not a cookie haiku

oatmeal cookie dough
microwaved for two minutes.
no cookies, just smoke

so that's what this stomping is about

I was walking back from the post office yesterday afternoon when I saw a young woman coming down the stairs extremely slowly. She was seated on the stairs, scooting down one step at a time while hanging onto the handrail. Next to her was a pair of crutches, and she had a cast of some sort on one foot. Nearly immediately I knew that she was our new upstairs neighbor, and figured out what all of that stomping must have been about.

I introduced myself and asked if she lived upstairs, and she explained that she had moved in about 2 months ago. She recently broke her foot, so she's been hopping around upstairs! She apologized about possibly causing disturbances for us. She figured we must hear her, being directly below her apartment.

Anyway, I couldn't stop laughing to myself afterwards. This information makes the noise much more easy to tolerate. So much for my career as a detective.

clutter abounds

We need to have more space or less stuff. Between these two choices, the 2nd is probably better.

he's back, hooray!

Now we have lots more stuff to cram into our apartment. We have more board games than we know what to do with, and now some duplicates of kitchen stuff because some were purchased for temporary use over the summer. But back is good.

stomping, or loud upstairs neighbors

This post is actually supposed to be for Sunday. Even though I can set the timestamp to read any date and time, I don't want to set this back because it seems dishonest.

Neighbors upstairs have been stomping lately. I don't know that they're really stomping, but that's what it sounds like from here. Either they are stomping or performing a dozen jumping jacks every once in a while. They might be moving furniture in some odd manner. I don't know that moving furniture should sound like stomping, but I've heard that when people move furniture it sounds loud from adjacent apartments. At one point when there was more continuous stomping I thought, "Maybe they're playing DDR." I should be happy about the idea of people playing DDR, but I don't think DDR players should live above the first floor.

There was also loudness of a different sort at what seemed like 4 in the morning. I don't know whether I preferred it to the alarm clock incidents of several months ago.

Maybe someday we'll live where we don't have to hear our neighbors.

decor

Today included more wonderful rain and my first time using an electric drill. Curtain rod is up, now we just need some curtains. The bedroom feels spartan, with plain white walls that don't have anything on them. I wish I had a stronger decorator intuition. And I wish it was as easy to rearrange furniture, carpet, and walls as it is in the Sims!

it did rain

It did rain. You know what I love about it? I never wash my car, which my mom hassles me about to no end. Yet today, my car is clean!

chilly and gusty today

It is nearing the end of September and for the first time, actually beginning to feel like it. So far all semester, I've heard students and colleagues complain about how cold it is inside our building. It has been warm out, so it seems not unreasonable to go to class wearing shorts, flip flops, and tank tops (at least for students, if not professors). But air conditioning is always cranked up inside, which contributes to warming on a global scale, but many freezing students and instructors. Today I actually heard two different people mention it being cold but referring to the weather outside! Although I dislike being cold, the cool weather comes as a pleasant surprise. As an added bonus, the next two days' forecasts look like rain...

Python Problems

I love Python---it's a fantastic language. Still, it does have a few annoyances, one of which I encountered while dealing with very large integers. I've been frustrated for a while that ints and longs are considered to be different types, as opposed to (for example) one being a subclass of the other. Recently when doing typechecking (which, I understand, should be avoided as much as possible in Python) I ultimately ended by sticking in the gem:

assert isinstance(int(x), int)

Now, to me, this looks pretty similar to

assert True

which is a pretty unexciting statement. Of course, I was both amused-and-not-amused when I started getting TypeErrors. Yes, it turns out that int(x) can return a long, which is not an int. Although I doubt that I'd prefer it throwing an exception, there seems to be something strongly disconnected here.

In any case, if you would like to make sure that your functions are being passed integers in the larger sense of the word, the statement you're going for is probably:

assert isinstance(x, (int, long))

cheap stuff

Most recent Craigslist exchange was my $10 for someone's ikea coffee table. Super cheap, but I think this is the second time I've bought this exact same model of table for $10 off of someone from Craigslist. I don't think it's the same one, because last time I bought it in the Bay Area for temporary summer furniture, and this time I'm in L.A. But I like the possibility.

I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. Having things below eye level increases the likelihood that I will bruise my knees or shins, but I figure I can recoup my ten by resale if needed.

at least one sentence per day?

Today I walked to Lincoln (the street), which is 2 miles from here and makes the round-trip a 4-mile walk. From my old place in Palms, I used to do a 4 mile walk up and down Venice from close to Bagley to the 405. The weather this time of year makes an evening walk a bit before sunset very pleasant. Although I don't mind walking alone -- I like to take in my surroundings -- it's also nice to walk with someone else.

blogging

I wish I blogged more, but for some reason don't actually do so. I think it's because I've set some internal threshold for quality of post -- whether it's something as vague as interestingness, or just length -- too high. Here's my first post in a while. Brief and mundane.