I didn't make it very long before falling asleep last night, but I did FINALLY finish sorting the Allen & Ginter baseball card sets. Spent all morning and afternoon on them, and finished with about an hour to spare before getting picked up for movie adventures. In that time, I think I have decided to drop NCIS. I can't help it. I just hate Tony too much. He's basically the anthropomorphic personification of rape culture, and he sucks. My search for a good card sorting show continues.

At around 6:30 I was picked up and we headed for The Land. Relatively small gathering today, what with the rain all week and it being Pride weekend in Portand at the moment. Dinner was an absolute feast. We had turkey smoked in a newly built smoker, two excellent salads one with black eyed peas and cucumbers, and the other carrot-based. There was fresh grilled corn on the cob, home baked bread, and a sweet potato pie. Some of the best food I've had in ages! Not to mention all the popcorn.

Tonight's movie was The Dark Crystal, which I don't think I have seen since my early 20's. I was amazed at how well I remembered it. Almost as well as The Princess Bride or Labyrinth. Two of the group were young enough not to have seen it before, so that was fun. I've heard rumors that a sequel is finally being made, which I have mixed feelings about. I really hope that if it does happen they will make it with puppets instead of animating everything. I feel like that's my only real criteria.

Since the crowd was small tonight, I am in the adorable guest room instead of the tiny house! I missed its purple walls.

My transition paycheck was even sadder than I expected, possibly because I forgot to factor in the cost of my medical insurance. Money is still going to be tight this weekend, but things will greatly improve on Monday. I spent the whole morning running errands. When I was mostly finished and on my way to work, I passed by an unfamiliar lottery cafe and had an inexplicable urge to go inside. I still had a little money left, and they had a new game I hadn't tried yet, so I played it for a little bit. It was very entertaining, but not doing much for me, so I switched back to the game I've had good luck with, and promptly won a $1500 jackpot! That's all I won, though, and it was an automatic hand-pay, so while my wallet is going to be ecstatic on Monday morning when I can go to the lottery office, my wallet is still currently fairly sad. Still, an exciting way to start the day.

Work was very silly today. All my email problems were fixed, although it took an hour out of my shift to get it all set back up the way I had it. Something about the combination of jackpot giddiness and work relief put me in a spectacularly silly mood. This was compounded by something amusing and completely accidental. On the way to work, I bought some drinks at Uwajimaya, including a can of Assam milk tea. The alignment of the label, the graphic design, and the size of my hand conspired to make this happen.

My coworker started cracking up and it took me a minute to realize it was because she looked at me and saw this. pic.twitter.com/BTMkKojeCf

— Drave🍑🎺Moonrascal (@DoctorAvenue) June 17, 2017

That may be the funniest thing I have ever done completely by accident. Twitter had a pretty good reaction to it as well.

Damn it, I'm so close to being doing with this Allen & Ginter set, and I don't have to be anywhere until 6pm tomorrow. Plus I'm still a little too hyper to sleep. I think I might just stay up until it's done.

For the most part, I try not to use ad-blockers, because the people who are hurt most by them tend to be smaller content providers, but today I saw an ad that has left my convictions deeply shaken. It was of a type that I have seen a lot lately, but more often on mobile sites. About 5 seconds into reading a page, an ad will pop up that obscures the whole site, and you have to manually close it. This one was a giant close-up video of a human eye looking around. Like, it filled my entire browser window. The pupil was the size of my fist. It scared the living hell out of me!. Like, my heart was still racing for ten minutes after it happened. Advertisers, this is ABSOLUTELY NOT OKAY and it is going to give someone a heart attack someday.

The saga to repair my Outlook continues. I swear all the IT people here work incredibly odd hours, and I say that as somebody who works from 2:45 to 11:15. The guy who was working on my problem yesterday emailed me around 9pm last night. Then he emailed me again at around 7am this morning. What kind of schedule requires you to be working at both 7am and 9pm? Somebody else took over today, and they kept sending me troubleshooting emails that were all roughly three hours apart. Out of the three remaining issues from last night, one has been fixed. The biggest one is still there, and I don't really care about the third.

Three more hours until payday. I think I am going to spend some time going through this good and cheap PDF cookbook this weekend and see if I can't plan out some meals that are a little more interesting than just sandwiches at work and rice and lentils at night.

I called Animal Control again today. Turns out they did send someone over yesterday, but that person wasn't able to find the cat. I can only surmise that they didn't try very hard for whatever reason. Anyway, I gave way more detailed directions this time, including which corner it was on, and where it was in relation to the pole with the crosswalk buttons. This seems to have done the trick, because the cat was removed by the time I got off of work. Whew. I didn't need that daily burst of sadness right at the start and end of my work day.

Work sort of fixed the problem I've been having, but not quite? I mean, they fixed the major issue, but in the process of doing so, they created three more issues. One of them is a fairly big problem, but the others are mild enough that I can work around them. Things show every sign of being back to normal by Friday, at least for me. My lead is having a whole other set of issues, so we'll see how that goes.

One more full day until payday, but it's going to be the saddest payday. Due to this month's switch from semi-monthly to biweekly, this paycheck will be for the week ending the 2nd, and the week ending the 9th, which means it will only be for seven workdays. That's not going to be a whole lot more than I need for the rest of my bills and credit card payments. Money is going to be very tight for the rest of the month, although I should hopefully have enough left to start some ice cream experiments with my new ice cream maker.

I called Animal Control this morning, and they said they do indeed take care of deceased stray animals. They took down my contact info and the location and said they'd send somebody to take care of it. As of midnight, they haven't been by yet, though. This makes me realize that I have no idea of the logistics behind this sort of municipal service. It appears to be organized by county. How many people does one county get? How many duties do they have to share? I assume they are understaffed because every government office is. What if there is only one person to deal with all animal issues in a city like Beaverton? I have no idea. I hope they come tomorrow, because it breaks my heart every time I pass by that poor kitty.

Fortunately, I was able to distract myself with shopping errands this morning. Sandwich fixings have been restocked, although I appear to have made a tactical condiment error. I wonder what Safeway's return policy is on open products. I would feel guilty returning something that can't be resold, but I think I would feel more guilty just throwing out this disgusting spread. Which is pretty dumb when I think about it, because I'm sure if it gets returned it just gets thrown away as well.

In other news, there is a silly meme that I've seen going around the past few months. The way it works is that you post two pictures that are conceptually similar, but one of them is considerably better than the other in some way, and you add "you vs the guy she tells you not to worry about" as a caption. It's much funnier than it sounds if you pick the right two pictures. Anyway, I made one today that made me laugh really hard, and it has caused the best reaction of anything I've tweeted this year. Let's see if I can actually embed a tweet in LJ now. Hey, I can!

You vs the guy she tells you not to worry about pic.twitter.com/B3BNpkcPh8

— Drave🍑🎺Moonrascal (@DoctorAvenue) June 14, 2017

A poor stray kitty appears to have passed away on the corner right near where I live. What an incredibly sad thing to see on the way to work. It didn't occur to me at the time, but I realized later in the day that of course there must be some kind of municipal service that takes care of things like this. I didn't have time to look it up until I got home, but it looks like Animal Control handles these things. If the poor kitty is still there in the morning, I will make a call.

Consequently, I have had kitties on the brain all day. The usual kitty gifs on the internet were making me more emotional than usual, too. Late in the evening I found out that my coworker who took this whole week off for a trip to Las Vegas had to cancel her trip because her cat got sick and she had to take it to the vet and pay for a bunch of tests. (The cat may be diabetic.) All kinds of cat sadness today.

In less depressing news, I finally was able to articulate how the big studios are going wrong in trying to set up their shared cinematic universe franchises. Obviously, Marvel is the master of the shared cinematic universe. This is because they built their world the way Bob Ross paints. Very slow and methodical, one piece at a time, until a coherent picture stars to take shape. Sometimes he will paint a giant dark streak right up the middle of the painting, and it makes you go "What the heck is going on?!" until he starts putting on the bark and shadow and leaves and whatnot, and you realize it fits perfectly and enriches the whole picture. Movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Doctor Strange are those foreground trees.

Now we've got Universal with their Dark Universe classic monster world, and we've got Warner Brothers with the DC cinematic universe, and they are both struggling to get off the ground. The reason it's not working is that they are trying to create a Bob Ross painting, but they are using Jackson Pollock techniques to do so. I have nothing against the art of Jackson Pollock, but the way he paints just flat out can't be used to do landscapes. No studio is going to create anything as cohesive as the Marvel world unless they are willing to slow down and paint their rocks and their creeks and their happy little trees one at a time. None of them will do so, however, because Marvel has so much of a head start.

Well, I think it's safe to say that I appear to have settled on NCIS as an acceptable show to use for card sorting. I spent all day today watching and sorting, with my only breaks for food. It definitely hits the sweet spot of being formulaic enough that I don't need to devote all of my RAM to watching it, but having characters compelling enough to keep me watching it. The one way in which it's unusual is that it has one main character that I actively dislike. I find Tony incredibly gross and irritating, and not even in a fun way. He just consistently lowers the tone every time he appears. Fortunately, the rest of the cast keeps it pretty high up there so even when he lowers it, it doesn't go that low. My favorite characters so far are Ducky and Abby.

The best part about watching a show like NCIS that has been on forever, aside from how much of it there is to keep me busy, is playing Oh Look It's So and So with the weekly guest stars. The first one I noticed was David Ramsey, who plays John Diggle from Arrow. I could barely recognize him because he looked so much younger. Then it was Glen Morshower, who has played a friendly military person in almost every movie and TV show ever made. (He was the First Lady's bodyguard on 24!) Then I saw a couple of Lost folks, Terry O'Quinn and Josh Holloway, who didn't look all that different. I've also spotted people from Bones and Twin Peaks. I guess you don't realize just how much everybody is in everything until you start watching unhealthy amounts of television.

Nothing else to report today. Cards and NCIS was literally all I did today. (Only breaks were for food!)

The first half of today's adventures involved C-Cakes. We were going to go to the Rose Festival and hold tiger cubs, but we decided it was too big of a frivolous expense, but we still hung out for a good chunk of the day. We started at a queer vegan taco stand called Mis Tacones. (Yes, queer vegan tacos are a thing you can get in Portland!) They were actually very good. Apparently, this place doesn't have a set location. It just pops up randomly, and you need to follow them on Twitter if you want to find out where they are going to appear. This time, they were on a block affectionately known as the Vegan Strip Mall.

The rest of our day was mostly meandering around and chatting. There was a brief ice cream break, though. I got to try a blueberry lavender chocolate dipped cone of elderflower lemon ice cream. We ran some errands, including a Target run. We walked down to the waterfront to look at some impressive ships currently docked in the river. We explored a mall, although that may have started out as a hunt for a bathroom. Sometimes it's really nice to just walk around with a friend, not doing anything in particular. The weather was a little indecisive, but I didn't mind. (First day in a while I have needed both my raincoat and my adventure hat in the same trip.)

In the evening, my movie buddy and I went to see The Mummy, which was pretty thunderously bad, but in some interesting ways. It's a remake of the "classic" but with a female mummy and Tom Cruise playing the Brendan Fraser role. It's also a shameless attempt to force this new shared universe that Universal is trying to create using all their classic monster films. I feel like they are making the same mistake DC did, in trying to hit the ground running instead of really doing the work to set up a cohesive world. The movie is full of weird tonal shifts, and scenes that feel like they belong in some other movie. Also, it's the first time I think I've seen Tom Cruise place a character who is completely unlikable. Russell Crowe is in this mess as well, and I fear the sheer amount of scenery he chewed might be the cause of the weight he has gained recently. Anyway, yeah, this is one to avoid.

Still haven't fixed the email issues. They seem to be getting worse, actually. At least they are affecting the whole office, not just me, so hopefully that is motivation to figure it out quickly. They really should have done more testing before this migration. I was already irritated about the email issues, but I was also hangry for most of the day. I should have made something before work but I got too caught up in working on card stuff. At least there was a lot of free food today. Sadly, it was all sweets. Currently waiting for a giant pot of rice and lentils to cook.

Had a weird realization tonight. It must be at least a year and a half since I've gone on an actual date. I know I haven't been on one since I moved into this apartment, because my apartment is in no shape for overnight guests and hasn't really been since I moved in. I know I went on a couple dates when I was living with the First Tech coworkers, but I must have deleted my OKCupid profile at some point two winters ago. I think I am becoming more asexual as I get older. Or maybe I just don't have the energy to try and meet people anymore.

Ironically, I might be meeting a Twitter friend next month. One of those random people who followed me because somebody they follow retweeted me, or something. Then, at some point, they said something to be that I liked enough to follow them back and we've been mutual friends for a few years at least. I didn't even know where they lived until today, but apparently they are in Seattle. Now I'm wondering what inspired them to make plans with me at this particular time.

I had carefully budgeted exactly how much I needed for groceries to last until payday next Friday. I got up bright and early to go shopping, but I missed my bus. I checked my bank balance and saw that I once again forgot about Movie Pass. I miscalculated my monthly budget by exactly the cost of the Movie Pass, so it looks like I'm on rice and lentils until Jughead's card payment clears, which will probably be on Monday. Frustrating. Better than being overdrawn, though.

I was already in a bad mood when I got to work, but then a whole bunch of small irritations happened in a row that put me in a bad mood all day. It started with the newly promoted lead basically calling me a liar in front of the other leads. We started a new thing where when we do work on a certain kind of spreadsheet, we report how many lines we completed at the end of the day. I did 589 lines yesterday, and he replied with "That seems high. Please confirm how you arrived at that number." Fortunately, my swing shift lead wasn't having it, and she replied with "If you watched him work for five minutes, you'd see that 589 is actually low for him." Nice to know she has my back.

The other things were just a lot of small annoyances that aren't even really worth discussing. I made it through the day without snapping at anybody, so I guess I won?