Personal Postpourri and Weekend at the Brave New Workshop

Things that are disconcerting to hear or read at work:
1. referring to giving someone a "facilitated debriefing".
2. hearing someone state, "I lost six hours of processing because I had a big load."

I also decided upon overhearing a coworker speaking on the phone that I wish I was a Russian programmer, just so I could say "variables" a lot.

The weekend was pretty relaxed. Kyle came over and brought dinner (Dan'l would have been happy - meat covered with potatoes) and beer and whiskey with him. We played video games for several hours while Pooteewheet went to see "Pluto and Other Lies My Teacher Told Me" at the Brave New Workshop. I went on Friday night. I've been told that it's strange enough that my wife and I attend films separately, but separate plays are beyond the pale. However, I find myself not going to my half of the separate movie nights because I know I can just wait until it hits Netflix, and 3 times out of 4 I'll be disappointed I went to a theater to see it anyway (I have an issue paying premium prices for watching crap...I have no issues watching crap on a much cheaper per cost basis). Then again, I went to 300 last weekend, and Pooteewheet didn't. Going to a play...well, they haven't figured out a way to Netflix that yet, so that's just more interesting, and they start at 8:00 or 10:00 p.m. if you're attending on a weekend, so even the early play is almost past Eryn's bedtime, which is one of my soft rules for entertainment.

Spoiler alert for Sean - don't read this as you're going next weekend.

The play was good. BNW is a writers' theater, so the focus is less on quality acting (hey, I'm sure I'm not surprising anyone with that statement), and more on exploring some issue or series of issues and sheer entertainment. That said, Pluto was worth my ticket price just to see how they handled the sensitive issue of Stephen Hawking and Diaper-wearing female astronauts. A better than Star Trek time traveling plot line was a bonus. And I got a personal kick out of a son and father discussing email. Son: "You want gmail, AOL mail, or Yahoo mail?" Dad: "Are you fucking with me?" After the show, they even put on a little ad hoc "Who's Line Is It?" style event so you can drink your Summit seasonal and watch them making things up.

Got the Saturn fixed this week (Friday) after 14-16 months of random electrical glitches, radio misbehaving, dials flickering up and down, starter problems, etc. It never exactly stopped the car, and I was rather paranoid about what an electrical system overhaul bill might cost me, given that I'd wiggled the cables around a bit and poked through the fuses and those didn't seem to be the issue. Actual bill, $38 and change. It was the cables - corrosion. I feel like a mechanically challenged idiot because I can't even diagnose cable corrosion, but cool. Electrical system fixed for the price of a few oil changes! Our mechanic is a prince.

And we capped off the weekend with Grandma Nomie's birthday party, and a trip to the Como Zoo where Eryn took me for a ride on the monorail. Good animal watching today as we seemed to be there just after feeding time and they were all up and moving around a lot. We even watched the zookeeper feed crickets to the little slow lorises. She made them reach for the crickets, and they'd stretch, stretch, snatch. There was no slowness about eating the crickets - those things must be like loris candy. Pooteewheet also took extended video of one of the sharks nibbling on one of the others. It had grabbed the fin, so maybe it was a love dance. I don't know much about shark love...but some quick web research shows a lot of hits regarding shark fin biting and mating having to do with pectoral fins. Excellent...live shark mating...all those kiddies yelling "Dory!" in the viewing area may have learned something they don't teach you in Finding Nemo.