merideath

My nephew Victor entered Mayor Mamdani's lottery for the 300 seats at City Hall for today's Knicks parade, and he won! So he and Trish got to sit through the ceremony and see everything from relatively close up! They said it was awesome. I watched but did not see them in the crowd. I enjoyed it. There were so many high points - Mamdani's speech, Brunson's speech, seeing Alvarado and KAT, who are local and really understand what this means to the city, dancing to Alicia Keys! Mariska Hargitay! Her and Brunson's mutual admiration society is so cute! A fitting end to a magical post-season.

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It was very exciting to watch the Knicks win the NBA championship last night with another wild 4th quarter comeback! My brother's kids went to one of the watch parties and put me on alert that if they couldn't get home, they were planning to come here to sleep, and I said of course! And then I did not hear from them again, so at 2 am, I went to bed.

I woke up this morning and texted to make sure they got home all right, and when they didn't respond, I checked in with my brother, who told me that the subways had been shut down (I had not read or heard the news), so they ended up going to one of my nephew's friend's apartment to sleep before getting home this morning. But they said they had a good time and it looked like people were mostly being cool while celebrating from what I saw.

The parade is on Thursday! I am no longer one to stand in a crowd for several hours, so I have no intention of going, but I think it's gonna be super cool.

In other news, I was doing one of my every-so-often checks to see if there was a publishing date for Alecto the Ninth yet and I ended up on the Locked Tomb subreddit, which is fine - there is some cool meta there - but I have tried to consciously repress that Muir was in Homestuck fandom, and posts there always remind me, and I do not wish to know anything more about Homestuck than I already do, which is almost nothing. And there is still no release date for AtN. Sigh.

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So yesterday, I logged off a call with my boss and the CEO, and my internet went down again, just like it had on Wednesday, at almost exactly the same time (1:30 pm EDT). After some back and forth with Spectrum where they insisted it was a me problem and scheduled a tech visit, I got a message that there was an outage in my area but it would be fixed by 4:30 pm.

Unfortunately, instead of being done with work at 2:30 pm like a usual summer Friday, I had a board call from 3 pm - 4:30 pm (despite all of my written and verbal instructions to Assistant J, many meetings were scheduled on times and days I told him not to schedule things, like the Tuesday after a Monday holiday, or 3 pm on a summer Friday, but I hope this experience of having to work 2 extra hours on a summer Friday stays with him so he never does it again), so I had to be on by phone, because no one from IT ever answered my question about why I couldn't use my phone as a hotspot, the way I used to be able to. Until I was logged in on my phone - then Teams started blowing up with instructions and I was like, sorry, on a board call, can't talk right now. But it should work going forward if necessary. I was looking in the wrong spot (I mean, I was looking under "hotspot" instead of "wifi" so was I really wrong? I don't think so. and yet!), which they kindly told me.

I could have tried to switch in the middle of the call, but figured better to stay on and get all my notes than disconnect and not be able to reconnect. And then at about 4:35, the internet came back! And I still had to wait almost 2 more hours for one of my co-workers to finish editing her slides so I could PDF them and send to the chair for review. And then the slides were too large, even as a reduced-size PDF, to email with all the other materials, so I had to split it into 2 emails. I told my boss they need to slim that deck down, but one of the VPs is insisting on having his slides in there twice since he gave the same presentation at 2 meetings, instead of just saying, "please refer to slides A-K for this presentation." I am desperately hoping the chair dings him for that, but he probably won't. (If it were up to me, I'd have just deleted them but when I asked my boss told me the VP specifically stated he wanted them in there twice. It's just the pre-reads deck that probably nobody reads, so it probably won't matter to anyone else, but I think it is a bad way to manage your meeting materials.)

Anyway! In other news, I mentioned friend L is moving back to ATL next month, so she's coming to hang out here next weekend, so I need to get some of my clutter tucked away before that happens. I ordered some Rubbermaid bins to pile stuff in, which won't look great but will at least free up the chair from all my mixing bowls and cupcake pans. (I know, I know, but sometimes it's just easier to always have stuff out then to put it away and need to pull it out again three days later.)

I'm thinking about what to cook and I might do the white lasagna I like so much - I could send half of it home with her and still have enough leftover for dinner for a couple of days - plus the SK strawberry summer cake. And maybe breakfast tacos on Sunday? And some coffee granita? Idk, I'm still thinking.

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