Sakura of DOOM

This weekend, I have:

• Slept a terrifying number of hours to make up for sleep deprivation during the weekday.


• Locked myself out of my apartment.


• Forgotten to take my meds.


• Run back and forth between my car and the apartment approximately eight times after forgetting to bring my cell phone, my meds, and assorted other things.


• Locked myself out AGAIN (my parents' place). While taking out the trash. Meaning I had nothing on me except my car keys and could not figure out how to call anyone because a) my cell phone was in the house and b) I do not remember anyone's phone numbers without my cell phone.


• Driven down to get keys as parents' place does not have handy manager with skeleton key.


• Spent the entire weekend planning how to create homework piece for one class while completely ignoring all other classes.


• Realized just now that homework piece I have spent entire weekend thinking about is due... next week.

In conclusion: Murphy, 10 billionty; Oyce, -9.

Am still severely sleep deprived, though I managed to make it through my programming placement test/assignment. Some edge-case bugs, but given how tired I was, I just thought, "Fuck it, it mostly works" and turned it in instead of trying to get up early and troubleshoot.

It is hot. Very hot. And there is no air-conditioning anywhere, and yesterday I walked for about half an hour in the horrible, hot sun with two packages of books, during which I decided I hated the bus that did not come, the whole sun-setting-in-the-west thing, every single person who stood in my way on the sidewalk, all the cars that wouldn't let me cross, and the entire world, for good measure.

Also, I feel like I have done nothing but deal with bureaucracy and things going wrong: the library I was most used to for programming isn't the one most people use, so I had to figure out stuff from scratch quickly; the router keeps turning off, thanks to a giant and sensitive on button (naturally, it was by Motorola, who seems to enjoy making the least usable things ever); my new library card already had problems; the idiot people at the post office almost wouldn't give me my package because they claimed my name was wrong (it was not. They misread it); I was redirected to four different lines to get one freaking course package that I had PRE-ORDERED online; the toilet in the apartment is plugged up and we have no plunger; there is a giant and VERY LOUD street-cleaning truck that drives by my window, which I have to keep open because of the heat, at two and three in the morning; the Ikea guy called at eight in the morning to try to reschedule delivery (ha. NO) after I had already stayed up late with aforementioned programming and aforementioned street-cleaning truck; I still have to figure out health and dental insurance; and I think I am sunburnt.

None of these problems are very big, really, it's just that it would be nice if they stopped piling up.

On the plus side, the used bookstore in the area paid me $25 and Korean 101 is AWESOME and I love it. Now if only they would take me off the waitlist...

We have arrived in Mariposa!

The universe has apparently decided that it is no fun embarrassing people unless there is an audience involved. I thought I was going to start with this morning, but in fact, the misfortune starts earlier! coffeeandink managed to miss her plane by five minutes (which was secretly good for me, as I was still scrambling to pack, as I managed to forget quite a few groceries). Alas, when I checked her flight status for the later flight, the plane seemed to be stuck on the runway for about an hour, which meant she got in around 1am.

Instead of going to bed like sane people, we instead watched vids! Alas, most of my vids seem to be either emo Spike vids that I downloaded five years ago, or amazingly good yet horribly depressing vids featuring footage of the atomic bomb. and nothing happy or cute. Finally, after going through several sort-of-happy vids, we got to Charmax's Pushing Daisies vid and Laura Shapiro's cute Hiro/Ando vid.

Then, as Mely hadn't yet had coffee and therefore did not have enough brain function for higher math, I was woken up at 9:30 California time. Also, the toilet overflowed, which I swear, has never happened to the condo before. Then after we spent many long hours in the car, entertained by my insanely bouncy Happy Mix #8 and Mely's Imaginary Vids soundtrack, I got a speeding ticket. I swear, first ticket ever. Also, I feel a speed limit of 55 mph on a dead straight road in the middle of nowhere is somewhat insulting (and everyone else was going fast!), particularly after they force a 55 mph speed limit on roads that wind up dangerous mountains and should actually be 35. Everyone was speeding past me as I tried not to get ticket #2.

But! We are now here, and we all got distracted by various cracktastic and awesome media we brought, including Rachel's Mithrans-in-Japan-cow manga (cracktastic), Yoon's Joseon court book (awesome), and assorted artbooks (sartorias fanned herself while going through the Saiyuki ones).Day

We had an earthquake! Everyone says 5.6 and I believe them without clicking the link because I am just that lazy.

Sadly, I had actually forgotten that it happened only twenty minutes after. I think I have lived on the Pacific Rim for too long. And my measure of Big Earthquake is "stuff falls off shelves and we have to hide in the car" from hearing reports of my family going through the big one in Taiwan in 1999.

Also, I think rachelmanija's flea infestation has come home with me.

In conclusion: DOOOOOOOOM

Am still at work and not sure when I will be heading home. Am also going to have to work through the weekend, sigh. Well, I knew this was happening, but it is still not fun.

Also, I have discovered today that samosas are flammable.

In other words: I would highly advise against reheating samosas in your toaster oven at 200 deg F while you go restart your computer. I finally noticed that the small popping noises and the faintly acrid smell of smoke wafting through the halls could not mean anything of the good. I ran to the kitchen, only to find the front glass door of my toaster oven completely blackened, smoke pouring everywhere. I'm rather amazed that no fire alarms were set off.

After staring slack-jawed, I vaguely remembered that you're not supposed to pour water on an electrical fire and reached over to unplug it. Popping noises continued to come from the sooty innards of the toaster oven. I freaked out. I didn't have anything large enough to cover the toaster oven with to cut off the air supply, and despite Alton Brown's multiple extortions to keep a fire extinguisher in the kitchen... you all know the end to that sentence.

I then timidly opened the door of the toaster oven to find two very blackened samosas, one of which was merrily blazing away. I put it out with some water and thereby saved the house from burning down and me from having to answer embarrassing questions: "So, how exactly did the fire start?" "Well, you see, there was a samosa..."

In conclusion: samosas = flammable.

Soooo. Unsurprisingly to anyone who is not me, I managed to again not make a flight. Despite multiple checking on my part and my mother's, the travel agent apparently booked a ticket for tomorrow instead of today. This would be a woeful but somewhat more forgivable error if the travel agent had also not spelled my name and my sister's wrong multiple times, despite being corrected on email (I forgive phone misspellings more readily), not mailed out confirmation until bugged by my sister, not booked my seat or at least not told me about booking my seat until bugged by me, gotten the frequent flyer card number wrong multiple times, despite correction on email, and managed to send several wrong links to the itinerary.

So it appears that I am in Taiwan for another day. It also appears that my travel luck has not changed with the turning of the year, although I suppose one could handwave and say that the actual booking of the wrong ticket happened in 2006. I am vainly hoping that 2007's travel luck will at least not include: booking the wrong date, forgetting my passport, having salad dressing spill over the insides of my luggage, or five hour flight delays.

Things that have not yet happened to me but no doubt will include: lost luggage, luggage being broken into, falling asleep at the gate and missing my flight, or not being let out of the country due to an expired visa. (The first three have happened to my sister, and the last to me, albeit not last year, thank god.)

Instead of venturing out to Yaoicon, we ended up skipping out all together and wandering around San Francisco. Friday, I managed to drive around Millbrae by taking every single wrong turn possible, staying in all the wrong lanes, and basically making a general nuisance of myself. So, when we took the BART into the city, I felt much better, given that it runs on a track and it's very difficult to go wrong. Unfortunately, we were having so much fun talking that the next thing I knew, we were in West Oakland, which is most definitely NOT the Ferry Building. I apologized profusely to rachelmanija, and we took the BART back. Of course, by the time we actually arrived, it was around 2, and we were both starving.

I had also advised Rachel to bring a jacket, since the city is nearly always cold. But we emerged from the BART station to sunshine and warmth. And of course, the Ferry Building was insanely crowded, despite it being 2 in the afternoon. We went to the little Japanese deli at the Ferry Building and got wasabi mashed potatoes (mixed with sugar snap peas, vegetables, and etc.), which was green and had just enough wasabi for a bit of a bite; roast beef sushi, made nigiri-style so that each piece had a lovely red piece of roast beef on top; kakiage tempure, a giant fried mixture of teeny whole shrimp, onion, and other assorted veggies; tonkatsu; and salmon onigiri made so recently that it was still warm, with little salmon bits scattered all through the rice. It was delicious. There were no seats available at the time, so we just parked ourselves next to a bookstore sale cart and watched the bay.

Well, until we started looking at the sale cart (this didn't take too long). I will let Rachel write up the unbelievably insane book God Is Gay, which purports that, among many things, we are androids who need to pay more attention to our basic programs (I think... it's hard to tell because the prose is so bad), and randomly flipping through a Terry Goodkind to find mention of a killer chicken. Alas, no sense of irony there, but since it went on for five pages, I think it may be the top Manga Fowl of DOOM, despite not being manga.

We also visited two anime/manga merchandise stores (one of which was extremely awesome and organized and had manga for 60% off), in which we both walked out with much less money, but a lot more little ninja figurines!

On the way back, to continue with various transportation woes, the BART ended up stopped at a station for fifteen minutes or so. Normally, this wouldn't cause that much woe on my part, but the conductor announced, "We're stopped here for I'm not sure how long. I really don't know what's going on, but apparently police are stopping all trains in [station name I forgot] to look for someone. They aren't letting any trains in or out. I'll let you know more when I do."

Rachel and I looked at each other.

"Did she really say something about the police?"

At which point, Rachel relayed a story about her friend, who ended up with an escaped convict under her house one bizarre night, which really didn't make me feel better.

Thankfully, we made it back home alive, without any such run-ins with convicts, escaped or otherwise, and celebrated by watching a lot of Fullmetal Alchemist.

Note: these were written up in the past week, but I'm posting them now. So no, I'm currently not in Italy (sadly).

I have finally made it to Naples, despite the fates conspiring against me.

Well, not really the fates, but Murphy, at the very least. I had ticked everything off my to-do list, taken the rats to the sitter, packed, handed off everything at work, and was sitting happily at the gate, about twenty minutes before departure, when my mom called.

"Hi-I'm-at-the-gate," I said, too tired for a long conversation.

"Did you remember your passport?" she asked.

There was an extremely uncomfortable silence on my end as assorted curse words ran through my head.

( In which I panic )

ETA: accompanying pictures

My cute pink flower flip-flops just broke. At work. Thankfully, I have spare flip-flops in the car, but still. I liked them a lot!

Woe.

Yesterday I had a doctor's appointment at 4:45. For some reason, I decided this meant that I absolutely had to leave work at 3:45 -- I think I got a little confused, because I have a dentist's appointment tomorrow for 4:00, which would mean leaving at 3:45, and obviously I have a very hard time telling Monday apart from Wednesday.

Of course, I didn't realize this until I was on the highway.

Had no idea what to do with myself, so I just ended up going home and changing into more comfortable clothes. I also figured I'd get a book for the wait at the doctor's, and because I was going to meet up with some people from work for a movie later.

I left the house in such a hurry after frantically waving my hands about and complaining to fannishly that I forgot my book.

The doctor's appointment, luckily, went ok, as much as these things go, and then I settled in to wait for everyone at the restaurant, after pretty much everyone had cancelled on me. Sat for about half an hour really desperately wishing that I had remembered a book, then called up M. to see if I had somehow accidentally given everyone the wrong time and/or place and/or date and/or year to meet, seeing as how it was that sort of a day. Luckily, I had actually told everyone the right date/time/place (amazing!); they were just all running late. Then my cell phone ran out of batteries.

Turns out there was a crisis at work, causing T. to be late, and M. had gone home to get movie ticket passes and done pretty much everything except leave with movie ticket passes. I reassured him, saying that you know, I do that sort of stuff all the time, just look, I had forgotten to leave with my book!

Didn't quite realize that I would discover about four hours later that I had also forgotten to leave with my keys.

Of course, I found this out the hard way -- in other words, pacing in front of the apartment door frantically going through my purse and all my pockets, thinking, "Ohmygosh, did I actually do this?" Then I rang the doorbell several times in the desperate hope that fannishly would come to my rescue, but no such luck.

So I went over to the neighbors, who I've never talked to, and felt horribly embarrassed trying to explain to them that I needed to borrow their phone to call my apartment because my cell phone's batteries were out. No answer, so then I turned on my cell phone to look up fannishly's cell number, since I don't have it memorized, while also trying very hard to explain that while my cell phone had enough batteries so that I could look up numbers, it didn't have enough to place a call, and that no, really, I wasn't a weird stalker trying to look at their house or something.

Thankfully, fannishly picked up the phone and let me in, after which I decided not to push my luck any further.

The absolutely awful thing is that both M. and my boss ended up having even worse days.

And now I am laughing hysterically in my cube because it's pouring rain, complete with thunder and lightning, despite it being September in California. To explain: I washed my car for the first time in eight months on the weekend and was joking with everyone that it was going to rain.

I think Murphy wants more sacrifices or something!