Wednesday: Four boxes.

At this rate, I have about a week's worth of unpacking left to do.  Except I can't keep doing that, since I leave for Arizona this weekend.  And tomorrow I have to do computer stuff because I really want to decommission my big old computer as soon as possible, so I spent $700 on new computer stuff today.

Because no matter what, a brand new computer is always going to be "like $1000".  At least now I'm switching to a more distributed, cluster-like system.

Anyway, this is basically what four boxes of books looks like.

I think I need to shim one of my bookcases to keep it from tipping over before I load it up with more books.  It should also go faster now.  I think all of my books have been inserted into the catalog at this point, and although I still have some that are missing LOC numbers, the majority do.

• Squirrels.
• I'm going to need to do this at some point, so I need to get vinegar.
• Hopefully I'll be able to rip all my DVDs with this new system, so I can have always-available video without having to get off the couch.
• Instructions.

Saturday: Looking at apartments.

Means waking up early.  I hate waking up early.

I mean, look at how early I was checking my friend gifts?  Who's up this early?

Me, I guess.  Looking at my first apartment.  It's good.  I sent in a bunch of stuff this afternoon, and I need to schedule a lease thing for next week.  That's a good sign.

Then I didn't take pictures at Dunkin, I guess?  And then had more time to kill, so I went to look at malls.  There's a B&N.

Ok then.

 It's been awhile since I went to a bookstore in person.

Why?

So I kind of assumed it was ok to buy something.  Then the thought of cooking made me think about what kind of kitchen stuff I might need.

Like cookie sheets.

The cleartouch one has silicone added to the surface to make it automatically non-stick.  However, the few reviews I found said it warps in the oven.  Another review suggested that the "goldtouch" top-of-the-line one is actually made by Chicago Metallic, and purchasable for less from them.  Which isn't much of a surprise.

Then another mall, another nice apartment (with similar lease-potential this week), followed by wanting something for lunch.

I was lazy, it was there, I enjoyed it.

Then home to mail out "why I'm good for your apartment" paperwork proving I have moneys to pay for stuffs.  Like this stuffs:

I went to B&N looking for the next Binti book.  Then the horror anthology got me by charging less than 8 cents per story.  I found the scrubber at Sur La Table at the second mall.  It's dishwasher-able, and looked cool, and was only like $8.  The cast iron pans are kind of expensive there, though.

 Then apartment three, followed by Ant-Man and the Wasp.  It was good, and as much as I was worried they'd try to make Janet Van Dyne a bad guy, they didn't, so that's good.

And I guess Panera worked out for dinner?

 It's completely different than it was before.

Even the soup recipe seems to have changed.  It's not bad, though, so despite Julie's warnings, I'll probably be back.

Alolan Raticate looks like a fat old man.

• Well, that's fucking wonderful.  Even the zombie corpse of Gawker has been good to read.  What even is a double-undead?  "Half-consumed ghoul"? "Double zombie"?
• Sad news to hear.
• I like this idea.  I have junk books I don't really want/need, and this might make a good project to hide tech.

Wednesday: There have been so many days during this trip that I haven't even left the house.

It's a nice feeling to wake up whenever, donk around on the computer for a bit, eat some, donk some more, eat some more, and maybe take a quick nap in the evening to rest up for a long night of not worrying about stuff and sleeping.

It's almost exhausting, but I can block that out with enough naps.

But soon I'll need to get back into a less-lazy swing, and fly for the last time until Thanksgiving, and then pick up my car from Matson, and then babysit and chauffeur for a bit.  I think that'll be basically the same, except I won't be able to sleep in, and there won't be automatic food waiting for me to eat.  Not a bad deal, either way.

And then driving, and then going back to work.  I think everyone should be able to take a month off every so often, just to destress about everything.

This long rant is mostly here because I don't have any pictures (see not going outside), so there's nothing to fill space here.

I did see a toy that I've been trying to find online for years this evening while looking at slides with my parents.  The good news is that I'm not crazy.  The bad news is that the slide was too blurry to get a name or anything.  I should probably order a slide scanner at some point, so all those images can be put onto a USB stick or something, and organized so the same event isn't split over four reels.

• Giuliani is still trash.
• The raccoon is safe.
• Why I love Ms. Marvel.
• I sorted out some edge cases today, so now my ISBN to LOC call number script works in about 95% of cases.  Still not sure why some (like this one) fail, but that success rate means organizing my books in my new apartment will be fairly easy.  It needs to be two pass: first to scan ISBN with my tablet, then an export, ingest into sqlite, followed by an LOC script pass to fill that field.  This is also the point where I accept that writing web bots is significantly easier in snek, due to the high quality html parser.

Saturday: Getting up for lunch at lunch time made today rather productive.

But since the Koa Cafe place I talked about on Thursday closes at 2, I couldn't do my usual "get lunch around three" strategy.

I probably shouldn't have gotten the $9 bottle of juice.  It was pretty good, but not $9 good.

That wasn't what I was there for, of course.  I didn't wait in parking lot gridlock (before simply driving into an open space that no one bothered with) for expensive juice.

Gochujang chicken and waffle.

It was good.  Not the infinite good I had imagined it would be in my head, but realistically good.  The syrup is spicy too, so I think there's just the one gochujang/syrup mix used on both.  The waffle is good, and holds up against the chicken better than my last C&W experience.  I could have done with a bit more chicken, but that's probably always true.  I think this is a good place.  Parking is a bit tricky, but it's not impossible.

Then I came home, and indexed booked with that app I found.  I've covered all the books in my bedroom bookshelf (except three old books without ISBNs, that I will index when I get to the rest of that same series), half the pile of books in front of my main bookshelf (now far better sorted by size and standing upright instead of, you know, "pile"), and the top shelf of that main bookshelf (which was two rows of mostly paperbacks, which I've now converted into two rows of mostly paperback with an added half shelf on top of some of those paperbacks where they're all identical in height).  This covers 226 books, and somewhere between a third and a half of all my books.  I don't know exactly, which is part of the reason for this whole exercise.

One interesting feature of having all my books in a database is being able to look at trends:

Like when the books in this sample of my library were published.

This is kind of interesting to me.  Other than two glitches (I have one book published in 1994, and zero from 2012), I have had a roughly linear fraction of books from 1988 onwards, gaining about 7 books a year (or, scaled to the full collection, something like 14-21 books a year).  This kind of makes sense, as I have almost none of my "kids books" here, which would probably fill the early 80s section better (and increase the tail on the left, as I know a lot of those books were classic kids books).

One more library related note:  I'm very happy that the I in ISBN is international.  This means all the books I have from Japan and Germany that have proper bar codes just work.  No futzing around typing in numbers manually (I'm looking at you, crappy paperbacks with shitty bar codes), no searching for a plausibly consistent edition based off of a title (old books), no giving up and just accepting the first acceptable result (Thucydides).  I also learned that a book that's only "kind of old" may have a SBN, which can be converted by prefixing it with a zero.

And then I got dinner (although some of the indexing happened after dinner):

I decided to try their duck dip.  Braised duck, onion, apple, gouda(?), aioli, kewpie mayo (I didn't get that, although kewpie is better than regular mayo), cilantro (is garbage), and arugula (which got lost somewhere).  I then ordered french onion soup, which was dumb, because the dip is basically a soup itself.  The dip claims to be a Tan Tan, but it had odd flavors that reminded me more of a curry.  I wasn't sure of either by themselves, but together, the sandwich and dip worked well.

And I saw a really fuzzy dog:

I may have taken lots of pictures.

 And there was a good sunset.

See?

And since there were four Pokestops, I walked around the shopping center collecting things.  Plus three Ekans.  Aina Haina is an Ekans nest.

And then I bought some macarons, and took another picture of the sunset.

• Pokemon.
• Jenny and Joy.
• Don't be mean, Psyduck.
• Trouble.
• Not Pokemon.
• Looks like I need to go back to the museum soon.  This exhibit looks good, too.
• Squirrels.
• I want an ice cream taco now.
• I was not expecting this to happen while reading these recaps.  That girl is Luna, who is a cat, and is usually represented on that show by a stuffed animal that they manipulate from off camera with strings and things.  The tags explain it all.
• This is an interesting piece on immigrants/immigration.
• Bruce and Jen.
• Clay Croker died today, and that's unexpected and awful.

Friday: This was the plan all week long.

After work, I was going to go get a burrito.

It is very hard to make the unicorn horn look normal.

There are three Pokestops near the burrito place, but only two of them can be hit all the time.  The third one depends on where the game places your trainer.

On the other hand, Target (the actual destination) only has one Pokestop, and it's only available by the entrance to the store.

The Target trip was mostly to get a few things that are easier to get at Target.  Also, I had to go back and get the check out lady to fix my total, because she scanned the $20 toilet paper cube twice.  I also decided to get a new shower curtain, because my current one is kind of old.  They didn't have the same "generic calm leaves" pattern, so I got a "stylized three-tone grey cityscape scene."  

"I should get new shower hooks to go with this new curtain."

Except no.

I have wonderful frog shaped hooks, and I was hoping to get either new frogs, or some similar "small animal" or "silly thing" theme.  But the kids shower curtain area (where I got the frogs) doesn't have hooks, and the hook section only has boring ass grown up ones.  Also: tacky ass hooks with giant fake gems.  Why do you hate fun, Target?

And the moon is full, and was out above the store, but I couldn't get my phone to set the exposure correct.

But this shot I took from home came out pretty decent.

I should level up tomorrow, I think.

I also spent fifteen minutes last night looking at book library apps again.  I found one that seems to work well, and has a good scanning and export capability.  I'm hoping to work through all my books this weekend, so I can finally have a proper catalog of what I have.  This was partially prompted by not knowing where one book is, and that led to a desire to organize things, and that to the idea of making the catalog and, pending shelf space I don't have magically appearing, organizing everything by Library of Congress call numbers.

The only problem with this is that the app doesn't do LoC numbers, and there doesn't seem to be a clean online mapper.  The actual LoC catalog returns the full call number for a given ISBN, but it doesn't seem to be complete (it didn't find my Yotsuba book).  This one seems to be more complete (it looks to be based on a survey of actual libraries), but doesn't supply a full call number, just the first component.  I think the solution is to use the app to make the catalog, and then write something that scrapes both of those pages when I convert the CSV export into an sqlite database.

The final benefit of this is that I'll be far better at not buying duplicates.  I know I have two or three clear duplicates, and I've stopped buying Adventure Time trades because I can't remember which ones I have.  Even more surprising was when I was looking for that book last night and discovered that I have a book of Kafka.  When did I buy that?  What else did I buy at the same time that I read instead of that?  I have no idea.

• Pokemon.
• Venonat buys some shoes.
• Ok, but they keep adding new things.
• Have I posted this one before?  Since I split my Pokemon RSS stuff from the rest of the saved RSS stuff, I tend to not hit the right "mark read" button.
• Not Pokemon.
• Bees.
• Batman.
• So one side has Tony, Cap, Thor, Spider-Man, Other Cap, Strange, Kamala, and Luke Cage, and there's still a fight?  I see Jen and Monica on the other side, and sure, everybody's on edge and emotional, but no one stops and thinks, "hey, this is stupid.  Let's not be stupid because the writer is bad at his job"?
• This is a good story, and part two is also pretty good.
• Ghost Detective.
• Julie made a new blog post, and it's good, and despite my audience having probably already read/written it, I still wanted to link it.