Rusty

* This post was constructed and posted on Tuesday, 9 Feb 2010 for reason that will become self-evident as you read.  I posted it with a date of 7 Feb 2010 simply to remain consistent with the fact that these events unfolded over the weekend and that every other post goes up on a Sunday.*

This weekend I took a little trip for work and because of the location, I decided to stay the whole weekend with some friends I knew in the area.  We had a great time and I left earlier than anticipated on Sunday morning to beat the weather home.  There was supposed to be a storm coming in and I didn’t want to drive too much in that storm if I could avoid it.

Things were going really well until I hit a patch of ice.  It was on a corner and the back end of my car slid out to the side.  It tapped the guard rail and put me in the ditch.  Basically, it was the best situation because there was a cement wall that was about 25 to 50 feet back on the road that if I had hit would have caused some serious damage to the front end of my vehicle.

This started the experience of trying to get home.

I had the car towed to a repair shop and attempted some really minor things that might get Rusty to start.  None of them worked so I went and checked into what was an absolute dump of a hotel.  The room was quite literally just a bed and a foldable table and chair.  The table had an old 12 inch tube TV on it and a rotary phone.  Everyone was super pleasant, but you got what you paid for there.  The bed was about as firm as a marshmallow, but it was a bed in a heated room, so I couldn’t complain too much.

The following morning I started my insurance claim and attempted to find a way home.  Because my car was not drivable, I was going to get a rental car.  Those plans were brought to an abrupt end when we realized (my Dad, the insurance agent and myself) there wasn’t a rental car company anywhere near the tiny town I was in.  I ended up purchasing a Greyhound Bus ticket and getting a ride from the hotel attendant to the local bus station.

The bus station (which was also a gas station) had a small table that I camped out at for nearly eight hours while I waited for the one bus that leaves the town.  It took me to a town to the North (I am trying to get South at this point) where I found out the one bus going South from there was cancelled.  I was told to try going farther North in order to increase my chances of getting on a bus that night.  I went to the next town to the North and the same story was repeated.  I went to the farthest North station this bus operates and found that the South-facing buses were all cancelled until the next morning.

I spent a chilly night sleeping on the metal mesh benches in the bus terminal.  The security officer seemed to be okay with an indoor temperature of 50 degrees, so I woke up from a few fitful and uncomfortable hours of sleep shivering violently.  Usually you can concentrate and get a couple seconds reprieve from the shivers, but these were the full body shakes that wouldn’t go away.  I walked about 20 laps of the inside of the terminal to get the blood pumping which brought the muscle convulsions to a bearable level (they didn’t go away completely for another two hours).

We found out the bus that was going to take me home was leaving that morning and I got a ticket issued to me.  It was operated by an alliance bus group that doesn’t speak English, so loading was a bit of a fiasco with people not knowing where to go or what to give to whom.  After we were all seated, we began the reverse journey I had taken the night before.

In the first town, we picked up a few more people and a guy got on who decided the seat next to me would be the most comfortable.  That’s fine; I have nothing wrong with sharing space with another person.  He promptly told me he had just been released from a federal prison the day before and he was headed to a halfway house to get things back in order before he went back out to society.  This piqued my curiosity.

It turns out he was in prison for drug trafficking, small arms dealings, stabbing a K-9 unit and putting a human cop in the hospital.  I’m starting to get uncomfortable as he begins to outline how he hates the government and thinks the current political situation is ‘sh*t’.  When asked what I do, I simply said I work with computer security.  I figured that would alleviate any problems we might have had.

On the eight hour drive home, he talked about how he hated snow and the current weather and wouldn’t hear that there was somewhere outside of LA that was capable of supporting human life.  He came up with such gems as:

“Here parents punish their children by sending them outside.”

or

“Those aren’t real cows.  They are either plastic or frozen solid.”

and

“F*ck this town; the only kind of people that live here are uni-bombers.”

I thought that last one was especially classy.

I finally got home safe and sound with all my belongings and got picked up by a friend.  When I went to eat dinner at another friend’s house, I was told that I was never to do that again.  If I am in a 500 mile radius of one of the guys, I am to call him and he will leave right then to pick me up.

If only I had thought of that before I got on the bus.

Goggles

We managed to go skiing this weekend because there have been some places around us that have gotten feet of snow in the past two weeks and we figured we had a day off, we may as well go enjoy some of the fresh powder on the slopes around us.  We were going to try Telemark skis until we realized we didn’t want to waste some of the best powder this year learning to ski.  We’ll try those on some of the smaller (and cheaper) slopes around here another weekend.  It’s just doing lunges all the way down the mountain, but I’ll let you know if 1) it’s that simple and 2) I’m any good at it.

We all escaped without serious injury though my ski goggle did break.   The middle lift that took us to the top of the mountain was kind of quick and I was a little too tall.   I did alright for most of the day, but one time I didn’t duck in time and the bar knocked the goggles right off the top of my helmet.   They were connected to the back of the helmet with the snap strap, so they didn’t fall off, the hinge that connects the strap to the side of the face piece just snapped. I got them from REI though, so I’ll just take them in for an exchange.   I’m surprised they snapped that readily, but the lift did knock my helmet pretty hard.

Work has been going really well and it looks like the daily workload has leveled out to a manageable amount; we’re no longer bringing work home in the evening simply to get out of the building and have a slight change of scenery.   I do miss working at home because of the people I have around me there, but the group I’m working with here has been an absolute blast thus far so it’s a great change of scenery and we do get to do a lot of things here that aren’t really available back home.

All my mail has been arriving to my new address because we all put in a change of address request and I think it’s just now catching up in the system.  Amazingly, USPS does not forward bulk mail.   That is great for us because we have three people that changed our address to a location here and getting four sets of bulk mail (one for each of us and then the set we already get for having a mailbox) would be a bit overwhelming.  Thank you, USPS, for doing something moderately logical!

Piano

You may have noticed my pictures lately and seen a picture of my latest purchase (reproduced below for your viewing convenience):

This was sold for an INCREDIBLE discount on craigslist.  As I was playing it with some of the music I have, I realized I’m not terrible.  It takes me a second to pick up songs, but I can usually force my way through them with only moderate pain and suffering.

The weather here has been atrocious.  We’ve had snow, a lot of hail and more than our fair share of rain.  The road we drive to work on (a dirt detour around a bridge they blew up) has become one giant pothole.  On of my roommates will no longer drive his car to work because the giant ruts the tires make on the road cause the bottom of this car to scrape the dirt for much of the drive out there.  I would like to meet the person from Civil Engineering who drives that every day and thinks, “Yeah, this should be good.”

That’s really the only big things that happened this week.  I’m going to start posting videos online showing where we work and where we live.  Keep your eyes peeled.

They have made a laundry folding robot.  I want one.  As two tech journalists so eloquently put it, “If in between filing your nails, getting your hair did and lunching you just don’t have the time, this robot will do you laundry.  Why don’t I have one of these?  The laundry is killing me.  You are going to find me one day in my house, an otherwise perfectly competent person able to handle most of my life, buried … dead … under a pile of laundry.”

Rafting

On our day off this week, we thought we would go rafting.  When I heard the word rafting, I assumed it would be much the same as the whitewater rafting I’ve done in the past.  Quick-paced, constantly getting wet and generally entertaining watching the other people in the raft.  How wrong I was.  First, the water was just about frozen solid.  I understand the concept that water in winter is cold, but it’s a controlled release river so I figured the dam and plant that are controlling the water release would use the water for some process that would make it less cold.  In the end, I just didn’t realize how far above where I am the water was released.  It has a LOT of miles to go and cool off before it ever even came near the part of the river we were on.  Second, the water was moving at 200 cumecs which is a virtual standstill.  Third, only the rafting guide paddled.  The four people riding in each raft were just along for the ride.  It was a nice trip with a great view of some cool scenery, it was just a little different than what I had envisioned in my head.

I’ve been looking online for a stage piano on craigslist.  Apparently that’s where to get EVERYTHING in this town.  You can’t talk to a single person here who didn’t get their house, apartment, car or other large item in the veritable onslaught of online classified ads.  There is one that I’m looking into that I hope I can get (it being sold at a 65% discount) so I’ll keep you posted on that one.

When we moved into the house we’re staying in, we were excited and relieved to have Internet speeds that were approximately 100 times faster than it was in the places we were staying earlier.  Then, we realized that putting three people with at least six computers on the same (moderately quick) Internet isn’t as fast as we would like.  We called the Internet provider to see if we could get an upgrade on speed and found that the area we are in is limited to 1.5Mbps.  You all know my built-in rage for slow Internet speeds.

There was an update to the Kindle software a few months ago that was supposed to increase the battery life of the Kindle and I would like to report that it has done that in spades.  Now, I have to charge it about every third week instead of every week and a half and I don’t think I’ve really changed my reading habits.  Anything that gets me two times as many hours from the same battery is okay in my book (no pun intended).