~/caitrin

When I was little, we had a beanbag chair in the tv room. It was brown and furry, and it was the type that's filled with little styrofoam pellets. This probably explains why my mother eventually got rid of it. Those things end up everywhere.

That beanbag chair may be the only piece of furniture my parents have ever thrown out. The apartment I moved into a few months ago came unfurnished, but the only things I had to purchase for it are a couch, a coffee table, two bar stools*, and two lamps. Everything else came from raiding the basement. Dad hates to get rid of anything that might be useful some day and Mom hates clutter, so they were both happy to see me take it. As for the few things I didn't get from home... if you're looking for cheap, quality furniture, check your local retirement community. The place where my grandmother lives has a resale shop to make it easier on residents as they move from their townhomes/apartments into the nursing home. Two lamps with shades and a well-made, glass topped coffee table for under $100 is hard to beat.

Anyway, because moving was a lot less expensive than I had expected, last week I was able to get the one piece of furniture that I'd been wanting but hadn't been able to justify spending money on up front. Today the FedEx guy delivered it, and I have a beanbag chair again! It's one of these, in the 5 foot size. It is brown, and while it isn't furry, it is sort of fuzzy.

I really should have taken a photo before I took it out of its box. Instead of styrofoam pellets, they fill it with shredded upholstery foam, which means that they can suck the air out to make it fit into a small space. When you slide it out of the box it's this dense cube, maybe 2 by 2.5 feet, and it slowly expands out to 5'x5'x2'. They say it can take up to a week for it to fully fluff up, but it's already well on its way. I'm very pleased with it. It's going right in front of the tv, and it should be perfect for video games. And also for napping. Naps are good. Which is a good thing, because I foresee naps happening whether I plan on them or not.


~~~

* The bar stools are for the kitchen peninsula. I'm sure that's not the right word, but I don't know what else you'd call a piece of counter that would be an island if only it weren't attached to the wall at one end.

Dear Yuletide Author,

First off, thank you for writing me a story! This was my year for being horribly indecisive in my signups, so I ended up with multiple prompts for each fandom. I hope that's helpful, rather than a problem.

( General Likes and Dislikes )

( Pan Am )

( Once Upon a Time (2011) )

( Rizzoli and Isles )

( E.R. )

Well, that wasn't how I was planning on spending my Friday night.

Apart from fanfic, I've deleted all entries from ctorres, and I will not be crossposting entries to there from Dreamwidth in the future. I will continue to read my LJ flist, but when LJ characterized a bug that allowed users to see other users' locked posts and inbox as having "no effect on security", they lost the last bit of my trust.

If I'm not following you on Dreamwidth and you'd like me to, let me know, please. And if anyone needs an invite code, I've got several.

In theory, the point of having an internship is to take what you've learned in school and learn to apply it in the workplace. I would really like it if things happened in that order more often. It seems like more often than not, exactly the opposite happens. The most extreme example of this was last fall* when J had me spend the morning teaching myself JDBC and then my professor spent the afternoon introducing us to that very topic, but it's happened enough that it's notable when I'm actually learning something for the first time in class.

(* Last fall, as in a year ago plus or minus a week. I distinctly remember this being a late October project. May the coming November 1 bring good news regarding personnel decisions, rather than last year's mess.)

This week is taking that general pattern to a new low. Thursday, I have a meeting with my team's lead PHP/JQuery dev for the purposes of getting a general introduction to how the team uses those languages. When we set this up weeks ago, it wasn't for any particular purpose apart from getting me that general introduction. My boss thought I might find it interesting, and the lead dev agreed that it would be useful for me to have already had the introduction, should I find myself assigned to something other than a Java project at some nebulous point down the road.

I try to make a habit of checking my work email in the evenings on days when I haven't been in the office. Tonight, there was a meeting invite waiting for me. Guess who's getting assigned to another dev's PHP project tomorrow morning?

Hey, at least when Thursday rolls around and lead dev guy sits down to teach me everything I'll need to know tomorrow, at least I'll have a list of intelligent questions.

The NPR article about Dennis Ritchie's death included this:

#include ˂stdio.h˃ 
int main(void)
{
    printf("goodbye, world\n");

    return 0;
}

I'm a little sniffly now.