Crankypantsing

Week 4 of This View

This post-apocalyptic hellscape is outside my cubicle. I’ll be glad when it’s finally gone, but they’re replacing it with shelving, which is only a slight improvement.

(It’s not anyone’s fault that it’s taking this long to clean up and reconfigure the space. The folks doing the work are backed up with jobs. That doesn’t make it any less frustrating for those of us trying to work in this environment, though.)

Crankypantsing

Construction Season

Construction season has begun. I expected this sort of thing to be going on outside, but not inside.

This was going on next to my cubicle when I got to work this morning.

They started disassembling the cubicles across from me last Monday. Silly me for assuming they would have done a better job of cleaning up after themselves.

Crankypantsing, Genealogy

More Fun with Genealogy

Someone on Reddit posted about this entry on the FamilySearch tree. It’s delightfully entertaining. First, the “Important research has been done on this person,” note. Understand that anyone can add anything they want to the FamilySearch tree, but it should be factual and supported by some sort of evidence. I’m not criticizing people’s beliefs or religion. Believe what you want! I certainly do. But this has no place in genealogy.

Must we? And the arguments in the change log about definitive proofs and whether or not Joseph should be linked as his father and whether or not he really married Mary Magdelene and did they actually have children. There’s a place for those discussions, but I don’t think this is it.

This is my favorite part. Under “Facts,” which ought to be at least somewhat fact-adjacent, right? His physical appearance: “Curly bright silver grey hair. Aquamarine blue eyes (Post resurrection reports)”

I’m seriously tempted to replace the profile pic with Black Jesus. I’m feelin’ fighty.

Crankypantsing, Photography

Running Fence and Jordan River

I had to walk across campus to Parking Services. They’re located in a parking garage where I cannot park. I might have been able to find a spot in a nearby parking lot, but none of the lots on the online parking services map indicate which parking passes can park in that lot, which makes the map absolutely useless.

So I walked over there, which took me longer than it should have, because I had to navigate a giant fence maze in front of the student union. Once you committed to entering the maze, you couldn’t get out until the end. There were no side exits, which meant I went way out of my way. The whole thing was super annoying.

The most annoying part of it was that my parking permit should have been mailed to me. It was returned by the post office because IU’s Parking Services’ mail merge program cannot cope with the apartment field that IU’s master address form provides. It just completely omits that field when printing labels, so my apartment number was left off the mailing label. I tried to explain what happened to the clerk at Parking Services, and it was like talking to a brick wall. She said they’d had mail returned from other apartment dwellers, but had no idea why. Lordy! Your mailing software is BROKEN!

I’m pretty sure the problem is at their end, not mine. And then she told me that I should always pick up my tag in person, because everyone in her office is so nice and it’s a pleasant experience. Considering I cannot park anywhere near their office, that’s not going to happen.

Art, Crankypantsing, Ladybusiness

Representation Matters

Representation Matters

A book on sketchbooks, written by a man, contains artwork mostly by men. Not at all surprising. Call them “visual journals” and the author will much more likely be a woman, and the artists represented will be mostly women. Art is for men, but craft is for ladypeople. I’m reminded of a Joanna Newsom interview in which she said that men were harpists and women were harp players. We don’t let women play in male spaces (still!), but we also devalue the spaces where women are allowed to play.

(I may not even have noticed, except I started to wonder how many drawings of teen boy sexual fantasies there would be in the book. A lot. And all of them drawn by men, so I looked at the artist bios and did a quick tally of the genders: 31 men, 10 women, and one non-binary person.)

Crankypantsing, Photography

Sunrise

Sunrise

Did I mention that we had a lightning strike last weekend? It fried my modem, requiring a call to Comcast (I hate phones!) and a visit from a technician to install a new
modem, because our local service center no longer carries equipment.

And then I found that the Ethernet card on my computer had also been fried. I got a USB wireless adapter, for short term, but ordered a new Ethernet card from Amazon. That arrived today.

I turned on my computer, to uninstall the old Ethernet card, shut down, physically installed the new card, tried to tuen the computer back on, aaaaand bupkis. I think the motherboard is dead.

The food news is that the hard drive is probably fine, and if it isn’t, it’s pretty well backed up. I may lose some email and a couple of day’s worth of work, but that’s not the end of the world. Being temporarily computerless might be the end of the world, though!

Crankypantsing, Pets, Photography

Feet Bouquet

Baby Bear #dogs #boxerdog

The baby bear made a feet bouquet, while he was napping. Is there anything cuter?

We have our yearly all day in-house conference at work tomorrow. They are allegedly serving pastries and coffee in the morning, but the last time I attended, they said the same thing and there was bupkis.

They won’t tell us what the lunch menu is, but every year they serve the same revolting vinegar-drenched artichoke heart veggie wrap. It’s absolutely inedible, so I’ll be packing Pop Tarts and a PB&J sandwich. Better safe than sorry.

Crankypantsing

Dalek Pizza Delivery

I’ve been looking at ways to trim some of my bills, and lo and behold, my newest Comcast bill had gone up about $40. So that’s an obvious place to start. Before dropping cable, I wanted to make sure a Roku stick would work for me. There were a few glitches, but I finally got it working.

If you’re a Doctor Who fan, I recommend checking out the BritBox app. You can stream the classic episodes with it.

(And yes, I know I can call Comcast and probably get my bill reduced. I did that last year. I’m just kind of annoyed, plus we’re moving into the summer TV black hole season. Now is as good a time as any to ditch cable.)

Crankypantsing, Photography

Heckofajob!

You might be an asshole if... #badparking #wtf

Parking Operations will ticket you if a tire is touching the white line. I can only imagine the driver got out of their car, looked, and said, “Screw it, I parked inside the lines and that’s good enough!”

I’d be so mortified I’d have to re-park.

[Also note that the passenger side of the car is beat to hell. There’s probably a good reason for that!]