Elephant trunk. North of Chiang Mai, Thailand. September, 2003.

Taken with some little point and shoot film camera that I can't remember because two nights before leaving for the (then) trip of my lifetime, someone knocked my good Minolta Maxxum off of a table and broke it. This picture isn't all that visually impressive or anything, but come on - elephant trunk!! Someone in my group, maybe even myself, rode this impressive beast later that day. Riding on an elephant is not nearly as comfortable and exotic as it might sound. Their gait is not all that conducive to a cushy ride and if you think you're high up whilst horseback riding, get on an elephant sometime. It was fun, though.

If you're new here to my flist thanks to AMA or however you might have found me, you have the misfortune of hitting my LJ at a time when I'm really super busy. We're trying to get a lot of stuff closed out here before Christmas and I'm finding little time to write about what's going on. Feel free to poke around, read what you'd like and comment if you feel the desire. Welcome, and enjoy. If you've got questions, please ask.

Before I go anywhere with this post, a very happy birthday shout out to rediscover_me! Have a wonderful day!!

The weekend was fine, although made a little insufferable by the sheer number of University of Florida and Alabama fans that were milling about the city, generally clogging up the works. I'm as big of a fan of college football as anyone, but holy hell some of those people were really annoying. I'm sure alcohol was a factor in most cases.

At the same time, it was fun. There was a lot going on around the city this weekend and there was kind of a sense of things happening and events taking place. It made the city feel bigger and more cosmopolitan than it often does. I like that.

I did a little Christmas shopping and that led to an interesting interaction. I do a lot of my shopping online since the vast majority of my gifts are going to be mailed to other cities and I'm going to have to pay to ship something anyway it often is a good deal. However, there are a few things that I need or want to get in person, one of which was at the Apple store in the mall. The store was jammed and the line to pay was horrendously long. While standing there, waiting my turn, my eyes were roaming around the room. I had one of those "my eyes swept past your face while your eyes were sweeping past mine" moments with a woman who was on her way out, probably ten feet away from me. We made eye contact and I was feeling a little stupid because while I wasn't checking her out (she just happened into my view), she was the kind of girl you probably would check out if you checked out girls. She was tall and attractive and dressed nicely. Just as I was giving myself an internal shake of the head and looking away, she kept her eyes directly on me, gave a big smile, and with an indication of her head toward the queue said (very sincerely), "good luck!" I managed a "thank you!" that hopefully wasn't too much stammer, totally surprised. And then like that, she was gone. Honestly, it made me feel pretty good. The look on the face of the guy behind me was pretty funny, eyebrows raised and lips pursed in what I assume was jealousy.

It's been a really, really slow morning here. For whatever reason it seems like I've been here all day when it's only been a couple of hours. I don't have any big project to do or anything and a few of my people are out today, so I knew it would be dragging a bit today but I didn't expect time to actually be going backwards. I'm pretty much at the end of the Internet, at least the Internet I can access here at work, and it's only 9:30. Ugh.

Good news today though as I learned that my cubemate, he of the Lance cracker breakfast and constant chair rocking, will be gone all next week taking his family to Disney World. The week after that I have three days of a training class in another building and then after that I'm off for two weeks for Christmas. So this is more or less the last day I'll have to deal with him this year.

Happy birthday today to the fittest dudette on my flist, the bad-assed wolfsgotnards. I hope your foot is all better and that it hasn't set your running back too much!

There might be snow here tomorrow. That would be exciting. I imagine I won't get too much in the city, but the burbs might get a dusting. It'll still cause mass chaos.

Urubamba River Valley. Near Pisaq, Peru. March 2006

Taken with my Minolta X-700 using a 35mm lens (the widest angle lens I had at the time) on Fuji 400 speed film. Our bus pulled off the side of the road here just so we could take some pictures and stretch our legs. The river valley here was considered sacred by the Incas. It doesn't show up too well in the photograph, but the snow-capped mountains off in the distance were amazing. Towering. Inviting.

I've had a couple of Shins songs stuck in my head since Wednesday when they came up randomly on my iPod during my run. This morning when I was in the shower I started thinking about the composer who allegedly went insane because of a note that was stuck in his head (Schumann?) and how I could totally see that happening. I got into work and without even thinking about it started up my media player on random like I often do (to drown out the sound of my cubemate) and of course two of the first five songs are Shins songs, one of which the one that was stuck in my brain. I'm considering sticking some mechanical pencils in through my nose and see if I can get them out that way.

Speaking of the cubemate, he's on his second Diet Coke of the morning and is having his ritual package of Lance crackers for breakfast.

I really enjoyed my Thanksgiving break. Dinner was really good and it was nice to spend time with my aunt, uncle, and three cousins again after not seeing them for several months. I used my time to do some cleaning around my apartment and some organizing, of which I can never seem to do enough. I put up my meager Christmas decorations, though not my tree yet (basically just some lights and swapping out some photos on the walls for Christmas themed stuff). The tree I'll do in a couple of weeks. I got some reading done and hung out with a few friends. It was rewarding time off and is serving to make me want to get to my Christmas break that much more.

For now, though, it's back to the grind.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! Yes, even you non-Americans who are not technically celebrating today.

I'm thankful to have such a wonderful group of friends here. I'm really lucky.

Taking a break from Thailand and jumping ahead three years to Peru.


The Cathedral of Cuzco. Cuzco, Peru. March 2006.

Shot with my Minolta X-700 using a 35mm prime lens on Fuji 200 speed negative film.

I cherish the time I spent in Peru and loved Cuzco most of all. There was a certain charm to Lima and Cuzco definitely had touristy issues, but I loved the feeling that you could almost reach up and touch the clouds. I felt at home among the mountains and wished I could have stayed longer. I went to mass in Spanish for the first time in my life here and not for the first time in my life (nor the last) I cursed my decision to take French in high school. Cuzco and the area around it are beautiful.

Today is traditionally the day when the least work gets done around here. Some people take the day off for vacation, which I understand, but it's kind of a waste. This is like a free vacation day, besides the download speed on the network here is like a thousand times faster than at home. My boss is one of those taking the day off, though, so I'm not going to complain too much.

So I took my time getting up this morning and making my way into work. I stopped to get some tea on the way, which I always think I'm too late to do normally, and it was really good. It was a perfect morning for it here: chilly, overcast, and somber, until I walked in my cubicle area and realized someone had the heat set on 78 degrees. Whoah.

I consider my reading list to be pretty varied and I do often try to find new authors. I hate being stuck in a literary rut. So I look around a lot, which is why I have no idea how I could have missed out on Paul Bowles for so long. It's not like he just popped up on the book scene, but not only have I never read anything of his until now but I was only dimly aware of the existence of his books (mostly from a reference in a song by the Police). Last time I was at the bookstore, though, a copy of The Sheltering Sky caught my eye for some reason. I picked it up, read the first chapter, and was utterly hooked. That was four days ago and I'm halfway through. I mean, seriously: Paul Bowles studied music with Aaron Copland and was friends with Gertrude Stein and Gore Vidal. The book is really outstanding.

Would it kill my cubemate to chew his gum with his mouth closed? I am very much looking forward to my four day weekend. I don't plan to do too much for Thanksgiving except eat dinner with my aunt and uncle and their faction of the family and sleep. A lot.

I lunched at my local Subway today and as so often happens there, ran across something interesting. There was a guy sitting at a table by himself. He was very disheveled looking with some crazy hair. He wasn't obviously homeless because he had nice-ish clothes, a nice backpack, and (I found out later when he left) a decent car. He was, however, wearing a trench coat. He was bent over and talking to himself, somewhat loudly. I thought at first that he had some fancy Bluetooth gadget for a cellphone, but neither a phone nor an ear piece were visible. To make things even more disturbing, his table was full of handwritten notes scrawled on random pieces of paper in big, bold black ink (like a Sharpie or something).

He's either planning an uprising or is, in fact, a genius scientist. Possibly a mad one.

I don't normally have a problem with public displays of affection, even in the workplace, but I've just been reminded that apparently that feeling is highly dependent on which people are doing the displaying. The guy I just saw and the woman whose neck he was nuzzling are not two people I want to envision getting, um, romantic with each other. It wasn't "cute" nuzzling either, it was more like the guy (who incidentally must be 65 years old, has a BMI of -25, and smokes two packs a day despite the company's stated "no tobacco products on campus" policy) was assaulting the neck of the woman (who incidentally must be 35, have a BMI of 1000, and smokes just as much). And she was loving every minute of it. The sight was made much worse by the sounds. She was all giggly and he was all like, "nom nom nom" and it was just ew. I can gouge my eyes out if I have to, but that sound will never leave my brain.

I have a new food obsession, one that isn't going to be good for me (how often are food obsessions healthy, though?). I met a friend of mine last night at Steak N Shake for a quick bite to eat on my way home from work. I was forced to order a white chocolate milkshake and I have to say it was one of the tastiest things I've sucked down (er... that doesn't sound good) in a long, long time. I'm a fan of white chocolate in general and this was a more than worthy application of its wonderfulness. The Coke with vanilla syrup was definitely overkill, but also delicious. Hello, empty calorie Tuesday!

If I had a fireplace I'd be all over a nice fire tonight. It's that kind of day here. Very Autumnal.

I'm not a huge germaphobe or anything, but would it kill the guy that I saw sprint directly from a stall in the bathroom here to stop and spend thirty seconds of his life washing his hands? This would have been especially nice from him because when I exited the bathroom about 15 seconds later, I saw him getting something out of a vending machine. That's just... wrong.

I'm laboring through the afternoon with a killer headache. I'm not really sure where it came from, but as always my first suspect is my sinuses. My sinuses and I have a long history of warfare with each other, and lately they've been getting the upper hand. I can deal with congestion and being reduced to being a mouth-breather, but this pressure shit has got to stop. I don't think I've got any Sudafed-type stuff around here, either.

Looks like there's going to be a space shuttle launch today at 2:28 Eastern Time, at least as of now (1:30). Cool.

My weekend was good. I was social. I didn't get a lot of sleep and I am dragging big time today, but it was fun. Nothing especially noteworthy but it was nice to be around friends.

Karen tribe member and her child. Near Chiang Mai, Thailand. September 2003.

During my trip to Thailand in 2003, I took an overnight trek in the mountains north of Chiang Mai. Our overnight accommodations were at a village of Karen people. They fed us and housed us and provided us with plenty of Chang beer as we sat around the campfire that night listening to their children sing songs taught to them by Christian missionaries. The next morning, while everyone got ready to continue our trek, I walked around the village taking some pictures which is when I ran into this mother and her child. The villages that the Karen people live in are all on the sides of or at the top of mountains and walking around with a baby strapped to their backs is something they seemed to be quite adept at.

Oatmeal is best as a brown sugar delivery device.

That is all.

I decided that I would start posting a picture I took a long time ago and try to tell the story about it. I'm not going to say I'll do this every day or anything, but when I think of it, I will.



Long tail boat on the Chao Phraya river. Bangkok, Thailand. September 2003

I took this picture during my trip to Thailand in 2003. I was just starting to get serious taking pictures and had a pretty decent Minolta Quantum SLR with a good lens... that someone broke knocking it off a table two days before my trip. So I had to make it for 11 days in the most exotic place I've ever visited with a little point and shoot film camera I bought at Target pretty much right before I left for the airport. It ended up serving me pretty well, but I was limited in what shots I could take because of the lens (not very much wide angle, fixed aperture, limited zoom).

I'm getting tired of having wet socks. Back when I was in college and was traipsing around a campus in Michigan every day, I insisted on having really good waterproof shoes to wear. This was back in the day when Timberland stuff was actual technical gear and not a fashion statement worn by people who have never even seen the woods much less hiked in them (side note: I know I'm showing my age when I say that, and am willing to make it even worse by saying I remember when Abercrombie and Fitch sold clothes that could keep you dry in the rain and warm in the winter, which, you know...). That was then.

Living a sheltered life of cubicle luxury as an adult I have gotten away from that. Sure, I've got a 10 minute walk from my car to my desk, much of which is outside, but hey, this is Georgia. The weather's nice here. Besides, we've been in a drought for the last five years.

I've gotten soft. The flooding from September and the rain we've been getting from our dear friend Ida have shown me that. I don't wear fancy shoes to work, since I am an engineer after all and something from Crockett & Jones would look a little out of place climbing into a half-finished airplane fuel tank. My current shoes are Borns (I know there's HTML script for the Scandinavian "o" character, but I can't find it) which are functional but hardly waterproof. It doesn't take long for water to start coming in around the seam between the sole and the uppers.

With Tropical Depression Ida parked over us for the past two days I'm getting annoyed with the deep puddles in the parking lot and the long walk to the building. I'm tired of taking my shoes off when I get to my desk to let my socks dry, only to have to put them back on to go to a meeting and have them get wet again. I'm not sure Georgia has seen this much rain in a three month period in centuries, but the knowledge that it may never happen again in my lifetime doesn't make my toes any less cold!

The commute home from work yesterday was horrible and a little scary. The rain is supposed to be moving out today, so things should be improving from here. Let's hope.

Pretty sure this is the most I've ever written about soggy footwear

Just overheard while walking down the production line here at work, one production guy talking to another: "I think I've got a piece of aluminum in my throat." Yeah, he might want to have that checked out.

Yesterday I went to lunch at a local pizza joint. It gets crowded at lunchtime, because it's good, and I had to take a table in the middle (there are booths around the perimeter). Let's keep in mind for a minute that I'm not a man of the size that would cause his chair to stick out into the aisle when sitting at a table. Also let's recall that I don't eat lunch with my chair pushed way back from the table, stretched out and feet up. I have good posture. Anyway, three people bumped into the back of my chair in the 30 minutes that I was there eating. Three freaking people, and do you know how many of those assholes so much as nodded their head in my direction as an apology? I'm going to go ahead and let you guess. WTF?

Something that's been bothering me: a few weeks ago they finally instituted a recycling program here. Finally! We do, unfortunately, generate a lot of paper. Many of the people I work with are older and aren't fully trusting of computers, so when you send them an e-mail usually the first thing they do is print it out. In other words, we are in need of paper recycling. So they put out a number of bins that resemble the kind you get at the post office if you have a ton of mail, except these are bright yellow in color. They are labeled very distinctively as paper recycling and there were a lot of things on our company website that they were going to be "deployed" (as they put it) throughout the facility. You cannot mistake them for anything else. They put one in my office area on the floor right by a door to the rest of the plant, which is awesome. Yesterday I took a stack of paper down there with the intent of dropping them in and took a look in the bin before I did so. There were a few pieces of paper inside, but there were also a ton of candy bar wrappers, three plastic Coke bottles, some Styrofoam to-go containers from the cafeteria, and a stapler. Seriously, people?? There is a big trash can like three feet away. Grrr…

This whole thing at Ft. Hood is very troubling to me. My dad was stationed at Ft. Hood twice and I spent the better part of three summers there back in the late 1980s. I can recall the base pretty vividly; for the most part it's a really desolate part of the world. Since there are tank and helicopter units there they need a lot of room to move around and practice. It was the first place I can ever remember seeing a "tank crossing" sign, like a deer crossing one except with the silhouette of a tank instead, which I thought was hilarious. I don’t have any memory of the facility at which the shooting took place though, it may not have even been built at the time.

Far be it for me to disparage slightly more than half the population of an entire state, but boo to Maine and their voting down of the state's gay marriage law. I think what galled me the most this morning about the whole thing was how utterly gleeful the people who had opposed the law and worked to get it repealed were. They were cheering and laughing and rejoicing and I just couldn't believe it (well, sadly, actually I could believe it). Okay, I understand they worked hard for something and won. But it's like pictures I see of people in graveyards, where they're frolicking around with enormous grins on their faces. In some situations, in some places, decorum is called for. It really seemed like a time when even a modicum of compassion would be nice since they had just, after all, upset the lives of a good number of their fellow citizens. But there they were, whooping it up like they'd just won the Superbowl. I guess compassion isn't something in big supply among people who try to legislate their morality unilaterally on another group of people.

In less important occurrences, I just got an e-mail from someone in my company whose first name is Kizzy. I remember seeing the TV miniseries "Roots" when it aired and I recall the name from there, but this is the first time I've encountered someone in real life with the name. Interesting!

It's been really nice here the past couple of days and Mother Nature appears to be trying to make up for raining out most people's Halloween night. As a kid from Ohio/Michigan, I can definitely handle November weather that is in the mid to upper 60s. This is one of the most beautiful times of the year here and I'm thankful to be able to enjoy it.

The end of Daylight Savings Time, the full moon, and the spreading fire of fall colors conspired to make an amazing drive into work this morning. That enormous moon hanging low in the western sky took me away somewhere beautiful, even if only temporarily. The illusion that everything was wonderful was shattered within four minutes of me sitting down at my desk, but at least it was there for a time.

My cubemate needs to understand something basic about humor: repeating a clever word, one that wasn't even that clever to begin with, does not make it funny. He constantly refers to any e-mail containing a trace of a controversial subject as a "flam-o-gram". I assume he really means a flame-o-gram, that is, an e-mail that's just on fire (baby) but it loses something when you mispronounce it. It also loses something when you say it 50 times in a day. Of course, this is the same guy who rocks back and for constantly any time he's sitting or standing in one place for more than 10 seconds.

Incidentally, the most awful thing about his rocking back and for is that, try as I might, I cannot muster any empathy for him. It's obviously a compulsion of his, not something he consciously decides to do every second of every day. I shouldn't even notice it anymore, and I wouldn't if he weren't such a turd otherwise.

Apparently Halloween has stuck with a few people around here at work. The woman who has infuriatingly large signature files attached to her e-mail that change with the seasons still has her witch riding a broom around a "spooky" house. I just got an e-mail from another engineering in which he informed me that two parts on the plane "INTERFEAR" (caps are his, not mine) with each other. I'm not sure I want to go check that one out in person, but it could be interesting.

I was pretty disconnected from Livejournal this weekend, well, actually since Thursday. Reading back (400 entries was as far as I could bring myself to go) it seems I missed a lot. I didn't retroactively comment on nearly as much as I would have commented on posts if I'd seen them closer to their actual posting time, most posts tend to be time sensitive and after three days there isn't much point. One thousand apologies. It'll never happen again.

Birthday shoutout to the craziest Arrested Development fan in Deutschland, no_touching! Enjoy it, woman.

curmudgeonlet, I'm sorry to hear about your accident! I'm sure it was really scary and I'm glad you're okay. It's always painful to be reminded of what the world would be like without friction and I'm glad that you escaped with as much of yourself intact as you did.

I'm so fucking annoyed right now. Well, annoyed doesn't quite cut it. It's a little complicated to explain where I sit here at work. Essentially, I sit in a building inside of a building. One building is absolutely enormous (it got almost twice as much square footage as the Georgia Dome where the Atlanta Falcon's play) and then within that building there are several "support centers" (their official name here)that are akin in some ways to a trailer or mobile home. They these sort of prefabricated walls that enclose a big empty space into which they put cubicles. They're three cubicles plus one aisle wide and eight cubicles long (in mine, not all the cubes are full so there are only about 22 people that sit in here). We've got some printers and such down at one end and a coffee pot and refrigerator down at the other. There are probably a dozen of these support centers inside the main building.

The problem yesterday and today is that the one I sit in is the only support center that has another support center directly on top of it (it's two stories tall). I used to sit in the upstairs support center until it got flooded by a sprinkler "accident" (that's a story for another time for you new people to my LJ - it wasn't an accident really) at which point we got moved down here.

Apparently at some point in the recent past they decided just to deactivate the one above us and not ever put anyone into it. At least, that's what we thought the plan was. We thought they'd just turn off the lights, lock the doors, and that would be that. Sadly, this does not seem to be the case.

In a company where we are constantly fighting for funding and have to account for every penny, they have decided to tear down the completely non-used support center above us. Like, tear it down to the floor. Yesterday they spent taking out electrical and Cat 5 wire and then got started on some demolition.

The only thing that separates our support center from the one above us are some steel i-beams and a very thin metal roof, to which they screwed a plywood floor for the floor of the center above us. All day long yesterday and now again today, as they've carried out the demolition, they have been dropping things on their floor, which is our ceiling. Think of the worst apartment you've ever lived in, think about your neighbors above you and how you could always hear them walking around. Now subtract some insulation and other items that might deaden the sound, like wooden two-by-fours, and imagine your upstairs neighbor dropping iron sprinkler pipes on your head, and lighting fixtures, and cubicle walls. We can hear every screw that they take out of something and just let drop on the floor. We don't even have one of those drop ceiling things above us, just the metal of their floor.

The best part was this morning when the finished disconnecting the sprinkler system and took down the delivery pipes. Apparently they didn't take into account that even though the system had been deactivated that there might still be some water left in the pipes. I escaped without harm but some other people down here got dripped on. Absolutely ridiculous.

And it's not like it's just a background noise at some constant level, like a grinding wheel or saw would be. That would be bad enough, but this is worse. It's random, sharp, jarring noise that jolts you out of whatever it was that you were trying to do.

What galls me the most about this is that they could have done it over the weekend. That would have been more expensive, though. The company has just reminded me again that everything here is an equation to which the only correct answer is a financial one. They value their balance sheet more than they value my comfort, productivity, and maybe even my safety. They didn't even bother to come in and let us know what they were going to do. They didn't bother to inform us how long it might be going on or what we should expect, much less offer a token apology. Absolutely ridiculous.

Also, one of the workmen upstairs doing all of this has been whistling the tune of "Hava Nagila". Yeah, it's real rejoiceful down here, motherfucker.