You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Pets; Good Day, Mixed Day

What is happening? Is the world getting weirder, or are the weird people just getting more web access? Take pets, for example. I just rewatched the episode of Due South where the wolf is humiliated by being forced to wear a tam'o'shanter in order to humour a dotty old woman.

But then there are sites like BeeDogs.Com, which encourages you to humilate your canine companion, and Pets in Uniform, which offers to do it for you (via some frankly weak-ass photo-shoppery). What is the matter with these people? I mean, I agree that giant bees are lovely, but if Blind Melon music videos have taught us nothing else, it's that dressing up in a big ol' bee costume looks kind of retarded.

***

Had a pretty good birthday. It didn't start particuarly auspiciously, since I was at work until 1am -- which is a consequence of having to wait until the coordinators finish working (at about midnight) before I could start making a bunch of "totally vital" changes (that I suspect won't be used). Anyway, the day itself was pretty good -- I had a couple of people come to me with problems, and I was able to say, "Well, how about this?" and then present them with a finished solution an hour later.

(As I may have noted before, Perl is a awesome language for this sort of thing. :)

I also got a number of birthday wishes from people in the facility, both in person and via email, and my room decided to sing me "Happy Birthday" very badly in a classically "ha-ha, only serious" moment. ;)

And in the evening, I actually left at six o'clock (it was still light outside!!) and popped in to see my mum and youngest sister, and then watched four episodes of Due South with C -- which may have been foolish, since it was 11:30pm by the time I dropped her back in Thorndon and got home. (I blame Jenni, as I was fully prepared to just watch a Hitchcock movie and then go home to bed -- doesn't she know how bad I am at moderating my media intake? C hasn't seen any Due South, so I'm getting to watch from the beginning with someone who's coming to it fresh, which is cool; but it makes it oh-so-easy to watch just one more episode...)

The next morning wasn't so good -- I had a dental appointment in town at 8am, and woke up to see it was 7:30am. My "go in by bus" plan was thrown out the window, and ten minutes later I was showered, dressed, out the door and into the van. I was pretty worried, since just finding a park in town can take up to half an hour, and getting down to the Kirks end of town through morning traffic takes 15-20 minutes. And then I discovered something amazing -- there are tonnes of car-parks in town at eight in the morning!

This meant I was only five minutes late, and got injections in both my upper and lower jaw for a final three fillings, which went fairly quickly. As I don't often get into town, I decided to take the opportunity to try and find a mandarin-collared shirt. I went into Kirks on the principle that they'd be likely to have something, even if it was a bit pricy. As it turned out, I was only partly right -- they had one style of shirt with a mandarin collar, but it was black, Versache, and something like $460. Nearly half a grand for a shirt!? Who would pay that kind of money for clothing?! Maybe a really good pair of shoes that are going to last you 20 years... but a shirt?? Some people have too much money.

Someone at work told me that formalwear hire places often have weird-collared shirts for sale, so I popped into the one around that end of town that I remembered going to for my brother's wedding. Unfortunately, the only ones they had went up to a size 40cm neck, and I'm 42cm. (And the shirts were even on sale, to rub salt into the wound!) I've mostly been looking for Jenni's Space Cowboys party, though I wouldn't have minded one for general use; but it looks like I'm pretty much out of luck.

I did manage to buy fifteen random bottles of wine from Rumbles (a "Spanish dinner pack" of four reds, a white and a desert, a six-pack of mixed reds, a French rosé and a couple of sav. blancs), so the trip in wasn't a total waste. I really should start drinking some of these wines, I guess.

Anyway, I got to work about 10am, and while things haven't been as productive as yesterday, they haven't been too bad. The only downsides is that the fillings have been pretty painful -- I took a couple of panadol, but ended up having to go out and buy some Neurophen, which has helped a bit. (I'm not very keen about taking pain pills, since I regard pain as Nature's way of telling you to stop being a dumbass, but it was getting hard to concentrate on work; hope that it's reduced by tonight, as I don't fancy trying to get to sleep feeling like this.)

And I just got a call from the garage -- the good news being that the repair of the breaks seems to be going well, and it should get a warrant by Friday; the bad news being that they found out why it was running rough -- fouled spark-plugs caused by the auto-choke not turning off, caused by low radiator levels, which may be a simply undetected radiator leak, or may be a problem with the head gasket.

I hope it's not the head gasket. :)

***

The weather is pretty gorgeous; according to the Met Service, it might be gusty on Friday, but shouldn't rain. Yay!

Hope to see some of you tomorrow.

Posted by svend at September 29, 2005 4:00 PM