Local insanity is insane

Dear all,

I am currently in lab, since the power outage from Thursday put me slightly behind schedule in terms of experiments, both in terms of actual experiment and in terms of equipment malfunction (sensitive equipment don't take well to sudden shut downs).  The day had started off gloomy, moved toward sunny, and now the evening clouds have already crept in from the ocean. I am going to attempt to summarize the past week's events in the order that I remember them, which may seem random and definitely will not be chronological. You all have been warned.

Blogger's new posting window does the "save" thing automatically, much like Google docs, but somehow the lag is worse and so I end up pressing enter fruitlessly, trying to start a new paragraph, while the scripts are busy churning away, trying to store a snapshot of my typing, and then my cursor jumps to the start of the paragraph for no reason. It is annoying. Dear Blogger, please stop doing that.

The recovery from the blackout seems to be coming along fine. There are still traffic light malfunctions everywhere. It looks like any system that is tied to a timer is a little ditzy at the moment (and on Friday, all the outdoor lighting that's tied, I assume, to a digital -- as opposed to analogue -- timer that does not run on batteries was on the fritz -- as in all the night lighting were on during day time and that was interesting), but we have so far received no warning about the fragile system after Friday, and it looks like everything's still set to run on full power come Monday.

The side-view mirror from my car came this week. I got the first notice, in fact, on Thursday. I always get notice for these things since I am never home during normal working hours on weekdays, and they can never tell me exactly what time they were going to drop by (I can't exactly sit around all morning / afternoon waiting for one package), so am well familiar with the course of action required of me. Though I did refrain from calling Thursday evening since they keep all the records on computers and well, with the power out, even if they were diligent and didn't go home like the rest of us, they won't be able to pull out my record anyway. So: I called yesterday and have just picked up the mirror. It's currently sitting in the trunk of my car (the office for it is closer to lab than home). (Though on my way there I noticed a restaurant that declared "Japanese! American! Seafood! Chinese!" One of those is obviously not like the other. I was amused.)

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It turns out the cursor only appears to be at the start of the paragraph, but when you type the font shows up at the right place. I am on Ivy right now, running Firefox 3.6.20 on Fedora 14. Dear Blogger, I do not understand.

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Earlier this week I was ordering a copy of Persepolis (along with a set of jeweler's screwdrivers, heh) on Amazon when I realized that I have been talking about buying a nicer camera, which my parents did offer to do for me (then they talked to me and decided to get me a new laptop instead. Did I blog about that when they came over? I don't think I did. We had a joint almost-birthday thing -- belated for mine and early for mom but right on day for dad and they gave me a nice Dell laptop which I named Elev) for a really long time. And you know what? I have no idea why I haven't bought it yet. So: I ordered myself the Canon EOS camera that I've been crushing on for just over a year and a macro lens (with my obsession with plants this cannot come as a surprise to ...well, anyone) and that, everyone, would be very exciting indeed. Especially given that it's starting to look like that more people can make the Arizona trip over winter break and that Malvina would prefer a winter break trip and so I have Thanksgiving, which I refuse to spend ALL in lab (just most of it to make up for the time off that I'll now need at probably the end of December), so I'll probably go hiking somewhere nearby and play with my camera.

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And now I'm home, having left lab to do grocery shopping, where I ran into a post-doc. This is not the 99-Ranch meeting of Chinese. My program has 4 predominant neurosci / genetics labs: I work in one, he and Wendy's best friend is in the other (our labs have a complicated sometimes collaborator, sometimes competitor atmosphere). He is French and the subject of much teasing when Wendy and I went over to borrow their guillotine tissue slicer and couldn't find it, in the sense that the girl we were with claimed that the French (man) stole it. (He didn't actually steal it. It was in a box with other boxes from another post-doc who left.) It was a health food store and I suppose that makes sense, given I see on him on the bus fairly regularly. I said "hi" and it was all very awkward, because I can never quite figure out how closely I must interact with someone before they remember me, and so must decide between accidentally ignoring someone who did remember me and creeping out someone who didn't. Luckily he remembered me, so that's one less Awkward Penguin in my zoo.

I've installed the new mirror (despite of the advertisement, the connectors aren't quite right, so I'm trying to figure out if I have the tools to slap on a new connector) on the car after that, and washed a lot of dishes and now I must go make dinner if I want to eat it by the time I get hungry. But before that I want to mention that Ivy's my carry-on "book" where I have it sync'ed to a lot of things and have a bunch of reading material there and Thursday night I did try to read HUNGER GAMES again (having downloaded a copy much earlier)...and quickly remember why I stopped: generally I don't like first person narratives, but I can tolerate it if I like the person OR the writing is really good OR the plot is really engaging. Katniss annoys me, the writing style is not what I would consider exceptional, and I failed to be wow'ed by the plot. So no, not for me.

There are some other things but a) I can't recall them off of the top of my head at the moment and b) FOOD! And I'm on Elev running Firefox 6.0.2 on Windows 7 and when I hit enter twice to start a new paragraph the cursor disappears, though the letters will show up at the right place afterwards. Dear blogger, I am confused.