I Didn't Know I Could Hurt There

After going six days straight between Red Hat training and work, it was nice to have a day off yesterday.
Or rather, it would have been if I hadn’t had to go to a training session yesterday afternoon.
It was only a couple of hours, but it was a little irritating to have something interfere with my day off.
It didn’t help that the training was really, really boring.
The session was held at one of the local facilities of a company we do a lot of business with, and was basically just a high-level review of their network and how our data travels over it.
The person giving the training is this engineer I’ve met before who’s a really nice guy who knows a lot about networking, as he’s been involved in the business for a long, long time. I’m talking about being around to see the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors long time.
So when he talks about this sort of thing it goes beyond simply being over my head to being somewhere in the level of a low earth orbit.
It was reminiscent of this class I took in college called simply “The English Language,” which was a very in-depth exploration of the language, its history, its variations, and its mechanics.
The professor was from India, and while many people complained about his accent, there was no way you could dispute his command of the language. He was very much the product of a colonial education and as a result knew all of the ins and outs of the language better than most people know the backs of their hands.
As frequently happens with someone who has that kind of wealth of knowledge of a particular subject, there was a sort of disconnect from reality that occurred in his mind between what he knew and what he assumed other people knew.
For example, he would frequently advise us, “Remember your Latin,” to which we had to respond, with some trepidation and fear of derision, that none of us actually had any Latin to remember.
In the training yesterday I had a similar experience when the engineer said, with considerable amusement, that a particular piece of equipment “still uses rip routes, if you can believe it.”
I have no idea why that would be funny, or why I should have difficulty believing it. It was kind of like having Nick Burns crack a joke, though this guy is considerably less surly.
In any case, because I was going to be in her neck of the woods that afternoon I IMed Kathleen to see if she wanted to get together for lunch.
We agreed on a place and a time, and at the appointed time I was waiting outside her building to pick her up. That’s pretty much the way we always do it, but for some reason this time Kathleen thought – though she found it odd – that I had wanted to just meet her where we were going to eat, so after I’d been sitting there waiting for ten minutes, which is pretty late even for her, she called and said, “Please tell me you’re not sitting there waiting for me to come out.”Ultimately no real harm was done, but it did make for a short lunch.
Anyway, after I got home from the training I went to work on the Heroic Portraits site…after I finished my self-portrait. Basically I was just stalling because I didn’t want to have to deal with putting the site together. It’s such a pain in the ass, what with having to make sure that all of the links work, make the thumbnails, and etc.
I haven’t tested it in multiple browsers, though the application I used can check for the most common compatibility issues. It found some possible issues on the “About the Artist” page, but that page isn’t really that important, so it’s not a big deal to me if it doesn’t render properly in Firefox or something.
Today I went out and did a little bit of grocery shopping, though I’m planning on a more significant outing tomorrow.
While I was in the store I noticed this woman in a track suit. In addition to wondering, as Scott did a bit ago at work, why so many people seem to be wearing track suits these days (though this one, at least, was not velour), I noticed that she had an extremely nice ass. One of the best I’ve seen in a long time.
She wasn’t especially pretty, though if she didn’t look so haggard and prematurely aged (I’d guess she was in her late twenties or early thirties, but her tired, baggy eyes made her look much older) she would have been considerably more attractive.
Still, she was attractive, and I have to say that ass – which was, ironically enough, well-served by the track suit – went a long way to make up for her other shortcomings.
There are people who claim that the supermarket is a good place to meet women, but I’ve never found that to be the case, as it’s fairly unusual to see an attractive woman, and even when you do, she’s married.
I never managed to do a ring check on this woman, but based on the contents of her cart she at least has kids.
Anyway, how would I have approached her even if I’d been of a mind to do so, and if she hadn’t been talking to someone on her cell phone the whole time?
“Hey, I couldn’t help noticing that you’ve got a great ass, and I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the way you’re leaning forward on your cart and making it stand out more prominently. What are you doing tonight?”
I never really heard her say anything, but while it was of ambiguous ethnicity, she just looked like English wouldn’t be her first language. So odds are I might have been able to say those things to her without her being able to understand me well enough to be insulted, but I have the feeling that rejection and humiliation are the same in any language.
In any case, she got in line behind me, and while I was standing at the end of the register and waiting for the cashier to finish ringing me up I had the perfect vantage point for watching her bend over to retrieve items from her cart to put on the belt.
So that was my cheap thrill for the day.
When I got home I started to prepare the chicken I’d taken out of the freezer yesterday for the slow cooker.
It was mostly thawed, but the giblets were still pretty well cemented in by ice, and as I worked at pulling them out, I was struck by the absurdity of removing a chicken’s internal organs only to put them in a bag and shove them back into the chicken so that the person who buys the chicken will then have to remove them again.
After that I decided to go for a walk.
Early on, I managed to injure a part of my body that it never occurred to me that I could injure, especially by engaging in an activity as low-impact as walking. I kept walking hoping that this kink would work itself out, which it did, but it took a while and so, feeling soured on the idea of walking today, I decided to just turn around and head home.
I’ve signed up to take the Red Hat Certified Technician class and test in July. I had been thinking about trying to take it in June so that, after failing it, I could sign up for the Certified Engineer class and test in July with Scott (you have to take the RHCT class before you can take the RHCE class, and when you take the CE test you also take the CT, and it’s possible to fail the CE but still pass the CT).
However, the only June offering of the CT class would have conflicted with an event in my social life (What the hell? Something conflicting with an event in my social life? Well, at least it doesn’t involve a chick, so it’s not too far outside the pale.), so I had to sign up for the CT class in July.
I could have still managed to squeeze into the CE class, but there was another conflict (Another instance of me having something better do? What is going on with the world?), as that’s taking place the week I’m flying home to Michigan (Oh, I’m just going home for a while. That’s okay then.).
I usually go home a little earlier in the year, but this time around I decided to wait until summer was in full swing. Of course, I was going to go a bit earlier than that, but I found out that my old grade school is having its 100th anniversary celebration towards the end of July, so I decided I’d go home in time for that.
I’m not really thrilled by the prospect. I mean, it’s not like I have happy memories of my nine years (Kindergarten through Eighth grade; currently it only goes up to Sixth grade) in that quaint little hellhole, but my mom wanted me to go, and there’s a possibility that my brother might go home for it as well, so I figured I should.
Speaking of Red Hat, the Munin’s Red Hat Desktop: You Make The Call voting has so far resulted in a tie, with two votes for Version 1 and two votes for Version 2.
Of course, given my reluctance to boot up Red Hat and try to sort out the mouse problem it may be a moot point anyway.
In any case, this entry has been long and rambling enough, I think.