13:49 Saturday, 17 January, 2015
Today I woke up, decided to have a nice lie-in, and lolled about in bed for a bit. Pelvic floor exercises may have been involved. So then I rolled over to get out of bed and felt that peculiar sensation and ran *very carefully* to the bathroom, to find that one of the epic, epic blood clots had fallen out into my underwear. If I had "nice" underwear anymore, it would have been stained into ruin. As it is, it's merely stained, and it's been rinsed so the blood will drip out of it and won't cause a scene no matter how late I am with the laundry.

22:46 Sunday, 18 January, 2015
The thing about starting a tale "There are way too many $NAMEs in my life, so I label them; this was Shrimpy $NAME..." is that when you are done with the tale, the other guys at the lunch table are looking at you bright-eyed, and then ask, "So which one..." and nudge a shoulder in the direction of the engineer who has brought you to this lunch table. Because clearly they have a grasp of the important issues.

"Purple," you answer.

"That's not so bad," they murmur.

Purple provides further color commentary, and the guys nod understandingly.

00:01 Wednesday, 21 January, 2015
My weekend was sort of a mess. The theme turned out to be "flooding". There were the events of Friday, of course. Then there was Saturday night.

Saturday night was going to be the night where I stayed in and watched the code push roll and kept on top of the comments. Then, about 5 minutes before push time, came a conversation shaped approximately* like:

Tif: Azz, what's your weekend like?
Azz: uh, sleep? maybe?
Tif: could I get a ride to Home Depot for a wet/dry vac tomorrow if I order it tonight?
Azz: sure?
Tif: OH THANK FUCK YOU'LL NEVER GUESS WHAT MY WASHING MACHINE JUST DID ALL OVER MY KITCHEN FLOOR AND IT'S SPREADING TO THE LIVING ROOM
Azz: Hold that thought, let me see if my shopvac swings both ways.
Azz: So, guess what! Also, I'm bringing the steam cleaner. Have pants on; I ride at midnight.

* actually it was 12:30-ish, by the time I left

So that happened. Which was why by the time it was all over, we swung by a diner for much needed breakfast lunch dinner breakfast, and then I didn't get to sleep until 9:30am because Costco gas was almost open by the time I passed that way, and then I was a little hyped up, and ... yeah.

So my sleep schedule was a little discombobulated all weekend, culminating in going to bed around 8pm on Monday, waking up at 11, only realizing it was because I was hungry at 12:30 ... and nothing in the kitchen looked like food. So it took a while to get back to sleep after that, and then I was up and out the door and actually to work before my first alarm went off. It was just as well, because there was a conference meeting, early-ish.

The thing about PCOS is that you find yourself accepting situations like "and then I bled through my second overnight pad of the day in under 4 hours" in stride, and people like Madam Standards are looking at you aghast and saying things like "And why didn't you get me to drive you to the hospital!??!" because apparently for the more typical uterus, this is a bloody nightmare.

Party committee kickoff went all right, if sparsely attended. I had a few words of caution: yes, by all means, improve on last year, but don't get into a game of one-upmanship with last year.

At lunch, I keep being The One With The Internet. So I showed the guys what Purple meant by "caber toss". The Rollercoaster Tycoon hung around to chat with Purple and me as the other guys wandered off. He's a very energetic fellow, and we'll miss him.

On the way out from lunch, I explained to Purple that flooding had been the theme of the weekend. "And there was Friday, of course," I said.

"Refresh my memory? One or two words?" he asked.

I could have been deeply obnoxious, but instead of the verboten #bloodcannon, I chose the tame but evocative "Menstruation."

Rollercoaster Tycoon, who sits in the same building as Purple and hadn't yet entirely split off from our little group, would have done a spittake had he been drinking anything.

I feel a little overwhelmed by the number of demands on my troubleshooty nature. There are three distinct things at work. Researcher Haystack is Shocked and Appalled by some of the shenanigans of some on-premise-hosted software the team is considering, but compared to *cough* the current thing, he nearly fell out of his chair when the external vendor's thing turns out to be night and day better than the homebrew thing with the wack UI actually is.

It could have been a milkshake day, but the meeting overlapped that.

The former intern who is leaving so unexpectedly soon (announced today, last week is this week) is doing so because his wife is going back to Korea to accept a much-hoped-for university teaching position. Which, if you're doing that, that is an entirely legit reason! The ladies (the Dogesitter, the visual designer who shares the office with the very buff guy, and Designer Sparkles) were talking about how sharing offices tends to mean that someone leaves. I noticed that Sparkles phrased it as "and [Overlady] kicked her officemate out" even though, in the most technical sense, Haystack is the one who has remained with the company and on the team. (Exceptions include, of course, the Stage Manager and Non-Boring Manager, who have been roommates forever, Madam Standards and the Norseman, and the lady with the tiny dustmop dogs and the Hawaiian Shirt Dev. The Monkey House used to have three, and now it has two because the guy from Bulgaria chose the peace and quiet of a cube, so now it's just the two skinny blond bearded white guys who are fortunately different heights so I can tell them apart reliably. Not to mention all the people off in other buildings.)

Some of the recruiters were making the rounds, hoping to see some of the more unusual things people have done with cubes. It was "our guy" (someone the others recognized but I didn't), who was giving the tour to someone from Cambridge and someone from Home Office, Arizona. I shared espresso beans. I don't have much out of the ordinary wall-wise, but the interior is an entirely different matter. Most people's cubes do not contain a large metal rooster, a disco ball, a very tiny mini fridge, or a couch. To say nothing of the loon hat.

The evening saw me rapidly getting cranky to where Everything was Terrible, more so than Friday night, as I told Purple. Friday night had been hilarious, if horrifying. This was tedious and I was cranky. Unfortunately, this was not the helpful sort of cranky that lets me successfully explain why the suggested fix is insufficient. Sometimes you ride the flux, sometimes the flux rides you. Declining to explain Emory, I instead found a snack, and that made many things better.

My friend's department has discovered that the helldesk software generates flowcharts. They are really, really, really inexplicable things, and a source of wonder and terror all at once.

Some of the helldesk software tickets are reaching revolving-door level epic status. The Stage Manager and I are both generally of the opinion that until the fix is live, we stay on an open ticket about the issue. To make matters even better, the helldesk software is now issuing duplicate notifications about each change, one for each type of tracking number. (There are two now, thanks to the hilarious way they stuffed the implementation in sideways at the beginning in an attempt to not scare the horses. Things done to "not scare the horses" tend to be ... less good ... if the 'horses' are in fact Companions...)

It was, however, time to go home. I poked Purple and he came to collect me. His hair was freshly washed, and formed spirals that shone silkily in the lights of the parking lot. The top of his head was fluffy. Because both of our brains went there, I told him that no, he was not a pink fluffy unicorn. "You're a Purple fluffy unicorn!" I told him.

It turns out that "purple unicorn" is now on the List of Unfortunate Phrases. "One-eyed purple unicorn" is worse, and "one-eyed weeping purple unicorn" is just right out. From there it was a quick step to Weeping Angels. (Steph declares that Weeping Angels, like loon units, do not belong in the pants.)

#dammitpurple is not a regular hashtag in my things. #AzureLsInTrouble is, but that's a slightly different thing.

Fetched dinner, and about a zillion tubs of cold soup for when nothing else is food. Did laundry. Reloaded laundry card. Checked mail. It was a good mail day, all told:
* spam
* W-2
* utility statement
* two free drink cards from Starbucks because their survey sucked
* my 2015 sticker from the DMV

So that's my tomorrow morning before work sorted then! An alcohol wipe, a sticker, and a coffee. I can live with that.