Squee!!

Happy Hearts: An HKO Valentine’s Event

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I know who I want to be my valentine (blush)

New blog posting over at the HKO blog! “Stay tuned” has a good ring to it!

Well, now that I am home, I figured I’d amaze you with more stories. Or bore you, which is probably closer to the mark. But anyways.

Actually did get my install done today. I asked them to start early. Early. But they wanted to do it at 9am, which is not early. By 9am, most people are at work, already engrossed in their daily routines. I was replacing their Nokia IP firewall with a UTM-1 firewall, it disruptes the whole office, which is why I wanted to do it while there were no users around.

When we left the office at 8:30 to go on-site, it was still snowing. The install took 30 minutes, and we waited an hour after that, just to make sure there were no outstanding issues. When we went back to the office, the snow turned into sleet. By the time I felt like ditching work at 12:30, the sleet turned to rain. So it was a fun drive home. I did loose control once or twice, but nothing dangerous, mostly fishtailing or that kind of stuff.

Of course, I had a driveway to shovel when I got home. So I spent at least an hour doing that. Snow, slush, rain and sleet. Fun. And every year, you read about people having health issues while shoveling (heart attack, exposure, broken limbs), so you need to be careful. When the snow is like this, one shovel could easily weigh 20lbs.  I couldn’t use the snow-blower, either, cause it doesn’t work in those conditions.

Even though my Mustang is under a cover, I still clean it off. I don’t want all that weight building up on it. Hopefully next week it will dry out enough to start the car; there is just no way I drive it in this kind of weather.

This is just another stupid snow storm for this year. So far, every storm has been snow-to-ice, or ice-to-snow. I almost wish for a real nor’easter. Almost. Just to get it over with. At least it is the end of January, Feburary being a short month, and March brings Spring! I promise I’ll show you some nice Spring photos, when the trees start to flower and everything is green.

After shovelling, this is what I feel like. Well, that’s what I look like, but I think the picture captures the emotion.

Now you’ll excuse me while I get out of these wet clothes, take a long hot shower, and get myself a nice cup of hot coffee.

As you might have seen from prior postings, I don’t really like snow. Well, it’s not that I don’t like snow itself. I don’t mind if I can stay at home and enjoy the view, not having to worry about driving anywhere. But snow storms rarely take my preferences into consideration.

So I woke up this morning to a heavy snow storm in progress. Luckily it is not a classic nor’easter. Apparently it started not long before I needed to head to work. If you’re familiar with snow removal, you know they can’t plow streets until a certain amount of snow falls. Before that, they just salt and sand the roads. And IMO, sometimes that just makes it worse, because the snow will melt, and then freeze.

Since I am a network engineer, a lot of my work has to be done off-hours, so I come in to work pretty early in the morning.  I started my car like usual, and pondered the idea of not going in to work. Looking at the Weather Channel, I decided to give it a shot. I figured at worse, I can turn around and go home. If I make it in, then I have the rest of the day while street crews try to keep the roads clear. But with my luck, they’ll call off work, and I wouldn’t know, because I’m already here!

Anyways. Here is a shot from my office, out the front of the building. Since I work in a “big city”, the road crews are pretty diligant to maintaining streets.

Of course, the parking garage is a different story, since that is maintained by a different group of people. I don’t park at the top, because it’s easier to exit the building. And if it snows, I don’t have to worry about cleaning my car or getting stuck coming up the hill.

And me at my desk, asking myself “why did I even come in to work today?”. I actually had an install scheduled for today, and told them yesterday that we were going to postpone it, due to the weather. But they said no, don’t postpone it. So here I sit, waiting to perform an install that probably won’t happen today. The coffee cup is unfortunately empty by this time, which makes me a sad panda indeed.

I picked this up some time ago:

I thought it was cute. It is one of those “best friends” types of things. There is an identical mate to it, but I didn’t see any reason to take photo of it. I don’t wear it. It’s kinda of silly of me, I guess, but since nobody is wearing the other half, it made me feel a little little funny.

Feeling a little lonely, so here are just some random images of my cat. She can usually make me smile.

Feeding time soon?

Seated on her throne.

Freedom Call is an excellent but under-rated German power-metal band. This is the song that made me say “wow”. I’m feeling frustrated with my life right now, and when I hear this song, it usually makes me feel a little happy; but right now, I wish I could take the advice and “arise from the cower”. This isn’t live or anything, just static images.

I got this as a Christmas present in 2007.

I’m actually not using it at the moment. It is very battery-hungry, and rather than keep buying AA batteries, I wanted to pick up a recharagable battery kit. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet :-/ The dongle on the left is the wireless receiver, which blinks when the mouse moves.

It is very “bling”, which is not really my style, but this was the only HK optical wireless mouse available. There is a nice wired mouse, but this is not an optical mouse. It uses a mouse-ball, which is a grime magnet.

I love chocolate. In almost any form or style. In my house, there are always chocolate treats. Whether it’s chocolate cookies like Oreos, individual chocolate cakes like Swiss Rolls, or even just chocolate bars like Hersheys. If you ever visit me and need a chocolate fix, I’m sure I could accommodate.

Today, someone gave me one of these new Hershey Kisses, called Cherry Cordial. And all I gotta say is if you like chocolate, go buy a package of these things. They’re apparently seasonal for Valentine’s Day, so get them while they’re hot. When I went into the store to buy a package of these, there was one left, even though they had tons of the other stuff (like the caramel-filled Kisses).

The USB memory stick I won arrived this morning. I knew it was going to be delivered, because I had a delivery ticket, so I was looking forward to receiving it today. So here are some images to enjoy! Please forgive the length and graphic-rich posting; I’m kind of excited.

The postage stamps. As I previously mentioned, I’m a birder, and these are nice stamps. Two of the birds appear to be of Asian locale, the long-tailed shrike and the common kingfisher. I’m pretty sure my field guide (specific to the eastern seaboard of the USA) wouldn’t list these, so I won’t even look it up. Yea, I’m kinda geeky that way, but it might be nice to actually add these to my log one day.

And someone has very nice handwriting! I’ve got terrible printing. Some of my friends call me “X” because my handwriting is atrocious.

An interesting packaging system.

And the back:

The memory stick is very tiny! It has its own little case.

And finally, the actual memory stick. Tiny (and blurry), indeed!

I did plug it into my PC. Was kinda curious if there might be something on it. Maybe some secret screenshots of the up-and-coming HKO OB, audio files, a group shot of the team, or maybe just one particular person of the team. Oh wait, I didn’t say that last part out loud, did I? How about that generic sports team? But, alas, it was empty.

Again, thanks to everyone at HKO (and Sanrio, and Sanrio Digital) for this game, the events, and everything. If you haven’t guessed already, I’ve been having a wonderful time with the HKO community, even if I act like a total dork sometimes.

Here are a couple of things I’ve picked up here and there. I have some other stuff laying about, too. But first, here is a Kitty plushie.

I think I picked her up in 2002. She was packed up from the last time I moved, and was really grungy. The care label says “surface wash only”, but since she was already in bad shape, I took a risk and put her in the washing machine. I let the spin-cycle dry her, so no dryer. That probably would have ruined her for sure. She came out nice and white!

In 2007, a friend of mine gave me this. Can you guess what it is?

It’s a candy tin! The best part about it is that it is legally licensed (as is the plushie above). Yea, I do worry about that kind of stuff.

Woke up to this:

That is zero degrees farenheit. I guess that is -17 degrees celcius? Makes me want to stay in bed, under the covers, all day. Although there are places here in the US that have even lower temps.

I normally like to sleep with a fan running, even when it’s not warm. When it’s cold out, I set it on low, but I like the breeze and air movement, and the sound helps me to fall asleep. Not last night, I tell you that!

A day late, and a dollar short, as the saying goes. This was recently posted to the official HKO blog. Good news. And Miyaw has been tempting us with a screenie.

My MBLife pendant arrived today. Actually, it arrived Monday, but I was not home, so they left a delivery ticket. Which meant that they picked up the ticket on Tuesday and then actually delivered on Wednesday. Such is life?

I tried to get some photos of the stamps on the package, because they were written in Chinese with some very pretty bird images. I’m actually a birder myself. What’s a birder? You might call us “bird watchers”, but we call ourselves birders.

Here is the pendant box. Almost too nice to open.

And inside the box. Forgive the blurriness. This is my first name initial, the letter B, since it’s not for anyone particular. I guess if I ever give this to someone as a gift, and her name does not begin with B, I can always say it means “bellissimo”! (meaning beautiful)

Thank you to HKO  for the opportunity to participate in an event with such beautiful gifts.

I made a button. All the cool people are doing it, so I wanted to try my hand at it. I’m pretty inept regarding artistic or creative stuff like this.

Whether anyone will use it is another story, but that’s not the point.

Now, before you sadly shake your head and edge away, let me explain.

I’ve been a huge fan of Tolkein for years, probably since ~1980, long before “those movies” (which were pretty good, actually), and Azog is character from the M-e mythos. I’ve been using that pseudonym for years. although it has become popular elsewhere. If you google for azog, you’ll find not just me, but others who have adopted this as their online persona. The text is a writing system named cirth, which Tolkien had adapted from the futhark, so, read left-to-right, it simply says, azog.

Pretty interesting, huh? Yea, I know. Just humor him, they said.