A couple days ago, yeah, the one where I was home all day sick, so that would be Wednesday, Heather came home early from work. Thus far, when she's come home from work having not eaten, if there aren't known leftovers in the fridge, she'll stop by some place and pick up lunch. As she did on Wednesday.

So, she arrived home, said hello, puttered in the kitchen, then came out to the living room, where I sat with migraine fairies sprinkling headache dust all over me, the dogs lying on the couch next to me. She jumped on her computer and started typing away. After a few minutes, we heard a little bang!

Hmph. The fairies moved to the kitchen.

Heather looked up, then around. I thought little of the sound.

Twenty seconds later, we heard a louder, most insistent bang!. "What was that?" Heather asked.

"It's the toaster oven. Something's just settling in the oven."

"The toaster oven?" she asked, dubiously. She stood up, eyeing me carefully, possibly seeing me pull one of the fairies out of my hair and throw it against the window, and walked into the kitchen.

"Oh my gosh."

I turned to look at Heather, who was standing in the kitchen door.

She rushed forward. "Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!"

The fairy I was in the process of crushing momentarily forgotten, I stood up and hurried into the kitchen. Heather was near the toaster oven, trying to figure out what to do. The dogs ran in behind me, howling. "You're supposed to howl before it catches on fire!" she yelled to the dogs, the room a dark yellow glow from the smoke billowing from the toaster oven.

I hurried over and looked over her shoulder. By opening the toaster oven door, Heather had put out most of the flames. Enough for me to see the source of the flames was the paper wrapping around a burger she was heating up in the toaster oven. "How are we going to get it out?" she asked, looking at the smoldering lump of her lunch.

"Eh, tongs," I answered, pulling a set out from the door next to me, and reaching in and pulling the burning ember out.

I set it down and hurried away, as she picked up the burger with the tongs. Three seconds later, I was hovering over her shoulder, camera in hand.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Documenting the best roomie ever. Today was a crappy day. This is making the blog."

Note to self: if you set the timer, don't forget to turn it on. Otherwise, you may end up with burnt scones.

If you do burn said scones, it helps to have a husband who will eat those scones anyway.

Or a dog.

So, Mike's been getting a number of odd calls to his home number. The message was always something like, "This is mumble, calling from mumble-mumble. It's really important you call me back right away. My number is 702-something-something-something-you-get-the-point."

After receiving three of these calls in the last two days, he called the number. Sure, the first one is a missed call. But three of them? Something was up. He called from work, with Doyle and I sitting in the office, not really listening at first.

"I'd like to know why you keep calling me."

"What's the nature of your business? Why do you keep leaving messages on my voicemail?"

"What do you do? Where are you located? Why do you keep calling my house?"

"I'm not going to tell you that information. You are the one calling me, remember?"

"Look, yes, I know where you're calling from. You're calling from [the 702 number]. Is this a sales call? pause Look, I receive a lot of sales calls, and I'm not interested in receiving them. If you're calling about..."

He was cut off by a very loud, "Mide yo oh-OHN bidness!"

Momentary shocked, Mike looked up at me. Then at Doyle.

We started laughing. Mike recovered quickly.

"Let me speak to your manager. No. Your manager. Right. Now."

I don't know how Mike does it. I'd be cursing up a storm at that idiot woman about 10 seconds into the converation. "What the ****? Look you, *****! You're the one ****ing calling me! Cut this **** out or I'm ****ing calling the police on you for harassment."

Instead, he calmly found out from the manager that the company is a collections agency with the wrong phone number. If they had bothered to do a reverse lookup on Mike's number, they would see Mike has had the same number for the last 8 years, an no, the name on that number was not Jesse Beach.

Yeah, Mike's approach.

Way better.

Stupid woman.

Posting when recovering from a migraine is, I would have to say, one of the most retarded things one can do. Just guessing here. So, since post-migraine is a perfect opportunity for complete stupidity, here I go!

Closed communication among the "top" of anything I've ever done is a source of complete and total annoyance and frustration for me. I'm uncomfortable with it. I despise it. It's the number one reason why I hate working for companies with more than two levels of management (the top being the president of the company, the next level being the manager level). If I'm going to be asked to do something, I want to know why. "Because I said so," is never good enough: there are very, very few people I trust enough to accept that as an answer.

Also a big reason I would suck at the military. Other than my problem with authority.

Well, not so much authority, as stupid authority.

So, along comes Michief's junta. I'm currently on the mailing list, though I would argue I'm there because I'm married to Kris and not because I provide any clear input. Using that argument, however, there are another 3 people on the list who also don't belong, but that's not polically correct to talk about.

So, there's the list. The list gets a lot of traffic. It has many discussions on it relevant to the whole team. Yet most of the people on the list forget to include the rest of the team, and just assume the rest of the team knows what is going on. With is untrue, since neither discussions are forwarded, nor the summary or outcomes are forwarded to the team as a whole.

A clear case of a closed group and communication breakdown, both of which annoy me.

I find it interesting that three of the six people who use the list the most resist opening it up to the rest of the team, since (so far, since we've selected the team) nothing incriminating has been sent to the short list that couldn't go out to the full list. I would even argue that by not sending it out to the full list, we lose the input of many experienced players.

Perhaps it's the closed-source, proprietary model of thinking, instead of the open-source model of thinking that clouds their judgements. I'm not sure. But it's annoying.

Completely annoying.

Drove up to the City for dinner tonight. I was meeting up with Roland from Bryght, who was down from Vancouver for a conference.

Every time I drive up to the City, I feel guilty. Guilty that I'm not using the mass transportation system that (nominally) works. Guilty that I'm spending over $5 in gas to get there, only to spend another $3 driving around looking for a parking space, and another $5 to drive back.

And yet...

I met Will Pate of Flock, Sarah, Steve, Paul, Roland, Ivan, and Dimitri at the dinner. Tantek, Messina and Tara were all there, too (YAY!). Tara's leaving Riya this Friday, nominally because the new Marketing VP is going to be a suit guy, and because the engineers developing the social software don't actually use the social aspects of the software, and hence have no clue how to build it. Neil showed up later, as did James Walker (having spent over an hour cumulative waiting for connections from BART to MUNI).

I had offered to drive Roland back to Sunnyvale, where he was staying with a friend for the conference. After James showed up, said hello, and socialized for a bit, we started gathering to leave. "Hey, you have a car? Can you drive me to ...?" By the time we actually left the restaurant, I had 5 people in my car, ranging from a quick Haight dropoff, to Palo Alto, Mountain View and Sunnyvale (all of a mile from my house for the last two).

Sure, the car is expensive, non-environment friendly, big and sometimes annoying.

But it sure is convenient at 11:30 at night when you need to be 40 miles away from your current location.