Off the Wagon?

Well, not really, not like that. But I haven't posted in a long time, so I thought I should update my status. Since I last posted, I found out that I'm going to be a dad, and I taught two new classes, and I finished writing an article on something about pottery, and I was asked to review an article for a very interesting journal, and I bought a whole slew of books, and I got to see Paul Simon and La Bohème and the Nutcracker, and I got a new espresso machine, and I discovered Portuguese coffee in Bloomington, and I learned about how heat pumps work, and I did a lot of other things too. We had several really good friends come visit us over the past few months, and then some of them moved off to other parts of the country/world, but it was awesome to have them visit us here in the Middle, because it really is a very nice place to be. We're planning to have other people visit us in the near future, because until the new person comes along, we're going to have at least one fully extra room, and we can arrange things to work out even after he's here - he won't need his own room for a few months, anyway.

I haven't been keeping up with my old soccer regimen; the weather, my work schedule, and the people in charge of the field space around here have all conspired to keep me off the grass. Fortunately, I can still ride my bike as often as I want to, and whenever I'm on campus I get to climb 6 or 7 flights of stairs, to keep me at least a little bit fit. I do have a great view out my office window, I've posted a couple pictures on that "networking" site, but here's one such view:

Since I'm going to be a dad, I am now accepting mailed gifts - preferably things like Benfica jerseys and Portugal costumes. Well, Portugal did manage to qualify for the 2012 European Cup and Benfica managed to make it out of a really easy group in the Champions League, so that's the justification for those two selections.

Oh, you probably want to see the new espresso machine. My friend Alex gave me a Gaggia Espresso a few months back (quite a few months back, as it turns out!), and I have been happily trucking along with that for quite some time. But I recently developed an urge to go with a machine that has an all brass boiler system, and the Gaggia is only halfway there, so I had to explore my options. I happen to know a guy who knows everything there is to know about such things, so I contacted him and he told me a small portion of what he knows - enough for me to know that I should just take his advice and get a killer deal on the Rancilio Silvia.

So that's the new machine. Thanks to Mr. Les for making that dream possible. I'm currently seeking a new home for the Gaggia, so if you know anyone, tell them to email me. Works perfectly, I have even been keeping it set up, just in case I need to entertain a dozen people with espresso some afternoon (which seems highly unlikely). You can see that the Gaggia has some pretty unique styling, and I can assure you that it makes espresso as well as it looks like it should! I'll be sorry to see it go, but I'm not allowed to keep two machines, according to the contract that I signed way back when.

Ok, I have to go learn some more songs for a thing I'm doing in a few days. Should be a good time for everyone, but for now I have a lot of work to do. That guitar I bought a few months (years) back is still doing its job, I suppose I should upload pictures of one or the other of those sometime.

Finally, the foot is great, no issues, no problems, not even something I think about anymore! The screw they put in my foot so many months and years ago seems to be doing everything it is supposed to do, and in fact I haven't even noticed any issues with the weather changes over the past several months, unlike my knee, which sometimes is disappointed with these pressure fluctuations. Ok, that's really all I have to say about all of that. Happy Christmas, everybody! Or Happy New Year, or Happy Spring, since I probably won't blather on again until sometime in March!

AT&T Teaches Us a Math Lesson

Alicia's job has a negotiated 24% discount on AT&T wireless plans. This includes existing plans. Our plan has been in Alicia's name for over 2 years. The discount applied to our account? $2/month. Why? Because they applied the 24% discount to "her" $9.99/mo. line. This should mean that when I call and cancel my line tomorrow, her plan will cost us only $8/month. I'm so excited to save all this money, I don't know if I'll be able to sleep! (stay tuned for my update...)

Here's what UPS did to my watch's shipping carton

I am about to detail the unfortunate experience of my watch and its shipping container at the hands of an irate (or careless?) UPS employee. If you are averse to violent or graphic images, please do not read any further. If, on the other hand, you are used to such images, and are even sadistic enough to want to see them on a regular basis, this is a unique opportunity to do so on my blog. I do not plan to update this post with further images, so enjoy them while you are able.

This unfortunate story begins with my extremely generous in-laws, who were kind enough to buy me a watch for my graduation. I'm thrilled, because I've wanted an eco-drive watch ever so long, but never had any means of acquiring one. Now I have both the means and a (somewhat) valid excuse! I searched the entire internet for the best watch for my needs, and, having found said watch on amazon.com (props to Amazon for their broad selection - I'll accept any endorsement fee through my paypal account), ordered it on Sunday. Even with the Memorial Day festivities looming, Amazon expected the package to arrive on the 1st, i.e. Wednesday, via that ubiquitous shipping company UPS. This is where things started to turn sour. Alicia and I had to go out for some groceries in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday, and on the drive back to our apartment I spotted our local UPS delivery truck. Naturally, I was somewhat excited at the prospect of having my new watch on my wrist by the early evening! I waited patiently in our apartment for the next hour or so, my anticipation growing with the passing of each minute (I had to use my cell phone to tell the time, btw). By 5:30pm I was becoming anxious, so I, in my excitement, waddled out to the front door of the building to see if the UPS truck was perhaps sitting in the parking lot as the driver finished with some less important deliveries. It was not. In fact, to my bitter surprise, there was an InfoNotice on the door of my building, informing me that the driver had been unable to deliver the package. Apparently, I wasn't home after all.

This has happened to me before, but this time I was especially annoyed at having missed a package by sitting on my couch instead of waiting on the bench outside my building. I called UPS to find out whether there would be any possibility of picking up the package at their customer service location downtown before Alicia headed off to work, and I was told that the local office would contact me to confirm a pickup time. By 6:30pm, I knew that the jig was up, there was no way they would call me on Wednesday. At 7:50pm, the infonotice data online indicated, in three separate entries, that the customer (that's me) would pick up the package that day (1.3 hours after their 6:30pm closing time?). This was starting to sound ominous, as I would only expect the system to need one line to tell me that, and in the past the branch has always called me to tell me whether the driver would be back in time for me to make the pickup before closing time. I wasn't too nervous, though. I figured I could get the watch on Thursday morning without too much hassle (it's only a 10 minute drive downtown to the office).

Thursday morning arrived, and when my cell phone showed 9am, I headed down to the office. Upon my arrival, I handed over the infonotice and the representative headed back into the warehouse to find the package. It took her and her assistant about 5 minutes to track down the box, it was apparently on the wrong shelf. When it appeared, it looked like this (look away, if you get queasy):

I stood there for a couple minutes weighing the options available to me: I could refuse delivery, citing the obvious signs of abuse, and then reorder through the good people at Amazon, who would doubtless make no trouble for me (they never have before, but then, I've never refused delivery before, either). Alternatively, I could take the thing home and see if the watch itself, or its immediate packaging, had been harmed in transit. Amazon is pretty good about these things, so my photographic documentation of what UPS had done to the box would probably be enough to set up an exchange without too much trouble, should the need arise. I decided to take it home and see how the watch itself was doing before trying to figure out if I should exchange the watch or not.

Unfortunately, the condition of the box didn't magically improve on the drive home, but I did get better shots of its sad, misshapen form outside the UPS shop and again in my living room (again, avert your eyes if you've a weak stomach):

The inside of the box wasn't too bad, and the watch itself was packed well enough in its own small box that there was no obvious evidence of damage. I've managed to set the watch and get it running, so I'll track its accuracy over the next several days to see how that is. If there are any issues, I've got both an Amazon and a Citizen warranty against defects and problems, and I'll let them hash things out with UPS if any conflicts eventually do arise. For now, I'm quite happy with the way the watch looks and feels, it's surely going to improve my quality of life dramatically, and I also expect it to contribute in a positive way to the image that my hair has already helped me to craft. After all, I am my hair, innit?

Out with the old

And time to start something new. See, I recently finished a bit of a thesis on late Roman Spain, and I've entered the post-project funk of having nothing important to do (or just not wanting to do the important things that I should now be doing). In any case, I've returned to the laptop to move on with a new project, much shorter in duration (I hope!), focusing mainly on the pottery from somewhere in Spain. Pretty fascinating stuff, if you're interested in this sort of thing, which I am.

My foot hasn't bothered me at all lately, so I'm thinking about developing a new injury elsewhere, perhaps something wii related. Soccer thrice a week in this 90 degree weather isn't going to make my old kelme duende amancios (size 9.5) very happy - they turned 4 this past April - so if anyone finds a lead on some new ones, please to pass along that information. By the way, they stopped making these cleats.

I've recently received a new espresso machine, much happier than the krups xp2070, whose pump seems to have lost a good deal of power and eventually gave me nothing but weak coffees. The new machine (new to me, anyway), was given by a pair of amazing friends from Mexas, and the machine works beautifully. I'm refining my grind settings and tamping procedure to accommodate the new 58mm brewbasket, and as long as I can keep the calcification down in the boiler, it seems like I'll enjoy this new machine for years to come. Of course, I won't object if someone decides to mail me a commercial machine along with those replacement cleats.

Well, since I'm working again, this blog is wasting valuable Spanish emailing time, so I'll get back to that. If you'd like to know more about my soccer cleats, feel free to post something in the comments section. Happy summers!

The world didn't end?

But maybe a lot of people won't be showing up for work tomorrow, I don't know. If the rapture happened yesterday, then I missed it. I like to think we've got a second shot at making the grade over the next few days, months, or years, but my end time theology is just not as robust as it could be, so I apologize for not offering much security on that front. I was relieved, in a sense, to finish my phd before this particular rapture, because frankly I put a lot of time into that thing and it would have been a bit anticlimactic to get swept up just days before finishing the degree.

Speaking of degrees, we just bought our first totally awesome piece of furniture. I can't talk much about it right now, it's still kind of emotional, but it's going to look really nice in our new apartment, especially now that we have a new accent rug to go with it. Yes, it has been an eventful week or two. I realize that it has been a long time since I updated my readers on events here, but I can't really think of much more to tell you. Yes, I did replace the intake manifold gasket on our car recently, with no adverse effects, and perhaps, once winter returns, with some positive results. The wife has a few different job options out there now, to go with my one job, so I think we're going to make it through yet another calendar year. Yay for us.

That's about it from here, any questions or suggestions for future stories? Sorry that things have become so uninteresting lately!

The ravings of a madman

Yes, I think I quoted someone in the title, but it's a loose paraphrase, and I'm not making any money off it, so there it stays. But I am a bit fired up today. Because I had to spend several hours fighting with someone we'll refer to as "ppt," made by some global software corporation that we'll just refer to as "ms." My problem was simple: I wanted to adjust the default blank presentation template to get rid of that horrible font, Arial, which is the default. I also wanted to set a different default background and edit the default settings for inserted text boxes. See, a simple problem (or small set of problems). All I had to do was change the defaults in a program that a lot of people use all the time. Good luck with that, though.

As it turns out, ms has arranged things in the 2004 mac version of this software so as to make it virtually, or perhaps literally, impossible to change the default characteristics of a blank presentation. So, after I had tried about a million different options, all of which were complete failures, I just made a template that I liked and then set the program to offer me that option as a "slide design" in the formatting dropdown menu. I also resolved to stop purchasing products from the company that wants me to use some dumb font that no normal person would ever want to use. So that's part one of my complaints for the day. Feel free to post your solutions in the comments or in the guestbook section.

Part two of my complaints relates to a fact that I discovered yesterday. I've been buying a Brasilian decaf coffee (the roast is done locally, but the beans are imported from Brasil) to supplement my standard daily espresso habit with an afternoon chaser, without all the extra "juice" that caffeine gives me. This particular variety of coffee bean, technically known as Coffea charrieriana, naturally contains no caffeine, so it's supposed to be a great alternative to all the chemically-processed garbage that so many companies still have the gall to call "coffee" once it has been decaffeinated. I started buying the stuff to see if I could handle the flavor, and it turns out to be quite pleasant, at least in the Opus 1 (medium) roast that our coffee-emporium markets. The problem, I've discovered, is that the caffeine content has been replaced, through some [naturally?] defective gene that produces theobromine instead. Theobromine, as we all may or may not know (and as I found out yesterday) is basically the same thing as caffeine, in terms of how it affects the human body, though perhaps slightly less potent. So my interest in avoiding the effects of caffeine by purchasing this naturally un-caffeinated coffee has been dealt a severe blow. Sadly, the news came as no surprise to me, as I've been feeling a bit "hopped up" in the afternoon of late, and this feeling is what led me to research the beans more carefully yesterday. It does come as a relief, though, in that this particular coffee is quite expensive, and causes no end of economic suffering to our family.

Speaking of economic suffering, part three of the whine-fest that is today's blog entry involves the good people down to the revenuers. I had the good fortune of going through our taxes yesterday, and discovered, much to everyone's dismay, that some of the companies that pay us for our services have been less than thorough, or even sufficient, in setting aside the proper monies for federal and state collectors. We owe about what my new TV was going to cost, come August, and so we'll suffer on without an LED 240hz monster for another, unbearable, twelve months. Sigh. We suffer. My, how we suffer.

As my loyal readers are by now fully aware, I like to end all entries, conversations, and activities on a high note, and so I'll finish with the best news of the week. I'm very much looking forward to an upcoming visit to a potential employer, not least because the more I read about the city, the organization, and the position, the more interested I am in finding out how I might fit in there. Sure, I have to be realistic about my chances, and about the other positions that are still dancing around the bush, trying to get their acts together so they can all have a shot at my attentions, but right now I'm really liking the one that shall for now remain nameless. Keep thinking positive thoughts on my behalf, or maybe hoping and praying that we'll all have clarity and wisdom as we face the decisions that we have to make.

GPS? Or Wall-E?

So I was thinking about GPS today, and then I was thinking about that (average, at best) movie Wall-E, in which humans have placed themselves so deeply in dependance on technology that they just lie around all day drinking smoothies. While there are a lot of obvious advantages to being fed all the time without even having to lift a finger (I can see the advantages, anyway...), there are obvious downsides as well. Remember when we used to just remember all of our phone numbers? I could rattle off pretty much every friend/acquaintance/family member's phone number. Not because I wanted to, or because I was cool, but because I was too lazy to want to have to look the things up every time I needed to call anyone. Now I can barely remember my own number, let alone of those I call very frequently. Sure, I recognize them when they pop up on my phone's caller ID, but that's hardly even important, since my phone also knows who's calling.

So do I really want to cripple my already-mushy brain by removing yet another burden from the multi-system subtexting that still goes on, in an at least limited way? Or do I skip the GPS, suck up getting lost a bit more often than would be ideal, and ward off alzheimers and other brain-degenerating diseases for a few more years? Just a thought. No need to comment...

Speaking of comments, nobody was bold enough to venture a guess as to which beans are which in the previous post, so here's the key: the darkest beans are, not surprisingly, Starbuck's "medium-roast" beans, and those are located on the far left of the photo; next (in the picture) come Archer Farms "light roast," and those are roasted slightly lighter than the Spotlight beans, whose roast is undeclared. Finally, the lightest roast, and the beans on the far right, are the NovoDia Supremo beans. Get some at TJMaxx for $10/kg! They're pretty rad, for the price.

Finally, please notify your local colleges and universities that I'm not going to be on the market forever, and if I end up in an awesome tenure-track job right out of grad school, I'm unlikely to be on the market again. Ever. So your opportunity to have a world-class expert on many things that some people might be interested to know is rapidly slipping away. I'm just saying...

Happy 2011, just a couple weeks late!