The Mandelbear's Musings

On the health front, I may finally be learning to relax the muscles in my lower back that make it hurt when I walk. Maybe. It also seems to have a lot to do with how heavy my shoulder bag is, so that's going to be an ongoing problem. A backpack would be better, except that it's hard to get off when I take a seat in the bus, and unlike a shoulder bag I can't swing it around when I want to get at something like my wallet.

I've finally started doing some serious system administration/scripting work to get my website working directories the rest of the way under git control. That's done -- I can now say "make deploy" in a web directory and have it committed, pushed to the remote repo, and pulled into the website with no further attention.

In the process, I had to write a script for converting a directory from CVS to git. There are a couple of challenges in that process because the old CVS repositories were in pretty bad shape, with stuff not having been checked in consistently. Not like a well-maintained software project, in other words. Bad bear. No cookie. My websites don't use cookies anyway.

The associated asset archive is going to be harder, because some directories have large media files in them. Like, um... the audio. The goal is to eliminate the use of rsync snapshots for backups (for reasons I will probably go into in more detail in a later post).

Detail in the notes, as usual.

A pretty good day, though mostly in the sense of retail therapy -- I didn't take a walk. :(

Lots of puttering, and I ordered Colleen's Mother's Day present (it's ok, it's right off her Amazon wish-list and she knows all about it) and pre-ordered The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. So that was good.

Somehow green stuff got left out of Colleen's last grocery order, so I went (rather reluctantly) to Zanotto's to buy same, to go with the skirt steak. The roasted brussels sprouts turned out particularly well: cut in half, toss with olive oil, sea salt, and a little crushed red pepper, place cut side down on a cookie sheet, and roast at 450 for 15-20min. Extreme yum. Also greatly to yum was the caprese-style salad of heirloom tomatoes, fresh mozzerella, onions, and avacados. The skirt steak with caramelized onions was good, but it wasn't the high point of the meal by any means.

I started reading haikujaguar's Flight of the Godkin Griffin, and tuned in to her livestream for a while (where I met catsittingstill -- fun!).

Not much in the way of links, but feel free to look.

So, um... Right.

I got two walks in; about the same as last week, only farther. And did better on my diet, at least modulo the Indian buffet last night. And took some checks to the bank for deposit, some of which have been sitting on my desk for a month or two. So a moderately productive week.

And I went to Kohl's and found underwear and dress pants on sale for about half price. I got three 4-packs of boxers from different manufacturers, to see which ones I liked, and two pair of Croft & Barrow pants. I got them both off the rack of microfiber pants, but one turned out to be a wool/polyester blend; not too itchy after washing, but I'm still dubious. It's slightly smaller and tighter; I think I'll leave it in the closet until I lose a few pounds, and revisit it then. I hate clothes shopping.

Oh, and I got some long-delayed blood-work done. Everything within normal range except for triglycerides (high), HDL (slightly low), and glucose (one point high). And made a tasty dinner of rockfish and Brussels sprouts on Sunday.

On the down side, I totally spaced (as it were) the lunar eclipse, and simply went to bed. It was cold, and I was sleepy -- too sleepy, obviously, to remember the reminder that I'd looked at not an hour before. I've seen lunar eclipses before, though; I'm not terribly upset about it.

Work felt rather unproductive, since I didn't write very much code, but I actually got some important holes filled in and did a lot of mentoring. I can't believe I'm the only person in the company who groks GNU make. I mean, I can understand people not knowing git: it's new. Make's been around for ages. Maybe other people don't read man and info pages for fun? Could be.

Some good links up there under the cut, as you'd expect after going so long without posting.

Good day? Darned if I know; I was too busy to notice, most of the time.

The morning was mostly spent working on a potentially show-stopping bug in one of the external trials, that eventually turned out to be the customer not following instructions. We knew that problem was there. We also knew how to set things up so that the problem couldn't happen. :P

The afternoon was mostly spent fixing real bugs of various sorts in my own code. The evening was spent trying to calibrate the latency correction in Audacity, and finding more things wrong with both it and Ubuntu's audio. Forget about suspend -- audacity gets very flaky afterwards. Grumpy bear.

I made myself a makeshift adjustable ear loop for my BT headset; as predicted, it worked much better than the stock one. So I'll be looking seriously into wire sculpture techniques and supplies for the next iteration.

I tried several times to record a scratch track for Filksong Lullabye; I'm damned if I know why I keep getting out of sync with the click track. It only seems to happen if I'm singing and playing guitar at the same time. Thinking about it now, it seems like my voice is about a half a beat ahead of the guitar. That's going to be tricky. But I do it a lot, so I'm just going to have to figure out how to handle it. Probably by syncing the guitar to the clicks, since pretty much everything has a guitar intro. Actually, the thumb goes on the downbeat, and the strum on the second beat. Idiot bear! I knew that.

I went out to REI at lunchtime hoping to buy two pairs of my favorite walking shoes, Keen Brooklin Mid, which were on sale for $75. The store was out (just hours after the sale started), so had to special-order them. But I got them. Last time I waited too long, and they were out of stock for two years.

Quite a few good links; it's easier now that I know what magic parameter to set to make emacs play nice with Chrome's "create link" extension (setq x-select-enable-clipboard t), it can also be set in the "killing" customization group, IIRC.

Lots of fascinating infographics at curetogether.com, though the data points at the low end of the "popularity" scale are probably very noisy due to small sample size. The idea of crowdsourcing medical statistics is a great one, though.

A very good day, both in terms of mood and otherwise. I'll take more, please. It started with about half an hour of snuggle in the morning. Or was it an hour?

I made my post on religious tolerance, found a couple more links on the subject, took a chunk of corned beef out of the freezer to thaw, and went out for a walk and some shopping. (Stopping at a couple of garage sales and an estate sale along the way.)

My mood was more variable than usual -- noticably sad at the estate sale, happy when a pretty cyclist smiled at me on my walk, grumpy when I decided to cut my walk short so as not to provoke my aging hip joints. The shopping trip was interesting.

At Guitar Showcase I lucked into a String Swing mandolin/uke hanger that clamps onto a mic stand. It's been ages since I've seen a clip-on hanger, so I bought it hoping that it might fit Plink. It doesn't, quite, but perhaps with some mods. But they have a clamp-on guitar hanger at their website.

I also saw a pile of Rode Microphones NT1A Condenser Mic bundles, which I was very tempted by. It's on the web for $140 less, though, and there's the additional question of whether having a(nother) good mic would motivate me to get back to recording. And whether it's sufficiently better than my present low-end CAD mics to make an audible difference. I think the answer to both questions is probably "yes". Especially the second question: see this review.

After that, I went to Big Lots in search of full-spectrum lighting (no luck there), and Ross, where I found a stack of 12 microfiber hand-towels for $10. Colleen uses these extensively, so I snarfed. Then I went to the Whole Paycheck at the other end of the Bascom-and-Hamilton shopping strip, in search of salad fixings for dinner. They were having a sale: fresh, wild-caught king salmon for $10/lb. Forget about the corned beef! I asked for 2 lbs, and got a whole side at around 2.8.

The salmon was delicious, with enough for five people plus today's breakfast and lunch for me.

After dinner, the YD came downstairs and mentioned that there was a sci-fi themed challenge on the food network, so we spent the next three hours in the living room watching food porn.

Good day. I'm especially pleased with what appears to be an improved ability to notice moods.

Some more links under the cut.

Pretty good day, most notable for a flurry of receipt-sorting in the morning, and a Costco run with Colleen in the afternoon. Which ended up costing more than I expected, but that's hardly surprising.

New tag: adventure - for changes at work as $research_project turns into $real_product. Resisting the Time Suck is probably going to become increasingly relevant.

More links, above, on the "HALT" (hungry, angry, lonely, tired) acronym/checklist, in which "scared" is added to make "HALTS". They all say "don't get too...", which doesn't work for me, and probably for most people. By the time I notice that I'm behaving weirdly, if I do, I'm already over that line. The checklist is a good diagnostic tool after that point.

No walkies, but a reasonably productive day anyway. Especially in the self-knowledge department: I can now add shopping and driving to my list of things I enjoy -- at least sometimes. Also walking and music, although in the latter case the enjoyment may come afterwards, once I get out of a flow state.

I'm gradually learning to recognize and enjoy small pleasures whenever I run across them. The biggest one was buying a new Korg clip-on tuner for Plink, since I'd given my old tuner to Chaos. Very featureful; I'm going to like it. Spent a fair amount of time in Fry's looking for a netbook bag and not finding one.

I also feel somewhat accomplished for exchanging a mistaken purchase back to Walgreen's. I'd been rather anxious about it for no good reason. A good opportunity to practice identifying and correcting negative self-talk -- I'm getting better at that, and I can tell that it's working.

For our "date night" Colleen and I took Marty out to El Torrito for some good Mexican. We got fantastic service: good-humored and attentive. We both figured it was only fair to take Marty out, since we'd taken my sister-of-choice out on a date night a couple of weeks ago.

... and I shouldn't forget the contented snuggles, either. Yeah; a good day.

A pretty good day, or at least a moderately productive one. Colleen had originally wanted to get up early and go to Tapestry In Talent downtown; I figured that if she doesn't wake up with a kiss, she needs the sleep.

While she slept I did the dishes, cleaned the pots, partitioned the fileserver's new drives, made breakfast, and made my hotel reservations for OVFF.

What I actually ended up doing with Colleen was going for a drive, and stopping at the large Whole Foods in Cupertino. Scored a 25-pound bag of brown basmati rice and some gluten-free English muffins, among other yummy things. Win.

I went out for a walk around the Rose Garden, and made burgers for dinner. I ought to show the YD how to make hamburger patties properly so they cook thoroughly and don't fall apart. Colleen's and mine had blue cheese in them. I can haz (blue) cheeseburger!

Ended the evening running through my concert set for Naomi (via phone) and Colleen; we added Chaos via skype about halfway through what ended up being a 90-minute session. We really need to get streaming and conferencing set up, and do it more often.

I'm not sure why music gets pushed aside so often. Some kind of coping strategy gone awry, I suppose.

I don't feel as though I got very much done yesterday. Especially considering how much I'll have to do if I want to get our bedroom cleared out and cleaned up by the time Colleen comes home on Friday.

In fact, I haven't done much during the entire last week, when I had the Younger Daughter home from school to help. She did clean her room and the kitchen; that's something.

I did some cleaning, anyway -- more like puttering, but it's a start. And I researched hospital beds at Amazon. If these are the same beds I saw at ABC Medical Supply locally, I could save somewhere between $500 and $700 buying a pair of them from Amazon. If I trusted them and their third-party vendors, some of whom list "10 pounds" for both the dimensions and shipping weight of the objects in question. Nobody lists the actual dimensions or weight, which worries me. And if the difference didn't get gobbled up in shipping costs.

Apart from these "done yesterday" posts, I don't seem to be posting much. Maybe just as well given how long it takes to write one, but I really ought to get back to writing at some point.

The astute reader may notice that I'm using both colleen-200903 and colleen-200904 as tags. I change the date when something major changes; I figure coming home counts, so I'll use the 200904 tag for planning toward that event.

It's been a rather lazy-feeling day, though I've actually gotten a few things done. Not a walk, though; I could have gone walking either before 9am or after 4pm without getting wet, but I didn't. By the time I finished breakfast it was raining gently.

I've gotten a few things done, though. Dishes, mostly, and a bit of general cleaning-up in the house. Started giving the Wolfling a lesson in CGI scripting, though it was interrupted by Colleen waking up (in a bad mood, with very low blood sugar) and needing breakfast. She asked for a sweet omelette, so I made two, with grape jelly. Yum.

Made us grilled-cheese sandwitches for "lunch" -- the quotes are because by that time it was 2:30 or so. Hers came within about 30 seconds of being burned into inedibility when I got distracted. Somewhere in there I also changed the tablecloth on the dining-room table (for some unguessable reason the Y.D. had used a plastic shower curtain) and re-organized it pretty completely. Did I mention the lightbulbs, the freezer shelf (with a rack of ribs frozen onto it), a little bit of music practice and a little bit of IM'ing? Must have slipped my mind.

Finished the afternoon with a quick last-minute shopping trip, during which I established that the items I need a couple of for last-minute presents are not currently in stock, but are expected sometime this week. Yeah, I could get them more cheaply online, but not if I have to pay for expedited shipping. Which I would.

Started the evening with a glass of gin. Somehow I still don't feel particularly accomplished, possibly because none of the things I actually did were on my ever-lengthening to-do list.

The chaoswolf is cooking dinner.

Went down with Colleen for the hotel's buffet breakfast around 8am; I'm eventually due to meet the rest of Tres Gique for "breakfast" but figure that it'll be more like a high-protein lunch. (ETA: have just heard from Joyce; they're heading down for breakfast now. Will join her for coffee; may ping cflute from there.)

Went up to the front desk to see about getting a room with a proper ADA height toilet; got a booster seat instead, which is much more practical for the current situation, since it means not having to change rooms. Win.

Inquired at the bell desk about drug stores; there's a Rite Aid a couple of long blocks away just on the other side of 101. Mainly we needed coffee filters, having discovered that the stupid bear had forgotten to pack them. Also plain aspirin and kleenex. Yesterday morning was hectic, to say the least -- I was too busy making mini-fliers for QV to do or think of much of anything else.

Between the drug store and the little park next to the hotel in that direction, I got in a nice hour's walk. There's a Denny's just this side of 101 at the corner of Topanga and Burbank.

On my walk around the Rose Garden I passed by a garage sale, where I scored a pair of pretty little bamboo trays (which we're now using to organize the headboard) and a large, cloth, hang-on-the-door shoe bag (which is now in the office and will eventually hold assorted cables, tools, and other clutter). Total, $11.

Spent a lot of the afternoon at the Baycon barbecue, with side-trips to Kaiser to drop off and pick up prescription refills along the way. Scored a nice, gray, adjustable task chair at the used furniture joint on Lafayette St. for $50, and installed it in the living room work area in place of the ladderbacked dining chair I've been using for the last couple of months. Much better. Tuesday I'll pick up a couple more for the bedroom; Colleen has decided she likes them.

Since neither of us was feeling particularly hungry after a large, late lunch, Colleen and I went out for a drive in lieu of dinner. Stopped at the Fish Market for a "snack" on the way home: drinks, raw oysters, smoked fish, and clam chowder. Yum.

Still feeling vaguely depressed and out of it, in spite of a reasonably productive day.

Walked around the Rose Garden in the morning, and went out shopping in the afternoon. Two new Panasonic DECT handsets at Fry's: neither exactly matches our base unit and existing phones, but since they're compatible it doesn't matter. One's for Colleen's desk in the bedroom, and one for her chairside table in the Living Room. That one is white, which matches the table. Four bags of coffee at Barefoot: half for us, and half for the Wolfling to take up with her as gifts. A pair of 2-person emergency kits at Bed, Bath, and Beyond: they're probably a little cheaper this month, and I had thoughtfully provisioned my bag with 20%-off coupons because I knew that the store is next to Barefoot.

The air outside is foul with smoke. Worse this afternoon.

Not sure about the vague depression. It could just be related to the flower_cat's arthritis and muscle cramps -- having a wife apt to burst into tears from pain at odd moments isn't really conducive to happiness. Could be return to "normal" after the New Song Energy of Quiet Victories. Could be financial worries; that's always good for a nice spot of depression.

Could be the size of my to-do list, or something else that's unresolved. Damned if I know. I probably shouldn't worry about it too much; positive feedback (in the negative direction) is the last thing I need at this point. I seem to have it anyway. Bleah.

The main item on yesterday's schedule was, oddly enough, a family shopping trip. Well, 3/4 of the family, anyway. The flower_cat wanted a new purple laptop-bag/purse for her new EeePC, and the chaoswolf wanted a new Windows laptop capable of running Adobe CS3, which she needs for school. The Wolfling had determined that there was a Lenovo at Micro Center that fit her needs, and nolly had suggested either Staples or Office ?Depot? for the bag. Along the way, the Cat wanted to drive around the neighborhood of the Baycon hotel and locate the nearest restaurants. So off we went.

Micro Center is located within Mission College's ring-road, and it's off Great America Parkway only a few blocks from the Santa Clara Convention center, so we hit that first and backtracked to MC, spotting restaurants along the way. There's nothing within a short walk of the hotel, unfortunately, but it's only a short drive. About 20-30 minutes' walking each way, if you want the exercise; I probably will.

The Cat had never been to Micro Center, so she had fun exploring (and rejecting their entire collection of laptop bags, none of which were purple) while the Wolfling bought her lappie. The Cat bought a little laptop stand that looked as though it would hold the EeePC off of upholstry and keep it from burning up, so that was OK. End of part 1.

There was a Staples on the way home. No purple bags, though we did get a dark-pink beanbag laptop tray in case the stand didn't work out. End of part 2. We continued toward home, intending to drop off the Wolf, until I mentioned that there might be something at REI. The Wolf immediately pricked up her ears, and we quickly changed course.

No joy at REI, either, though there were a couple of Timbuktu bags that came close. Sort of a muddy purplish, with a broad stripe of either beige or pink. Gack. But there was an Office Max next door...

Score! Buxton Reno tote; rich dark purple; big enough for her present purse, the Eee, accessories, and so on. Big win. End of part 3.

Came home and verified that, indeed, the little stand held the Eee just fine. The Y.D. immediately claimed the beanbag tray -- "It's pink!" Verified that the bag's handles are -- just barely -- long enough to go over the handles of the wheelchair.

Went out for my walkies around 6pm, when it was pleasantly cool. Leftovers for dinner.

After yummy pancakes for breakfast, the flower_cat went out for a Mother's Day shopping expedition. Unfortunately we didn't find most of the things we were looking for, but we had fun anyway.

A little surprisingly, the wheelchair does not fit in the back seat of my car; it probably would if the passenger-side front seat were pulled up all the way, but that's unlikely to happen. The best way to get it into the trunk is to reach over the chair, grab the folded crossbars between the spokes of the far wheel, and put it into the trunk diagonally, wheels first. Comparatively painless.

We went to Valley Fair, the local mall, mainly in search of three things: a pewter bud vase and a purple laptop bag for the Cat, a new bathroom scale, and a pair of Keen hiking boots for me. We found the scale. You'd think that a mall full of shoe stores would have at least one selling Keens, but you'd be wrong. Macy's had an astounding variety of men's shoes, none of which I'd be caught dead in (but which would kill my feet in short order if I tried). Many stores had an astounding variety of handbags, very few of which were purple and none of which the Cat would be caught dead carrying. Most were so bad that I wouldn't have wanted to be associated with anyone who wanted to carry one.

After the mall we headed for home; I set a course past the Rose Garden, so we stopped there. The wheelchair worked well on the paved paths, but bogged down in the grass. At that point we changed modes and the Cat used it as a walker. It was delightful; it must have been several years since the Cat walked in the Rose Garden. I hadn't realized that she didn't know where the Royal Amethyst was located.

At that point we were both a little too hungry, so we came home and had lunch: yogurt, granola, and strawberries. A little bread and cheese for me, as well. Yum.

Went out for a walk this morning by Los Gatos Creek; a little shorter than usual, because of some lingering discomfort from yesterday's leg cramps. It seemed to get better rather than worse as I went along but I didn't want to push my luck.

It was oddly different knowing that I was going to be walking there with a friend in a couple of weeks. I don't get to do that very often.

After that I went shopping. At Guitar Showcase I got a gig bag for our Casio keyboard, so that it would be easier to take to Consonance to be borrowed by the assorted keyboard players on the guest list.

After that I went to Fry's and picked up the APC 1300VA UPS they had on sale ($20 mail-in rebate). It's a little smaller than the 1500VA one I picked up a few weeks ago, but it'll do for the bedroom. Like the larger one, it can be permanently silenced, which means I can use it for the facehugger and the alarm clock as well as the computer, and not have to worry about getting rudely awakened by a screeching UPS.

(As an aside, this will free up the 420VA supply again; I'll probably put it back on Nova, the fileserver. That should give me about an hour's worth of uptime on the router and network gear.)

I also wanted to get 4GB of RAM, but discovered when I got up to the cashier that they'd given me 2GB. Don't know whether I misread the ad, or they just wrote me up for the wrong item, but it'll wait. It's not really all that urgent now, and it'll only be cheaper next time.

added: After Fry's I went first to Bed, Bath and Beyond, basically just across the street, to look at curtain rods. The plan is to be able to curtain off part of the living room (the part with the couch and bathroom access) to provide a little extra privacy for the guests we're expecting for the wedding.

After that, I went over to Southern Lumber to buy wood for cutting boards: my usual wedding present. It took a lot of looking, but I finally found a piece of nicely-grained maple that will make two cutting boards.

Finished the loop by stopping off at BevMo for gin. Made a second, briefer shopping run to Safeway for ground beef, grated cheese, and tortillas so the Wolfling could make tacos for dinner.

Went over to Micro Center after lunch in search of a video card, USB stick, and toner. Found 'em. For $40, $30, and $100 respectively.

The video card is a Radeon 9250 with 128MB of RAM; I can remember when that was a respectible amount of memory for a workstation. Plugged it in and it just plain worked, so I'm a happy bear. I have a quiet office again! Yay!

As it turned out, just pulling the old toner cartridge and rocking it gently from side to side restored it pretty well, but at the rate it was fading I'm not going to count on more than 100 more pages or so at the outside. So the new one won't be sitting around for too long.

I've determined that what I really want for a heart-rate monitor is a pulse sensor, preferably wrist-worn, that talks bluetooth. That and GPS drivers for my OpenMoko phone. A page or two of code can take it from there.

After lunch (which consisted of half-a-dozen potstickers and half a block of tofu to use up the rest of the dipping sauce) I went out for a drive with the flower_cat. On the way home we stopped at Bed, Bath and Beyond to buy a new quilt for our bed. Most of what they had was appallingly expensive, but they had a nice black, king-sized comforter on sale for $55. Less a 20%-off coupon. Win.

After that we stopped at Cosentino's -- the Cat's favorite upscale grocery store -- to get ingredients for dinner. Which chaoswolf cooked! It was delicious -- a tomato, mozzerella, and basil salad (which the Wolf ate!), and an odd but tasty concoction of kielbasa, hot and mild Italian sausage, potatoes, sweet onion, and garlic baked in a big package of crimped Aluminum foil. So basically steamed. Yummy.

Found my missing arch support, so I won't have to buy another pair. Found it in the trash, where I had tossed it along with a couple of genuinely dead insoles from other shoes.

Got my lab results back from Kaiser -- or at least, on the web. Their website sucks. The results weren't all that great. LDL low (35, should be >40), triglicerides high (292, should be <199; still, a third of what they were 6 months ago, so the new statin is working). The disturbing one was creatine kinase: 437, should be <200. Could mean heart problems, though there are other possible explanations. The shoulder problems? We'll see; I'll probably hear from my doctor next week.

Made a little progress on clutter in the bedroom, mainly triage on footgear. Tossed some shoes that were clearly dead, and packed a bag of old-but-useable pairs for Goodwill. Swapped quilts.

Some more progress on re-organizing the fileserver; things are pretty much all in the right places now, except for moving a couple of CVS modules around. CVS, unfortunately, doesn't handle this kind of thing very well, which is why I'm looking at replacing it with git or svk. Anyway, things are ready for tomorrow morning's backup snapshot. Which will be archived, seeing as it's the first Sunday in the month.

It's been raining all morning, which settled the question of whether I'd take my walk by the creek or down to the rose garden: no, I won't. If it doesn't clear up I'll go find a suitable shopping mall.

I did go to the post office to mail a CD order, followed by Fry's and the bank. Fry's had a copy of the recently-published, definitive edition of The Annotated Alice, so of course I grabbed it along with the 2GB SD card, SD-to-USB adapter, and powered USB-2 hub that I'd gone in for.

(update: not all that recent -- the copyright date is 2000. But the two previous ones were 1960 and 1990. It may have been recently re-published, though.)

After my walk -- a pretty reasonable one -- I did a little shopping. I started with Guitar Center, because I wanted to have a look at a lightweight polyfoam case that they had on sale for $50. This is about half the price of a superficially similar gig bag at Guitar Showcase, so I figured it was worth a trip. Besides, it was the first time since they moved to their new location that I had time and they had any parking.

I should know better than to go in there. It's loud enough to interfere with conversation, and the sales droid who latched on to me was highly annoying. Hint: don't ask somebody looking at guitar cases "Do you know what kind of guitar you have?" Look, you idiot -- don't you think I know what kind of guitar I have? And he seemed totally baffled at my annoyance, too, even after I reminded him of what he'd said. Apparently "do you know" is just his way of starting a question, with no intrinsic meaning to him.

I poked around in different parts of the store, fled when some moron cranked the volume on something up to 11, and got a different salesdroid when I took a second look at the case. Unlike other RoadRunner cases, it doesn't have backpack straps or an adequate front pocket, so it's not an improvement over what I have now.

As I said, I should know better than to go in there. Still, they do have good loss leaders from time.

Next stop was Central Computing, which didn't have anything I wanted, then BevMo, which for once had a reasonable supply of Boomsma Oude Genever. They rarely have more than one bottle in stock, so I bought two.

Finally, I went to the bank to get cash for the Dickens Fair tomorrow, and finished up at the Container Store. Picked up a couple of things there, but the one I was particularly after was a flower-shaped tea strainer called "Audrey". It says so right on the box. I mean, with a name like that... I bought three -- two for us and one for the flower_cat's cousin Audrey. I'll probably have to get a few more next week.

Went out for another shopping expedition -- this time with the Cat -- after lunch. Mainly Trader Joe's for a case of "two-buck Chuck". (eta: the Shiraz, this time.) It's moderately drinkable, and makes excellent cooking wine. We also hit the British shop, which yielded a DVD and some marmalade.

Went in to work this morning, intending to make up for the three days I hadn't exactly planned on taking off, only to discover that today was a holiday. Oh. (I remembered that Monday was a holiday.) I'm not complaining -- I still had some shopping to do.

Did that. Will say no more, since everyone I bought presents for is reading my LJ.

The gadgetry I ordered for the Younger Daughter's science project arrived today: an electronic compass module and "brainstem" controller from Acroname. They mostly cater to robotics hobbyists. I don't feel too bad about helping the YD with the hardware and programming (though I'll make her look over my shoulder enough to understand how it goes together) because the actual science will be in the comparative user testing. (The project is, as the astute reader has no doubt already deduced, a talking compass for blind people. The talking will be done using flite on a Debian-based laptop.)