16 February 1999: Two Dinners and Some Phone Calls

Tuesday, 16 February 1999:

Two Dinners and Some Phone Calls

Things are in the home stretch at, well, at a lot of things. But particularly at work. I'm trying to finish up my last project, and of course other things are coming down the pipe as well. Since I will shortly not be part of that pipe, I'm torn between asking for those other things to be given to someone else so I can do the best job I can on my main project in the time remaining, and not worrying about it too much because Friday's my last day one way or the other.

So of course the result was a compromise; I worked on one extra project (which would have gone faster if the instructions I'd received had been more explicit; as it was I had two false starts before I got it right), and asked for other things to be passed off to other people.

On the plus side, I did move a big chunk of my last project forward for PQA at the end of today, which just leaves me with a small (but still quite challenging) piece left for the rest of the week.

Actually, it's not so much the time that the extra project sucked up that bothered me, as the context-switching I needed to do to cope with it. I'm already working on a challenging project and trying to coordinate my moving plans at the same time, and much more than that is just a little too much stress on the old noggin.

Moving update: The moving survey guy came out yesterday and pronounced my apartment fairly easy to pack up and move. The only downside is that I'm going to leave my plants behind; apparently California has some regulations regarding importing of plants, which are not strictly enforced for individuals bringing things into state, but are enforced where moving companies are concerned. Since I can't really take the plants with me personally, it looks like I'll be giving them to Karen.

I also got some updated stuff from Apple on the job, found a hotel to stay at for my Night Without Furniture (yes, they take cats), set up a time to check out of my apartment, called the airline about transporting the cats, put in my mail forwarding slip, and made an appointment to take my car into the shop on Thursday for some minor work.

Well, not that minor; I'm getting new tires and having them look at my 'warm start' problem (basically, the car has trouble starting if it's warm, as opposed to cold or quite hot; if it's something simple then I'd like to just get it fixed). I agonized over doing this for a while, thinking that if my car can't pass the California inspections then I'll have to junk it and I'll have wasted the money. But I figure that if all the old VW Beetles I've seen out there can pass the inspections, then my little '87 Civic should be able to, even if it needs a new catalytic converter. So I'm playing the odds - or at least what I think the odds are.

Oh, and yesterday I went by AAA to pick up a book on hotels in this area so I could find one for my Night Without Furniture, and they asked to see my AAA card. So I showed them the card and the guy said, "That's nice, but it's not a AAA card." I looked, and indeed it was my Ameritech calling card. So I showed them the right card, and thought that people should be absolved of all errors committed before 9 am.

I've been doing the dinner thing with some friends in town. Last night I went to dinner with Colleen, my ex-girlfriend. She's finishing up a Master's degree in psychology and seems to be pretty happy with her life lately; she seems to have direction, which I don't think she had a few years ago. I think it's what she needs.

And tonight I went to dinner with Doran and Fran - bought them dinner, actually, as 'payment' for them watching my cats during my holiday vacation and Apple interview trip. We had a nice, fairly quite time, and talked a lot about Doctor Who, which Doran and I are both fans of. We spent a lot of time complaining about the awful Fox TV-movie of a few years ago, mostly making "What were they thinking?" noises.

And hey! Stephen Leigh's new novel, Speaking Stones, is out! It's a sequel to his excellent Dark Water's Embrace. I'll probably tackle it on the plane flight next week, unless I suddenly have a big chunk of free time before then (yeah, right!).

I also finally received and read the final volume of Marvel Comics' hardcover reprints of the early Amazing Spider-Man comics, and they're surprisingly good. Some of them feel a bit cliched, but of course these comics defined many of the cliches. As I think I've remarked before, it's interesting how Peter Parker actually feels like a teenager in these stories. It's also pretty amusing to see his future wife, Mary Jane Watson, speaking in heavy sixties slang.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)