The Weird Is Among Us

 I'm not sure much happened on Thursday--but if it did, it got knocked out of my memory by the weirdness that was today. Not even connected weirdness, but just a sequence of random weirds.

Woke up from a very vivid dream that...well, here's the summary from facebook: I’m at a science fiction convention at a downtown hotel. The guest of honor is a dragon. But nobody had counted on the fact that the dragon is not simply intelligent and clever, but also cruel and hungry. The con com is trying to negotiate with it on the matter of not eating the membership while said membership tries to go about the business of the con. Somewhat furtively to avoid catching the eye of the dragon That’s when the large Pleistocene-era tigers and wolves started roaming the streets. Less intelligent than the dragon but just as hungry. They hadn’t figured out how to open the glass doors of the hotel lobby but neither could we figure out how to lock them. So the tigers and wolves kept pacing past, looking into the lobby hungrily as we froze in place to try to avoid stimulating their pounce reflexes Someone suggested that rather than hanging out in the lobby we should go to the film festival, except the festival was specializing in jump-scare horror flicks and somehow that didn’t seem appealing at the moment.

It has been suggested that the first part of the dream might make an interesting flash fiction piece. I'll keep it in mind, but probably won't find the time.

Next up, did an early morning shopping run to deliver to Stockton tomorrow. Hitting the grocery store at 6am doesn't seem to be necessary for finding essentials any more, and they're still putting out the fresh produce at that hour (I almost missed getting lettuce) so maybe I'll try later in the day next time. I found everything on Earl's shopping list this time, with only one notable substitution. Also had a random encounter with threadwalker  who spotted my car in the parking lot and texted me.

The first half of the workday was pretty normal. My lunch bike ride was normal. I used the first bit of sourdough culture discard to make crumpets for lunch. (Needs practice, but delicious with marmelade.) I was planning spend the second half of the day pushing an investigation up to ready-to-review, so of course instead I got two new assignments over lunch. New assignments get top priority because they need to be evaluated for criticality. These involved some QC results that needed review, which sent me into updating my completely-unofficial-not-validated-seriously-just-for-my-personal-reference spreadsheet of purification QC results that I've been keeping up since the time when I belonged to that department.

And as I'm entering data, I notice something really odd. There's a test that sorts out a particular feature of the drug molecule into five different types and calculates what percentage of each type is present in a particular batch. The results are reported to the tenths place. And for this one batch, all the digits in the tenths place were zero. So it was like (made-up numbers): 47.0%, 25.0% 17.0%, 1.0%, 10.0%. It struck me that there were two possibilities. One was that by pure coincidence, this particular set of test results genuinely did come out rounded to figures with a zero in the tenths position. Or there had been some glitch and the numbers got rounded to the units position but then reported to the tenths place. The first is statistically odd, but the second suggests a complete failure of our validated calculation software. So I pinged the lab manager, pointed out the oddity, and asked if he could double-check it. He agrees it's odd and goes to look at the raw data. Well, as it happens improbable probability was the answer and the numbers were genuine and correct. Which is a big relief. But I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt at questioning them. Because I've had to investigate the consequences when the answer is "the software is rounding the numbers wrong and has been for the last couple years." It's not pretty.

That took me up to almost time for our departmental online happy hour, so I popped into the back yard to pick some mint for a mojito and went to wash it in the kitchen sink.
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and nothing happened. No water. Nothing. I went and checked the bathroom sink. Nothing. I went out into the front yard to try the faucet there and look to see if there were any signs of water system disaster. Nothing. What the hell. I find the customer service number for the water company and call to report. They pass me off to an engineering department line that is only taking voicemail. I suspect that the voicemail will not be listened to until Monday, so I try a different customer service number and they tell me to call the emergency service number. (Water company emergency number, not 911.) Emergency operator says he'll call an engineer at home and have them contact me. In the meantime, I've logged on to the video happy hour and babbled a bit about what's going on.

Phone back from the engineer. He's checked status and no larger problems reported so he says it sounds like someone turned off the main house valve. Might someone else in my household have done that? Um...the cats don't have opposable thumbs, and they don't go outside where the valve is in any event. But he talks me through identifying and describing the cut-off valves by the front door, and sure enough, one of the two valve levers visible in the system is in the "off" position. When I align it with the piping, water begins flowing again.

So the best I can figure out is that sometime between 2pm and 4pm this afternoon, some random person came up to my front door shut off my water valve. For unknown reasons. Beats the hell out of me. But I'll know what to check first next time.

At that point, I thanked the engineer, rejoined the video happy hour, and spent a couple hours in social chat with my co-workers.

And that's what my day was like. How about yours?