(The server that is currently hosting the wedding pictures that I linked to yesterday is down. I don’t know why, but I’ll try to remember to mention when it comes back up.)
So there’s the western power grid, the eastern power grid, and the Texas power grid. Texas has its own grid! Ah, I love Texas. No blackouts for us; we can secede without fear of power loss at any ol’ time. Go Texas.
Yesterday was very strange. It began with an early morning thunderstorm that woke me up, and when I fell back asleep I dreamed that I was climbing Mt. Everest (which my brain morphed into a tower a la the Tower of Isengard on the Lord of the Rings movie poster, except made of ice and snow). So here I was on a completely vertical Mt. Everest, wearing my crampons and clutching my ice ax. With me on the climb were Harry Potter, Ron, Hermione, and…Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Very random.
(Oh! completely unrelated side note: in Austin on Wednesday, as we were finishing our lunch at Kerbey Lane, a girl walked by wearing a Trogdor the Burninator t-shirt. It was awesome. Anyway, back to yesterday’s craziness.)
So after I finished climbing Mt. Everest with Ahhhnold and woke up, I came to work, only to realize I’d forgotten my dentist appointment, yadda yadda. Went to the dentist, came back, and hurrah, the computer man was here to take away my old crappy computer and give me a lovely new black Dell, with speakers. I’ve been waiting for my computer refresh for months now; little did I know it would be such an ordeal.
I had 6.5 gigabytes of data on my old hard drive that needed to be transferred to my new drive, but instead of being able to simply connect the two drives and transfer things efficiently, my old computer had to transfer everything to a small portable drive. This took five hours. At 5:30, the thing finally finished, and the tech guy and I finally went home.
Ugh. At least I have a new computer.
In the meantime, however, while my computer was being otherwise occupied transferring the entire contents of the hard drive, I got a call from my apartment complex saying my hot water heater had busted, I would have no hot water until tomorrow, and that Javier the maintainence man had discovered the problem after seeing water leak out of my garage, where the water heater is located.
There were multiple problems with this assessment. One, my water heater is not in my garage; it’s in my apartment in the utility closet next to the kitchen. I knew this, and feared that I would come home to soaked carpet. Two… ok, well maybe there was only one problem with the assessment, but it was a major one.
Anyway. I came home. Inspected the garage. No sign of water having soaked the cardboard boxes in the back of my garage. Went into my apartment. No sign of water anywhere, not the kitchen or the carpet. Try the hot water. The faucet sputters and does nothing, so indeed, I have no hot water. Hmm. Go downstairs to the empty apartment below me, which has been left open for me to shower. Aha! The carpet was wet next to that utility closet, which is directly under mine. Aha! The garage to that apartment is open.
Deduction: my water heater broke, leaking water into the apartment below mine, and leaking out of a pipe that resulted in water coming out of the garage next to mine.
Anyway. I showered at debbie’s, which was fine because I needed to go pick up Viggo the fish anyway. I walk in, look at Viggo, and notice that he has turned blue in the week since I’ve seen him. Blue? I ask Debbie what happened to Viggo, and she smiles beguilingly and says “Oh, he’s blue! He missed you so much that he turned blue!” But where’s the real Viggo, I wonder? Suddenly, a horrible thought occurs to me.
“Did he die?!?” I ask. Debbie looks at me. “Oh no, he died!!!” I cry. “The post-traumatic stress from me accidently dumping him down the drain has killed him!”
Debbie couldn’t keep it up any longer. She revealed Viggo, happily swimming in a new tank in her bedroom. The blue fish is named Vtot (pronounced vee-tote), and since Debbie didn’t know what she was going to do with him, I have adopted him and can now put their tanks next to each other and watch them attempt to fight. Viggo the red and Vtot the blue. Or if you prefer, one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.
(As a finale to this rambling and late-in-the-day entry, I guess I have to explain the blue fish’s name. Viggo (the red), which I pronounce vee-go, sounds to Debbie like Vgo, which is an orbital mechanics term for the velocity to go in an engine burn. To keep with the theme, she named the blue fish Vtot, which is the term for total velocity change. I am surrounded by dorks.)
