Commented out

Haloscan - the service I had used for the comments since the blog's inception in 2005 - is apparently about to be no more. Therefore, I edited the template so that it's now using Blogger's comment form. Unfortunately, this means that every comment in the history of the blog just went down the hatch. This probably isn't that big of a deal - it had already happened at least once, a few years ago - but just FYI.

(Weather) Odds and (Chicago Card) Ends

The weather has been really weird this summer. Aside from a stretch of about one week, it's been cold - it got disgustingly hot for a few days, at which point I finally got around to putting my air conditioning unit in, and then it immediately cooled off and has barely cracked 80 at any point since. Mother Nature, you're hilarious. Seriously, I know it's night, but it's barely above 60 right now. I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, I guess - not having to run A/C means I don't have to pay any additional utilities, and having it be 75 and mild every day is pretty enjoyable. But it's just weird. I mean, it's mid-July! 75 isn't summer in Chicago, it's summer in London.

In more annoying news, the CTA sent me a note a few weeks ago saying my Chicago Card would soon expire. I went online to renew it and did what they told me to do, but a much later expiration date was listed, and sure enough, the next day I got an e-mail saying I had been erroneously mailed the letter saying my card would expire. I went on about my business until today, when I was unable to get into the el in the morning because... my card was listed as expired.

I called the CTA and they weren't terribly helpful, saying that a number of people were having the issue and that the powers-that-be weren't sure which course of action to take. Their only solution for now is explaining the situation to the workers at every single station (and/or bus drivers) and hoping they buy it and let me in for free. 1-for-1 so far (since I wasn't sure what was going on, I paid the cash fare this morning), but that's really not much of a solution, right? What if I'm in a hurry because the train is arriving? Trying to explain the situation to someone who may or may not have been briefed on it and may or may not believe me if they weren't is probably not something that can happen in ten seconds. And of course I take the Purple Line, which only runs once every 15 minutes at most times. They'd better resolve this problem soon.

O, hi (o)

Back from Ohio. We drove out for Alma's niece's christening. It's not that terrible a drive to the Cleveland area, about six hours each way. Not too much to say about it, I guess. It was a nice ceremony and I liked getting a little break from routine (too much routine being the main reason so little has appeared here recently). It's a strange feeling to take a trip like that, though - I feel like I've been gone for a week, in part because each travel day really feels like two days.

We did get one pretty good story out of this, though. There was a bunch of stuff in the car when we drove out on Friday because Alma's parents sent a number of things with us (as they were flying out the next day), and when I went to carry several of them inside, I accidentally left my keys on the seat... and then closed the door. It's hard to lock the keys in my car because you can't push the driver's door lock down when it's open, but I closed and locked it first, and then still had my keys in my hand when I went to get stuff out of the back. Ugh. Pretty sure that's the first time I ever locked my keys in the car; at least it certainly was the first time I locked them in the Civic.

The upshot is that I was this close to letting my AAA membership lapse a few weeks ago, and now I've used it twice in less than a month (first when a tire blew out on the highway, and then with the keys). But the best part of this story is coming. So I call AAA at 8:30 and they say they're going to send someone over. It gets to be close to 10:00 and suddenly my phone lets me know that a call has gone straight to voicemail. When I check it, it's the dispatcher saying that the truck is looking for me. Argh. I run downstairs and call them back, and the dispatcher asks if I see the truck. I don't, so he checks with the garage and then comes back to me.

Dispatcher: "Can you check and see if your door is unlocked?"
Me: [checking] "No, still locked."
Dispatcher: "Okay, let me check with the garage again."
[thirty seconds later]
Dispatcher: "Are you parked by the pool?"
Me: "No."
Dispatcher: "...okay, we'll have him come back by."

So... they unlocked someone else's car door and then just left? Awesome.

Posting

Wow, it's been a month? It's amazing how little has been going on. I did have my 26th birthday, which was pretty non-noteworthy. I got Blue Planet DVDs from Alma to accompany the Planet Earth she got me last year, which was nice, and my parents got me both a subscription to The Economist and the Rosetta Stone software for Tagalog, which I really need to get started on. So I got everything I really wanted, which is always nice.

Class has started up for this quarter and my time is already running pretty short. I'm just praying that as few Cubs playoff games as possible are scheduled on Monday and Thursday nights, although I'm also praying, of course, that there are as many Cubs playoff games as necessary for a title. If the expense of that is me having to watch a couple on DVR, I could live with it. If a potential World Series clincher was on one of those days, maybe I could make an exception (we get one free skip).

Politics are making me ill. I really just need to avoid this garbage until Election Day. And no offense, but if you're voting for McCain you're probably an idiot.

Back in town

I'm back from San Diego. A deeper discussion of this with pictures will be up within a few days once Alma can get all her photos into the computer, but it was pretty nice, even if I only managed to see one of the two Cubs wins and had to sit through their loss. By far the worst part of the trip was the flight back in - in particular, the end of it, which was at best the second-worst turbulence I can recall having to deal with thanks to 35 mph winds at O'Hare - and while the weather wasn't quite as warm as maybe I would have liked, it's not bad when the weather is in the mid-60s with some sun and no humidity. It certainly isn't worse than the steamy 85 degrees I came back to.

All in all, it was a pretty fun time, and a good choice for my first true vacation since 1994. I don't know if I'll be able to take a vacation like that every year, but I'd like to. I think it's been good for me to just have some time away, not having to worry about anything. (Kudos to work for not calling me in a panic at any point.)

Cold snapped

While it's not 2001 - the year that set the record for "most late-season days without hitting 70," by not reaching that mark until June 7 - this spring has been pretty miserable so far. It's only cracked 70 on a handful of occasions, then only barely, and usually it's timed that to coincide with rain, making the warmer temperatures impossible to enjoy. With that in mind, today was probably the first truly nice day of the year, getting all the way up to 77 and only delivering a sprinkle of rain around 1:30 or so. It was a bit windy, but I like wind in the right conditions anyway. Alma and I, along with Justin and Margie, made the first mini golf trip of the year (to Par King) as a result. You can find the results on the Mini Golf page if you want to. Which you don't.

We stopped by Cold Stone afterwards and I had some of their Oatmeal Cookie Batter ice cream, which I hadn't seen before. Pretty good.

Speaking of hopefully enjoying better weather, I'm off to San Diego in a week. Maybe the Cubs can stop sucking ridiculous amounts of ass on the road while I'm there. We can only hope. I'll try to take pictures (or have Alma take pictures/video, since her camera is better and can take videos with sound) and then post them when I get back, although no promises. I may also have some updates from San Diego if Alma brings the laptop, since I'll actually have things to update about (unlike the usual week).

Other exciting (?) developments: the Lost finale is on Thursday, and I will spending three hours re-watching the first part and then watching parts two and three. I've got high hopes for it - last year's finale ruled, and while it seems unlikely that this year's can do anything quite so head-spinning, there's a lot more going on plot-wise right now. I briefly considered doing a Simmons-esque running diary for it, but that seems like more work than I need to put into the eventual blog entry for it considering I know like three people who actually watch the show.

I'm alive!

Gosh, it's been a while, hasn't it? Something like four weeks, in fact, which I think is the longest posting break in BigFlax.com history. But I have my reasons. #1, of course, is that between working full-time and going to school two nights a week, there's not much time to blog. And then #2 is that between working full-time and going to school two nights a week, there's not much worth blogging about, either.

To answer the obvious question first: school is going fine so far. The first exam in Intro to Psych is next week; I'm really looking to maintain as high a GPA as I possibly can, so I'm definitely shooting for As in these first two classes, which ought to be doable. Anyway, it's a start.

I've also been sick recently, so I spared you a week of "ohhh, this suuuucks" updates. I'm still shaking off something which first showed up on Friday the 15th, knocked me out over the next few days (to the point that I missed Monday and Tuesday of work that week, and only through sheer force of will dragged myself to class on Tuesday night), and has pretty much been lingering in sporadic cough and intermittently stuffy/runny nose form ever since. At this point I'm probably at 90-95% health, or at least 90-95% of my usual, which may or may not actually be "100% healthy," but the last 5% of illness has proven tough to shake. I could probably stand to sleep a little more, which would probably help, but it's hard. To get as much sleep as I'm "supposed to," I would need to go to bed around 11pm every night, which just. Isn't. Happening. I could barely get to bed by 11 during the period when I was getting up at 5:30 for work.

What else? Well, due to my combination of work and school commitments, and the fact that (also due in large part to same) I have watched pretty much no college basketball this year, I'm actually not going to run the Tournament Challenge, for the first time since 2000. Maybe if people want to get an ESPN group together or something just for bragging rights, that'd be cool, but I'm not feeling collecting money, organizing and updating brackets, etc. Just too much work, this year, with everything else going on. This news will undoubtedly please Alma and any other readers who give zero shits about college basketball, although it means I'm going to have to find something else to post daily about if I want to keep up my usual March volume. In 2006 I made 28 posts in March. 28! Please note that it is highly unlikely you will ever see me make 28 posts in one month ever again, for any reason.

This winter has been kind of soul-sucking, which may also have contributed to my lack of posting. Alma's car got stuck on a patch of ice a week ago Tuesday; I went up on Wednesday night and attempted to use some traction-creating plastic things I found at Target, but they didn't work. We ended up going to Ace on Saturday afternoon and getting an ice chopper, and Alma sat in the car while I chopped at the ice around the right front tire so that once I got part of it stripped away, she could try to back out of the space. It still took several attempts and I eventually realized that the problem was not just the ice behind the tire but in front of the tire as well, oddly enough. Alma took some pictures which maybe she'll post on her blog at some point. At any rate, that whole struggle was emblematic of the winter as a whole. It's just snowed a ton, and when it hasn't been snowing it's been really cold, except for like the one weird day when it wasn't. I couldn't be more ready for spring to get here, although I suspect we're not going to hit 60 degrees until about May 20th.

So that's what's been going on. Slogging through a shitty winter, working, and getting used to going to school again. Not much more to say than that, I suppose, but hopefully I can get back to posting a bit more often than once a month, lest you think I've gone all Matt Pearl on you.

Link updates

A change to the sidebar: the BlogRoll is now divided into two 12-link groups. The first 12 are friends' blogs, sorted top to bottom in order of how much I visit them. (I've tried to avoid sorting them like that in the past, but I mean, is this really going to hurt anyone's feelings? The people who I visit less often either know it or, more likely, don't notice and don't care much either. The people lower on the list tend to update less frequently anyway. I also was forced to drop Nemo and Pearl - I didn't really want to, but I would have had to find two more blogs to balance them out, and they both haven't updated for almost a year. If you guys ever get back online, give me a holler.)

The second 12 are blogs that I either write or read regularly. Try to guess which is which; I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

As always, if you have a blog that I'm not linking to, let me know - I think I've covered most of this site's regular visitors who actually have blogs, but you never know.

ETA: One other note: while BlogRolling is still useful enough for organizational purposes, it's been terrible about showing updates, which apparently has to do with a lot of ping spam it's been getting. So the links on the side may well be updated and you just won't see the arrow like you used to. I would suggest regularly checking any you might actually want to read.

(As long as I'm here, I got a promotion at work. More money, but also more responsibility. It's going fine so far, and the summer tends to be pretty slow, so things are good at the moment. But ask me in November.)