(no subject)

It’s been two weeks without an update from me. Sorry about that; I’m still here.

I should have written about my last two weekends; I’ve taken spur-of-the-moment train trips into San Francisco and car trips down along the Pacific Coast Highway, made it to a great tequila bar, and done slightly more cooking than I have been. I saw the beginning of the Chinese New Year parade, and spent a couple hours in an eclectic coffee bar in a loft over an art-house movie theater in Monterey. I was snowed on halfway up Mount Diablo, and saw snow in the Santa Cruz mountains on my way to a breakfast in Santa Cruz’s beach-beatnik downtown area.

At the office, I’ve been reacquainting myself with Perl and Ruby and realizing that I really do like Ruby more. Unfortunately for me, the company is pretty standardized on Perl as a scripting language, and from a practical standpoint it’s better for me to adapt to them rather than to try to get them to adapt to me. This is good, though, because it’s something different. A little scary for the same reason—it involves an engineering problem I’m not sure how to solve yet—but, challenge is good, right?

The downside was fights with two friends two weeks ago online, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. If you’d asked me then which one I’d expect to be talking to two weeks later, I’d have guessed the one on Saturday. As it’s turned out, though, the one on Sunday and I had a bigger fight later which ironically seems to have resolved a few things. We’re getting along much better now than we have in months.

The one from Saturday, meanwhile, wrote me off; I finally opened up about some things he’d done I found hurtful, and it went downhill. Apparently, from his point of view I can’t admit that I’m wrong and I don’t want to reconcile. From mine, getting painful things out is the only way toward reconciliation; I’d said what I wanted from him to move past that, and my feeling is he finds my “terms” unacceptable. Is that just a case of me not admitting I’m wrong? Some old lyrics from a Don Henley song always stick with me: There’s three sides to every story: yours and mine and the cold, hard truth.

When I wrote “cooking” it’s not strictly true, as I’ve been doing a few things that don’t involve cooking, or involve very little. Two nights ago it was my apple and grilled cheese sandwich again (mostly spurred by a conversation with ladyperegrine in which she mentioned them). I’d also bought some of Lunardi’s prepared salads, a carrot and raisin salad and ambrosia salad, but both were resoundingly mediocre. That did spur me to make my own ambrosia salad last night, with an improvised recipe I figured would be better than the ones I was finding online—and it is, although in the spirit of never leaving well enough alone I’m thinking of a couple tweaks. (I’ll put the recipe up later if people are feeling sufficiently 1950s homemaker to be interested.)

This morning I woke up from a dream which involved tugrik, revar, reality_fox, and my friend and housemate of a decade ago, chastmastr walking to Chili’s. For some reason we split up into two groups, and chastmastr and I were walking alone. It was dark and the landscape was flat and mostly wooded. Before the group had split, chastmastr had been repeating the same joke in multiple ways, and I’d been explaining as we walked that one time was enough, and at some point I said, “But that’s just a suggestion.” “Selection?” he said. “No,” I said, but somehow this led us both on a tangent about selections. (Anyone who’s heard us talk together knows we could go on for hours this way.) Then I realized we’d been turned around—I was theoretically the one who knew where we were going—and we set off down another street. I woke up about when we could see the Chili’s sign in the distance.

I have no idea what any of that means, unless it’s a suggestion I should go to Chili’s for lunch.

While I was in Santa Cruz, I managed to lose my check card, so I’m waiting on a replacement. As of right now, the online banking screen is refusing to tell me anything about my checking or savings account, which I find somewhat alarming—I know there was money in both accounts when I called the bank and had them shut off the card, but this is still a little nerve-wracking. Wherever I do end up for lunch, it has be some place that accepts credit cards…