Parking Meeting

Tino and I watched The Tao of Steve last night, and it's an excellent movie.  It was the first of the Netflix batch, and if the others are that good, I'll be amazed at my record of picking.  The others, for your nodding in agreement or snickering at bad choices are, in no particular order: The Virgin Suicides, The Professional ('70s version with Michael Caine) and Croupier.

Yesterday was a perfect weather day here in our nation's capital.  We had sun and light clouds, dry and no heat, just warmth.  Since some time late last night, it's been pouring, peacefully, quietly, straight-down from the sky.  Out here (Front Royal) this morning, all you could hear was rain hitting leaves (the A/C was off, and thank &diety for that).  I love that sound, especially when it's not being drowned out by the sound of rain hitting my tent.  I guess I'm fortunate to experience it without having to go camping and get wet.

Upon arrival in Front Royal, it became clear that the local peaches are starting to come in, so we stopped at the farmstand and bought some.  The first one I ate was so juicy and perfect that I had to gobble it over the sink and I still got it all over my hands and forearms.  Mmmm...that's good peach.

The parking meeting, which I was expecting to be a blood bath, was not too bad.  A couple of times, it nearly got out of control, but it never quite crossed that line.  As it turns out, if you blew off that meeting, you're fucked.  The letter the cluster sent out said it was a working session, just informational, but since we had a quorum and the choice was 31 ayes to 2 nays, we made the choice.

Our choice, which is the logical one, actually leaves us (the cluster, not Tino and I personally) open to a lawsuit at some point.  The gist of it is that people who have carports under their house are (apparently, under Virginia law) allowed to demand assigned parking, just like people without garages, if there are common funds applied to maintaining the parking areas.  There are a number of reasons why I (and most of the cluster) think that this won't hold up in our case, so we went with the logical choice:  everyone without a carport gets one assigned parking space.  All the rest of the spaces (almost exactly half) are for any resident (or guest to whom you've given your hang tag) to use at any time.  Here are the reasons, in case you're intererested in how genuine community politics work[2]:

1)  The carports have a driveway which allows residents to park two cars in front of their house.  This driveway, according to various surveys, is on common property as their private property ends at the foot print of their house.

2)  This is the way it has been done since 1962, the way the cluster was conceived to work.  We've already been given a waiver on the county zoning law which demands 2.5 parking spaces per residence (bliss, if it were actually not waived all over town).

3)  Only 9% of the common funds are devoted to roads AND parking spaces, so we aren't talking about a ton of money, even with the new parking lot loan.

4)  It is perceived as unfair for the carriage house people to have three parking spaces for their exclusive use, leaving the rest of us to have one parking space and almost no visitor or generally unassigned spaces.

People were honest, direct and sometimes heated.  Over all, it was interesting, and I'm really glad we stayed home and wasted our beautiful Saturday morning in a church basement[1].  Without just a few people, we wouldn't have had a forum and the arguing could have gone on endlessly.

Both weekend days I have gotten up between 8:00 and 8:30.  This is a *great* thing.  I need to cycle myself up to getting to work at 9:00 or 9:30 because this gives me an hour or two of having the office to myself, which I really, really need.

I'm having some incredible distraction problems with the office arrangement at work.  It's not unpleasant, which is what I was expecting, but it's not conducive to work either.  E. and I actually back into each other since we are both people who sit low and lean back in our chairs, and we can't actually turn all the way around to have a conversation or we'd be sitting in each other's laps.  Also, our intern, D., is in there a lot, as are many other people.  It's a gathering place for the local area in the office, and this is not an atmosphere in which code gets written.

I can't wait until the ergonomic evaluation of my workspace on August 8.  I wonder if they will take it in stride or express horror.  JW is by himself in one half of the office (because of the door swing space), and we are in the other half, so he doesn't really have a problem.  I certainly have a problem, but I'd complain less if my stupid Sun keyboard converter would finally show up.  I really need that thing as a Sun keyboard will get my tendonitis all raged up again, and I really don't want that.  I've been trying to explain this to my boss without sounding like a whiny brat, but he doesn't seem to care how much a loss of productivity will cost GiantMediaCo.

Honestly, I could wind up on disability (or bored out of my mind) for a couple of weeks if I'm not careful.  Or they aren't careful.  I can't figure out if he doesn't believe me or if he simply doesn't understand how this shit works.  Right now, I'm still getting everything in place[3], but I have been assigned a programming project.  The task is attractive, and I want to do it.  I can only put it off so long, and once I start, I know I'll be typing like crazy because I'll get involved and excited about it, and I know damn well that I'm not much on rest breaks.  I'll put on my headphones and not move (except for typing) for most of the day.  So, being excited about my job while I don't have the right equipment is actually a very bad thing.  I can't seem to get this idea across to J.

I just heard some of Buddy Guy's new album, Sweet Tea,  on NPR.  While I am from the land of blues, I generally don't much like the blues.  This album, however, has such a great sound going on that I thought it was really cool.  In case it's an epiphany, I'll wait a day or two and then listen to the samples on CDNOW or something before buying.