Spike prefers the Glock 34, which happens
to be the same gun I used on Friday.

Bits and pieces and odds and ends and I'm in one of my moods, if you feel like you're standing on the outside of an inside joke, you're not missing anything, there's nobody in here but me.

Half way point of the marathon oncall, I managed to get two rotations to overlap such that I went on last Monday morning at 9am and don't get off until this Friday at midnight. And I ran the downtime May 27 which means the last day that I did not work was May 21. This is a blessing, it's much better than being left to my own devices.

Friday I went shooting with Bob and Matt, Bob is very serious about this, and shoots better than I realized it was possible to do with a handgun. I went because I am kind of afraid of guns and know little except for Boy Scouts which doesn't count, I tended to stay away because I knew enough about the other things those 12 year olds did for fun at boy scout camp (spray mosquito repellent on the tent and set it on fire, throw frogs in the fire .. fire was involved a lot) that I was never exactly comfortable about them having firearms. Anyway Bob puts five shots into a group the size of a quarter, dead center in the target. Me, hey, I hit the target five times. Bob gave me some tips and I have no idea what he said but it helped quite a bit, my five shots were inside the second-inner ring the last time. I only tried a couple of times because I'm not sure how long my hands can hold the gun and it wasn't something I was keen on finding out.

Saturday I went to work in the morning in order to trade for a few hours off the pager in the afternoon; Vanessa came up from Santa Cruz and we went to this Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto that was Chip's suggestion and seemed to be pretty good, then went to Av's barbecue and played cards. Not sure if that was the most exciting thing in the world for her, but once my few hours were up I was back oncall and couldn't be away from home or another Google person's internets.

Tonight I watched the end of Cowboy Bebop, a mistake. Hear me out, I'm no big anime fan, I mostly watched it because I like the music and the first 23 episodes are nothing you're likely to take seriously. But then the last three episodes are something else. They complete the tragic back stories for each of the main characters, then dispose of said characters. Certain plot revelations hit a little close to home (yes it is a silly cartoon show, laugh if you must) as reflected in the fun-house mirror of my own soap opera history, such that as the characters are separated and isolated for the last time I find myself identified pretty strongly with one. (Probably not one you would guess.) Then the final tag-line (these are only quasi-English, most episodes end with "See You Space Cowboy") is "You're Gonna Carry That Weight."

You can say one thing about the ending, it sure doesn't leave you hanging. When it's over, it's over. The kind of ending I would write. Even though I'm gonna carry that weight.

Epilogue and blog house-keeping: Not-That-Eric shall henceforth be known as Eric, because I have met some other Erics too and the namespace is getting too cluttered. I know, I haven't been writing much and what I wrote hasn't made a lot of sense, thats ok, actually I have got a few too many readers for this page to serve its original purpose (which is obsolete anyway), and so when I don't have anything nice to say I don't say anything at all. And by the way, if you're reading my nonsense and you have a nonsense page of your own and you haven't told me, you're cheating.

06 Jun 2006 02:56 PT - persistent link - trackback - 3 comments