I work odd hours to beat the traffic. I’m in the office from 9:30-7:30 most days. Last in, last out. But this morning was different; there was a stream of cars leaving the parkade* which is not usual. I drove in, feeling like a salmon, and immediately noticed that all the lights were out because I am observant that way. Luckily because of the exodus I didn’t have to go down to the inky black depths for a spot. I made my way up the emergency-lit stairs to my office, and found it locked. The lock is a RFID lock. Which requires power.
Since no-one responded to my knocking, obviously there’d been a power outage (probably related to the construction next door) and everyone had been told that it would last for a while, so everyone went home. This would have been a great work-at-home situation, but I’d left my laptop in the office the night before. Just as I was heading down the stairs again to find someone with a good old fashioned non-electricity-requiring key, the lights went back on. Phoo.
I think this will be short day for me anyway; there are only two other people in the office (I called a few people to tell them the power was back on; why should I be the only one to suffer?) After all, it’s Easter, or Nawruz, or Ostara, or Mawlid-al-Nabi, or Purim**, or whatever else floats your boat, and even apart from that the house needs cleaning in a big way.***
* An unknown word here, did you know? It’s a “parking garage” here and most Americans find the word “parkade” unduly hilarious.
** If there’s anything that would encourage me to be a cultural Jew, it’s Purim. Commanded to get drunk, wear silly costumes and eat hamantaschen? I am so in!
*** Visitor Season begins this weekend.
And so the semi-annual Daylight Savings nonsense strikes again, and everyone is saying “oh, an extra hour of daylight, how wonderful.” Except no, it’s not an extra hour, now it’s just dark in the mornings. I feel like I should be running through the streets like Charlton Heston... “There is no extra hour, people! It’s all a trick!”
R:tAG’s back’s been bothering him again, so we sprung for an iNeed* thingy that is actually really really nice and I've been stealing it from him. I hope he will be up for walking more soon, because I just got a book on hiking trails in the Santa Cruz hills (the big green hills immediately to the south of us, not the dry brown hills far to the north of us, for those of y’all that have visited) and I wanna go.
A good book: Benighted by Kit Whitfield. It’s like the good bits of the Anita Blake books (i.e. not the soft-core porn, which means there is 90% of the book left to fill up with plot and characterization)
A good movie: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I had absolutely no knowledge or expectations of this movie before it showed up in our Netflix queue, and I liked it quite a bit.
A movie that I am bouncing up and down in my chair even thinking about, ever since I saw the trailer on Saturday**: The Forbidden Kingdom. Jet Li and Jackie Chan! High-budget wuxia! Eeee!
A good thing to do: Pilates. I found a class that works with my schedule, and I’ve only been once so far but I think I’ll like it. This is the “mat class” version, not the big scary Inquisition machine version, though I’m looking forwards to that too. It is like yoga, I think, in that you think “How hard can this be?” and end up kind of sweaty and shaky at the end. It’s being offered at a really nice new community centre right by us, and since they have a pool and a weight room as well as all sorts of classes, we bit the metaphorical bullet and joined up. Fitness “R” us!
Yet another case where I suspect that web cartoonists are spying on me because they are DOCUMENTING MY LIFE: here. The alternative is that I am really boring and predictable and not a speshul snowflake at all. ::sniffle::
* This “i” prefix trend is getting wearisome, isn’t it?
** We saw The Bank Job which is all right but nothing really special.
