Weekend thing.

The weekend was fairly down-beat, relaxed.  Somewhat frustrating in that way but not without some fun.

Friday night was pretty quiet.  Spent it at home dorking around with the BMW and a few cans of Plasti-Dip.  The hood of my car is now bears a rubber coating.  Woot.  Or something.

Saturday I woke up early enough to drive the BMW up to Alice's for breakfast with a friend, then scooted over to the Canepa Design open house in Scott's Valley.  That was a fun walking tour of automotive history and greatness.  Very much a good thing!  After that just hung out with friends, dorked around cars and then headed home around 10pm in the evening.

A few photos from Canepa - First, some Porsche 959s.  Is you know what these are then you know why it's significant that there are four of them in this shop being worked on.  It's also significant to note that apart from these four currently being worked on there were at least four other 959s at Canepa, a not insignificant number of the 337 of these that Porsche built.

Next, a panno of one of the other large portions of the Canepa garages.  There's a lot of very expensive inventory in this room.  Race cars, cobaras, two BMW M1s, some customs, a couple of Lambos, a Bugatti Veyron...And they just let you wander around all of it, as close as you like.  Such a good day.

Sunday was spent at home cleaning.  Sweeping floors (my roommate sheds like a dog, it's a bit crazy), picking up and mopping the kitchen, laundry and picking up around my room.  I also finished off the box of shiraz that had been lurking on my kitchen counter as it was nearing the end of it's useful life.

So yeah, generally speaking, it was a pretty down beat and casual weekend.  Not great, not bad. It just was.

Biggest Little FurCon Weekend - Part 2: Motorcycles

The next thing that I want to babble on about would be motorcycling this weekend.

When I registered for BLFC I knew that I was going to be riding my motorcycle to the convention.  This wasn't even a question for me.  I'd been looking for a good long weekend ride for quite some time.  Shooting over the Sierras to Reno had been something I'd been thinking about doing any way.  Nice when the stars align just right.

I won't go into the minutia of my preparation or route planning; it's enough to say that I spent a small bit of time making sure my bike was in good shape for the trip and knew that on the way out I wanted to avoid freeways as much as was practical.  In the end I had a fairly light load out on my bike, enough clothes for the weekend and some gear I thought I'd need. (But turned out not to need.)


Geared up in one-piece leathers, Gortex lined touring boots, gloves and all the other safety kit I headed out from home on Thrusday morning with a GoPro fixed to the front of my bike snapping away a new frame every 5 seconds or so. (Yes, this is being compiled into a video I'll post later.)

My route really beyond avoiding freeways when possible my route also stipulated a fuel stop in Placerville, everything else was open game.  My route took me over to Livermore via 84, then to 99 for a bit via 580/205 before I peeled off on Main Street in Stockton and started bombing through rural towns and farm roads going from Highway 26 to 88 to 124 to 49 to 50 to I395 into Reno.

I found myself grinning like an idiot on 49.  That's an amazing stretch of road.

Going through South Lake Tahoe was about the only really tedious part of the trip and, I think, the part that I liked the least.  Temperatures up at Tahoe were still pretty chilly, I was starting to get fairly uncomfortable even with the heated grips turned on.  It was also fairly late in the ride and I was just feeling physically worn down by that point.  I didn't want to get off the bike for a rest until I'd reached Carson City, though, so I pushed on.  Once I was in Carson City I realized that I wasn't all that far from Reno so I just pushed on through the discomfort and soreness, getting a second wind for simply realizing I was so close to my destination.

At the casino I easily found parking, unloaded the bike and got checked in.  Was kinda cool bumping into somebody also at checking in the for con who asked me he how the ride had gone.  Pretty sweet.


Moto ride from San Jose to Reno, in time lapse. from SmackJackal on Vimeo.

I didn't quite realize just how wiped out I was from the ride.  Not physically wiped out, I could have kept going.  My brain was just flat out done at that point and around 9 in the evening I passed out in bed to recover.

Sunday morning I decided I wanted to spit early to avoid some incoming rain and get a little distance between myself and Reno.  Needed some time to clear my head and sort through some thoughts from the weekend so I hit the bricks before any of my roommates for the con had woken up.  Not really feeling the need to be on the bike for quite as long as the Thursday ride up I super-slabbed it most of the way: 395 -> 80 -> 5 -> 205/580 but decided to have a fun cruise through Niles Canyon at the tail end of the trip which was, remarkably, invigorating after spending four hour chewing up multi-lane freeways.

Next year I'll probably take 88 all the way out to 395 if it's open in time for BLFC.

Biggest Little FurCon Weekend - Part 1: The Convention.

I guess it's only fair to break my babble about this weekend now just wrapping up into somewhat discrete chunks of thought to keep the streams from getting crossed.  Basically, it all shakes down into two buckets that I wanna spend a little time writing about: Biggest Little FurCon and Motorcycling.

Best place to start is gonna be with Biggest Little FurCon itself.

In short, it was good.  Very good.  I could throw in the qualifier of for a first year convention but I won't.  It was simply good, regardless of how many years it has (or hasn't, as the case may be) been going.  The staff put together an interesting program around an interesting set of constraints and came up with some pretty interesting solutions.  All-in-all, pretty bad-ass.

The setup of their space was the most interesting solution to the absolute lack of social spaces for people to just chill out in.  Being a casino, there were some pretty heavy restrictions on where members of the convention could and couldn't be in costume/fursuit at the Grand Sierra Resort, most of those defined by state law more than policy of the hotel.  In fact, from what I observed, the Grand Sierra resort was extremely accommodating where they had leeway within the context of Nevada's law.  Essentially this all boiled down to one golden rule for Biggest Little FurCon: No Fursuits on the Casino Floor.  If you remembered nothing but that rule you'd be in good shape for the convention.

Map of BLFC's Space, From the BLFC site.

BLFC's space was basically entirely confined to all of the Nevada Exhibition center of the GSR.  Into that they packed a dealers room, a small art show, main stage, photo shoot area, and ample hang-out space in a fairly open-air format.  They had dedicated two break-out rooms for gaming, one break-out room for a fursuit lounge, and two additional rooms for panels/quiet space.  The space they set aside for registration/ConOps was quite large, almost obscenely so. ( They could have gotten away with 1/2 that space for those function and still been swimming in an ocean! )  The setup certainly did encourage socialization...until the dances started.

All-in-all I think the only significant complaint I have with Biggest Little FurCon is that they went to great length to make sure that there would be ample areas for people to socialize in only to have that destroyed every night by the dances.  When the lights went dim and the the music picked up everybody who's not really into the dances ( for the dancing or the music ) found themselves shit out of luck for open chill space.  This essentially pushed people who didn't want to dance off into private room parties because, lets face it, as a venue for socializing, casinos blow.


One interesting thing I noticed, BLFC's Patron level memberships way out-stripped the Sponsors.  No doubt because of the seriously cool swag that the Patrons got.  No really, the swag:price ratio for Patrons was a crazy good deal.

The Grand Sierra Resort itself was a great host to the convention.  I'd always thought of the venue as being a little skeezy when it was an MGM.  In the years since I went to college in Reno the place has changed significantly.  It's a substantially better property than I remember it having been.  The guest rooms are quite a bit larger than I was expecting, as well.  The double I'd booked was larger than any hotel room I've stayed at in the last I don't even know how long.  Massive!  The only really questionable thing about it was the bathroom door which looked as though somebody had tried to kick it in sometime recently.

Lots of things to do at the GSR as well, apart from gambling in the casion.  There are quite a few good food options at relatively good prices, bowling, second run movie theater, go-karts, mini-golf, an arcade...the list goes on.  Of course because there are a lot of things to do--and it's a pretty big hotel/casino--it's also extremely busy on the weekend.  At least it was extremely busy this weekend.  The number of people staying at the hotel really started to swell on Friday night.  It's so weird going to a furry convention at a venue where the convention isn't the biggest event going on.

I'll certainly be going to BLFC next year.  Hope they can add a bit more programming and figure out a way to keep the social spaces accessible to everybody next year.

Weekend.

What I did this weekend -

• Cleaned up around the house, moved furniture around a bit.
• Sorted through DVDs, CDs and other junk to purge stuff I don't need any more. (GoodWill donations, trash, etc)
• Had pho with good friends, followed by almond milk tea.
• Fielded what seemed like an un-ending stream of escalations for my weekend on-call rotations.

What I didn't do this weekend -

• A group motorcycle ride with quite a few friends. (Because I was on-call.)
• An urban photography walk/hike with friends. (Because I was on-call.)
• Frolic. (Partly because I was on-call, mostly because I wasn't feeling it.)
• An epic Cars and Coffee event in Scott's Valley. (Because I was only told about AS IT WAS HAPPENING, ASSES!)
• Dinner and chill-out time in The City. (Because I was on-call.)

Quite a bit of stuff happening, a lot of it I couldn't be involved in due to the intrusion of professional life into personal time.  On the other hand, I'm much happier with my living room layout and it feels good to have ejected so much crap and I had a pretty good lunch with friends on Sunday. (Pho, man.  Pho.)

April 1st.

To a large degree I've stopped babbling about the goings on with the day job, mostly because it's just not all that interesting.  Usually.  This week's gonna be interesting.  Popcorn interesting.  Don't really feel too much like getting deep into the details of what's going but there's been a fair bit of shake up in my group that's been kept pretty tightly on the down-low. This week all of that is going to have to bubble up to the surface in one way or another.

In related news...Yeah, I got nothing.

Out.

Moto Convention Hopper...

Last post I'd mentioned refactoring my usual convention packing list for motorcycle travel.  This post be it.

I guess the place to start is to by saying motorcycles are not the most practical way to get to and from a convention.  They're not the most comfortable, hassle free way to get to and from a big event.  Riding a motorcycle to and from a convention any significant distance away from home certainly is an idea but you'd be hard pressed to describe as good let alone not bad.

None of that matters.

If you're a motorcyclist you understand what I 'm talking about.  If you're not a motorcyclist then there's no amount of description that I can offer that will convey the adventure of a road trip on the back of a motorcycle.  It's best if I just leave it at "It's fucking awesome...for me."  Just like motorcycling isn't for everybody, con-hopping on a motorcycle isn't for every motorcyclist, either.  It is a certain level of madness.

What I pack when I'm packin'...for a convention.

An interesting post on what to take to a convention was pointed out over on Anthrocon's website. ( http://www.anthrocon.org/what-to-take-to-a-furry-convention ) Got me thinking some about what I usually take with me when I rock a con.  As with so many things in my life I write I hope this does not devolve into a cautionary tale of what, maybe, not to do.

Stuff I pack when I’m traveling to a Furry Convention -

And now for something a little more automotive...

Some of you are aware that I own a project car that I've been poking and wrenching for the past couple of years now.  Depending on your personal perspective I'm either destroying the car slowly or building a track toy...I'm not sure there's any difference between the two.  What I do know is that since I've taken possession of this basket case Bimmer by measures of mechanical reliability and handling it is vastly improved.  It's has been a pretty fun on-going project.

It also spawned a side project when I decided that I wanted to swap the car's [second] 2.5L M20 single overhead cam inline six cylinder engine with a 3.2L S52 dual overhead cam engine from a late E36 chassis M3.  Down this path lies madness.  And Ebay.  Lots and lots of Ebay.  And more madness.

First, I sourced what I thought was a pretty screaming deal for an S52B32 out of a salvage title car in Florida. (collision, not flood)  I knew that there was a little bit of damage to at least the intake manifold but that's literally a $50 part on Ebay.  Yep, you can get M52/S52 intake manifolds [sometimes including throttle-bodies] for $50 on Ebay.  So done and done.  Bought it.  Had it shipped to my house where it sat in the garage on a pallet for a few months while I did other life things.

Last month a friend helped yank the transmission to mount it up on a motor stand and this weekend I started the necessary tear down to replace the broken manifold, remove the AC compressor, and replace the water pump.  This is where a simple project took a left turn to Looniville.

The Ebay ad wasn't too specific about the collision the car had been in, just that it had been one and that car was totaled.  From the damage I've found I'm guessing a front offset impact strong enough to tweak the frame but not crush the front end.  Apart from the busted manifold the cast motor mount arms were shattered, the AC compressor bracket was broken, and the power steering bracket and pulley were obviously damaged.  Not really all that big a deal, that stuff hangs off the motor and I was likely going to do rebuilds, replacements and deletes of much of it anyway.  The main goal was to strip the wiring harness off and get the intake manifold replacement sorted out.

Then I noticed the timing case cover is fubared.  Not obviously.  You wouldn't know if you just look at the motor casually and you'd certainly never notice it if I hadn't pulled the main crank pulley off to remove all of the accessories.  But it was.  Looking closely I found a spider's web of crazing covering the entire timing case cover.  Running my fingers over it I felt the slight drag and roughness from the the network almost invisible fissures.  Fuck.

And here lies madness.

The crazed condition of the timing cover means that without question I'm going to have to replace it.  While I've got the timing cover off I might as well replace the main seals, timing chain, chain guides and tensions.  I'm going to have to pull the VANOS unit to do this and while I'm up in the head I might as well replace the chain tensioners and guides there as well.  It's also a good time time to inspect the cams, check the valves and springs, and replace the lifters as a preventive measure.  This is about 50% into a full rebuild.

Have I mentioned madness?  I think I have.

If I'm going to go through that much trouble with the head I might as well pull it off and ship to a machine shop to be cleaned, reconditioned, and blueprinted with new valves and springs.  I might as well completely tear down the bottom end too, shipping the block and crank off for similar work.  And then, for reassembly, forged internals 'cause why the hell not at that point.

Madness.  Complete.  Utter.  Madness.  (Not Sparta.)

One week with a Jawbone Up

Initially I'd written a number of posts set to auto publish one after another to chronicle some aspects of this last week. Now I'm changing that plan a up a bit. I'm still going to post all of the goods, I'm just going to throw them all into this one uber long post instead of six individual ones.

So just what the hell is all of this about? It's about my one week living with a Jawbone Up.



Day 0 - Monday, 3/18
This afternoon I bought a Jawbone Up. I've been thinking about for a couple of months. Before Further Confusion this year I tried to buy an Up at Best Buy to better track my activity during the convention for...you know, Science(tm) but failed at that, they didn't have one in my size in the color I wanted. If I'm gonna drop a bill and a half I'm gonna get it in the color I want!

So now I'm the owner/wearer of a black JawBone Up.

At least until Monday next Tuesday, when all of this publishes automagically, I'll be tracking the fun things Jawbone claims it can track along with some notes about wearing it if I have any.

Day 1 - Tuesday, 3/19
This week is all about collecting baseline data and I can already see that being a frustrating thing; I desperately want to walk a mile or three to show I'm super awesome badass. Having this silly thing wrapped around my wrist and plugging data into the Up app tends to make you feel like you've got to move a mounting to prove you're...I dunno...cool, maybe? I can't do that. I have to remind myself to keep to my usual level of activity and food intake.

With that in mind, I've set the Up app with target of 7500 steps (it recommends 10K but I'm not even going to hit 5K steps/day in my baseline) and a sleep target of 6.5 hours.

Day 2 - Wednesday, 3/20
When I set my sleep target at 6.5 hours per night I thought I was being pretty reasonable. I'm happy to report that last night I nailed a solid 107% of of the target and feel farking fantastic for it.

The band is still a little awkward to wear but that's just because I'm not used to wearing things this big and clunky on my wrist 24/7 any more. Maybe if I were still a watch wearer this wouldn't be so bad but I don't wear watches any more. I'm sure I'll get used to it soon enough.

Day 3 - Thursday, 3/21
I'm trying very hard not to react to the information I'm gathering but its very difficult not to. Once I hit ~1400cal on the food log I looked at the bag of popcorn I was about to nuke for a very long minute before putting it back. It was kind of a moral question in relation to the notion of gathering a baseline, whether or not I should let this one data point alter my personal consumption or just eat the popcorn like I wanted to. I put the popcorn back and shamefully admit that breach of the protocol I'd set myself this week...though I'm not ashamed that I put the popcorn back.

There's something you have to understand about me and popcorn...It's the only thing on this planet that I call a comfort food. I have really, really fond memories of evening spent with my parents and sisters watching TV, munching popcorn, occasionally throwing a kernel or two the dogs who were also chilling out near us.

Day 4 - Friday, 3/22
A bit of a small rant here...

In sixth grade a friend told me that to lose weight I needed to stop drinking water and drink only milk. Seriously. Sixth grade. Even I knew that he was full of shit, told him exactly that too. Could be part of why we didn't remain friends too much longer than the sixth grade. That sort of underlines a point, whenever I've been open about my trying to drop pounds I've gotten all manner of strange advice from family, friends, and complete strangers--pretty much all of it anecdotal, illogical, and even bad. It gets tedious after a while.

No lie, this is part of why I'm logging this week with delayed publication.

What I'm doing isn't particularly special, magical, or amazing. At the core it's pretty basic data logging and not much worth the effort babbling about or calling attention to every single day.

Day 5 - Saturday, 3/23
I really don't have too many thoughts to share for today other than the activity numbers lie. I was actually pretty active...just active standing in one place working on a motor. Not exactly strenuous work but work nonetheless. In other words, I wasn't a sofa spud this weekend, despite what claims with its filthy lies.

Day 6 - Sunday, 3/24
More of the same from Saturday. Finding that it's hard to remember to enter my food intake on the weekends. Easy during the week when I'm at the office, it's just right there. At home when wrenching? Not so much. I end up having to spend time at the end of the day tallying up what I've been eating.

Day 7 - Monday, 3/25
Not too much to say about this whole thing today, no real thoughts or observations.  I've now got a week's worth of baseline data about my activity.  Now that I have information I can make changes and make meaningful observations about their effects.

Now is the time on Sprockets when we talk about roll bars, roll cages, and restraining devices for the Track Beater.

I've thought about this off and on since I bought the car, the installation of some sort of roll-over protection greater than the A, B and C pillars which comply with all of the finest safety regulations from the 1980's.  This is to say, in the vernacular, fuck all.

I've done a track day in the car already with all of the safety gear that BMW blessed it with upon it's birthday in 1986, I wouldn't have done that if I didn't have confidence in the car.  Having said that  certainly was hyper of certain...deficiencies.  When I was sliding sideways toward an agricultural excursion, for instance, fear that the car would flip if the tires dug-in did briefly flash in my mind just a bit as the rear of the car stepped out.


Nailing the Apex. from SmackJackal on Vimeo.

The question isn't whether or not more is needed, it's clear to me that for this car and the dirty things I do with it on occasion something more is necessary.  But 4-point rollbar or 6-point full cage?  Bolt-in or weld-in?  Without going into a very long discussion I've boiled it down to a weld-in 4-point rollbar with 5-point cam-lock harnesses and either Corbeau or Sparco seats.  4-Point because a full-cage in a street driven car--even one that's track oriented--is a really bad idea, weld-in because it's not like I plan to ever remove it.

I'll be honest, I'm REALLY looking forward to the seats and harnesses.  Driving an MX-5 Cup car around Laguna Seca last year sold me completely on the value of race seats and harnesses.  Not having to fight to keep myself in the seat while piloting the car was a revelation.

For a quick re-cap of the path this project has taken...


Basket Case -> Safe Street Car -> Reliable Street Car -> Trackable Street Car -> Streetable Track Car

Right now it's somewhere between Trackable Street Car and Streetable Track Car.  Roll bar, race seats, and harnesses will put it very solidly in the Streetable Track Car column.

Before I get too far into my work day I want to take a moment to once again mention that it is little league season which means that I have to suffer through the obscene levels of self entitlement that Little League Parents (LLPs, for the rest of this post) assume for them selves.

It would be far too easy to say that I hate the little leaguers who swarm all over my neighborhood during the evenings and weekends of this seasons.  I don't.  They're just kids out having fun while playing sports and that's completely cool.  My harsh judgment of the whole thing is more a result of the attitudes and behaviors of their parents. (Or other duly recognized guardian figures.)

I am sure that they wouldn't be happy with a couple of hundred cars suddenly showing up in their neighborhood, parking wherever they possibly could with zero regard for things like...you know...laws.  It is not at all uncommon during this season for me to come home to find the cars of LLPs piled up on the sidewalks, parked in private driveways, (especially the private driveway to the PG&E substation across the street) or in front of things like fire hydrants.  It's this latter one that really bugs the shit out of me because it's such a blatant "Fuck you, I'm better!" to the people living in my neighborhood and kind of a very bad example to set of kids. (In my own very humble and entirely unique opinion.

Some time ago I started snapping photos every time I saw cars illegally parked in front of the fire hydrant in front of my house during little league season, then taking the time to forward that information on to the local little league organizers asking them to remind LLPs that they've got a responsibility to be be...well...responsible.  That's basically gone nowhere over the last couple of years.  In fact, the illegal parking problem has only gotten worse.

I think that for this coming Saturday I'll print up a few signs San Jose's parking ordnance (related to hydrants) with a few of the cars I've snapped  illegally parked and post it around them around baseball diamonds before the fun and games start.

I should have taken pictures.

While poking around on the Internet on Friday I found tale of the use of this material called Plasti-Dip on cars for crazy applications like blacking out trim and such.  Further digging brought me to an entire company devoted to painting cars with this synthetic rubber coating which, when applied correctly, can be easily peeled away with no damage to the car's original paint finish.  Needless to say intrigue filled my MotoBrain.

Saturday morning, with nothing better to do, I made a stop at Home Depot to secure a couple cans of this wonder plastic in spray can format.  Back at home I got a little loopy with it on my crappy old BMW track car so that I could, you know, learn how to use this stuff.

So...Two cans of plastidip later a lot of hapless things sitting around my garage (including the BMW track beater) now have some experience using this stuff.  The wing on the back of the car is now painted in a few layers of flat black rubber as an endurance test and soon (as soon as I get more of the sprayable stuff) the hood will also be similarly rubberized...again for the purposes of endurance testing this particular coating.  If it all works out well then I'll likely just use plastidip to "paint" the BMW in the short term before committing to a real paint job.

And...well...it's just fun fuckin' around with stuff.

I really should have taken pictures of everything I sprayed with rubber this weekend.

I am an idiot.

I am an idiot.

No, really.  That's all there is to it.  I'm an idiot who pretty much deserved what I got this weekend.  Well, most of it.  The brutal morning after recovery I'll own up to.  Having my phone stolen, well not so much that.  I recount this tale so that it--as so many other things in my life--may serve as a warning to others.

When the alarm went of at seven on Sunday morning I was three city blocks away from 100%.  Wrecked.  Still a little drunk, maybe. Well...probably not maybe.  Somehow I managed to down a small count of ibuprofen tablets before showering away the lingering feeling of filth with near scalding hot water.  Most striking in my memory from the night before was sitting on the floor of a toilet stall in The Stud praying that I'd vomit out whatever the hell it was in my stomach.  No such luck; I was firmly in the grasp of alcohol suffering.

Nobody starts out with the goal of taking up residence on the floor of a dive bar bathroom wishing they'd hurl the contents of their internals into a porcelain filing cabinet.  That's the sort of sad desperation that comes only with the realization that you've gone too far and that it's way too late to do anything about it. At that point all you can do is hold while the world swims and swoons around your clouded, stupid head.

How I got there is partially a tale of kindness.

Saturday had been fairly sedate; breakfast up in the mountains at Alice's, a trip to the Pick-N-Pull in Newark for E30 parts, some plumbing work to fix the broken supply line to one of my toilets at home.  All-in-all a pretty well accomplished day.  In the afternoon I caught a late lunch with a friend at The Brit before heading up to Frolic at The Stud in San Francisco in the evening.

Before heading up to The City I'd enjoyed a glass of Yamazaki (12-Year) while watching Wreck-It Ralph followed by a rum and Coke.  I wasn't the dedicated driver for the night, didn't really bother me to get a little light headed in the pre-game warmup.  At The Stud I ordered myself a vodka tonic which I nursed over the course of an hour followed by another rum and Coke which, again, I nursed over the course of an hour while doing the social thing.  By this point I'd a good head going but wasn't in the land of stupid drunk, more that happy medium place that I like to be in when I drink in social settings like Frolic. (When I'm not the dedicated driver.)

At some point somebody wandered up and handed me a beverage in a tall glass that looked like a Long Island.  I tried to politely turn down the offered beverage, I was in good shape and really didn't want the extra booze.  There was insistence in return so I felt at least a little obligated to drink a bit of the demonic concoction.  From previous experience I know that the way The Stud mixes Long Islands leads to an effect, I imagine, not too dissimilar to being hit by a freight train.

This is pretty much where everything for the evening went to shit.

Alcohol is my social drug of choice. The problem with alcohol is that as you drink more of it you tend not notice it as much in the beverages you're consuming, it reduces inhibitions, and impairs judgment.  All of this was solidly in play when the feeling of obligation to courtesy commanded me to at least give the drink a try.  Then half the glass was gone.  Then the other half.  Seemingly out of  nowhere I was in a not happy place.  It's safe to say I was rightly fucked up good and not one bit happy about it.

People were good about it, they recognized my distress and tried helped me.  There's only so much that can be done when you get to that point.  The booze is in you already and one way or another it's got to get either metabolized or ejected.  The only thing I wanted at that point was to be somewhere cool, not loud and not moving too much.  Vomiting was also on the list things I wanted if only to maybe purge myself of and alcohol not yet absorbed by my stomach lining.  That last part really wasn't to be, at least not until my dedicated driver got me safely home.

Sunday morning I was the very model of human wreckage that comes from accidental social binging, something I'm embarrassed to admit.  I shouldn't have let myself get that drunk.  I consciously knew that drinking that Long Island wasn't a good plan but did so anyway.  I've nobody to blame for my state but myself.  I'm an idiot and I admit it.

As the morning wore on a bit I couldn't find my phone.  Seemed that the phone was off and that wasn't right, I'd charged it up just before Frolic so it should have had a ton of power left.  Then I saw posts from friends friends who also had phones go missing at Frolic.  A bit more searching around the house while doing laundry revealed it to be truly gone so I did the remote nuke and pave dance.  If it ever gets turned on again it'll get erased and bricked.  I also changed all of my passwords which was kind of a pain directly in the ass.

It really bugs me to think that had I not gotten that trashed on Saturday night that I wouldn't have been a good target for the low-life oxygen thief who stole my phone.

I guess, after writing, this I don't really have a point other than to admit my own personal cock up and the consequences there of.  I expect I'll have to pay for the replacement of my phone out of pocket which won't be a happy thing.

Weekend - Automobile Edition (4/2-4/3 2012-3:3)

Sunday morning I found myself standing between rows of non-functional European cars thinking to myself, Those parts would work but they wouldn't be year correct for my BMW.  Then I slapped myself for thinking that.  Hard.

I'm not restoring my E30 to concourse condition, it's a track beater.  I'm buying the parts necessary to install a function bumper that doesn't look like ass.  Nobody at the track is going to give a flying fuck if the side markers are from an '85 car when, clearly, my car is an '87.  Yet there I was, having a serious debate in inner monologue about it.

In the end I wound up taking the parts I needed from an '87 325i, the same year as my car; not because I actually cared they were year-correct parts but because they were the parts I could actually get off the car. The '85 E30 had rust issues making its bumper trim off not worth the effort.

On both Saturday and Sunday mornings I made the trip to the Pick-N-Pull yard to spend quality time with broken down Bimmers, work on-call duty be damned! (Had my lappy and hotspot with me, was totally willing to work from the salvage yard.)  I needed parts and they had 'em!  Cheap!

Among the issues my BMW has (had, now) was that it didn't have bumpers.  In its life one of its owners decided they wanted to fit a fiberglass body kit.  Rather than finding a body kit they liked that would work the factory bumper hardware they ditched the bumpers from both of the car and hacked off front tow-hooks. I'm not a fan of this kind of thing, I like having stuff like tow-hooks and bumps on my cars, especially when I'm flinging it around a track with twenty other cars!  Last year I'd replaced the front with stock front bumper/tow-hook, I figured it was time to restore the rear of the car to it's more natural from the factory rear hardware, too.  That's what had me out at the Pick-N-Pull arguing with myself about the shape of side marker lights.

I found two pre-plastic bumper E30s that hadn't been stripped of their rear-gear sitting right next to each other on the lot--the only E30s that still had their rear-gear.  One was an '85 325e, the other an '87 325is.  I wanted to cull as many parts from the 'is' as I could because it was the same model year as my car, unfortunately the physical bumper bar on it was hosed.  In the ended I took the bumper bar from the 'e' and the bumper shocks from the 'is'.  Unfortunately I'd not brought right tools to pull the bumper trim off, too meaning I'd have to come back the next morning.

That's why I found myself having an internal debate about the correctness of trim parts on a track beater in a salvage yard at 8am on a Sunday morning.  While the 'is' trim would have been year-correct they'd been stripped of their side marker lights, the 325e's trim hadn't.  If I took the 325e's trim I wouldn't have to source new side markers even though they wouldn't be quite correct for my car.  In the end--after slapping some sense into myself about the purpose of my old BMW--I chose the trim the from the 'e'.  Only that was full of fail.  The nuts holding the bumper trim on was so rusted that the landings disintegrated when the socket wrench on them.

Now I have a full set of year correct rear bumper trim for a 1987 BMW 325is not because it's year correct but because of some rusted hardware on a junker car.  Oh, and an order with Pelican Parts for shiny new OEM BMW rear markers lights to fit into that trim.

Moral of the story?  Sometimes you can't help but to come correct.  Or something like that.

Weekend - Cooking Edition (4/2-4/3 2012-2:3)

One of the things I've been doing more frequently is cooking at home.  Tons of benefits that I won't go into but so far it's been a pretty successful endeavor.  This weekend, though, was not successful.  In point of fact I will openly call it a fail.

Without going into huge detail I'll just say that for lunch on Sunday I baked a chicken breast that turned out to be deadly overly salty.  Fortunately I'd only baked the one chicken breast so I was able to force myself to choke it down as punishment for making something so completely wrong and terrible.

I shall never do what I did again.

On a side note to that, however, I think that tomorrow night I'm gonna make some fried chicken.

Weekend - Work Edition (4/2-4/3 2012-1:3)

So once again I was on-call for the weekend leaving me tethered to the office by phantom strings half the day both Saturday and Sunday.  I've never been a fan of on-call because it is very life limiting.  From seven o'clock in the morning to seven o'clock in the evening my name might as well be Service Bitch.  It's not that the level of work funneled into On-Call is particularly high or regular, it is neither of these things and that's really the problem.

If I knew that during an average weekend on-call shift that I would get even two calls an hour from the start to the end of shift then it wouldn't be so annoying, I'd simply treat it as any other work day.  With indeterminate frequency and volume, however, I'm kinda fucked.  I can't get into anything too involved as messy automotive or home improvement projects for fear of getting a call in the middle of them.  I can't go to movies with friends because I wouldn't want to get called out in the middle of them. Can't ride my motorcycle 'cause I need to be able to answer the phone.  Basically, when I'm on-call I'm stuck to short trips around home and small interrupt tolerant projects.

Even hanging out with friends is kind of a joke.  Chilling at a friend's place when I get a call means that I've got to retreat into a laptop for four or five hours because somebody somewhere in the world thinks that maybe I've got some notion of what's going on but they're not sure themselves so I have to sit on an IRC channel, ear plugged into a conference bridge until they realize they've got the wrong guy and let me go.  (Yeah, this has happened a few times.)  Not really a friendly sort of social experience, IMHO.

'Bout the only really good aspect of my current on-call situation of which rotations are far too frequent for my liking is that I get a bonus for making myself available.  When I think about it I can honestly say that I would happily forgo that bonus to simply not be tied to a pager.

(I've been at places that do no offer pager bonuses simply calling it part of the job.  That's ass.)

Anyway, I'm off on-call duty for the next couple of weeks.  Yay!

My busy life.

So far this year feels like this year is flying past at an insane pace, like I've not had a chance to relax.

The end of the year I spent mostly working through the holidays feeling a bit put out by it. (Single dudes get jacked for holidays in the corporate world.) Spanning into the beginning of the year I was running at a fast pace to get work squared away before Further Confusion. The last day of FC I found  that I was on-call that week so I had to make a crash reentry to my day job while heading up the last official day of the convention. Had to run at fast pace the rest of the week to cover on call, the work I'd missed during the week away from work for FC, and sort out post convention loose ends.

During the week, and weekend, following Further Confusion--while on call for work--I developed a nasty viral ear infection making that week not physically agonizing as well as busy and stress filled.  The weekend and week after that were no walk in the park either, though I'd sought attention the entire right side of my head was still well fucked from agonizing pain as I recovered.

The week after that I learned that my co-worker was heading off on vacation for two and a half weeks. (Yes, he'd been planning it. No, he didn't put it in the vacation calendar.)  I had to ramp up on all of his tasks to take over support of the entire project during his absence.  On top of my task stack.  On top of an on-call rotation to cover the on-call it'd scheduled for him because I didn't know he was going on vacation.

In there I had one weekend basically free spent in the garage wrenching on motor swap project and zoned out working on post FC work while watching House of Cards.

I'll be on-call this coming weekend, the weekend after that I'll be at Animation on Display doing the FNG thing with FLARE, and the weekend ofter that my entire Saturday is going to be eaten away by Board/Exec meetings. (I would prefer these be on week nights, honestly.)  Oh, then the following Monday I go back On-Call.


In the more immediate time frame this week as been even heavily loaded thanks to a another team's cert change that the production pipeline I work. That was a 16 hour day of troubleshooting and emergency deployments.  The day after that I was up at 5am supporting another team's deployment that broke pipeline [again] leading to another 16 hour work day.  Since the end of FC my days have been 10-12 hours anyway so...well...what's a few more hours, right?

The my coworker should return to the office on the 18th/19th making my work life a little more sane once again.  Over all my time will still be just as heavily subscribed, just with a little less stress.  I think I only have one free day entirely to myself between now and April.

I admit that I've done some of this to myself.  AoD is something I'm looking forward to for the fun of it but still, it is a contributor to my very busy life.

*HeadDesk*