Hour of Misc
Some assorted notes from the past few days...
I spent most of this past weekend in Sandy Lake, near the junction of I-79 and I-80 north of Pittsburgh, to see my friends Clinton and Dawn get married. It was a pleasant and down-to-Earth wedding held on a small beach on the eponymous Lake: A peak of about 100 guests; cooking and decorating by Dawn and a small battery of her friends and relatives; a brief, unofficiated Quaker ceremony with homemade vows read at sunset. After sundown, the requisite dancing on the sand, and some karaoke (I helped Clint do a grave disservice both to Frank Sinatra and to the city of New York) the party, mostly winnowed down to the exhausted core of people who had been around all day setting up, trailed off into casual conversation and clean-up fairly quickly. Also jumping in the lake and heading out to the diving platform, for those who had bathing suits and/or enough drinks in them for swimming to seem like a good idea. My bathing suit and towel, regrettably, had stayed behind in my suitcase in Grove City. There's something bracing, though, about jumping some 15 feet into 60-degree lake water when you're wearing soaked-through cotton boxer-briefs (the preteen girls present eliminated another option here), it's dark outside, and you're not wearing your glasses. It felt like about 3 in the morning when I left but the clock on my car dash said 11:30; 25 more cold-and-wet minutes of driving through fog and I was asleep in my well-enough appointed room at the Super 8.
Early to bed meant early to rise, so fairly early on Sunday I drove down to visit Mom and Dad, where I did some remedial napping before helping Dad close the pool for the season and eating a tastier, more vegetable-rich dinner than I can seem to prepare for myself. Then it was onward to Arlington, easy driving on the PA Turnpike but often torrential rain on I-70 through Maryland. Despite the weather I managed to keep an ear on the Manning-on-Manning Sunday night game on the Giants' AM radio affiliate, whose broadcast started slipping into interference patterns and religious-sounding singing whenever I drove down a hill and whose play-by-play man made a whole lot of less-specific-than-usual references to "Manning under center"...
Weather in the D.C. area since I got back has been suddenly Octoberish, slate-gray and intermittently rainy with seemingly chilly temperatures that in fact range from the high 60s to low 70s. It's a sudden shift from the usual late summer fare, and one that made me just get under a blanket and go to sleep starting at about 7 o'clock yesterday after work. Overall it's close to the nicest part of the year, though, without the swampy heat of July and August or the oppressive pollen counts of the spring. If you're musically programming your commutes, Philip Glass' fifth string quartet will be ideal in just a couple of weeks -- it has an uncharacteristic, autumnal warmth and a chugging middle movement reminiscent of steam locomotives that somehow sets the perfect tone when the leaves start to fall...
The most puzzling vanity license plate I've seen on I-66 in the past week: GODSCAB, on a white sedan. Based on the older women in the back of the car I assume it means "God's Cab", for a vehicle that's used by a church organization to shuttle people around. Parse it as "God Scab" as I did on my first reading, though, and it sounds like a name a couple of 17-year-olds would pick for their metal band...
The internal time-tracking system we use at work includes a catch-all "Misc." task for miscellaneous activities that don't really constitute forward progress on any of our targeted goals -- installing software, dealing with IT problems, using the internal time-tracking system, etc. So "hour of misc", pronounced with a hard 'c', is slipping into my internal vocabulary, defined as a unit of time not particularly well spent.
I spent most of this past weekend in Sandy Lake, near the junction of I-79 and I-80 north of Pittsburgh, to see my friends Clinton and Dawn get married. It was a pleasant and down-to-Earth wedding held on a small beach on the eponymous Lake: A peak of about 100 guests; cooking and decorating by Dawn and a small battery of her friends and relatives; a brief, unofficiated Quaker ceremony with homemade vows read at sunset. After sundown, the requisite dancing on the sand, and some karaoke (I helped Clint do a grave disservice both to Frank Sinatra and to the city of New York) the party, mostly winnowed down to the exhausted core of people who had been around all day setting up, trailed off into casual conversation and clean-up fairly quickly. Also jumping in the lake and heading out to the diving platform, for those who had bathing suits and/or enough drinks in them for swimming to seem like a good idea. My bathing suit and towel, regrettably, had stayed behind in my suitcase in Grove City. There's something bracing, though, about jumping some 15 feet into 60-degree lake water when you're wearing soaked-through cotton boxer-briefs (the preteen girls present eliminated another option here), it's dark outside, and you're not wearing your glasses. It felt like about 3 in the morning when I left but the clock on my car dash said 11:30; 25 more cold-and-wet minutes of driving through fog and I was asleep in my well-enough appointed room at the Super 8.
Early to bed meant early to rise, so fairly early on Sunday I drove down to visit Mom and Dad, where I did some remedial napping before helping Dad close the pool for the season and eating a tastier, more vegetable-rich dinner than I can seem to prepare for myself. Then it was onward to Arlington, easy driving on the PA Turnpike but often torrential rain on I-70 through Maryland. Despite the weather I managed to keep an ear on the Manning-on-Manning Sunday night game on the Giants' AM radio affiliate, whose broadcast started slipping into interference patterns and religious-sounding singing whenever I drove down a hill and whose play-by-play man made a whole lot of less-specific-than-usual references to "Manning under center"...
Weather in the D.C. area since I got back has been suddenly Octoberish, slate-gray and intermittently rainy with seemingly chilly temperatures that in fact range from the high 60s to low 70s. It's a sudden shift from the usual late summer fare, and one that made me just get under a blanket and go to sleep starting at about 7 o'clock yesterday after work. Overall it's close to the nicest part of the year, though, without the swampy heat of July and August or the oppressive pollen counts of the spring. If you're musically programming your commutes, Philip Glass' fifth string quartet will be ideal in just a couple of weeks -- it has an uncharacteristic, autumnal warmth and a chugging middle movement reminiscent of steam locomotives that somehow sets the perfect tone when the leaves start to fall...
The most puzzling vanity license plate I've seen on I-66 in the past week: GODSCAB, on a white sedan. Based on the older women in the back of the car I assume it means "God's Cab", for a vehicle that's used by a church organization to shuttle people around. Parse it as "God Scab" as I did on my first reading, though, and it sounds like a name a couple of 17-year-olds would pick for their metal band...
The internal time-tracking system we use at work includes a catch-all "Misc." task for miscellaneous activities that don't really constitute forward progress on any of our targeted goals -- installing software, dealing with IT problems, using the internal time-tracking system, etc. So "hour of misc", pronounced with a hard 'c', is slipping into my internal vocabulary, defined as a unit of time not particularly well spent.
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