Mizblog

I really miss my girls.

I have two computers on my desk, and both have screen savers that show slideshows of family pictures. I find myself just sitting and watching pictures from the last 3 years. Some are from the hospital when Saranya was born. Some are from last Christmas. I find myself just sitting in front of the computers, watching pictures go by. While I’m working on one computer, the other one goes idle and starts the slideshow. Then I have to stop what I’m doing to watch, and that lets the other computer go idle and start its own slideshow. It makes it difficult to do anything, and it reminds me how much I love my wife and daughter.

Last night was my first and last D&D night in a very long time. Rob, Greg, and I headed out to Kagel Cyn. to hang out at John’s place and do some gaming. Traffic was awful, so Rob and I had plenty of time to talk on the way out.

At John’s place we got to see all the progress he’s made toward getting the place fixed up. He’s been living there for years, and his family has done a ton of work to take the building from a dilapidated piece of crap to a skeleton with furniture. It’s shaping up to be a really nice place, once they finish installing the fixtures like kitchen countertop and sink. Oh, and stair railings. It made me worry about Saranya falling down stairs, and she’s on the other side of the freakin’ planet.

D&D was fun but I wasn’t very into it. Rob wasn’t either, and he was DM. That lent a “yeah whatever” feel to the happenings. Maybe I’m getting too old for this shit. That’s an unhappy thought.

We got home by midnight. I crashed and got up this morning with the usual sinus congestion, but also with an ugly rotten feeling that I just can’t explain. I think it’s called “depression” and it seems a stretch to tie it to anything that’s going on in my life right now. Sure, my wife and daughter are going to be gone for at least 2 more weeks. Sure I’ve got a project deadline that falls just after they come back. Sure I’ve got an apartment that is not yet halfway cleaned even after 2 solid weeks of daily effort.

Hmm, now that I think about it, maybe all this stuff is just adding up to be overwhelming. Yesterday I felt fine, though. Today I feel like shit. Maybe it’s just one of those things.

I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

Sangeeta called Wednesday night, and spent the whole time telling me about how big a dirtbag her uncle and his kids are.

Then I was surprised to find that I had slept all night long. Luckily I had already brushed my teeth.

Thursday night – same story. Crashed at 9:30pm and awoke just before 5am. Odd…

I was up until 5am, working and cleaning. Exercising and studying. Packing.

I got the basic multiple choice problem movie working and looking nice. It shows a wrist x-ray and asks you to classify it into one of four categories. After you pick, it tells you if you were accurate or not, and shows the relevant information on the x-ray.

I put all of Saranya’s toys into her crib, since she’s not using any of them this month and I need to get to the carpet to clean it.

My insecticidal rampage continued but at a decreasing rate. I had myself a literal bug hunt.

Having more space around me feels really good. All those toys were making the living room feel very cramped and small. Now it’s a wide open room, and it makes me feel free somehow. Now if only the carpet weren’t so filthy. That’s going to happen this weekend.

I haven’t heard from Sangeeta this week. I hope they’re doing alright. Since Milan left for Subash’s wedding, she probably doesn’t have access to Internet until he gets back. I really miss them. 3 more weeks…

I’m sleeping twice per day. I get an evening nap for 2 or 3 hours, then I work until the sun comes up before sleeping again until late morning. I get tons of work done at night, but very little done during the day.

This afternoon I took my brother Rob out for some Abbot’s Pizza. It was okay: thin, crunchy, too hot for my liking; the atmosphere was loud, with dance music blasting and a TV silently showing golf; and service was good. Afterward I took him for a drive to keep him away from his family for a while. Finally we went back and he asked me to help him swap sofas between his apartment, and his father-in-law who lives next door. Well, the sofa was too big and awkward and delicate for us to get it out and maneuvered, and my back was giving me clues that I should stop trying, so I did. I expect to try again next weekend – this time with some more protection on the sofa so that the job doesn’t require such precision.

That couple hours was pretty much my whole day. Before that I had coffee and bagels and slowly became conscious and alive. Afterward I went to sleep and woke up at 10pm. Had a quick skirmish in the kitchen (usual suspects in unusual places), put away some canned goods, did some spot cleaning in the living room, and planted myself in front of the computer again. I’m still hoping a plan for living room cleaning is going to pop full-formed into my head, and it’s going to be easy. Until then, there’s a bouncy horse that’s going to keep silently mocking my failure. Go away, bouncy horse! STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!!!

I attended a wedding this afternoon. Dave Kitani and Ji Son got married, and it was the biggest Jesus fest I’ve ever seen. I think Dave and Ji are really nice people, and the wedding theme was a very cleverly thought out political allegory, but the cheerful little zombie cult stuff was too much.

The other thing that bugged me was that the selected scripture (Ephesians 31-35 or something like that) was written by Paul, who I consider to be something of a lunatic. He emphasized that the woman’s role in the marriage is to respect the husband, but no mention was made of a husband’s duty to respect his wife. It was the old patriarchal cultural biases being reiterated. I hope those two don’t actually try to emulate that antiquated formula.

After the wedding, KP, John, and I went over to Joel’s house in Santa Monica. From there we walked all the way to Venice beach, and out to the end of the pier at Washington Blvd., where we saw a dozen or so fireworks shows at various distances up and down the coast. The closest show was Marina Del Rey, and it was weak for most of its duration. Single bursts were fired at a fairly steady pace, sometimes with two of the same in a row, and sometimes with long silences between bursts. But the finale was really exciting.

The walk home was exciting too, because drunken crazy people were lighting fireworks off on the beach. Some of them were going horizontally into the surrounding neighborhood. It was slightly harrowing but still overall a fun experience.

After a stop at Holy Guacamole for some burritos, we went back to Joel’s place and watched Die Hard 2. This was difficult because the disk kept skipping. Finally, John fixed the disk and we watched the conclusion. We decided that the reporter on the plane wasn’t such a bad guy, but Holly (the wife) was a seriously violent bitch who deserved jail time. Also, the whole story falls apart if you think about it for 5 seconds, so don’t do that or you’ll ruin the enjoyable action. :)

KP and John are going to Hawaii on Monday. Ji has already moved out of the lab. It’s going to be much more sparsely populated in there for a while. I miss them already.

Today I spent 2 1/2 hours scrubbing stove burner rings with steel wool, trying to remove baked on charcoal. Even though I’ve made huge progress (you can see actual metal in some places now), the overall result is still spotty and ugly. It feels like some of that carbon has been cooked into the steel, anodizing it a dull gray. I also feel like I wasted too much time scrubbing burner rings when there’s so much else in the apartment that needs attention.

I used compressed air to blow the junk around inside the stove while the burners were disassembled. Lots of charred food remnants in there that I’ll never be able to reach. Oh well, at least the nutritive content has all been consumed by fire, so it won’t be much of a haven for vermin.

I just finished cooking up a pot of turkey chili with extra jalapeños. It’s cooling and should be ready to eat by tomorrow. I took special care not to allow insects or insecticide to get into it, because I doubt either one would make it more delicious.

While stirring the pot every 15 minutes or so, I took the opportunity to clean out the spice cupboard. Eeeks, what a mess. In the back was evidence of multiple spice spills and habitation by a spider. I threw out spices that had dust or cobwebs on them. Apparently we don’t need those. Allspice? Dill weed? No. Bye. Trash.

My war with the other inhabitants of the kitchen continues. If anything it has accelerated since yesterday, but now I hold the field and can easily spot and destroy them when they pop their heads out of their hiding places. The areas they used to treat as safe are now barren and exposed, making them easy prey. I also noticed that they’re having a harder time finding food. I dripped a drop of liquid from the black beans onto the kitchen counter, and within 15 minutes it had attracted a scout. Dead.

Sangeeta took the key to the laundry room to Nepal, so I think I’m going to have to visit my parents’ house tomorrow with two bags of laundry. I’ll probably do some yard work to pay for it. Usually it’s enough just to bring Saranya, but Sangeeta took her to Nepal also. :P

I’m on a weird sleep schedule. I crash before midnight, wake up in the wee hours, have coffee, do some work, then go back to sleep after the sun comes up and sleep halfway to noon. I feel that process starting again…

It’s 2:45am. I just slept 4 hours and woke up. Guess I can get some work done while it’s dark and quiet.

In the kitchen I saw a few of my little friends next to the stove, so I broke out the bug spray and killed some babies. Then I partially dismantled the stove and sprayed bug spray inside it. The little pilot lights would ignite the bug spray, making fireballs that I imagined would napalm the little bastards to fiery hell.

My kitchen is a war zone, left mostly uninhabitable by both sides. I can’t prepare food in there anymore. I keep a fan running all the time to prevent the fumes from collecting in the bedroom. I can turn it off after the war. I’m tempted to just nuke the site with a room fogger, but those pilot lights would turn the whole apartment building into an inferno.

…

Now it’s almost 4am, and I’m trying to re-learn how to manage a SVN repository so that I can clean up some mistakes I made way back in 2007.

On Monday night, our lab went to Everett’s new apartment in K-town for Mr. Pizza. Joel regaled us with tales of his adventure in Ibiza, and then we all walked over to a Korean karaoke establishment. It was much fun! I had 1 glass of beer the whole night, and then drove people home safely. I got home and crashed at about 3am.

Tuesday morning I woke up at 7am, expecting a possible call from Nepal. The call didn’t happen, so I tried to go back to sleep. I was very uncomfortable and finally decided it just wasn’t working and I should get up and get coffee, but when I looked at the clock it was 9am. I’d slept 2 hours and didn’t even notice.

Tuesday evening I got home from work around 8pm with a few groceries I’d picked up on the way home. While putting them away, I spotted a cockroach on my refrigerator. Immediately I went into cleaning mode, cleared all the bags and boxes and plates and trays from the top of the refrigerator, and wiped the whole thing down with a hot soapy rag. It actually cleaned up pretty well, but while I was washing some of the big plates we’d stored up there, I turned and saw that I’d disturbed some more cockroaches. Even as tired and as hungry as I was, I was more angry that these little bastards were invading my living space, and I was determined to exterminate them all. I even tried to move the old refrigerator to clean behind it, until I started worrying that it might break.

Anyway, after all that effort I went to bed with one more clean area in the kitchen, and creepy crawlies in my head. I laid awake for 3 hours in the dark before my consciousness time traveled to morning. 5am. Allergies had kicked in. Coffee. World of Warcraft for my jc daily quest. Then some mindless travel while reading the news on the web, drinking coffee, and generally being a zombie. By about 10am I was again tired and went down for another shot at sleep. This time the dreams came almost immediately, and I knew I was dreaming because Saranya jumped on my back and tried to poke me in the eye like she often does, while Sangeeta yelled from the other room telling Saranya to leave me alone. I thought “oh, this must be a dream” and then it changed into something less memorable. After an hour of REM sleep though, I feel much much better.

I woke up at 6:30am to the sound of the phone ringing. Actually my first memory was when I actually saw the phone in the next room, but I was expecting the call. I needed the call. Sleep had been elusive yet I jettisoned it in seconds.

Then the phone stopped ringing. Oh. No!

Whew! It rang again! “Hello?”

It was Sangeeta! They made it safely to her father’s house in Kathmandu, and Saranya was finally sleeping. Apparently Sangeeta’s fears of bad behavior proved unfounded, as several other passengers complimented Saranya on her exemplary behavior during the long trip. She only fussed a couple times because of the difficulty of sleeping on the plane.

What a huge relief! I had been worried in the general sense of having no information and no control. I was up at 1:30am and checking the time in Nepal, thinking surely they’d landed by now. Anything to keep the darkness and solitude at bay, and to keep my mind from enumerating the possible disasters which could have befallen my loved ones.

Now I can rest easy. Well, maybe…