A seething mass of turgid drama.

Monday we flew to LA for a quick vacation.
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And now back to catching up on work.

I had a business lunch yesterday. Since it is summer in San Francisco, the weather is cold - 50s and windy. I chose a restaurant named "(x)'s Chowder House" and was looking forward to a big bowl of Boston-style chowder. Possibly a sourdough bowl.

Unfortunately, the place has gone fast-casual. You order at the counter. They didn't offer large bowls; only a small paper cup with a sandwich. The tray shows up at your bar stool and you eat with the plastic utensils on the table. I didn't need linen tablecloths, but this was not what I was looking for.

The chowder was, in fact, quite good Boston-style (the only kind, in my opinion) and was properly hot. I yummed it down. My crab cake sandwich was fine. But I would have largely forgiven the ambiance had I been able to get just a large bowl of chowder.

So I am meeting the wife for lunch tomorrow on our own dime at Tadich, where I can at least order a bowl of chowder at the bar and mop it up with sourdough bread.

The company took advantage of AT&T wanting to clear out their old Apple inventory. We got "free" upgrades to the penultimate model. That's fine; I wouldn't have cared, but why not.

Because we got several, they also threw in a new tablet, which my boss gave to me as he already has one. I upgraded to the previous model a couple years ago, but again why not - and because I bought the previous one, I can give it to the wife. Score!

...Except that the setup process is broken. My last upgrade was painless: I synced the old tablet to the new one, and was done in about five-ten minutes. This one... not so much. Setup has been a bit of a pain as the camera scan hasn't worked; I manually logged in and transferred settings from a backup. Not a huge pain, but not painless either. But then - the new tablet refuses to go any further without upgrading to the new OS. And that's where it bricks. I've wiped and restarted several times to no avail.

I might have to brave the Apple store for help. Last time I did that though, they acted like a nightclub where I wasn't cool enough to enter.

Yesterday was my dad's 82^nd birthday. We went to his place, chatted a while and told stories about our Italy trip, then took him out to dinner. He wanted to go to a local pizza place, which is decent. It was a good visit. Apparently the postcard we mailed from Italy finally arrived last week - six weeks after we mailed it. Got to love international mail.

I had planned to make a cheesecake (his favorite) but ran out of time and ert. We ended up buying a Key lime pie at the farmers' market, which thankfully was pretty good.

There's a guy usually running a charcoal grill a few blocks away from his place. They used to do tri-tip, but that got too expensive and now they only grill spatchcocked chickens. Still good, so we picked one up before we got to his place. Rather than leave it in the car and sun, we took it up and put it in his fridge... where it remains today. Darn. We were looking forward to that for dinner tonight.

Our smoke alarm went off at 4 AM. Repeatedly. It insisted there was a fire, and then carbon monoxide. Neither of these were true and the exceedingly loud noise frayed both our minds and the cat's.

I did not get back to sleep, so it's going to be a second-cup-of-coffee day.

We watched a PBS show last night that had the amateur historian who co-discovered Richard III's grave. She's clearly a committed Ricardian, and this show was her showing primary source evidence to a lawyer for him to judge her belief that the revolts against Henry VII were in fact led by escaped Princes from the Tower, and not by frauds Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.

(I lean somewhat Ricardian myself, if only out of contrariness against the dominant Tudor propaganda. But... it seems to me that the most likely scenario is that Richard had the princes killed - he had the most to benefit.)

The thing that annoyed me about the show was that the lawyer consulted experts to judge if the documents were plausibly real. He judged that they were. (And one was incredibly cool - a document in Dutch archives with an attached royal seal for Richard, the younger prince. Wow.) And thus the show determined that her story was plausibly true.

I would agree that the documents are plausibly not later forgeries but contemporaneous documents. But that doesn't mean that the young men in question were actually the princes; the show completely ignored any hint that people behind the rebellions had anything to gain if either had gained the English throne. Just because a document from the court of Maximilian shows that he gave money to "Richard IV" doesn't mean that the person was actually Richard! It means that Maximilian used that reason, and he clearly would have benefited with supporting an English king taking his throne.

Or the argument that Perkin Warbeck charged with treason means that he was truly Richard, because Warbeck was supposedly Dutch, and treason only applies to English subjects. That's cheap legalistic linguistics. He was charged with treason because he led a revolt against the Crown.

Then there's the line they used in the opening teaser: "This has the potential to change history." No it bloody does not. Time travel has the potential to change history. Her story has the potential to change our stories and interpretation, but history is going to stay unchanged, thank you very much.

Chalk this show down to propaganda. Agitprop bugs the hell out of me, even if I am sympathetic to its views.

Our home internet vanished yesterday, conveniently after phone reps left the office. We ran automated tests and they told us it had been shut off for non-payment.

Which was BS, because the account is linked to a (valid) credit card. The wife called in today, prepared to argue and present proof, and was told that we needed a new modem. Which is less stupid, but less convenient because it can't just be switched back on. A new modem is ordered and is supposed to arrive tomorrow evening (again, conveniently after phone rep hours).

I'll have to go into the office so I can work. Which is not the worst thing ever, but.

I ran late this morning. Just moving slower than usual and out the door five minutes after my usual target, so I decided to take the backup bus that comes later. I waited for it, got on the bus as it arrived... and slowly realized I had gotten on a different bus.

Sigh. I got off two stops later, hiked back down the hill, and briefly thought about just going home. I'd already gotten into work clothes, though, so I walked to the usual bus stop - and got there just as the bus arrived. I got into work about 10 minutes later than usual, so no real harm done.

But feeling more discombobulated than usual...

Today is my lovely wife's birthday. I hope it gets better.
Our power flickered several times over the course of a couple hours, then went out completely around 10 PM. That's unusual since we're on the hospital's grid and they get all the redundancy possible, for obvious reasons. It's not back on yet; PG&E says "5 PM" which means they have no clue.

Because I didn't go into the fridge this morning, I forgot my carefully-packed lunch.

At least the outage page shows no problems at the local restaurant where we have a dinner reservation.

Miss Bea was happily snoozing in the crook of my knee early this morning. I was happily snoozing too. Then the hard-wired, mandatory fire alarm went off around 2 AM. There was no fire. It kept turning itself back on as we frantically flapped a towel in front of it. Finally I got on a stepladder and swept around it, just in case there were any cobwebs with spider farts setting it off. I don't know if it had any effect, but at least it didn't go off a fourth time.

It took me an hour to get back to sleep. Beatrice had bolted underneath the bed in her usual "panic due to loud noises" scram, but when she came out half an hour after we returned to bed she did curl back up next to me for a while.

Add lack of sleep to the general feeling of work inertia today.