Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Because of the show last night, I did not get to bed until nearly midnight, but I did wake up just before 6 AM. I had some ideas of getting an early start driving home, but the hotel breakfast doesn't start until 7 AM on weekends, and having paid for it, I sort of wanted to eat it. In the end, I didn't get away until almost 8:30 AM, as a few things came in over the email in the morning. Still, it was Sunday morning, and traffic was light everywhere.

I made excellent time on the drive home, by my standards, which do require a lot of restroom stops, in this case Livermore, Lathrop, Lodi Jct (including refueling the Astro), Rocklin, Gold Run, Donner Summit, Gold Ranch, and the Reno Nugget before getting home. And furthermore, because apparently the emergency I-80 repairs weren't happening on eastbound I-80 today, I didn't get stuck in an hour-long backup the way I expected. This means I got to Reno about 2:30 PM.

( Recycling and Waiting for a Train )

I'm now home an unpacked, and this should be, as far as I know, my last trip before I leave for China on October 14. Between now and then, I have to go through my things and do lots of repacking for that trip.

Oh, and in the end, there were no work-related issues, and I had no vehicle problems, so apparently carrying my work computers with me worked to keep me from getting stuck in the Bay Area again.

Lisa and went to Reno/Sparks again today, with several errands to make.

First was taking recycling to the drop point. (To recap for newcomers: Lyon County where I live neither collects recycling nor has a recycling station at the local transfer station. If we want to recycle stuff, we either have to take it to Reno or Fallon in the adjoining counties.) This is, as always, complicated by the fact that the recycling point closes at 3 PM.

Next was the wholesale-foods store, which has some things (albeit in large boxes) we can't get anywhere else.

Next we went hunting for the two separate parts we need to repair the dishwasher, which had to be obtained from two different stores. The outlook is promising, but we'll not say more until Lisa has the opportunity to test and install the parts and put things back together.

Finally we went to WinCo Foods for a larger-scale shopping run, mainly because we were already in Reno. We'd rather do these larger grocery trips when we can go shopping at 3 AM when there is hardly anyone around except the people stocking shelves, as it's easier on Lisa.

Not wanting to make the same mistake we did on Tuesday, I checked traffic conditions before we left WinCo. Had there been a traffic meltdown like we had a couple of days ago, we would have gone the other long-way-around, taking US-395 south to Carson City, then US-50 to US-95A to get home. However, there was nothing more than routine minor backups due to some construction, so we headed straight home.

Today's weather has been full of thunderstorms, which is good because it keeps the temperatures down. However, it looks like the forecast is for warm to hot weather over the coming holiday weekend.

Yesterday afternoon, Lisa and I headed for Reno/Sparks for our second Pfizer vaccine dose. I got away from work early (after only eight hours, rather than my more typical 9-10 hours), so we also took the many boxes of glass bottles we'd been accumulating so that we could dump them at the facility in Reno. We'd noticed on our last pass through there that the big Twin City Surplus store in Reno where we had bought many things over the years has closed. It had previously shrunk in size by 50%, and it had looked to us that new owners had pivoted from the original military-surplus model to just buying cheap Chinese stuff from a distributor, so it was no surprise to us, and not as much of a loss as it could have been, for them to go out of business. Photos on Yelp show them having been evicted.

After dealing with the recycling, we headed for the Safeway store in Sparks, where we had an appointment for our second doses at their pharmacy. Although we were about an hour early for our appointment time, they were able to handle us. I wish I'd known that we'd need to submit the same waiver forms we'd done the first time around; I would have saved the PDFs from last time rather than having to fill them out again. I've saved those PDFs now, in case a round of booster shots is forthcoming.

The same pharmacist shot us up as last time. Lisa complained to me that instead of moving his rolling chair around to her right side (because she's mostly left handed, she prefers vaccinations be in her right shoulder), he hunched over her, so she felt the injection was less smooth than it should have been.

Rather than staying in the waiting area for the requested fifteen minutes, we did some grocery shopping, on the ground that if either of us had felt an unusual reaction, it would be easy enough to go back to the pharmacy area. Although we rarely shop at Safeway, they had given us 10% discount coupons, cross-marketing that worked for them in this case as we bought stuff that saved us a separate shopping trip. By the time we'd finished our shopping, the fifteen minute waiting period had ended, so we paid for our groceries and headed for home. We spent the evening sitting on our porch watching one of the local rabbits munch on the grass growing in the lot on the other side of our fence. (You go bunny! Eat them weeds!)

Yesterday evening around 9:30 PM, just as I was getting ready to shut off the computer and head for bed, I started feeling dizzy, as if I was shaking. At first I thought it was a strange reaction to the vaccination, but then I realized that I was shaking. It was an earthquake! There was no other obvious shaking, noise from the house, fixtures moving, etc. I checked the USGS earthquake site, and sure enough, there had been an earthquake northwest of Truckee and about 90 km west of Fernley. It was a 4.7 'quake, one of a swarm of three quakes in about a ten minute period, with the other two shakers being in the 3 range. Lisa said she thought it felt like a heavy freight train passing at just the right speed, something with which we are quite familiar, but there was no train. (As it happens, while I composed that last sentence, just such a train passed our house.)

This morning, my left shoulder feels a bit like I've been kicked by a mule; it seems worse than the previous dose, but I may be imagining it. I'm also slightly woozy, but that could still just be from not getting as much sleep last night as I should have thanks to the excitement of the earthquake.

Yesterday, when we went out to get the parts for the shower door, we thought we would first run over to Fallon to dump a minivan-load of can and plastic recycling. We pulled up to the transfer station in Fallon at 4:01, only to discover that they close at 4 PM, not 5 PM as I thought they did. So today we tried again, only earlier. It was still close, but this time we got the stuff dumped with about seven minutes before the gates were to be locked.

I still haven't found a place that accepts glass; Nevada's recycling programs are not very good. There may be places in Reno, but it's hard to tell without actually going to them and seeing if they have anywhere to put glass.

The repaired shower door rolls nice and smoothly — far more smoothly than at any time since we moved here. It's a relief to be able to take a shower without worrying about the stall doors jamming or coming de-tracked.