A bit of the crankies

In short: everything after work took longer than expected and i didn't get the food i needed until after 8:30.

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Off to the 6 am meeting: this morning runs full of meetings, which is why the evening's delays made me so cranky.

In skin news: last night was the first dose of Derma-Smoothe, a steroid in oil carrier for my scalp. A colleague's daughter has skin issues far worse than i do, and i do keep in mind that my case is not as bad as it can be. Indeed, since getting the advice from my dermatologist that i should be using the steroid 2x a day on the sensitive spots that have been distressing me so, i think they're doing better. So quickly! Is there some lesson here about risk?

Although, i really did think the cause in one area was due to a different issue and that the problem was the OTC solutions to it were causing skin trauma. My primary care doctor didn't really give me much definitive help when i saw her about the complaint. So, if i remind myself of my questions going into the dermatologist, i did have reason to believe that it wasn't a condition that could be treated by steroids.

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So there's a chance i've figured out what was eating the household bandwidth. I think Mobile Me (Apple's "cloud" solution) was failing to synchronize correctly with my work laptop. My personal machine has 1.26 GB received, 1.99 GB sent over 8 days uptime; my work machine has **39.82 GB** received, 5 GB sent over 17 days. I had disconnected my work laptop from my personal account right before the reorg in May, and i knew that i hadn't had one application synchronize correctly since then. It seems it was in some failure mode where it must have been repeating the download of the same couple hundred megabytes (yow, the backup of my address book is 250 MB?!) over and over and over..... Insanity in software.

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Another thing i did after work today was make camping reservations at Manresa State Beach. The sites are fairly booked up, and the available nights at Manresa are in conflict with potential Quaker responsibilities and the last Friendly N's dinner. Since we were just committing to two of the three dinners, i am fairly OK with missing the dinner. (When i could take a week and when i could camp were somewhat constrained.) I can't miss the other event if it comes up, but i decided i was OK driving back to Palo Alto if i needed to clerk that event. (And Christine suggests i could see if folks would be willing to meet another day.)

It was a bit stressful to make the decision, but Manresa is a "walk in" campground -- so we know we won't have big RVs and people with portable houses but more simple neighbors at Manresa. The other state beach had a campsite that wouldn't conflict with the potential clerking event, but i have a fear of huge RVs rumbling by, generators running, portable airconditioners.

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Christine had to meet up with someone from Ohlone College at an Adult Ed facility (also, a high school) in Santa Clara, so i rode along with her in the after work traffic. The high school was right next to a Discalced (shoe-less, says Wikipedia, but maybe sandals) Carmelite Monastery. The sky was so blue, the sun so bright, the vegetation so lush: i took a stack of photos with my phone's camera. Some were mostly of vegetation escaping over the monastery wall, but there were some high school scenes (ghostly empty on the summer afternoon) and a passion fruit vine, where a stinkbug was dining away on the fruit.