Today I drove. The parking situation was sort of dire at the hour I got there; I parked in the far garage and thought I could walk between the car and my building without a cane. Which was not the smartest decision I ever made, but not the dumbest either.

I had emailed Researcher The Stig regarding planning for his upcoming thing; part of that had included "hella pizza". He emailed back saying that he had been waiting for someone to use "hella" in work email since he arrived here, and I had just made his day. (Heh.)

This resulted in a lunch table discussion of how "hella" could be usefully added to services that have moods as part of their updates. I proposed that it be added to the list. The Renaissance Man counter-proposed that it be a tickybox to apply to the mood: are you tired, or hella tired? And then, if your entry was hella, was there anything that could be done to the styling? The Renaissance Man suggested that positive emotions could be intensified in some way, and negative emotions could be maybe faded.

Now it turns out that he had hit on one of my modest design-and-emotion related hot buttons unawares, and I hastened to enlighten him. He and I were both on the same general page as far as "positive" emotions, but just because more amped up works for "happy" and more diminished works for "sad", from the directions we were looking at it, doesn't mean that works for everything. "Angry" is also an energetic emotion, so "hella angry" would be adding intensity; "calm" is a quiet emotion, and "hella calm" would be a good thing, if perhaps excessively quiet.

Lunch was short, as I had a meeting to get to. I raced to the room I thought it was, consulted my phone, and raced to the room it actually was.

The meeting was about the upcoming internal thing, in the summer. In with the rest of the other stuff, Shibe Designer was on the topic of swag. I sort of think of him as kind of a wacky guy who is possibly likely to explode stifled creativity in an unexpected and possibly destructive direction, but he surprised me by stating a rule for swag up front: "Nothing that can be caught on fire."

There are a lot of things that can be caught on fire, y0.

This means that the candle wrapped in condoms which you can use as a slingshot or a whistle is right out.

Yesterday I bestowed some more chocolate covered espresso beans, and also some non-caffeinated pomegranate chocolate things upon the Renaissance Man. ("If it's not caffeinated, what's the damn point?") Today included the strict instructions to not stick them up his nose. Also a prohibition against snorting caffeine powder mixed with pixy stix. I shortly thereafter provided him with two pixy stix: "One for each side." Despite his previous firm declaration that he did not put citric acid up his nose. (Installing Citrix in your sinus data center: probably also a poor choice.) I finally remembered that I'd brought FEED with me, and dropped that off, for his copious spare time. (Basically it sucks to be the one person who does a thing who is also not on vacation when something urgent happens with the thing; he's My People now, and $FAMILY takes care of Their People.)

I bumped in to his officemate in the break room, and we introduced ourselves. I am still not used to being relatively tall, even though statistically speaking I know I am.

I headed out at a reasonably sensible hour to do hella pizza research. (Amusement: someone else's concept of "a lot of pizza" was "what, like 10 boxes?" Actually, math says 33.) My poor Researcher The Stig is getting stage fright: not the literal fear of being himself up in front of people, but fear that it'll be a complete shitshow of an event with all the ad-hockery and stuff hanging out of the fronts of our pants. I gave him the duck lecture. Even with many of the things that could go wrong, we already have the advantage of having had some of them go wrong before, and things still went well.