No, this isn’t a time-optimization of a certain song (which I happen to like, but I’ve pretty much always liked Madonna’s music). Three minutes is the amount of time it takes for me to go from a dead sleep to out of my apartment with a bag of essentials when a whole-building fire alarm goes off at three in the morning.

I appear to be going through potential disasters this year. Tornadoes, flooding, now (potential) fire. Fortunately, it was a false alarm–a “pressure surge in the water delivery system indicated it was in use and therefore activated the alarm”. What I found fascinating was the complete lack of response of this fire alarm. There are over 400 people in that buildings but only about 40-50 actually left the building. Probably about 30 left via car. Another 40 or so remained in the stairwell, despite the known problems of panic in stairwells causing death, but apparently they felt it was perfectly fine to stay there instead of leaving a building that potentially was on fire. Not as bad as the people still in their apartments looking out at all the people outside. I mean, they were rubbernecking from inside the building that has an active fire alarm.

And those are the people who complain the most if they get hurt or injured in case it was actually a fire.

Another interesting thing was that only one person I saw actually saved their cat. Of course, it looks like most people didn’t bother leaving the building, so they may have had their cats in the stairwell with them, but it just reminds me of the thousands of animals just abandoned during the flood. As I mentioned before, I take a serious effort to take care of my animals. I don’t abandon them because it is inconvenient or put them to sleep when they cause problem. No, I visit them at my in-laws twice a week (well, the best I can, car troubles not withstanding), despite the over hour driving just to do so. So, when I see that people just left their animals in a building that might be on fire, that just saddens me.

Since the flood, I’ve been having some interesting problems keeping up with my own life. When you are going day by day, you don’t really think about adding one more bookmark, one more web comic, or even one more RSS feed to browse through. And, once you are used to it, adding a second or third really isn’t a problem. But, when I took two months off without a computer, going back became difficult. I tried, but I can’t keep up because I wasn’t used to it anymore. The double-whammy of GenCon and flood, basically forced me to get rid of things that I just kind of had lingering around–simply because I couldn’t keep up.

(more…)

Just another tiny little short thing. As some of you know, I was impacted by the flood that took out large parts of Iowa. During those 50 days that I couldn’t go home, I did a temporary change of address to forward my mail to the in-laws so I could get it; that way I didn’t have to go to the post office every few days, on the opposite side of town when all the bridges were closed, just to check my mail. I picked a random date about three months in the future, I mean, how long could mail be disrupted?

And it worked. It worked beautifully.

The problem came at the end of last month. My license plate was about to expire, so I had Fluffy mail me the updated sticker (which was an adventure by itself). Should have been a nice neat thing. That was three weeks ago and, you guessed it, still no sticker.

I gave it a proper week before tracking it down, just in case the USPS was going slow. Problem one came up, my temporary change of address had expired, so my mail was no longer going to the in-laws. It was going to the post office. The post office would normally forward it to the temporary drop-box for my apartment complex, but I never set it up because I had it forwarding to the in-laws (and thought it was going another few weeks). Since I never set it up, they were automatically returning to sender which means Fluffy would get it back in a few days.

A week has passed since then. I’m two weeks into having expired plates, which makes me very nervous driving. I don’t like breaking the law. The sticker hasn’t shown up for Fluffy, or the in-laws which I resumed my forwarded mail. I’m about to get a second replacement sticker (part of the long story) because it apparently takes over two weeks for mail to go to Iowa, get bounced back, and returned.

Just in case I thought my troubles with the flood were over. :)

Oh, and according to the building manager, the apartment will be able to handle isn’t own mail somewhere near the end of October or November.

Addictions don’t always come with the shakes.
Nor do they have sweat dripping down your face
Or the gasping whimpers while curled in a corner.
Sometimes, they are just that moment at midnight
When you are still awake and staring at the window
Or just a feeling of something horribly wrong.
Sometimes, you don’t really realize your addiction
Until that first moment of exquisite relief
You feel when you start right back up.

For the last two weeks, I’ve had a ritual. Every morning, I’d wake up, unplug the modem for a minute, then plug it back in and see if the Internet has been restored. Each day I was greeted with two blinking lights that basically mocked me with their inability to give me a series of tubes. Last Thursday, Mediacom was suppose to come in, but through a series of bad events, it didn’t happen. Yesterday, they were suppose to come between 13:00 and 17:00. I anxiously waited, running through what-if scenarios that I do constantly. What if they don’t show up? What if they can’t fix it? What if the building collapses?

(Yeah, don’t get me started on the what-ifs if Fluffy is three hours late coming home.)

When I finally got that phone call, I was so excited. Just in case, I unplugged my modem, waited a minute, and plugged it back in. Two flashing lights, nada. He showed up twenty minutes later. Unplugged it, waited a minute, plugged it back in.

…

And it connected.

He did it again.

It connected again.

Okay, I know he fixed it before he came up, but damn it was frustrating for a minute to just have someone walk in and fix it. Then, I realized the other things:

I HAVE MY INTERNETS!

So, um, let’s just say the next 7-8 hours consisted of “poor time management” and resulted in me going to be two hours late to bed, hours of insomnia since I seriously considering doing “just a bit more”, and being 15 minutes late to work the next morning. I’m exhausted, tired, almost caught up on email and forum stuff, still have 413 RSS feeds to browse through, my alternative LiveJournal account to go through three months of friends, and this game that I’m very happily coding. Oh yeah, and that homework thing.