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I'm standing at the traffic light, forlornly waiting for it to turn red, so I can walk across the road and stand at the bus stop. I can see the electronic sign from here (just). 20 minutes till the next bus that goes all the way to Hove. The sheeting, hissing, freezing rain is bouncing an inch or so off the pavement as it hits, soaking rapidly into my clothes and laptop bag.
Flash back a bit. Why am I here?
National Novel Writing Month starts soon. There's a group in Brighton, being run by a couple of good friends of mine, and their inaugural meeting was tonight at 1930, in Hove. One of my old English teachers is a member of the group, as are a few other random people I know, and the group as a whole is very cool. It would have been nice to reconnect with them, and to remind myself I'm not totally crazed to be embarking on this quest to write so much, in and around my work. Me, I consider it a welcome break from all the academia: to be able to just write what comes into my head for a change, without worrying about whether it's right, or provable, or supported by results, is a rare pleasure. Still. Other people are at least as crazy as me in this, and most of them would have been at that meeting.
I stayed a little late at uni to get some work tied off, so I was already running late by the time I got to my bicycle. It being, in technical terminology, Bloody Freezing, it took some work to get all my kit tied on or otherwise mounted to the luggage rack, so I lost another five minutes or so before setting off.
The ride back was uneventful until the Coombe Road junction, almost home but barely halfway on the route to the meeting place, a cafe called the Sanctuary. As I approached the traffic lights, the entire frame tugged abruptly backwards under me, once. Since I'm not totally stupid, I pulled up almost straight away and took a look. The rear brake was locked on, solid, because an axle nut had come loose and the wheel was canted about ten degrees in its pivots. Try as I might by hand, I couldn't get the axle nut back on solidly, or the wheel back to its correct angle, so I'll have to look at that tomorrow. I half expect the axle may be damaged, given some of the other symptoms.
Anyway. Bicycle very nearly immobilised, me very nearly road-decoration. Exciting, but not an evening in itself, so I walked the bike home (ten minutes away, rear wheel clunking and hissing against the brake, but I didn't have much choice) and got changed to go to the Sanctuary by bus.
Since the Sanctuary has WiFi, I packed my laptop along with the index cards containing my plot sketches, so I could use the net while at the meeting if needed. I stepped out of the porch and started down the hill in a light mist of rain. Great. My hoodie and jeans are marginally waterproof, so I figured, what the hell? What's the worst that could happen?
The rain ramped up to full-fledged freezing-rain / sleet by the time I reached the bottom of the hill, and was in the condition I mention at the start of this entry by the time I got to the traffic lights. No cover, overflowing drains and gutters made for a very tricky journey. The lights and the buses were the last straw. I like those people, a lot. I don't like them enough to persevere to a meeting in a cafe, in sodden clothes, with a laptop that sounds like a holey water-bucket when shaken. So I turned around and went home. My boots are still damp, six hours later.
Sorry, NaNofolk. I'll be at the next meet, I promise. Unless it's on a Thursday, in which case I'll try... (fencing does have to happen at some point, you know).
Roll on November 1st, and the true start of the madness.
Alright, so I seem to have recovered from the cold that's been hammering me for the last couple of days, and it seems that Colorado has decided that I deserve further punishment. Epic rain, most unseasonable and the heaviest I've ever seen here: it's been raining about eighteen hours in twenty-four for the last three days. The drains are barely coping, and atmospheric humidity is way up. Depressingly, there's no thunder or lightning of any kind, except the occasional desultory flicker.
Still, the weather can't stop everything, so today Rachael, Mike and I went over to our mutual friend Isaac's new house. Isaac has ... secured a bargain in his new place, and consequently a certain amount of improvement work is required. We spent most of the day in the basement, replacing 2ft and 4ft sections of drywall, making holes for the power sockets and other discontinuities that get in the way. Drywall is peculiar stuff: it seems to be sheets of highly compressed gypsum clay with a paper backing. It cuts with a Stanley knife, but takes screws, drills and similar without any trouble. It's kinda crumbly, I must have had five or six corners snap clean off today when fitting panels to spaces for which they weren't quite correctly formed, but, since there's a plaster coat going over the top, I'm not too worried about it.
Anyway, the new victim is Rachael. Like many basements, the one in Doom House (name changed to protect the desperately-in-need-of-further-work) has a sump pit at the lowest point to collect any water that seeps in through the walls. Of course, in this weather it's working overtime, and the sump pump that belongs in that pit is out of action (unsurprisingly, it needs some maintenance). There's a temporary submersible pump in there, and it's mostly equal to the job, but there's always a few inches in the bottom of the 2ft manhole. So, to the Fail. Yeah, Rachael carefully marked the position of the sump, stood over it to plaster the half-centimetre gap between two pieces of drywall, then stepped back into it. Hilarious to hear about, of course not so funny to actually do... I suspect I'll go over there at least once more before I go home (I happen to like home improvement projects, ok?), so I wonder who'll get bitten by the house next time.
Assuming it doesn't float away in this rain, of course...
Hmm. That was exciting.
I took my umbrella with me to university today, since it was drizzling a bit when I set out. Supervised the 9AM class, and spent most of it on IRC (my students are just that good), beat my head against the protocol bridge I'm working on some more, and eventually set out for home. I tend to walk that route quite fast, since I'm normally quite hungry and want to get something to eat: net result, I build up quite a lot of momentum. Nonetheless, about halfway home a sudden and vicious gust of wind literally stopped me in my tracks. The little weird-weather detector I keep in the back of my mind started feeping gently, and I picked up my speed in the face of a fairly constant wind.
The storm broke about ten minutes from home, with rain hitting the umbrella hard enough to almost wrench it out of my hand on occasion. Said portable fabric shelter protected everything from the knees up. The rest essentially became water. And to add insult to injury, lightning went off directly overhead at one point. Light and sound were simultaneous, and the firmware on my MP3 player locked up under the ensuing EMP. The device is fine following a hard reset (by the simple expedient of pulling the battery), and I think the hair on my arms has returned to normal.
So yeah, wet and startled. An exciting end to a dull day. I'm off to install some software.
Bloody weather. It's been cold, rainy and incredibly windy all day. I had to go into town to pick up Christmas presents this morning, and it was windier than it had any right to be. My coat was streaming out behind me and, when I turned away from the wind for a moment my glasses were blown straight off my nose. What. The Fuck?
To add insult to injury, the Engineering block is currently under maintenance (to repair the persistently leaky roofing over some of our more vital switchgear and machinery), so the heating is off. When I went in to do some work, there were four of us in a relatively small lab, and still the temperature fell to the point that I was unable to double-click a mouse. Those of you who have seen the speed with which my fingers move on a keyboard will appreciate what I mean when I say these truly were twenty-words-per-minute temperatures.
Whether it was sheer boredom or the effects of said temperatures over five hours or so I don't know, but by the end of the session I was regularly fantasising about the pasta-based meal I was going to have for tea. This worries me: when a guy is thinking about pasta on a five-second basis, there's something wrong.
So it goes. It may surprise those who know me to hear that I have just discovered Metallica. Good tunes :)