To Disturb And Protect

As a pleasant change of pace, last night I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow.
However, about an hour and a half later I was awoken by the sound of someone yelling outside my window.
After hearing things like, “I have a dog in the cruiser and I will sic him on you,” and “Hands behind your head! Get down on the ground! Face down!” I realized that the person yelling was probably a cop.
After the person being yelled at complied, the cop brought his voice down to a lower – but still high – volume and began asking questions.
The person he was talking to explained that he was 19, from around here, and was simply out for a walk.
A while later another cop showed up and began asking the same questions, then they explained to the guy why they’d stopped him.
Apparently there have been a lot of break-ins lately, so they’ve been patrolling the neighborhood and immediately responding to any suspicious activity.
That was kind of a good news/bad news thing. I mean, the good news is that the cops are being vigilant. The bad news is that they’re being vigilant because there have been a lot of break-ins in my neighborhood.
Actually, from what one of them said, it seems more like they’ve been walk-ins, with not all that much breaking; basically someone – or someones – has been going around to back doors to see if they’re unlocked, and, if they are unlocked, letting themselves in. Presumably this would mean that they’re not putting any extra effort into the endeavor if they find the door is locked. As I always lock my back door, I’m hoping that I won’t run into any issues with this.
Anyway, I’m glad that the cops were doing their job, and that they did it in a relatively calm and level-headed fashion, preventing the whole thing from turning into some sort of “Don’t tase me, bro!” YouTube spectacle.
I just wish they hadn’t been doing their job right outside my window on a night when it was finally looking like I was going to get a decent night’s sleep.
On my way home today, I had a run-in with the cops, as they were doing some sort of driver’s license checkpoint. This time around I wasn’t told to have a “cheerful” day.
After getting past that I hit the comic shop, then came home and watched some recorded TV and tried not to fall asleep on the couch.
And that’s pretty much been all of the excitement since my last entry.
I got to leave at the normal time today, as my Wednesday 4:00 conference call has been rescheduled due to a conflict one of the participants has. Unfortunately, it’s been rescheduled to 4:00 on Thursdays, so I haven’t really gained anything. I could have been a jerk and selfishly accepted the other proposed time, which was 3:00 on Wednesday, which would have meant that there’d be no day on which I’d have to stay late, but I couldn’t do it. Why? Well, as it is, there’s a person in New Zealand who’s on the call at 8 AM his time, and I couldn’t bring myself to make him get on a call at 7 AM, so I accepted the proposal to just move the call to Thursday.
Oh well.

"Panic Cookies" Would Also Be A Good Name For A Band

Sometimes when I don’t get enough sleep – as was the case last night, when, for whatever reason, I got, at best, 3 and a half hours – my body has kind of a strange reaction the next day.
Rather than simply allowing me to feel tired, my body decides to start pumping adrenaline to keep me going.
A lot of adrenaline.
This would be okay if it just meant that I would spend the day not feeling tired, but there tends to be rather more to it than that.
All of the adrenaline coursing through my veins makes me feel really, really anxious.
If you’ve ever had an anxiety attack, I would say that you could liken the feeling to a mild anxiety attack.
One that lasts all day.
The reason I mention this, of course, is because that’s what’s been happening to me today.
I’ve spent the whole day feeling antsy, with my stomach churning, and a sense of impending doom hovering over me as I worry about…well, nothing.
That’s the really irritating part; this isn’t a reaction to any sort of external event. I don’t have anything to actually feel anxious about, yet I feel anxious as hell. If there were some external source of anxiety, I could try to do something to deal with it. But there isn’t, and so there’s no way to really deal with the feeling.
It was, of course, this weird fight or flight response going on that, more than the kids and the music, prevented me from taking a nap, which is ironic because the whole reason I wanted to take a nap was to try to get the fight or flight thing to go away.
(Typically when this happens I feel fine the next day, after having crashed and gotten a decent night’s sleep.)
In an effort to give me something to focus on – for the record, writing this is a huge effort; I manage to write maybe two or three sentences, then I have to get up to pace wildly – and to expend some of the energy, I decided to make oatmeal raisin cookies earlier this evening.
It was…an experience. To an observer, my baking efforts probably would have looked like something out of that “Go Meth!” commercial.
My efforts didn’t really do much to burn off the energy, and the cookies came out kind of retarded, though given that today’s yard work didn’t do it, I’m not sure why I thought baking would have any impact on the energy.
Somewhere in the racing thoughts in my brain I realized that the idea that baking would burn off energy was just one of many mistaken assumptions I’ve made recently in regards to oatmeal raisin cookies.
The first mistaken assumption, which is part of the reason I decided to bake oatmeal raisin cookies specifically, came a while ago at work on my lunch break.
While standing in line to pay for my lunch at the café I usually buy my lunch from, I decided to grab one of the packages of chocolate chip cookies on the counter for dessert.
When it came time to eat the cookies, though, I discovered, to my disappointment, that they were actually oatmeal raisin cookies, not chocolate chip.
I like oatmeal raisin cookies, but when you’re expecting chocolate chip, it’s kind of a letdown. Still, they were pretty good, and have actually become a standard part of my lunch.
(They’re actually better than the chocolate chip cookies that are sold at the café.)
Inspired by the café’s cookies, I decided that somewhere along the line I should make some of my own, an idea which, as mentioned, I seized upon tonight.
I was operating on the assumption that I had all of the ingredients, but in the process of gathering all of them I learned that this was yet another mistaken assumption, as it turns out I didn’t have any oats.
After doing some frantic digging around, though, I learned that this was also a mistaken assumption, as I did, in fact, have oats.
(I’m rambling, I know, but I can’t help it.)
I thought about going for a walk, but one of the elements of these all-day anxiety events is just a smattering of paranoia (for that tangy zip), so I didn’t want to venture out into the world and be seen by people.
This morning’s excursion provided quite enough of that.
In any case, I suppose I should move on to do something else in the pursuit of wearing off this energy, but I just thought I should share today’s Adventures in Anxious Mania with you all.
Hopefully it’ll be the usual well-adjusted……err, slightly more well-adjusted, and considerably less energetic, Jon who writes the next entry.

I Wish MY Car Could Transform...Into A Better Car

All day long I waited to get a call about my car.
I decided that I wasn’t going to call because in all of the times I’ve brought my car in they have never once called me; I’ve always had to call them.
So today I said screw it and decided that I wouldn’t call. My thinking was that these are people I’m paying to provide me a service not some chick I’m trying to date, so they could quit fucking dodging me and dial my damn number.
And so they did.
Eventually.
So, nearly $600 later ($596.65 to be exact), I got my car back, all 30,000 miles serviced and with new brakes and no clicking noise.
Of course, the work isn’t actually done. There are some remaining issues that need to be fixed, but the part won’t be in for a week. The remaining issues aren’t serious enough to cause any immediate problems, so I’m able to drive the car until the part arrives, at which point I have to bring it back in (though this time I’ll get a loaner).
I was waiting on another phone call today as well, this time from the rental office here. Now that I’m no longer a homeowner, I have to sign a month-to-month lease and pay rent.
On the 27th of June, people representing the new ownership were at the office in the evening to assist with this process. I know this because I got a letter telling me that people would be there. One problem, though: I got the letter on the 28th.
So yesterday, being my first opportunity to do so, I walked down to the office expecting to sign a lease and pay the July rent (plus prorated June rent for two days – way to grab every penny, ass clowns). The question I was presented with was, “Did you fill out an application?” I said that I wasn’t aware that I had to.
The women then proceeded to get me an application, which I couldn’t fill out there because there was some info I had to check on. I came home, filled it out, brought it back, and was told that I had to wait to sign a lease because they needed to run a background check on me.
I’ve lived her for a year and a half without incident: what more do they need to know?
Naturally they had some problems with their background-checking system, so they said they would call me back today.
Apparently there’s some version of that book The Rules written for people in the service industry which tells them that if they don’t return calls they will become service industry creatures unlike any others.
Seriously, if you play hard to get I’m just going to say “fuck it.”
It’s not going to make me want you more.
In any case, I made no effort to reach out to them all day, but I did write them a note explaining that I will not be available until the 9th, and enclosed a check in the amount I was told would be due and left it in the rent drop box. After all, even though they’re the ones causing the delay, I could easily see them blaming me for not paying my rent in a timely enough fashion and charging me extra.
Up until I got the call about my car, today was largely uneventful. I woke up late, as I was extremely tired last night.
As you can see if you go over to Brian’s blog, there were two fires early yesterday morning here in Leesburg. I live near a major highway, so for a period of about an hour it was non-stop sirens going by, which isn’t especially conducive to sleep.
I had to get up early anyway to bring my car in, so losing that hour of sleep was a pain.
About an hour after I got to sleep, and fifteen minutes before I planned to get up, I was awoken by what sounded like – and was – a helicopter.
I would have gone back to bed after I got home from the shop, but I decided to deal with the rent thing first, and then Kathleen called and wanted to have lunch.
We had a very quick lunch at Subway, as she had all manner of things to do and places to be.
In any case, very tired Jon slept in until a bit before 10, got up for about a half an hour, then called it a day and went back to bed until noon.
Once I got up the second time I really didn’t do much beyond showering until I got the call about my car.
After I picked my car up I stopped at Super Target to pick up something for dinner, then came home, made it, watched some TV, and wrote and posted this.
And that brings us up to date.

Jon And The Quest For The Gray Fleece

I didn’t sleep well at all over the weekend, so last night found a very tired Jon climbing into bed. Despite this, I still managed to wake up at around 8, though I refused to get out of bed and insisted on sleeping. This was made a challenge by the fact that stupid new dog had been left alone again, and so was yipping its worthless head off.
I think my mind has been colored a bit much by all of the Fables I’ve been reading lately, as I took a great deal of pleasure in imagining myself throwing on the Witching Cloak, grabbing the Vorpal Sword, teleporting down there and putting an end to the barking with a quick Snicker-Snack.
Of course, as satisfying as that would be, I recognized the silliness of it, and soon managed to tune out the yipping and drift back to sleep, waking again a bit before 10.
After – reluctantly – getting up, talking to my mother, and making myself some blunch, I said, as I am particularly wont to do on Sundays, “Screw this,” and went back to bed for another hour and a half.
And now I’m up and still tired.
I need to do the laundry, but can’t build up the motivation, and there are some pictures I could be working on, but, well, it’s Sunday. Sunday isn’t just my day to rest, it’s my day to fester.
The company I work for frequently gives out bits of company-branded merchandise to all of us. It’s done to boost morale and company loyalty, and to make us forget that they’re keeping us in a constant state of uncertainty about the company’s future plans and what, if any, roles we’ll have in that future.
The thinking is, “Give them a logo jacket. It’ll take their minds off wondering when we’re going to ship their jobs to India.”
(As an aside, it baffles me that they can complain so much about the rumor mill, when simple open and honest communication about what’s being planned, even if that information is only the broad strokes – we’re perfectly capable of understanding that some things can’t be revealed and that many plans aren’t final – could easily cut the number of rumors by at least 50%. Consider the sale of the Reston facility. For weeks we’d heard through various grapevines that the place had been sold, and we were seeing people being moved. Meanwhile, not only had we not been officially informed of where – if anywhere – we were going, we hadn’t even been officially informed that the place had been sold. For weeks this went on. I don’t understand how hard it would have been to say, “Hey, as you’ve probably guessed, we sold the building. We’re still trying to figure out where to relocate you, but don’t worry, we’re working on it.” Instead we got silence and rampant speculation, and disingenuous shrugs from our managers when we asked what was going on.)
A while back, like rest of the peons, I got a fleece featuring the company logo. I’m sure that management was hoping that we wouldn’t notice that we’d gotten fleeced literally and figuratively, inasmuch as that while we got cheap outerwear emblazoned with company propaganda, select other employees were getting frickin’ iPods.
In any case, it often gets cold in the NOC, so I kept my fleece on hand, hanging in the break room.
Since the fleece was always there, its pocket became a good place to keep the headphones that I also like to have on hand.
For a while I’d been using the ear buds that came with my iPod (the one I paid for myself because the company has never opted to give me one), as I have some pricy noise-canceling headphones I use with it.
But in the course of a 12 and a half hour day, having ear bud crammed in can get a little painful, so recently I bought some nice earphones that clip onto the ear rather than going into it.
Yesterday when I went to grab them at the start of my shift, my fleece, which had been there a scant 12 hours earlier when I stowed my earphones at the end of my previous shift, was no longer there.
Because I tend to expect the worst of people, and because I work some of the people I work with are total assholes, or at the very least immature jerks, I naturally assumed someone had stolen it.
Still, I allowed for the possibility that this wasn’t done intentionally, particularly given how lame it was as a bit of theft. I mean, we all got the damn fleeces at one point, and we’re not talking about terribly expensive earphones.
But the fact remained that I wanted it back. Not so much for the sake of the fleece, of course, but I did want my earphones back.
So I first asked the manager on duty if someone had done some sort of “spring cleaning” on the coat rack, as it did seem to have been messed with, but she was unaware of any such activity.
I wrote a neutrally-worded e-mail asking for its return and had the manager forward it out to everyone.
Some hours later I went into the break room to take a look, and sure enough, there was my fleece on a hanger, complete with earphones.
I can’t help but wonder why it was taken in the first place – maybe someone was cold and thought it was some sort of community property – but I was glad to have it returned.
Still, I won’t be keeping my earphones in it any longer.
And so the quest for the gray fleece was pretty much my big adventure for the weekend. I know, it wasn’t exactly Jason and the Argonauts, but maybe one day, after constant retellings, the story will grow to mythic proportions.
Somehow I doubt it, but you never know.

The Sunday Fester

I haven’t been sleeping especially well lately, finding that, while I feel tired, I just can’t get comfortable at night and so I toss and turn for a couple of hours, wake up multiple times while it’s still dark out, wake up again about an hour before I would normally get up, then fall back to sleep and get up a half hour to an hour after the time I normally get up.
I am then tired all day and anticipate falling asleep easily owing to a certain amount of exhaustion, only to repeat the same cycle.
I suppose I could talk to my doctor about it…if I had one.
Actually getting a doctor is one of those things I’ve been meaning to do for a while, but have never bothered because, frankly, I haven’t seen any real reason. I almost never get sick (and when I do it’s generally just a mild cold that runs its course quickly), and despite a few minor complaints here and there (as evidenced by yesterday’s entry), I don’t really have any sort of ailments that demand medical attention.
And if suddenly get violently ill or something there’s always urgent care.
It’s certainly not like I’m opposed to seeking out medical assistance for specific problems. I mean, I’ve got a dentist, an eye doctor, and a chiropractor, but somehow it hasn’t seemed necessary to acquire a general practitioner.
And I doubt that it will any time soon, as I’m sure the sleeping thing will pass. Even if it doesn’t, I do manage to sleep on work nights, so it’s not really that big of a deal.
In any case, after waking up at around 10 this morning I did the usual dicking around before showering and shaving.
Shaving was a pain, as I’d done my usual Sunday festering yesterday, and as a result had not shaved.
Normally I shave with an electric razor, but that loses its effectiveness if I go more than one day without shaving, so today I had to do it the old-fashioned way, which is kind of a hassle (compared to the electric at least).
Once all of that was out of the way it was time to head out into the world. I was going to stop at Super Target to pick up a few Super-Target-y things, then go to Shoppers for groceries, but, forgetting the lesson I’d learned last week about why I shouldn’t, I decided to do all of my shopping there.
Oh well.
Among my purchases were some belated birthday presents for Kathleen. Now the question is whether I’ll see her and be able to give them to her this week, or if I’ll just give them to Brian on Thursday.
I haven’t seen Spider-Man 3 yet, as Scott and I are planning to catch a matinee tomorrow.
So far the reviews have been mixed, but on the other hand it apparently broke box office records over the weekend, and on the other other hand I don’t care what reviewers think anyway.
I got a letter the other day informing me that someone from the condo developer will be stopping by to inspect my unit (hehehehe) on Wednesday.
Not sure what’s up with that, as we did not achieve the required unanimous acceptance of the buy-back offer by the deadline, forcing the developer (who is in negotiations to sell off the project as an apartment complex) to go back to the drawing board.
It’s to their advantage to own all of the units if they want to sell the complex off, so I don’t’ really know what they’re going to do next.
While I don’t know what this means for my future, I do know that it means that I’m going to have to do something about the comic books piled up all over my floor.
As mentioned, yesterday I did the usual Sunday Fester, which consists of not showering, not getting properly dressed, not going anywhere, and generally sitting around doing not much of anything.
I did watch The Life of Brian, and the That Yellow Bastard segment from the Sin City special edition DVD, though, by way of doing something.
I also ordered a pizza.
So that was exciting.
Last night’s episode of The Simpsons featured Homer becoming a volunteer firefighter, which naturally made me think of Brian, who has recently moved his Becoming a Firefighter blog over to Blogger. My link to it has been updated to the new URL.
I suppose there’s enough time left in the day that I should try to do something constructive (like maybe pick up all my comic books and put them away), so I guess I’ll get to it.

Too Little Sleep And Too Many Comics

There are few things in life that are better than freshly cleaned sheets.
Okay, there are few things in my life that are better than freshly cleaned sheets.
Normally when I have them – as I did last night, as I’d washed the sheets as part of the whole cleaning thing – I get a very good night’s sleep.
Unfortunately, at diner Stacy ordered a Coke and, with my more relaxed attitude about caffeine, I thought, “That sounds good,” and ordered one for myself.
Of course, we were there for quite some time, so one became several, al of which meant that, clean sheets or not, I didn’t get to sleep until well after 3 am.
I woke up sometime before 10 and found myself over on the opposite side of the bed sleeping in a diagonally position, the very top of my just barely resting on my pillow.
After getting up, talking to my mother, and doing a bunch of nothing in particular, I decided to try to take a nap around noon, but recently a new dog has arrived in the building and he, like the dog upstairs, likes to keep his loneliness at bay through barking.
The new dog’s bark is much more shrill and yippy than the other dog, and he also seems to have more energy and determination, continuing to bark well past the point at which the old dog is willing to settle for emitting the occasional whine.
So the yipping pretty much killed the nap idea.
I spent the rest of the afternoon watching some show about prehistoric animals that existed before dinosaurs that I’d watched before, and entering some of my comics into the database software.
I was basically working from memory, selecting the issues that I know that I have.
This isn’t really that phenomenal a feat; I was mostly putting in limited series that I know I have every issue of.
I was also doing the Superman titles, which is made fairly easy based on the fact that I have, with a handful of exceptions, every issue of Superman, Adventures of Superman, Action (excepting the year or so when it was a weekly book), and Superman: The Man of Steel published between late 1986 and mid 1995.
So basically it was a matter of going into the list, finding the range and checking them all off, then skimming through to uncheck the issues (I’d say fewer than five) that I’m missing from that period.
Even with just working from memory and entering in a small percentage of the total, I already have 573 comics in the database.
After that I did some work on the comics themselves, de-bagging them in preparation for the day when I will re-bag them.
I actually learned something while de-bagging them: a person my age shouldn’t spend a significant amount of time sitting on the floor hunched over.
And later I learned that those force flex garbage bags are no match for a pile of old comic book backer boards. I learned this on the stairs on my way to the dumpster.
And that was my ever so exciting Sunday. I’ll bet you’re glad I decided to write an entry to tell you all about it.