Friday was relatively normal, all things considered. Did some work stuff, fixed a semi-crisis, went out for pizza. There wasn’t quite as much traffic on the roads as I’d expected while I was going home, which is always nice.

And while on lunch break, the following exchange took place:

Patty: I need a capybara.
John: I need a chupacabra.
John: Chupacapybara!
Cary: I need a caipirinha. Is that the same thing?
me: If you drank a capybara-sized caipirinha, you wouldn’t know the difference between a chupacabra and a kielbasa.

. . .social networking can lead to really silly conversations sometimes. Is this a bug, or a feature?

Thursday was actually relatively normal at work. No real need to work after work, which is always nice, and stuff appears to be working in the whole newly launched website.

What else. . . on Wednesday, I got a phone call from Marcus. Apparently, I’d called him first, accidentally. (My phone will call people if it gets its buttons pushed in exactly the wrong way, as happens sometimes if it’s in my pocket.) But anyway, I heard about what he was up to—trying to get his dissertation done. Apparently, his girlfriend has a new job, one where she alters mouse genes, then shines laser light on exposed mouse brains to activate these altered genes. Mice with frickin’ laser beams on their heads, man. The mind boggles. But anyway, he said that he needed a break and was thinking about visiting Arizona sometime possibly in late December or January. Those are definitely the months to be here. . . .

Wednesday had what may actually be the end of the whole week-long wrangle over how the e-mail we’re sending out looks. Of course, it took all day, but them’s the breaks sometimes. So tomorrow, we hope everything goes back to normal and nobody has to work a bunch of overtime at home.

What else. . . the normal Rock Band get-together didn’t happen, since Steve had to attend an event at his son’s school. So, Stephanie and I got Chinese takeout food and played Rock Band without Steve. Moira meowed along. At least, I didn’t have to do a whole lot of work after work was over, which is always a good thing.

Work: I’ve been fighting with a problem that’s essentially unfixable for long enough that I’m hard pressed to care much anymore. Especially since I didn’t get to go to trivia tonight—had to do more work.

The root cause of 90% of the problems I’ve had with this whole process is that Microsoft Outlook can no more render HTML than a Labrador Retriever can do calculus.

Monday was actually a fairly typical workday, even though there were some problems with the stuff that I’d done on Sunday (sigh). These were overshadowed by other problems that other people found that were more severe. AFAICT, everything I’m responsible for is working reasonably well, which is always nice.

Tired. Would like to emulate the kitten above. I’ll be able to pretty soon, at least.

Sunday, I really wanted to emulate this kitten. However, I had to work. I had almost all the problems fixed, when a couple of pieces of networking equipment in the secondary datacenter fell over. That caused way too much grief for everyone involved, and took a couple of hours of finangling to get fixed. It would’ve been worse if some of the more experienced people hadn’t been right there watching large portions of the network fall apart.

Oh well. The stuff I had to do is fixed as well as I can fix it. I barely had time to make dinner tonight, but whatever. I just hope nothing falls apart at 0-dark-thirty, which has a nasty habit of happening sometimes.

Since the whole problem I talked about yesterday still isn’t entirely fixed, I spent far too much of Saturday working from home. And of course, I’ll have to do that Sunday as well.

Naturally, Friday came with its own stupid crisis. It consumed hours at work and hours after work, and will consume hours of my time tomorrow and probably Sunday. All because some clueless suit’s favorite “e-mail client” is incapable of rendering modern HTML. So yeah, not a fun day.

Five years ago, I found Moira outside my old apartment building in Lansing. She didn’t have anyone, so I took her in, so she’s spent the last five years meowing really loudly and costing me money. But anyway, she’s here, and will be for as long as she’s still around.

Work was relatively normal. There was some stupid stuff happening with mail, but I think the latest fixes should’ve gotten that settled. Stephanie and I went out to Sweet Tomatoes again (we went there 2 weeks ago.) At least this time, I remembered to print the coupon off, so it was cheaper.

Work on Wednesday wasn’t really all that interesting, though some folks decided to wait until 5 minutes before quitting time and say, “Can you do (complicated stuff)? Right now?” I don’t know why people do that. They have a great talent for that, though.

We had Rock Band at my place, since Steve’s in the middle of getting all of his stuff moved.