Birthday miscellany

It's my birthday. Yay!

Things have gone well, after a rocky start -- I woke up with my shoulders locked up, in enough pain and inflammation that I felt like I was going to be sick. I managed to get that under control in less than an hour, happily.

I spent the day with Greg, driving down to see littlemissstoli while her human is away. Then I grabbed some paneer tikka masala at Daawat, ate a bit while Greg had Panda Express for lunch, stopped by to get something left at Chaos Castle last weekend (Dominic is a sweetheart), and came back up to ransom the RV from the shop for far too much money. The generator works now, at least, and other than some small handyman-style fixes and things like topping off the batteries and the spare tire, it's just about ready to go. Whew.

I tied up the tomatoes again (they're responding well to weekly feeding) and picked my first 1-pound tomato in several years. They're just getting started, too. O.O

My dad gifted me with a pair of 1-GB memory sticks so that I can upgrade the laptop... and my mom just handed me a couple of fat collections of Stinz. It's a bizarre comic, but I'll read them at the burn, where they'll fit right in. :) Then I opened my mail to find a $50 rebate check from Verizon, from when I bought my phone.

Now we're about to go out and get ice cream before finally seeing The Dark Knight.

Life musings

Something that struck me: I'm becoming a professional. Yikes.

It came to me a few weeks ago when we were in the South Bay, and Brian asked for my opinion on some trees he was hoping to move; I told him which ones would work, and which wouldn't, and exactly why. After discussing sun exposure, I was going out through the front yard (the gardenia was suffering from high pH soil) and I realized that what I had just done was to dispense my professional opinion. It felt... odd.

It came back this afternoon when I was working over Greg's bike for the Burn -- it had a slow leak in both tires, and I had already changed the tube in the back. The front wheel needed a new rim liner, so I cut one from an old leaky tube and put it in (never done it before, but it's not a hard thing to grasp) and put the whole thing back together. I had to put the chain back on the gears (it had slipped), rode it a little to settle the chain in the back (it needs to be under load to do that), checked the bad brakes (ancient pads and some maladjustment) and generally looked it over. I pronounced that it was pretty much ready to go, given new pads and a little lube... then I felt weird when I realized I was the resident expert. There's a lot about bikes I don't know, but I've hit that point where I know enough that I can look really knowledgeable to the average person, and I can do the basic maintenance -- and check for larger problems -- easily. About where I am in linux, actually. :)

I know enough about some things that I can pronounce my conclusions with some authority. It's kind of heady, and kind of intimidating. It's also a nice change, after going through so much of my life having to rely on guesswork. My god, I actually know something! How's that for a birthday revelation?