Friday: A lot of hurtling

Plug-ins

My day was pretty hectic. After getting Kouryou-chan out the door for school-- an event that involved panicked running out to the grocery store for bread and milk-- I was able to get dressed and head over to the P&R for my interview with the Perl job people. The P&R is going through a major revamp; Metro expects to open the new station with all sorts of bells and whistles Saturday afternoon. One thing I noticed is this new row of five plug-in stations along the side of the lot, apparently for electric cars.

And Stilgar Asked...

The bus ride into Bellevue was the same as before, about an hour, this time without the smelly homeless woman. I walked along the broad avenue and into Lincoln Tower, which has an elevated walkway over to the Bank of America Tower, which was where my interview was going to be held. Inside Lincoln Tower is this tall, three-story glass-and-water sculpture that always reminds me of the quote from Dune where Stilgar asks Paul and Jessica, "What do you intend to do with such wealth?" The wealth, in question, is two extra liters of water.

I did the interview. It was okay, but as I said he didn't have his own ducks in a row and couldn't do the engineering part himself, and upon learning I had daughters he really just wanted to jaw about his own. A bit unprofessional.

I headed back out and, since I had time, hit the Barnes & Noble on the way back, learned about Stripes, realized my Perl-fu is way rusty, then stopped for an overpriced Reuben sandwich and waited for the bus. I wrote about 1500 words total today on those bus rides. Once I was back at the P&R, I passed by the new City Hall-cum-city library, and learned that the library was going to be closed for two weeks to complete the renovation. Bummer that.

I got home, sat and geeked mindlessly for an hour, then headed back to Kouryou-chan's school. They were doing some cute fundraiser by trying to run the kids to death around a 1/4-mile track, but I had the time wrong so was half an hour early. I went a few blocks up the street to a second-hand clothing store to find more sport coats, didn't find any in my size, and then went over to the park to watch Kouryou-chan run 13 laps and nearly collapse in the heat.

Lap 13

I cheered her on and made sure she got water, and generally we all had a good time. They had snacks afterwards, and then I took her home.

On the drive home, she pointed at stores along the way. She whined, "Can we get something from Baskin Robbins?" "No, you had a popsicle and chips." "Can we get something from Starbucks?" "No, you had a popsicle and chips." "You're the meanest dad ever!"

When I got home, I did some gardening, called back another friend who wanted to know if we could get together tomorrow evening, then got a panicked call from Omaha. She had gone out hiking for the day with Lisa, and they'd gotten trapped behind a maze of washed-out roads and were unexpectedly late getting home. And I needed to handle a looming financial crisis.

We'd recently made the effort to switch from Bank of America to a credit union. Because BoA still has almost all of our electronic bill-paying relationships, we hadn't moved much money over to the credit union yet, but Omaha had grabbed the wrong checkbook for mail-out bill paying. I had 40 minutes to get a lot of cash out of one bank and into another.

That involved a lot of hurtling. And after that, I had then to hurtle over to the new pharmacy to get Omaha's meds, only to be told that the insurance had still not cleared. WTF!? It turns out the insurance company had gotten its money from the COBRA clearance, but had not yet cleared it with its own pharmacy insurance clearer. WTF²!?!? They gave us three more days. And I learned just how expensive Omaha's drugs really are. Fuck.

After that, I was too burned out for anything, so I did an evil: I took Kouryou-chan through Burger King. I haven't done that in months, and with good reason. We got home and ate, and Kouryou-chan went out to play with friends. Omaha and Lisa finally got home, and I spent the next half hour as houseboy, massaging four feet and calves, and making sure Kouryou-chan eventually got into her pyjamas. We all went to bed early.

A Ghost Of Done.

I had a story idea that I'm not going to write, just because I don't have time.

Kouryou-chan and I talked about long-running games on-line that put characters into "holding patterns" if you don't come back to them after a while. Other games, however, allow characters to die. The original is the Tamagotchi, of course, but nowadays there are hundreds of these "come back soon or your friend/pet/animal will be sad/dead" ideas out there.

So I had an idea, a kind of Dante's Inferno meets Tron, where someone gets "Translated" into the Tron universe but ends up in the children's section, where sad-eyed WebKinz e-pets, long forgotten by easily-distracted children, pace around their translucent rooms and approach characters saying, "I haven't eaten in 160 days. Will you feed me?" and "I haven't gone to the potty in 218 days. Will you open the door to the bathroom for me?" I imagine Sisyphean stables of Bella Sara horses buried in pooped-out gumdrops and redolent with rose-scented Bella Sara horsefarts; I imagine MyTribes islands where only adorable corpses litter the beaches.

I imagine that someday AIs will gain citizenship and sue our adult children for the horrors they inflicted on the SIs for whom they were responsible.