MLK Day, redux

Last year's MLK Day was a comedy of errors on my part. Little did I know it would become an annual tradition.

I met Omst and Neha in the afternoon at Ritual Roasters. Neha is starting grad school at MIT, and the two of them are flying to Boston tonight. Once again I found myself saying "I will miss you" and "Send photos" and "I hate change".

The outflux of my friends moving away is significantly higher than the influx of new friends. If this trend continues, in two years I will have no friends living in the same city as me.

Then I can start acquiring my 19 cats, or my 1 pig.

After departing the cafe, I was greeted with a parking ticket on my windshield. The meter had run out fifteen minutes prior, and the parking maid had already come and gone during those minutes.

I wrote a check for the ticket and ran out in the rain to drop off the wet envelope in a mailbox. I drove to my nail appointment, got the address wrong, and arrived late after walking four blocks in the rain. The salon cancelled my pedicure, but still gave me a manicure.

It was shortly after dusk, the hour of melancholy, and I sat in my car looking at the torrent through the streetlamp lights. I decided the solution to fix this day was to go to Sugar Cafe. Specifically, I would go eat their mini-burgers and write on my laptop.

When I arrived, the barista informed me the kitchen closed early.

"I still see plates of mini-burgers coming out of your kitchen!" I protested, to no avail.

I sat down next to Sugar's gas fireplace with my laptop, and pressed the un-hibernate. To my absolute horror, nothing happened. The screen stayed black. My laptop made no acknowledgement of my action.

This has never happened before. Did it rain on the laptop earlier? How much work was on it that was not backed up?

Fortunately, after I arrived at home and plugged it in, the laptop turned on.

There's a xkcd comic, where the protagonist says after six hours of fiddling with his computer, "I'll be happy if I can just get it back to the state it was in before I started."

That describes my day today.