2002-05-06 - 9:55 a.m.
Everything is temporary, but some things are more temporary than most.

Goodness. The peculiarities of office construction ... I wonder why I didn't notice before? The building being leased by the non-profit I work for used to be state offices, but I think it was something else before that. At some point, the room layout must have been vastly different, because everywhere I look, the walls fail to meet the ceiling. It's really strange.

They must have thrown new walls in to subdivide the place long after it was first built. Maybe it was all cubicles in the beginning, with support columns containing electrical outlets scattered among them, instead of true walls. No way to tell. There's only a few millimeters of gap in most places, but the ceiling tile definitely goes right over the walls into the offices. There's even an ivory-painted metal "cap" over the wall in most areas. Temporary walls are probably common in leased buildings like this, but I've never seen them before. I'd love to get my hands on the blueprints.

My dad used to have pads of that blue paper that people use to draw schematics on, ruled not only across but up-and-down and anglewise as well, with space for a legend at the bottom. Dad used it to draw electrical circuits. Mom used it to re-arrange furniture, cutting little precisely measured shapes out and moving them around a drawing of the room to see what would actually work before she called in Dad's muscle to effect it. Azash and I used it to design our "dream houses", complete with secret passageways and underground movie theaters. It was a lot of fun. Not that I completely understand "real" blueprints, but there's a certain thrill in looking at the guts of a building drawn out in 2-D.

*stretching* I'm still tired. I turned off my alarms on autopilot this morning, then snapped awake ten minutes later, still tired and fuzzy at the edges but quite definitely kicked out of dream-world. I'd gotten almost exactly five hours of sleep. Eeesh. It's nice that my body's getting on a schedule, but I'd rather it be six hours than five; I'm still zombie-fied at 9 a.m. on only five hours of sleep. I only did that all last week because I was trying to catch up with my reading! Oh well.

I levelled my EQ wizard to 12 last night and picked up a quest drop and 100 platinum from various helpful people. Gee, maybe I should have been a wizard at the beginning; my 32 mage has languished in one place forever, unable to find good groups to fight with, so I haven't played much of late. It would be easy to get sucked back in now that I'm having fun, but I have the example of Azash to deter me. Well, it's better for you than drink or drugs, I guess, and it's pretty cheap as addictions go: $12.95 a month. *grin*

I've noticed something about your typical sci-fi/fantasy geek. (It might be true of other genre fans as well, but I haven't seen elsewhere yet). Put a group of them together and they are quite capable of lauching a discussion of the nature of vampires or the biological basis for telekinesis or the physics of faster-than-light travel without even blinking. It can take minutes or hours before somebody finally grinds to a halt and admits, "Well, it's not like any of this is real, anyway."

Last night Azash had a friend over and we were going on an on about whether or not vampires could survive underwater. We discussed how deep they'd have to go to escape the sun's rays during the day, whether the pressure would threaten them at those depths, whether pressure could kill a vampire, whether coming back up would give them the "bends" since they only breathe in order to speak and presumably therefore wouldn't have gaseous components in their bloodstream, and whether fish blood would be enough to sustain them. *rolling eyes* What a conversation.

Anyway. *yawn* I'm about a fourth of the way through my day, and, incidentally, a third of the way through the year, and over three months into my current employment. *shudder* Time to get a move on.

Thought for the day:
"A feast is made for laughter, and wine makes life merry, but money is the answer for everything." Ecclesiastes 10:19 (NIV).