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My lunch location is determined in the following nested if statement:

IF I have a lunch engagement
THEN go to engagement

ELSE free food available work
THEN eat at work

ELSE in a rush
THEN eat with 3 blocks of work

ELSEIF eat at home

None of the first three conditions triggered much this week so I tended to eat at home. The other scenario whereby I’ll eat at work is if I’ve packed my own lunch. I am remarkably incapable of packing a lunch that doesn’t depend on salad greens and having none, I didn’t pack my lunch.

On the way from the subway station to my apartment which clocks in at maybe 100 feet, a fellow that looked like a homeless Dudley Moore started following me and asking me questions. I blocked him out and as I approached my front door, the mail man was there. He dropped the mail into the bottom metal box for my downstairs neighbor but then held off dropping mine in when the fellow following me said “Hello” to the mail man. The mail man stopped, somehow presumed the vagrant following me was somehow associated with me and gave him my mail. I slammed the door behind me and got halfway up the stairs before realizing what had just happened. I recalled there being two pieces and both were in glossy envelopes, statistically he is now in possession of a credit card pre-approval and a note to the previous tenant to pay a parking ticket in Seattle, Wa. I hope they make good rolling papers.

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I transitioned back to my house from my mother’s today and I was glad to return home.  I noticed the smell of cat and smoke as I do every time I return home after an extended time away and Max seemed excited to have me back.  He even seemed to pick up on my frail state and was extra energetic when playing with his socks or bedding so I wouldn’t have to do much work to play with him.
The stairs were slow going and going up and down them in a 15 minute window left me winded.  Sleeping still required me to prop up my back and bend my knees and achieving this posture required gathering six pillows from around the house, that is to say all of the extras.  My dad knew that nicotine would interfere with my recovery and politely hurried through his cigarette when he saw me approach.
Some standard elements of my house had become traps.  The tubes in me had a tendency to catch on door knobs and chair arms so whenever I stood it was with caution.  The mail box seemed an impossible distance away and getting up to let out the dog or cat required willpower.  Max no longer bothered me to let him out at night just so he could come in and get a treat and the cat seemed to use his litter box more.
This household too molded to my needs and I appreciated it.

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While my father travels, I’m taking care of the animals which includes a dog, a cat, and a cockatiel. This isn’t time-intensive so much as it’s time restrictive. The cat and cockatiel can safely poop in the house but Max tends to leave… surprises after about 12 hours. Things I’ve missed because of this:

*Barcamp Afterparty
*Drexel Boardgame Night
*UPenn Material Science Night in the Pub
*Philly Start-Up Conference

On the flip-side, I can have people over on a week night and not worry about inundating them with smoke and Jeopardy.  I think it’s a nice break every once in a while.

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I love my father, but he and I make poor housemates. We each have spots of the house that we consider sacred and whose violation we consider sacrilege. I consider it subhuman to not have the toilet paper on the roller, he considers it a throwback to not always have a clean kitchen towel at the sink.  This week and next, he’s on vacation with my mother, his ex-wife, and the person he’s dating which all happen to be the same person.

Tonight I returned to a house empty of other people but containing a dog that a very happy to see me, a cat that saw me, and a cockatiel that was somewhat adversarial.  This house would be mine for the next 10 days and I celebrated by not changing a thing.

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Shipping out cookies in weights of greater than 13 oz is a bit more expensive than one would wish.  Priority mail becomes the best shipping option and generally this will cost between $7.00 and $10.00 for any sort of goodly sized box.  But if one can successfully pack cookies in an envelope which are shipped at a flat rate of $4.95, things suddenly become much more economical.  There is a phenomenon whereby vacuum packed materials become much more firm and resistant to breakage, especially if granular, and this phenomenon was exploited to great success by roboticists earlier this year to create a universal gripper hand:

So, why not try this with cookies?  I bought a vacuum sealer and got to work making cookies.  I vacuum sealed a dozen cookies and pit it against a control group of a dozen cookies in a Zip-Lock freezer bag.  The vacuum cookies won hands down in the drop test where I dropped the bags from a height of about six feet showing no breakage or deformation.  The vacuum sealed cookies also won in the crush test where I put them under a stack of books.  The one case where the Zip-Lock cookies won was in what I call “initial deformation”, the force of the atmosphere is enough to bend a cookie easily if there’s a hint of gooeyness left in the cookie.  As I want my cookies to still be soft, the work around I came up with was freezing the cookies first.  When I failed to do this, and left the cookies in a windowsill, the vacuum package exhibited a behavior I now call “monocookie”.

I’m happy with the increased resiliency of cookies when vacuum-packed and envelope-mailed but I doubt I’ll ever use this process for things that are even a hint of sticky.  If you get molasses cookies from me in a vacuum pack I probably hate you.

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A house mate returned after some business travel and asked me about my new printer:

Him: How big will it print?
Me: 17″ x 22″
Him: Wow, how many colors does it use?
Me: 11.
Him: Impressive. Will it do business cards?
Me: Like standard 10 up business cards or individual ones?
Him: Individual ones.
Me: The minimum print size for this is 8″x10″.
Him: Well, I’m sure it’s very useful to you.

What printer on the face of the planet besides a business card printer will print onto an individual business card?  Franciscan Monk is the only thing I can think of or maybe a standard impact printer.  Maybe he has a foundry I don’t know about.  I’ve never been in his room.

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Housemate’s Girlfriend:  Terry, do you have any weights under 10 lbs, like 3 or 5 lb?
Me: Hm…. if you take the weights off the free weights in my room the handles are 5 lbs or 4 without the nut on them.
Housemate’s Girlfriend: Great, can I use them?
Me: For what?
Housemate’s Girlfriend: Forever.
Me: Um…. no, I use them three days a week.
Housemate’s Girlfriend: Oh, you actually use.  I just.  Wow.  Sorry.
Me: I’m thinking of switching to something with a nicer handles if you…
Housemate’s Girlfriend:  No thank you, I’m just going to walk away now.
Me: Your hair looks nice.
Housemate’s Girlfriend: Thank you.

I’ve found a hair compliment functions like sherbet and can erase the taste of bad conversation in your mouth.

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A popular past time at my house is to light cardboard boxes on fire.  I had accumulated a few boxes and tried to light them but the decals were impeding flammability so I did what any reasonable person would do: Drown it in toluene.

Dave: Looks like you having better luck now.
Me: Yeah, I drowned it in toluene.
Dave: Any hazard to that?
Me: Nah, assuming you didn’t inhale too much.
Dave: And if I did?
Me: Possible kidney failure.
Dave: How would I know?
Me: Do you feel like a teenager sniffing glue?
Dave: No.
Me: You’re fine.

Next I need to burn through my mineral spirits, xylene, and a spot of vintage undenatured alcohol.

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Me: I noticed you keep leaving the grape juice and cranberry juice out.  You should probably put it away.
Housemate’s Guest: There isn’t enough room in the fridge, so I leave them out because they’re tart and won’t go bad.
Me: I don’t think it works that way.  Some juices are slower to spoil but all will.
Housemate’s Guest: Maybe, but the worst case scenario is we wind up with wine.

I’m glad I don’t drink.

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Driving from Chicago to home with a stop in Fort Wayne was dull, except the stop in Fort Wayne.  It’s a route I’ve done before a few times and, since I had a ticket on record in Indiana and my car was out of inspection in PA I drove in that narrow band between “normal speedy” and “driving slow enough that no significant laws are being broken but fast enough that it doesn’t look like you’re trying to hide something”.  This was punctuated by driving across Ohio where the gas was cheap and the roads were barren.  The trade off was that all the rest stops were operated by attendants stunned by customers whose prose lacked elision.  Meh.

Through the drive I was listening to the 54 part series on the History of the United States.  I hit the war of 1812 as I stopped to pick up my rental car, I can’t wait to hear how it ends.  When I got home it looked like someone had broke in and cleaned the ground floor, baked an angel food cake, used the pool table, and somehow emptied the well.  Looks like someone had a party.  Based on the 3 full recyclables container and empty well, a very active party.