Over by the windows day is dawning

Now, when the maintenance office fellow told me he would schedule an appointment to have my air conditioner serviced for Monday at 11 am, I took that to mean Monday at 11 am. The air conditioner service guy, however, had the idea that it should be 10 am. This was a good chance to embarrass me a bit because I decided, given how much I've felt like sleeping in lately, to sleep in to a bit after 10, shower, and do some further tidying up before the expected arrival at 11 or afterwards. It was bad enough I didn't get the place a bit cleaner (a belt hanging over my couch, oh, that's classy), but I feel guilty when it's altogether too obvious to people who're doing real work that my job needs mostly me to check my e-mail.

I was curious what the maintenance would consist of considering it wasn't going to fix the leak in my master bedroom air conditioner, and it didn't. Instead he went through the air conditioner units and cleaned out their filters -- which do get dirty distressingly quickly -- and some of the hoses that aren't so easily accessible. With that done, my guest bedroom and study air conditioners are in good shape, and the master bedroom not working. Tomorrow I start camping out in the maintenance office.

Meanwhile the Singapore Street Festival has found a new way to attract photography: cosplay! Festivities this year either already have or are going to -- the news report wasn't clear -- include a Japanese Anime Character Costume Parade, at Youth Park. They estimate there are 500 cosplayers in Singapore, and the evening news was careful to point out that dressing up as anime or video game characters is so regarded as a legitimate and not at all weird art form in Japan. They demonstrated this by showing pictures of people dressed up as faintly familiar video game characters -- I really don't know the genre -- wandering around what looked almost but not quite like Orchard Road. The cosplayers were quoted as saying they hope this will bring Singaporeans to better appreciate their art. I'm just now stuck on the image of Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew meeting a large guy dressed as Sailor Moon.

Trivia: The first, 165-pound, load of enriched uranium supplied power for the Shippingport, Pennsylvania, atomic power plant for two years and a day. Source: Life Science Library: Energy, Mitchell Wilson.

Currently Reading: War for the Union, 1862-63: War Becomes Revolution, Allan Nevins.