The Out-of-Town Sarah, The 13 Days to Halloween, The LJ Revamp, and the Busy Weekend (weddings, homework, other stuff, oh my!)

BLOT: (18 Oct 2010 - 12:03:08 PM)

The Out-of-Town Sarah, The 13 Days to Halloween, The LJ Revamp, and the Busy Weekend (weddings, homework, other stuff, oh my!)

For reasons I am not sure, I like to do these "catch-up" posts in reverse chronological order. This one will be no different. Warning, a little bit of an info dump.

We'll start with my Livejournal revamp. My friends list currently shows about 50 friends. Of that number, about 30 have not posted in the last month and I'd guess as many as 20 have not posted within a season or two (ten or more have not posted in over year). I'm not going to delete anyone, because I've learned through experience that even those not posting are occasionally coming back to check up and comment, and some will go through journal restarts in the future, so I will leave my old friends where they are. I am going to go out, and have been going out, to find people with like interests and those who quote the same sort of books and movies that I do, and have been adding them. Not a whole lot, nothing like SAS (serial adder syndrome), but maybe a half-dozen or two. And, in a month or two, maybe another half-dozen or two. I mentioned to a friend, recently, that LJ has gone through three stages for me. First, there was the time when my friends list was entirely like-interest. Then, around 2004-2007, it was largely like-region people that I knew personally. Now, since about 2009 on, those have moved on or just stopped updating, and so I am returning it to more of a like-interest format.

In my search for people that would be cool to add, I found someone doing a "31 days to Halloween" movie/clip countdown. Which reminds me, today is something like 13 days to Halloween Night (I think, math is a strong point of mine, but today is not very mathematically vibed...it might be be 12...that's ok, too). At any rate, tonight will see the first of 13 Days to Halloween Night, the thing I try to do (and often fail) every year to share some free or lesser known mood-setting stories and movies and radio shows and such. I think I will start with Poe's "Berenice".

Sarah went out of town this morning for a week-long conference. I have to admit that I don't know which one but I know roughly where it is located so I guess I could find it if I needed to find it. At some point, she is going to be one of the speakers. This is kind of a big deal, in that way some otherwise non-issues can be a big deal in particular contexts. So many of her peers (not chemists, per se, but the particular filed of chemistry she is in) are older men. For there to be a mid-20s woman getting up in front of them to speak and network, I know it's nerve-wracking for her and an experience worth bragging about. Hopefully they will be polite and not scoff too much. From what I have seen, she is already starting to get their respect bit by bit, so I am sure she will be just fine. Might blush a bit while actually doing it, though.

While she is gone, I am going to focus on getting a couple of projects knocked out of the water, so that we will hopefully have some spare time for each other next week. Our sixth anniversary falls next Tuesday, which is also the day we are going out to Scottsboro to talk to a Chemistry class. My half, the latter half, is about scientific ethics and Sarah will talk some about scientific practicalities. The gist of the dual talks will be, "Is science worth it?" and hopefully we can reach something like a "Yes, but it's not a free pass" in the middle. She will talk real-life failures of safety protocols and the dangers of contamination.

For food last night, we ate at Viet-Huong. I got a small vermicelli soup with beef brisket and a bowl of charred pork on more vermicelli. Except a small soup is something like a quart, which made it entirely too much food. However, both of those things are recommended for anyone who eats there and has always stuck to the clay pots and might want to try something different. Next time I go back, I'm going for the large soup with some bean sprouts and cucumber and tofu or something on the side. Make it a meal in a bowl. Earlier that day, we met with the teacher to whose class we are going to be giving the talk. Got the idea of time and sign in procedures. I have not actually re-entered the high school environment in a long time (since a brief trip to Hillcrest in 2004 or so, my first time in a high school since 1995). I wonder how it will feel being there more on the educator side?

Saturday was by and large taken up by the wedding of Laura (née Nabors) and Brandon Cripps. It was a pleasant outdoor affair, down at the old Depot in Huntsville. Sarah and I both got misty-eyed. It was pretty. The only "quirk" to the ceremony was a car that parked up on the Parkway kind of near the wedding and then the guy stood there and just watched for a bit. Fooking snipers, how do they work? After the ceremony we went in to the "Roundhouse" and had food and drinks for a couple of hours and got a chance to relax with Mandi and Jon, and Katie and Jason. People we haven't been able to see for a bit (last time I saw Mandi might have been several months ago).

Which brings us back to Friday. For some reason, I had it in my mind that there was something worth talking about on Friday but now, on Monday, I do not remember. I went to work, and the library was a little crazy because they were having a build-up event to that night's Midnight Madness. Meaning there was much shouting and playing in the library. Academic libraries are a weird mix, sometime. More studious and quiet most of the time, they have a propensity for being much louder, too. The only other thing I remember from Friday is...OH. OH. I remember it...

While at work, my cell phone ran out of juice. Sarah picks me up and we go over to the bank so she can get the money she needs for her trip, and can talk about a notice we got in the mail that was fine, as far as notices go, but had been torn open and we have no idea if it was accidentally or purposefully done so. I am out in the car and decide to plug in the car charger for the cell phone so it can start charging. At the time, we were going down to Sam & Greg's and were going to hang out in the park for a bit. After about two minutes, at the most, into charging my phone, lights go a little weird in the car. Turned out that was all it took to shut everything down and completely drain the battery. Sound ridiculous to you? It does to me. Here we are, with a phone barely charged above a zero, and a dead car battery. I can walk down to the campus PD but I feel a little weird asking them for a jump or assistance. I do walk down there and there is one woman behind the desk, typing up some sort of report and a guy in line. I am not sure if she was doing it for him or if he was waiting for her to finish. After about five minutes of no response from either of them, I walk back down to the car. Sarah has gone into the bank and asked if they can help her, but they take it as a request most unusual, and hand-wave about how they can't leave to do such a thing (despite, you know, one of them coming outside three minutes later to walk around on her smoke break...). The official vehicles near the bank can't be used to jump us off because that is some violation of their policy. And, the others that drove by just kept on driving by and staring at us. Not, you know, glancing. A few goose-necked with a force that probably required corrective procedures to put their spines back into place.

The upshot of the whole thing was Mai, Alicia's friend from Grant and current UAH student, and Mai's boyfriend had stopped by and he was able to give us the jump start we needed. Since we have power cables, it took all of about 30 seconds once he showed up. Since then, the car has ran fine. We've kept the radio off and generally not ran the A/C. This weekend, we'll replace the battery, finally. Was going to do it much earlier but Sarah's parents wanted us to hold on until they dug up the old warranty on the current battery so it wouldn't cost anything. Which means we've had to put up with a handful of stallouts and such in the meant time. Screw it. I'll just pony up the 100 dollars.

Then, breaking the reverse chronology of this post, we picked up How to Train Your Dragon and had a nice, relaxing night in.

And that catches you up. On to a little homework and some fun-time reading.

TAGS: Me in 2010

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010