engaging in a minced oath.  And, when I call my mother Ellen, I may be guilty of name dysphemism.

Who knew spotted dick was such an educational opportunity.

A List I Never Made (one year later)

It occurred to me that in at least one place out here I should have a list of the (physical) damage from the accident, in case I ever need it:

• Collapsed left lung
• Hole in my left side used to aerate the left lung, left a nice (itchy) scar.
• Chipped tooth, left side.  Actually missing a chunk that Shirene patched.  She was pleased the patch seemed to take.
• Hole in my knee - from Regions, they put a post through my left leg just above the knee to keep it straight so the hip would heal.  Was supposed to take five minutes, then they kicked my wife out of the room and it took an hour.  There's a scar on both sides were the post was.
• Pain in my left knee - gotten better over time, but the knee actually has more of an ache than the hip ever does.  Feels I bit like I'd expect arthritis to feel.  Changing weather (see my last snow post) makes it worse.  Additionally, sometimes it itches like crazy (see the next bullet).
• Nerve damage in my left leg originating from a post hole - see the last bullet about kicking my wife out of the room.  The nerve pain extends all the way up the leg and crosses to the other side as well as slightly down.  It absolutely starts at the post hole and sometimes I can feel it cross from the inner side of the leg through the leg to the post hole scar on the outside, and then start to radiate up and down on the inside from the scar.  Originally, in the hospital, they told me the pain I was feeling in some private spots was jock itch (there's a post related to that in the history - it was a problem), but that went away and left behind the nerve pain which was what I'd actually been complaining about, it just happened to live under the other issue.  Gotten a bit better over the course of a year, but retraining that nerve is slow and if I exercise a lot, the nerve is the first thing to complain.
• 14 stitches, left side of my head, near the scar from my birthmark. Bit of scar tissue there, left side of the eye, but I worked it extensively while I was laying in bed recovering, so it's not as bad as it looked in the hospital pictures.
• Brain swelling - no longer an issue (I hope), but it was there and there was concern. My mother, sister, and wife were constantly watching for changes due to brain damage.  Except for one toilet seat incident, I seem fine in that regard.
• PTSD - my wife claims it's an issue.  I know what behaviors changed as a result of the accident, so I don't concur.  I know I slow down more for intersections than a normal person would.  I have to be able to see all the traffic coming.  I was paranoid about traffic before because of how often I ride a bicycle, but the accident took it up a notch.  Also ramped my paranoia about watching other people carefully so I'm not in an injury zone up a notch.  If you're in my space, I have a pretty close eye on your physical movements at all times.
• The hip - I broke both my acetabulum and sacrum.  The acetabulum was patched with two plates to hold it all together.  The sacrum was left to heal.  The hip does well most days, but if I push the exercise I can feel it start to ache a bit.  Hence the training prior to RAGBRAI so I don't end up weeping in a corn field unable to pedal another stroke.
• I almost forgot - there's a 14" scar on my left hip, rolls up toward my back across me bum.  I find it amusing in retrospect, because it looks very much like the outie version of the dent that was in the side of the Mustang.  I mirrored the damage to my car very well in a lot of respects.  Fun with metaphors!
• Broken clavicle.  Healed very fast - the doctor said in part because of the head damage.  There's a link there that they don't understand.  When I feel off my bicycle on the ice about two weeks ago and hurt my wrist, it took me a while to notice that the ache extended up my arm and into my shoulder.  Same place where it was broken before.  Probably not a coincidence.
• Me bum: Regions fed me all sorts of drugs to loosen my bowels while I was there to offset all the pain killers they were feeding me (e.g. narcotics).  Problem was, the nurses weren't actually checking the charts and wouldn't listen to me, so they didn't realize I was taking almost no pain killers whatsoever. The resulting side effects probably gave me the anal fissure I had to have surgery for only months later.   Surgery in that case was minimal, but it took six months to heal up.
• Large foreign objects in my lungs - these are the two small hamburger type chunks Regions Hospital lost despite being asked to retain them after checking what they were.  I always said their process ability sucks - their recent dumping of the remains of two babies in the laundry (one of which they can't find yet) sort of proves out that point.
• Glass in my mouth when I woke up - not damage, but if there were foreign "things" in my lungs, it's good to note they didn't get all the glass out in case they ever find a piece of safety glass in my lungs and don't know what it is.  "What's this?"  "Piece of a car..."
• Pneumonia (or some such lung infection - my local doc took care of it).

I think that's most of it that I can remember if you leave out night sweats, etc., which are really just side effects of other issues and went away.  Some scratches and nicks here and there otherwise, but overall, I'm in pretty good shape given that laundry list.

Snow

I refuse to be up to the minute.  It's a blog, not a Twitter feed or a Facebook wall.  So these are pictures from yesterday morning, just in case you weren't tired of looking at them all over your social networks.  I'd say it all seems to be melting away, but while I'm sitting here at Dunn Brothers writing and entering Coke Rewards caps for charity - it's exciting to be able to look at the window and see one of the two schools you're entering points for - I notice there are piles of snow to the right that still look to be about twelve feet tall.  That's bad news if you need to get some bicycling in before the Ironman, MS60, and Almanzo 100.  The 100 worries me.  Without a few good rides under my belt, beyond the Ironman and MS60, that's going to be rough.

So here are my beautiful pictures of our mid-April snowstorm.  Three of the four are of the back porch and my wife's vine system.  I took  more of the other snow-covered objects, but I liked these best.  And I'm hoping to put some hydroponic grow systems back there for vegetables if there's ever a grow season, and it's slowly falling apart, so this might be one of the last chances to photograph it before I change our back view.  The angle in the pictures is a bit strange.  I wonder if the accident has made me somewhat lopsided (usually surgery to your hip does)?  I'll have to watch for that in the future.







The picture without the table and chair.  Those planks in the lower left are remainders from the wheelchair ramp last summer.  I'm hoping to make them go away now that I'll have a summer where I'm steady on my feet.

Bananas

During Eryn's birthday party I managed to refilm the banana scene from Hausu.  I feel a little shoddy for not actually getting the everywhere in bananas, bananas, everywhere.  But in the end, it'll save me from a potential lawsuit.

Eryn and I go to Denver and Sidney...Her Report, 2 Years Later

I found this on my iPad today when I was taking notes.  I noticed there were a few things that were something like 767 days old.  That's weird to see.  Makes it seem like it happened forever ago.  One of the documents was Eryn's homework for her teacher explaining what we had done on our vacation to Denver and then driving her Great Grandma back to Sidney.  She did a pretty good job for typing on an iPad on a train in the middle of the night with an ear ache when she was barely eight.

Five days ago,my Dad and I flew to Denver,Colorado.  We met my grandma, grandpa and great grandma at the hotel La Quinta once we got in Denver.  We took a shuttle to get to get to the hotel.  I walked my great grandma's dog and after we went to Oskar Blues for lunch.  After that my Dad tried to go on a beer tour at a place called the tasty weasel but you could not go on tours on Easter.  The next day my dad got to go on the beer tour  at Great Divide.  I liked to watch the bottling machine then we went to Casa Bonita for lunch. I got a flasher when we where there.  We also saw divers at Casa Bonita. 

The next day we said bye to my grandma and grandpa we drove, and drove stopped for lunch drove some more and got to Hot Springs.  For dinner we went to All Star and the wings were the best ever!  We got a room at a Best Western and I got to swim!  The next day we went to the Mammoth Site.  We saw mammoth bones,tusks,and teeth. 

We also saw a sink hole inside the building.  I got a stuffed mammoth there and then we drove lots more and got to Medora.  I got a dragon in Medora.  We stayed at the Badlands hotel.  They had a really cool mini golf course that unfortunately I did not get to play on.the next day we got to sidney,montana and to my great grandma's trailer.  Later we set up my great grandma's garden.  We slept in her fold-out bed and then at five p.m. We went to the train station and my great grandma drove back to her trailer.we got in our sleeper car at seven,had dinner with another family,and then went back to our car.   

I played with Ipad for little while then went to bed,woke up in the middle of the night with an earache,went to the bathroom,my dad and I went to the View car, went back to our car,and went to sleep.  When I woke up my ear was all better and we went to breakfast with another person and then we went back to our car,got our stuff,and got off the train in st.paul.

The Map of Time and The Map of the Sky

I bought The Map of Time by Felix Palma when Eryn and I went to visit my sister in law while she was in the hospital.  Not too long after my own stay, as I remember parking in the handicapped portion of the ramp to visit her and how slow I was walking what seemed like half a mile to her room through hospital halls.  We stopped by Uncle Hugo's afterward, and I'm there seldom enough that I try to pick up a few books when I am, even if my choices are based entirely upon the cover and the blurb on the back.  Palma's book was one of two I picked up, having been a bit of an H.G. Wells buff in my younger years.

I enjoyed it, although it was a bit long winded in parts.  Particularly when it came to the relationships and it started to go a bit romance novel.  And here and there the author leaked through, patting himself on the back for being a clever author in the same vein as H.G. Wells. But I brushed over those bits and enjoyed the core story, which admittedly could have been half as long, despite the almost complete lack of science fiction.  Instead, it read a bit like a few tales out of The Decameron, but with a science-fiction-that's-not-really-science-fiction twist.  For clarification, if you haven't read The Decameron, it was a collection of interwoven stories about trickery, but within a science fiction/literary vein.

So when I stumbled upon The Map of the Sky at the Dakota County Library on the new shelves, I thought I'd read the sequel.  Big mistake.  Huge mistake.  The back of the book bio calls Palma "one of the most brilliant and original storytellers of our time."  And yet this book spends almost 200 pages (I estimate, I'm not going to count) retelling The Thing, strapping it to the characters from the first book, throwing in Edgar Allen Poe for no good reason I can discern, and then dumping the whole thing into "what if the invasion had been real?"  Yet maintaining the flaws from the first book I mention above.  It drags on with the invasion story, humankind sinking ever deeper into despair until...and this is spoiler for both books...H.G. Wells uses his ability to time travel (something that was completely unnecessary at the very end of the first book, and the only real bit of science fiction) to change the past, create a second timeline, and ensure the invasion never happens in the first place.  Despite overly chatty aliens, we never discover what they're really after.  Despite them being mixed among humankind for almost 300 years, there's no real depth to their interaction.  In summation, it becomes they hid in the sewers and at least one of them began to enjoy his interaction with humans, probably because he chose to mimic a priest.   589 pages of going nowhere fast while retelling old tropes, only to land on H.G. Wells made it all a dream (an alternate timeline).

Interestingly, while I'm simultaneously writing and reading here, I found this review by the AV Club which reiterates most of what I've said above.

"...this is a story that’s been told many times before, and didn’t really need another retelling...The second section of the novel plays out like any number of alien-invasion action films"

I definitely won't be reading the last book of the trilogy.

Good News!

Small victory, but I don't have to fill in this box for myself on this year's taxes.

In Bed With the Law

I have found a brand new use for the old corporate books that I had on my bookshelf, awaiting modification for use as hidden storage presents.  The bed frame where the inner portion of the frame attaches to the support for the mattress is in part glued in place, and the glue has dried out and the wood popped loose.  Go ahead and  make jokes about a.) the glue drying up like my marriage, 2.) the glue being as old as I am, 3.) blue humor of sundry sorts.  I'm more concerned that it doesn't appear as though anyone has cleaned under the bed since Eryn was born and I'm worried what might be living in the dust and what I breathed into my lungs.  And the combination of the popped frame and trying to lift the mattress set while I shove books under there with what might be a bruised bone or slight fracture has made me a bit cranky and in need of another Aleve.  In case you can't read them, I'm currently doing home repair using the Constitution of the State of Texas and a tome on Domestic Violence.

Life and Beth - II - Close to Home

As an addendum, I should add, it's not lost on me that almost exactly one year after my car accident, I went to a play where the wife is widowed and her annoying husband comes back from beyond the grave to try and run her life for her.  I've warned my wife that it was fortunate I did not die, because I fully attend to come back and haunt her.  But I won't be so blatant about the haunting.  It will be more along the lines of leaving extra Luna bar wrappers around so she blames Eryn.  Leaving cupboard doors ajar.  Hiding spoons in the garbage disposal.  Unplugging oft used appliances.  Moving things slightly here and there.  Hiding keys and sunglasses.  Come to think of it, you'd think she was already haunted how often she complains about those things happening.  It'll be nice to just sit back and watch and let her think I'm doing the haunting.

As a reminder to myself, I need to create a good haunting list and hide it somewhere safe.  I don't want to forget anything when the time comes.

(P.S. Mean Mr. Mustard.  I'm going to haunt you just a bit as well because your wife will probably assume it's me, but she'll blame you, and I'd hate to mess up her expectations just because I'm dead).

Life and Beth

Last night we went to Life and Beth at Theatre in the Round.  Very enjoyable and much more digestible for Eryn than All's Well That Ends Well, which was a struggle with the language, but which she still enjoyed.  She laughed out a loud a few times during Life and Beth, despite some grown up themes here and there.  It was a good play to find humor in, and it's fun to take her to some plays that are both funny and sad and make her think about what the playright is trying to convey and the complexity of people, opposed to the Children's Theater plays which are more one dimensional, even when they have a more complex theme.

I've been to an Alan Ayckbourn production before.  I saw Absurd Person Singular in London back in the very early 90's when I was there by myself.  I didn't know anything about the play before I went, and at the time the suicide theme for Eva was just too depressing to allow me to enjoy it, despite the humor in the other parts of the play.  But it was exciting to go to a play in London, which was my point at the time.  I notice in the Wikipedia article about Absurd Person Singular, it says it was playing at Whitehall Theatre in May 1990.  That would have been when I was there seeing a play at the West End.

But back to Life and Beth.  Funny, although in a dry way given most of the characters are dysfunctional in some way.  Alcoholic sister in law.  Overbearing, passive-aggressive (but dead) husband who says things like "hand on heart" and argues about how they've never argued.  Son who's driving his girlfriend nuts.  Girlfriend who's nuts (and talks once, which Eryn caught and we didn't).  And widow who is, in many respects, happy she's on her own.  I liked the idea that the dead husband's (Gordon Timms) parents used to tell his sister (Aunt Connie) that he had lapped her three times, until she could feel him breathing down her neck.  My sister should tell her eldest that same thing just so she knows to try harder.  And the vicar tells the widow at one point that she should accentuate the positive (the old Johnny Mercer song) and that she's still young, "for a woman."

As the Star Tribune review states, Jean Wolff was excellent as Beth.  She was the most believable of the characters and her reaction to her life with Gordon gone was illuminating.  An excellent production.

I am...The Cicada!

The other day, I received a piece of mail with the following bit of Chinese associated with the tagline: 杜凯希. I had no idea what it meant, so I asked Ming.  Which in retrospect was sort of silly, because I could have wandered over to Soon to ask the same question and he offers up a lot more backstory usually.  Ming said it was a cool name and I figured that meant something, but he said no, it was just some Caucasian Googling his own name and using the appropriate Chinese sounds.  In my case, this would be 斯科特, Si Ke Da.  Which sounds very much like Cicada.  Which has a pictograph of its own: 蟬, or chán. There's a pretty video here: http://characters.cultural-china.com/173.html. Which implies that if I adopt the character, I'm adopting the idea of being full of understanding and nobility.  Or full of something else.

蟬

It doesn't seem to be taken as a superhero name, so it looks like I can begin work on a costume.  Maybe I'd only come out to fight once every 17 years?  Like a poor man's King Arthur.  And there's already a maneuver I can claim as part of my superhero motiff, the Cicada block!  But I wont' be doing this...this is just gross... (very pretty site over there at Pink Tentacle, despite worries that I was on a tentacle porn site, check out the catfish/earthquake art and music - also, the slightly darkened Tokyo video).

In the oracle bone inscriptions, “chan” (“蝉”) is a pictographic character, with a cicada’s head on top, its abdomen at the bottom, and wings on both sides, displaying a vivid picture of a cicada on a tree in summer. In the small seal script, the shape is simplified, with a “dan” (“单”) radical added to the right, indicating its pronunciation. The character thus becomes a pictophonetic character and basically remains in the shape till now. In China, the cicada is also known as “zhiliao” (literally “know, understand”), because the songs of the insect sound like the phrase “zhiliao” in Chinese. In ancient China, there was a fabric named “cicada wing silk”, because it was as thin as cicada wings. And fans made of this fabric were called “cicada wing fans”. Ancient Chinese people regarded the cicada as a symbol for noble and unsullied qualities due to its exposure to the nature world. That's why an ancient scholar would express his noblility by comparing himself to a cicada.

Minnebar 2013

Today I went up to Best Buy (there's an annoying name if your B key is malfunctioning) to attend Minnebar 2013.  If you're not familiar with Minnebar, it's a conference (free) with a tech and business intersection focus.  So there's a mix of start up presentations, tech presentations, and things that fall in between.  The presentations come in 50 minute chunks with about six to ten going on at any one time, so there's a lot of variety you get during the day.  If you hang in the tech community in Minnesota long enough, you start to recognize and know a lot of faces as well.

I attended the following (full list of all presentations here).  If you were around me this year, I think I would have recommended going to presentations I wasn't going to.  Probably what I deserve for not sticking to the more technical presentations for the most part.  Not that I'm not impressed with anyone who has the cahones to stand up in front of an audience and deliver a talk, even if just for practice.  Scary stuff.

• The Crowdfunding Panel: very good panel discussion about various ways to raise money for your start up.  Equity (investors).  Gifts (Kickstarter).  Debt (get a loan).  The consensus of the panel was that a few fully involved investors are better than hundreds of little investors and that the primary benefit of social funding was that it gave you a very strong feeling that your product was something that would be accepted by a larger audience.
• Fundraising in Minnesota - it's increasing for the most part! I only got to watch ten or fifteen minutes because the room was so packed it was crazy.  I remember the room as the room where Justin Bacon presented his Lean Startup talk - lean being all the rage nowadays.  In the last presentation, one of the presenters stressed that there was too much emphasis on funding then prototype lately, and that it was worth revisiting the prototype and strong upfront work before funding model that, in his opinion, had better results.
• Make Lean UX - someone has to explain to me the preponderence of women in UX.  I bet there's an article out there.  I have never been to a tech presentation before where I had a woman sitting on both sides of me, in front of me, and behind me.  Maybe it's not a preponderance, but just significantly more than in other tech fields?  Because it's new and men haven't claimed it?  Creative aspect?  Just changing times?  Unfortunately, most of the women near me walked out.  Not because the presenter was a misogynist, but because he didn't cover any new or interesting ground.  Lean is about cutting the crap and getting to something important.  Contrary to his presentation style (sorry if you stumble over here Lean UX guy, but you seemed unpracticed for your talk).  I did push the buy button on the Lean UX book he recommended on Amazon however, so he pointed me at a resource I think I'll get something useful out of when it comes to talking with my own UX folks.
• Sorting Spaghetti: Structuring Large Javascript Applications - I have a bias.  I know the presenter.  Still, best presentation I attended today, both technically and sense of humor and preparedness.  He's an excellent developer with lots of concrete advice.  He honored the idea of unconference by fielding lots of questions and was capable of talking to all of them.  Glad he's back at my company benefiting our dev teams.  I always learn something talking to him, most of it applicable to my own code base which he helped design.  He also gave me the advice that I might want to use the Bones theme for WordPress while we were standing in the hallway, which may rank at the top of the bits of useful advice I received today.  His advice to strip the Twitter bootstrap buttons out of bootstrap might rank second.
• Blogging and Open Source: The Power Creating Free Content Has to Either Serve or Enslave You - I met this presenter (and his wife) at Riverplace last year.  He's a highly paid Javascript consultant with a datepicking jquery addin to his name (not just a popular one, but the popular one).  The presentation was primarily about how he hadn't monetized any of his work when he was younger - blog or add in - and felt disappointed about it now.  To me, that's part of the story of being young.  Lots of missed opportunities, so you just pick yourself up and hope you came through the experience with skills that will get you lots of money.  The people who capitalized; they seemed luckier rather than more prepared or more talented.  The most amusing bit was the woman who was in the room before me that started asking him about how to learn about javascript.  I had the strong feeling she hadn't bothered to kick up a browser and type in javascript and Twin Cities.  Let alone just javascript.  And ironic in the context of a speech about monetizing your technical knowledge at a free technical conference.
• Burning It Down -- Becoming an Agile Company - valid points about using scrum to overcome legacy development blues at a 50-strong company.  But nothing new if you've been doing agile for any amount of time.  It's fair to say "what do you know, you've only done agile at one company."  True, but I've had a few classes with folks who've been around the block.  I mentioned to one of the devs I knew at the conference that I'd just put a developer on my team in touch with his boss for a master's degree interview because he was one of the most knowledgeable large org agile experts I was aware of in the Twin Cities and elsewhere.  And a great former hairband member.
• Become a Better Designer With Side Projects - this presenter seemed sort of sad, but maybe he was just really nervous.  I do know he was adamant that he didn't want to learn Ruby on Rails.  His side projects made him happy, but he didn't really speak to what he was learning from them.  He talked about how he met experts, that it got him job offers, that people liked the sites...but I was looking for concrete design concepts he learned from them and how he applied them to projects, and how he picked the particular experts he interviewed.  What it was about them that was exciting.  And I would have liked to hear that excitement in his voice.  I think side projects are exciting.  Even the failed ones.  And the ones going nowhere quick, like perhaps a stick figure comic site.  They teach you things you didn't know and give you a playground to try out new tools like Twitter Cards, and Kickstarter projects (so you can experience the frustration of a few folks at that first crowdsourcing panel yourself), and Facebook integrations, and the validity of various web metrics, and first hand experience of what does and does not drive web traffic.

Anyway.  An enjoyable day despite the presentations not being stellar (and that's the point of conferences like Minnebar; if I think I can do better, I should just present).  Saw the husband of the coworker who sits outside my new office.  Saw a coworker who was on the community volunteer committee with me and went into consulting.  Saw Ryan, who I haven't seen in forever.  Saw Brock, but apparently looked right through him.  Saw Eric (not the usual Erik, but Eric), who I hired into my company many years ago and who is now contracting.  Met some of Erik's friends (and Erik was there).  Met a coworker I hadn't met before.  Talked to Brady, who left my company not so long ago. And others.  Given there about a thousand people there (or at least registered) there was a pretty good chance I'd meet at least one person I knew.  Meeting a dozen and catching up on jobs and projects was a pleasant surprise.

Did You Mean

I was trying to figure out a translation today for a few Chinese characters in the salutation of an email I received.  Not a Nigerian scam, but from a coworker I don't know.  Google Translate offered me a "Did you mean?"  If I'm translating, how the hell am I supposed to know did you mean?

I also shared with Mean Mr. Mustard that I received some scripts for a work implementation.  In the directions, they said to encrypt my password, using the included encryption script.  Then they assured me if I wanted to check it, I could use the included decryption script.  WTF.  There could at least be an instruction to deleted the encryption/decryption files at the end.

Here's my Googly DYM...

Spill

On the way to work this morning, I took a nice tumble.  I've been trying to avoid the ice, but found myself trapped on the trail with the choice of either braving the ice or walking off the curb.  I should have walked off the curb, but instead I slowly (e.g. just an mph or two) traversed the ice until I noticed it had a chasm in the middle.  I went to put my foot down and the whole bicycle shot sideways and I flipped up and landed solidly on my back, hard enough to knock all the wind out of me, and mashed my left hand.  After a moment, I struggled into an upright position, only to watch a bicyclist roll by without asking so much as whether I was ok.  My back wasn't too bad, but my left wrist hurt quite a bit.  So I crawled on my bike and figured I'd worry about the details at work.

Ahead of me, the unfriendly guy pedaled on in all his super cool winter bicycling garb.  Then took a left turn into the work lot.  By the time he made it to the office racks, I was pulling up next to him.  He looked at the sky.  Looked at his feet.  Stared for a very long time at his lock.  Slowly pulled off his gloves.  Looked anywhere but at me.  I wasn't impressed, but he was correct that he was to be shamed for not at least pretending to check.

My back ached: still aches.  Mostly it feels like I've been lifting weights.  But my wrist is the bigger issue.  Swelling below the thumb, and at the bottom of the swelling is a knot about the size of a bb. If I touch my pinky and thumb together, which I can do, but it hurts, the little bump pops up.  My wife thinks it's a ganglion cyst that showed up because of the strain on the wrist.  Might be, although the bump itself doesn't hurt significantly.  Primarily, the wrist is just stiff and hard to use.  Although tonight I can use it to do things (that sounds wrong, so let me point out I'm right handed), and right after the spill I couldn't even hold my phone or empty coffee cup without pain.

Once I was at work, I took a few Advil and Tylenol, like I have in the past for pain.  And launched into an almost three hour allergic reaction.  My eyes turned very red and swelled, until I almost couldn't see, I started sniffling, a headache erupted, and everything itched.  Everything.  Both my wife and my team lead told me I looked awful.  So when the allergic reaction wore off, I went and found some Aleve, which doesn't seem to cause problems.  That reaction might explain a lot of my allergic reactions in the past.  But I don't know if it's Advil or Tylenol, and I'm not particularly interested in experiments to determine the specific culprit.

I biked home later despite the wrist.  As long as I kept it straight, it wasn't a problem.  Although I'd hate to rely on it in a second tumble.  Bicycling made my back feel better, but didn't do anything for my wrist.  It's probably a little stiffer just because I'm not typing with it anymore (well, I wasn't).  On the way home it snowed.  Then rained.  Reminded me of Ironman weather.  And right before the house, I happened upon another cyclist in our neighborhood.  I said to her, "The weather this morning was much nicer."  She rolled her eyes at me - not a nice "I know" roll, but a "You're an ass, leave me alone, roll" - and went her way without a word.  I'm going to call April 5th Rude Bicyclist Day.

Evil Dead

I could have blogged at 12:05 a.m. after getting back from the theater (beautiful night for a short walk.  I took advantage of the finally passable weather and walked and picked up some Eagan trash), but committing to the bicycling for 30 days challenge means getting up a little earlier than I was getting up before, so I was trying to maximize sleep time.  When my alarm went off this morning, I was in denial, accusing my wife of the ringer in her phone going off.

I went to Evil Dead.  It has 66% on Rotten Tomatoes at the moment.  I just don't see it. And maybe it suffers not only in comparison to the original Raimi version, but because the last enjoyable horror movie I watched, Cabin in the Woods, was so exceedingly superior.  Primarily it's about the violence and creativity in the violence, and that bores me.  It was even at the expense of flushing out the characters.  Drug problem does not equal character.  Doctor does not equal character.  Big brother does not equal character.  Those are just stereotypes or rough outlines at best with no real depth.  Makes it easier when they die because you're not as invested, but that's disappointing.

And there was little interesting about the story.  It could be argued, what has to be interesting about a story where the main point is evil book lets loose inhuman demonic force, but I'm pretty sure you can have your cake and eat it too.  Very close to the end, there was a bit of an homage to Raimi with a chainsaw (beyond just showing it) which I enjoyed.  I just wish some more attention to scripting had run throughout the film rather than just being a "remember to throw in some references to the original" sideline.

Thursday nights are cheap at the theater.  Only $6.  So when a teenager was trying to buy some Chuckles and didn't have enough money left, I bought them for him.  Admittedly, he might have spent everything but his last $6 for the movie on herbal enhancements, but all the more reason for him to enjoy his frustrated munchies.  And I'm still crabby about the Quick Mart candy bar episode at Iron Man 2007, so he got the advantage of my pet quest to see candy justice in the world.  A better spent $3.50 than the $6.00 + soda I spent on myself for Evil Dead.

It's Moving Time!

Not It's Business Time!  It's Moving Time!  Aw yeah, girl.  Tomorrow, we're going to move.  You know how I know?  Because it'll be Wednesday.  And Wednesday night is the night we move.  It's moving.  It's mooving time!

But there won't be any sexy sock dancing and it took longer than 2 minutes to pack.

To be anticlimactic, I'm not switching homes, just offices.  And at my place of work, one office looks pretty much like any other office.  Although this is a downgrade in my opinion because I'm moving from my nice, quiet, out of the way space (except for the guy who forgot to leave his gun at home incident) where I sit with a lot of former team members who have different information about my product than I get anywhere else, to an office on a main row near the elevators next to testing.  I'm worried that fact alone will deduct 10% from my productivity.  That's an awful thing to say, because to quote all management everywhere, we're all part of quality.  But it works much better IMHO when the testers are embedded with the teams, not separate and worried about their own capacity and being matrixed across projects.

Here's my packing job.  I considered reviewing what I packed - I think some of it is just there to remind me to update my resume as it includes historic files from up to 13 years ago, things I can't even remember I once did - but I'll do that on the unload.  The syrup is being kept separate because I don't want to have to clean a box full of syrup.  I could put it in the box that's full of napkins, cups, bowls, plates, and plasticware, but I know if it spilled, the whole box would just go to the trash.

I put a sticker on Mike's chair too, although I'm not holding out hope they'll move it for me unless I remember to give it a shove into my office tomorrow night as I leave for the day.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to move the mugs that were left.  I placed a few again, but there are still a number left as you can see.  Before I left today I dropped them all in a box (carefully).  It will just encourage me to finally sneak them all into appropriate cubes.  I have someone picked out for the Wonder Woman mug on the left end.