The Last Candle

Watching.

Playing (also).

Keeping good company.

Working. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a good day for everything.

After celebrating my sister’s birthday today at a local fine restaurant I had planned a simple jaunt down to the library to pick up a couple of books. By chance, this Friday before Christmas brought a few performance artists out to Main Street. Here’s a bit o’ footage.

Original post: Edited entirely on a MacBook Pro, entirely while at Sweetwaters. With camera, memory card-to-USB reader and MacBook, fear this mobile movie producer. Of course, with that sloppy editing I should be feared. Still, it’s good enough.

Update: Much better — not great by any means, but better. If you missed the first version, good for you.

Cross-posted on the tumblelog.

The surface of the local Kroger’s parking lot is nearly clear of snow, while Stadium Road resembles a straightened luge track. The former is a mere grocery store, though a bastion of produce, shaved deli meats, toothpaste with glittering mint crystals, and other homestyle needs it may be, and the latter is a major, multi-mile conduit that serves to sustain a significant part of the local economy. Something doesn’t quite make sense. Oh, but when you put it that way…

Roughly eight inches of snow kept me from going to work today. In hindsight, I was foolishly optimistic about being able to make the conservative 10-minute commute from my apartment to work: my departure to the office on weekends usually begins at about noon, and I figured that during the night and the five hours of dim morning the roads would be sufficiently clear for a Dexter-bound trek.

But then not only was the winter storm more nasty than expected, and not only were the roads not cleared off very well, but the wind must have spent something like twelve hours blowing all of the snow that hit landfall on the west side of the state over to us. At the rate the breeze has been whipping the snow into drifts and blowing it across the length of the apartment complexes, our ‘burb here in Ann Arbor is now probably home to a large immigrant snowflake community that was originally sown in Kalamazoo, a hundred miles west of us, having been blustered eastward and airborne for most of the night and part of a day.

So the not-going-to-work part was a little nice, but now I’ll need to divide up the missed eight hours across the next five days in order to catch up with the current load of stuff. The problem is that the daily loads already take until 8 PM to complete, and I’m not even counting any issues that were sent to me today from the poor, luge track-faring souls that coasted into the office. I’m not actually sure if I’ll be able to catch up at this point, but I can say for certain that my nights won’t be spent at the ABC.

But Thursday the 28th is when five out of eight of my “products” need to be ready to ship. I have some solace in the fact that in less than two weeks most of my workload will be setting sail — whether those sails will be made of canvas, Bible paper, or Kleenex will be revealed at the time of departure.

In other related news, I haven’t played my guitar in about a month.

Still, I have Irish cream, peanut butter and strawberry preserves sandwiches on hearty wheat bread, Milliontown on the good ‘phones, 800 or so science-related blog posts and news articles to indulge, a funny little web project to develop and assorted other little projects to poke with.

Oh, and some final words about Twilight Princess: I’m done with it. It’s a very fine and polished game, but for all of its wolf-and-hippy alien girl dressings I still felt I had previously played this same game three or four times. Progress-wise, Mutton the Link-Man made it as far as picking up the Gale Boomerang, that classic of Zelda devices that now spins up a cool little tornado on its way to trigger buttons and switches. I like tornadoes, but I don’t like them enough to suffer through the rest of Twilight Princess just so I can use the boomerang to make my opponents dizzy.

I want a real Gale Boomerang. The cyclone would look awfully pretty in all this snow.

Songs removed on January 2nd, after only three weeks! I’m getting better at this.

Tracklist:

• Hyperventilate by Frost*
• Spoonful by Howlin’ Wolf
• Waste Some Time by The Paperboys
• Forge by Justin Bianco

Songs will be up about a week, or, more likely, until whenever I remember to take them down.

The beep-beeper on the bread-ead machine pealed out about twenty seconds ago. The twin tones signaled that the week’s home-made loaf had successfully passed through the gauntlet of kneading, rising and baking (hard crust only, please).

That is, I think that the gauntlet was successfully passed, but the yeast that went into the dough might think differently. Or not at all, as it were, since I killed them all. The whining to ancestors in the Great Yeasty Beyond probably began about 55 minutes ago, right about when the heat elements in the bread machine cooked the internal temperature to 350°, broiling the poor yeast, just after it had done such a good job leavening and flavoring the dough. Life is hard.

But my day wasn’t hard, because for the first time in a couple months I didn’t go to work, an event in my life worthy of a hearty, resounding “Huzzah!”

The morning began with momentum towards the same ritual I’ve been slogging through for the past three months: going to work, of course. These days the question is not if I need to head into the office (i.e., whether or not the day is a weekday or part of the weekend), but at what time do I need to show up.

Today the answer to the daily quiz was going to be 2 PM, a fairly liberal arrival, but I bailed out for multiple reasons. The main reason was that I convinced myself that the job I needed to accomplish today could be spread out evenly across the next week — the evenings would be later, but in turn that’d free up a whole afternoon today. The pending job isn’t urgent, so I can afford to take a day off.

Or maybe the main reason was that I really, really didn’t want to go into work. Not like, “Blegh, work again,” which is a fairly common feeling after slaving over the grindstone so much, but not terribly bad. The feeling was more like, “If I drive into that tree at my current speed — let’s see, that’s 70 miles per hour — the ensuing ‘accident’ would free me from my cube for at least a couple days. How comfortable are hospital beds, anyway?”

About the day off: it has been very nice. Peering yesterday at my ever-growing spreadsheet that keeps track of hours of overtime worked this season, I discovered that the last day that was free of absolutely no work occurred sometime in late October. Didn’t even notice, honestly, because putting down the tax hammer has occupied so much time lately. But this going into work every single day routine is not a habit I wish to keep up.

Today I did a teeny amount of Christmas shopping. I made a feeble attempt at catching up on my syndicated web feeds, which have overtaken and accumulated in my Google Reader like a kudzu infestation — removing 150 or so articles and blog posts today probably took out somewhere between five and ten percent of the 90-feed fire hose. Grocery shopping and laundry was also accomplished, purchasing goodies for meals today (soup) and later this week (baked latkes, although I still need to buy a coarse grater for them taters). I played a little Far Cry, an excellent shooter not enjoyed since October 10th (per the last save file’s time stamp), and I intend to dig into Zelda: Twilight Princess a little later on this evening.

So, yes, very nice.

Speaking of Twilight Princess and my rant on it from the other day: the crow is marinating in preparation for a fine meal. I tucked into a play session shortly after uploading yesterday’s steamed post, and ‘lo and behold, not ten minutes after resuming my previous save game did the narrative take a very serious, very non-Zelda turn. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but in essence what appears to be a normal monster-boss introduction cut-scene goes all science-fiction right in the middle of the show. The game hasn’t been the same since the twist, and it’s all the better because of it.

I still stand by the earlier horse-riding complaints. I’m less chafed about the ongoing lacks now, but thankfully (and predictably) so.

Two of the items I bought earlier were Nutella and Irish cream. A decadent hot chocolate drink can be made of the fabulous hazelnut spread, as I happily discovered today. The Irish cream was my idea as an additional augmentation, because it’s just so damn tasty.

Being that Sister Winter is raining down ice again, I think I’d better get to work on that hot chocolate.

Ooh, thought: Nutella and butter on warm, home-baked bread, accompanied by Nutella hot chocolate and Irish cream. And Zelda too? It’s almost too much.