Science Monkey

Late last night I was sitting in my office, playing WoW, and having a grand old time. Earlier this weekend I dinged 57 (yay!) and had pushed myself to within 5k xp of 58, so when I couldn’t sleep last night and didn’t want to watch TV (or actually do any work) my choice of pastime was simple. I ripped through about 20 undead (which seemed appropriate, given how close we were to halloween), dinged 58, and was on my way to the Dark Portal (and Outland). Oooo. Spooky. I hear a quiet little scratching noise behind me but ignore it, assuming it’s one of the cats.

I explored the area around the Portal for a bit and had flown to Thrallmar when I heard the noise again. This time it wasn’t so much a scratching as a cat trying to walk stealthily into my office. Last I saw, both of the cats were asleep on the bed with Emma, so I was curious who had come to visit me. I turned around and…no cat. I look around some more and see this long, white face with coal-black eyes staring at me from underneath a fish tank. “What the hell is that? Is that a ferret? Where’d a ferret come from? Oh…that’s an opossum! Wait a second…why is there an opossum in my office? What the hell am I going to do? Oh! Let’s get Emma. She’ll know what to do.”

I go wake my wife and with her help we managed to herd the possum into a cardboard box. Okay, so mostly she did the herding. And the planning. If it were just me, I think the opossum and I would still be staring at each other, not sure what to do.

So there’s one more reason why my wife is my hero. Emma Caplan: healer of the sick, wrangler of wild beasts, and owner of the cutest new haircut this side of the Pecos.

And my last posts were how short? Uff da!

Life has been pretty good here in Heggestad/Caplan-land. We’re enjoying the company of our newest resident, Tiger the chinchilla, who is un-fucking-believably cute. I put some pictures up on my Flickr page and will get some more up probably later tonight. She’s so so cute I just can’t stand it sometimes. The cats have been remarkably tolerant, too, which has been nice. Although…I am a little worried that they’ve been *too* accepting and am starting to question their observational powers. Maybe they don’t care because their lives are not too significantly disrupted. The only resource that Tiger competes for is our attention, and, well, they’re cats. As long as they have food and comfortable places to sleep, they’re pretty much okay.

I’ve been playing a little less WoW than previously, but I’m still progressing nicely. Waradwen’s up to 51, so woo-hoo! I ran Zul’Farrak this weekend with some guildies and the lovely and talented hunter Linada which was totally a blast. I sort-of screwed up the timing of the run, though, because I missed the season premieres of The Simpsons and Family Guy. Sigh. Family Guy sounds like it was great enough to go look for online. Hmm…anyway. No real progression in my tradeskills recently. I’m at 300 herbalism and 295 alchemy and can’t go higher until I get to Outland, which isn’t for a little while. I know I could buy a port there, or beg my guild friends, but I’m not in a hurry. Then again, it’d be nice to progress in the skills…I’ve been lax in my Monday Morning Screenshots of late because there hasn’t been a whole lot of change. I took a picture yesterday afternoon with my new hat and it’s at the bottom of this post. Do you like my hat?

Work has been okay the past few weeks. Nothing terribly exciting. No significant data or anything. I’ve got a committee meeting a week from Friday and am freaking out to a minor degree given my recent dearth of data. Maybe…maybe it’ll have to get rescheduled for some unknown reason. That’d just be tragic, wouldn’t it? Maybe we can push it back to…like…November? I should have some data by then. Oh, probably not.

Enough rambling for now. More work, less goofing off. Yeah, right.

Tiger-Schmutz Feller Heggestad Caplan

I have a bunch that I want to write about but don’t want to think about enough to write coherently, so real content posts are going to be a bit limited for the time being. As if the past month hasn’t been obvious.

Emma helped me start reorganizing my office yesterday. We swapped the weight bench from my office for the futon in the “guest” room. This should result in a better use of space.

My office before the move:

My office afterwards:

Still need to clean a bunch, but we made good progress. Better, right?

Our cats are so freaking cute, I can’t stand it some times. I can’t remember if I’ve blogged about it, but our air conditioner has been out again for about the past week. Thankfully for us humans we still have Susy’s Room with its independent wall unit, but the cats have been loving the heat. I’ve had the breezeway open the past few nights (seeing as it’s cooler outside than in at that point, and having the breezeway open is like opening a huge window) and the cats have moved themselves out there. I walked out of Susy’s Room the other day and saw this:

I know that I live in Florida, which is essentially one giant swamp. I accept that. I am even somewhat mentally prepared to live in Florida when the air conditioner breaks down for the second time this summer. I’ve got a plan, even. However, the plan has one teeny, tiny, minor little flaw. What happens when the power goes out? Like it did last night. All night.

Last night has to be one of the most uncomfortable nights I’ve spent in…well…probably my entire life. I remember a few similar nights a few years ago, after the hurricanes (Charley, Ivan, etc.) when we were without power for about a week, but that was in September. Last night? Last night was not a September night. In fact, we’ve been having near-record highs the past few weeks, I think, and I know it was hot as balls yesterday during the day. Fortunately, we have the enclosed garage room with its own a/c (a little wall unit) where I can live until the main a/c is fixed. We have an attic fan in the main house, so at nights and in the mornings when it’s cooler outside than in, I can get a breeze going and cool off a little. Plus, we’ve got ceiling fans in almost all of the rooms at this point, as well as a couple of portable ones that can be moved around as needed, so it isn’t completely unbearable. In fact, we had a storm move through last night that probably dropped the outside temperature by a good ten degrees in about a half hour. Unfortunately, that storm also knocked out the power.

There I was, moderately cozy in the garage room, playing a little WoW. It was about quarter to ten and I was thinking about heading to bed. I had just killed the last mob of the evening and was about to head home and sell the crap that I had harvested when *poof*. No more power. Lappy still ran just fine, but that’s because he has mighty battery power. The DSL was off, so poor Waradwen was abandoned in the middle of the Arathi Highlands. Fortunately everything around him was dead and should remain so until the server realized I had disconnected, so he probably wasn’t in too much danger, but still. Suboptimal.

I fumbled around the house for a while before I found a flashlight. I walked around the house and made sure that I turned off all of the fans that I knew were on (like the attic fan), then settled in to the garage room to wait out the power outage. It was still substantially cooler in there than in the rest of the house, and with the rain still beating down outside I couldn’t really open any doors or windows. I found my cellphone and called the GRU hotline to report that the power was out. The automated voice told me that they already knew about the outage and a “crew was going to be dispatched,” with an estimated repair time of 11:38. Sucked, but tolerable. I tried to sleep a little, but it was so stagnant that I couldn’t really drift off. Finally, about 11:15 I decided that I had had enough of waiting, so I called GRU again and got the same message. I was a little concerned that the message still said that the repair crew was “going to be” sent out, but the repair time was the same. I decided to jump in the shower and cool off until the power came back on, when I could go to sleep.

I discovered a great setting on our shower head where the water comes out in a really fine mist, which feels fantastic when it’s 90-ish degrees in the house. I even went so far as to fill up the tub with cool water and tried to fall asleep soaking in the tub, to no success. By the time I finally climbed out of my shower/bath it was 11:45 and there was no sign of the power coming back on. I called GRU again, to see if there was a new repair estimate and was pleased to hear a different message than the previous one. Now the automated voice reported that repairs were underway, but declined to provide a repair estimate. I was so tired at this point that I managed to finally fall asleep, expecting to wake up freezing cold because the power was on and the little wall a/c was set to max. Not so much.

I woke up for the last time at about 6:30 this morning and decided that I’d just get up, rather than toss and turn in the overheated garage room for another hour. I got dressed, fed the chickens (who seemed to have weathered the storm just fine), kissed the kitties (who are *loving* the heat in the house), and headed out. There were eight GRU trucks lining 12th road when I pulled out of my driveway. I don’t know what happened, but it was clearly a pretty serious problem that knocked out our power last night. I treated myself to breakfast out and a drive in to work rather than a bike ride, and have been checking to see if the power was on at the house by calling and waiting for the answering machine to pick up. It finally did, at about 9:45 this morning, so we were without power for approximately 12 hours.

As you can probably tell by this rambling narrative, I’m pretty exhausted. I’m going to work for a few more hours, then head home early and crash for a little while before I do some other stuff later tonight. Stay cool.

Waradwen is at level 35 as of this morning, and Emma yelled at me for playing for the first time this weekend. Well, she was frustrated after sitting for an hour at Walgreen’s, only to find out they didn’t have one of the meds (and didn’t bother to tell her until *after* they had filled the other), and snapped a little.

My goal for this week is 40 and a mount. We’ll see how that goes. Four levels and 100 gold in a week? Hmmm…good thing Emma’s going to her conference this week…

Emma and I fixed our lawn mower this weekend, with the help and guidance of our friend Hank. The poor mower had been neglected over the past year or so, so Hank showed us how to open it up and where (and how) to clean it, and she’s running like a champ now. Woo! It’s very satisfying, reviving a piece of machinery. It had been a couple of months since we last mowed the lawn, which was threatening to engulf the house. The grass was so high, in fact, that it was covering Emma’s ankle tattoo completely:

The yard looks much nicer now, after we cleaned and mowed. I did most of the mowing and Emma played Destructor, Slayer of Weeds and Vines. The next project is to finish moving all of the debris to the curb before Thursday. Oy…

Overall the house is looking very nice, I think. The cucumber plants have succumbed to the heat and drought, which is a little sad, but the tomatoes are persevering. I need to remember to start germinating the plants earlier next year so it doesn’t take quite so long to start producing fruit. Oh, and transfer them out of the germinating tray at the right time, so they don’t get stunted. That’d probably be more useful.

Emma and I went and saw the new Harry Potter movie last night and loved it. We thought it was a lot of fun and very well paced with some great effects and excellent casting. Dolores Umbridge was perfect, I thought, just as I imagined her. Emma thought that the Veil was just right, too, appearing as she imagined it. My only minor quibble is that I thought it was just a little bit too short. I felt like we were — if you’ll pardon the bad analogy — skimming like a stone across the book, hitting the highlights for certain, but missing a lot of the depth. Wait…I can’t believe I just called a Harry Potter book “deep.” Next thing you know we’ll be eating dinner at Applebee’s and watching “Deal or No Deal” every night on the TV. And we did have dinner at Applebee’s the other night! Ack! I draw the line at “Deal or No Deal,” though. Sheesh.

At any rate, the pace of the movie left me thinking: If you hadn’t read the book, or known much of the plot going in, how much sense would the movie make? The girl sitting behind us had trouble following the plot, but I think that she was just stupid and not necessarily the best candidate. I probably shouldn’t pass judgment, because I know that I am not the best at following plots sometimes, but still.

This makes three good movies that we’ve seen in the theaters in the past couple of weeks. We saw Die Hard 4 (whatever) and also really enjoyed it. Again, not Great Art, but a lot of fun and certainly worth the price of admission. Lots of ’splosions, and what more do you want from a summer movie? For our anniversary, Emma and I went and saw Ratatouille, which was excellent. Just wonderful. Fun and enchanting and funny and touching and everything a good Pixar movie is. The short before the movie was great, also, one of the best I’ve seen, and I’m already excited about next year’s release after seeing a 30-second clip. We had a great time.

Now to the other half of my title. Our A/C died sometime on Sunday. Can I tell you how much it sucks not having an A/C in Florida? In July? Ugh. It started getting warm on Sunday afternoon and it was in the 80’s (at least) by the time we went to bed Sunday. Last night we got clever and slept in “Susy’s Room,” the converted garage with an independent A/C, but the rest of the house is still pretty warm. We can open the front door and the door to the breezeway and turn on the attic fan, but it only does so much. I’ve got an appointment with a repairman between 3 and 5 this afternoon. Hopefully it’ll be something minor but I doubt it. The fan outdoors is still working and the fan in the air handler seems to be working, but the air that it’s blowing isn’t cold. Maybe the condenser? Beats me. I’m not nearly as mechanical as I wish I were.