i prefer pi

Mild-mannered Caleb is sitting at his computer, looking at reviews for rice cookers, trying to decide whether he can justify the $130 pricetag for what essentially amounts to a computerized pot. Out of the corner of his eye, he spys something moving. He turns… and looks… and waits… but whatever it was is clearly more patient than Caleb, because he sees nothing and goes back to reading reviews. But there it is again! Caleb looks, more intently this time, because he thinks that he just saw a bug crawling up his monitor cable. “What was that? A big ant?” Caleb hates ants, so he waits and watches again. The whatever-it-is isn’t so wily this time, and it gives up its location. It’s a spider! Knowing that it’s been spotted, it scrambles along the cable, heading for the dark refuge of the plastic cord casing. “Hey, get outta there!” Caleb has a brief vision of spider webs and hundreds of baby spiders pouring out of his monitor, so he knows that he has to act quickly. By the time he gets around behind his monitor, the fiend is nowhere to be seen. In desperation, he blows into the nest of cables, and — luck! — the spider is expelled. Now exposed on the kitchen table, the spider scrambles for cover. “Oh, no you don’t!” Caleb grabs the notebook sitting next to him and begins to run around to the other side of the table and –Stars.

The rather phenomenal sequence of events leading up to the current situation would have made a great study of cause and effect, had anyone been around to study it. A power outage at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, an animé series called Samurai Champloo, the decision to do a load of laundry, a pair of headphones wrapped around a table leg, socked feet, and a recently-waxed kitchen floor culminated in interrupting the spider’s imminent demise.

As Caleb lies on the ground, slightly dazed, piecing together what just happened, the spider (presumably) scurries away.

The score? Spider: 1, Caleb: 0.

Yesterday afternoon, I took the 545 Express into Seattle with no particular goal in mind, just to see what I could see. And I saw a lot. I saw signs: “Heather C., please come home. Everything is all right. Everyone misses you,” written in Sharpie on notebook paper and taped to building walls. I saw a travelling Bavarian band walking down the hill to the waterfront, jingling all the way. I saw the world’s first Starbucks, and I saw the world’s longest Starbucks line. I saw flying fish and a five-hundred pound piggy bank and a size 40 shoe. I ate at a Russian piroshky stand and had lemonade from a Korean fruit vendor and walked past a restaurant specializing in Turkish Delight and “the best lamb gyros in the hemisphere” (his father makes the world’s best back in Greece). I saw the Seattle office of the American Institute of Architects, with intricate models and photos of beautiful houses in the window and a homeless man sitting on the stoop.

Yesterday afternoon, I took the 545 Express into Seattle with no particular goal in mind, just to see what I could see.

I think that I’m allergic to Washington. *sniffle*

My office, circa 11:30 AM:

“Caleb, I have some good news, and I have some bad news. Which do you want first?”

“Uhh… I’ll take the bad news…”

“Good! Because that’s what I was going to give you anyway. The bad news is that your account is migrating between domains, and you don’t have any access to the network. It’s a seamless process, and we’ve all done it before, so you don’t have to worry about losing your profile or anything.”

“Oh good. I thought that I was fired or something. That’s the good news too?”

“No, the good news is that I don’t have anything else for you to do. Take the rest of the day off, go home, get an early start on your three day weekend.”

“Oh. That is good news.”

Can you believe how hot it was today? We almost set a record high. I mean, 84 degrees?? This is ridiculous.

(Nyah, nyah. )

I reset my bike computer the other day. In the last year, I covered 148 miles on my bike — that’s pretty puny, but my excuse is that my rear tire was flat for most of the time. My goal is to get 300 by the year’s end, but at the rate I’m going, I’ll be likely to get around 200 by the time that school rolls around.

You wouldn’t believe how scatterbrained I was this morning. I’m getting ready to walk out of the door, and it’s roughly 8:30. I roll my bike out of the apartment (because there’s no bike rack nearby). I start to head down the stairs, but — oops! — I forgot to lock the door. For some reason, I’d packed my keys into my bike toolkit, even though I was wearing jeans, so they would have easily gone into my pocket. Dig those out, lock the door. Put them back into the toolkit (I’m scatterbrained, remember?). As I get down to the end of the sidewalk, I realize that somehow or another, I’ve gotten a black chain mark on my pants from brushing up against my bicycle. Back inside the house (have to dig those keys out again) to change. Take off my backpack and dump out my pockets, change, then head back out again. Get outside, lock the door, and — oops again! — forgot my helmet. Unlock the door, fetch the helmet, lock the door, unlock the door, fetch the backpack, lock the door, get on the road. Total elapsed time: roughly 20 minutes. Resolved: to do better.

Something monumental, something epic, something amazing happened 28 years ago today. No, I wasn’t born. My parents weren’t married, and I don’t even think that they were dating. Dimitri wasn’t even born. No, on May 25, 1977, a small film called “Star Wars” was released. This has been your trivia moment of the day, brought to you by the letter “T”, the number “93″, and Nature’s Valley Apple Crisp granola bars.

Well, I didn’t go swimming, but I did bike up to the athletic club, scope the place out, and run a few miles. If I’m not mistaken, I think it was the first time that I’ve ever used a treadmill (or if not the first time, it was the first time that I’ve spent any significant amount of time running on one). I was quite disoriented afterward. It was sort of that feeling that you have when you walk around after skating for a long time… when you take a step, you feel like you ought to be moving very differently than you actually are. Peculiar.

My head is longing for there to be more dessert foods in my apartment, but I think that it’s actually a good thing that all that I have are fruit and granola bars and carrots. We’ll see how long this lasts before I start buying orange slice tubs at Fred Meyer.

Today was my first day at Microsoft (again), and it was substantially better even than last year’s first day. I have a feeling that I’m going to get a lot more done this summer (in a lot less time) and have a lot more fun doing it than I did in aught-four (which is saying a lot, because last summer was a blast). I think that I’m going to head home, have some supper, and then go bike and swim for a while — no 30-minute rule for me! Actually, what’s more likely is that I’ll head home, have some supper, and then go and think about biking and swimming for a while.

Today was busy, but I’m short on time, so you’ll be short on updates. I have a new goal, which is to be able to bike back from Bellevue without stopping to walk. It’s only five or six miles, but the hills — oh, the hills! It was grueling. Work tomorrow; bed now.

From The Facebook:

Brian Nadeau has a birthday on May 25th.

Sadness.