This sculpture is in the gardens of the Phoenix art museum. It’s just totally silly. Horses hate wearing masks and hats, for one thing.

After getting some sleep, I was able to fix the stupid problem with the database that plagued me yesterday. Sometimes, error reporting is . . . not as clear as it should be. Sigh. Well, as of 8am, it was all working well, so everything should be fine now.

Since the new year is about to leap upon us all with fangs bared, time to recap some of the highlights.

Best Book I read: The Impossible Bird, if only because it made old ideas seem new again and asked relevant, pertinent questions. (Moby-Dick is disqualified from this category because I read it in 1996.)

Most Mixed Blessing: Getting laid off in February. Sure, being unemployed for a while was a pain. However, that led me to my new job, which is quite a bit better than my old job. Dealing with database problems, code bugs, and dumb users isn’t always fun, but it beats fighting physics, engineering, and a spectacularly incompetent wannabe manager.

Hobby I thought I’d given up, but got sucked back into: Video games. Guitar Hero and Rock Band got me to spend money on games, systems, and peripherals. If we hadn’t decided to buy Kelli a PS2 and Guitar Hero, I would be a few hundred dollars richer. . . but I would’ve had less fun.

The Best Part of 2008: As always, the friends and family. I had friends in Lansing, of course, but all of them had spouses and kids. So we didn’t get together more than about once a month, if that. Now, we’re almost guaranteed to get together once a week, if only for the pub trivia contest.

This piece of art juxtaposes curved wires against a background of evenly spaced vertical wires. The result is a piece that looks slightly different when you look at it from different angles. It almost looks like cursive writing in a strange language.

Sunday, we didn’t do much, mostly because I was still partially sick. We watched “Tropic Thunder”, which was fairly funny even though it was as subtle as an axe between the eyes. Then we went out grocery shopping, then ate dinner. It’ll be a while before I have eaten all the leftovers from this Christmas thing.

Monday was not fun. I had to deal with all the things that had piled up in my absence, and then try to figure out how some irritating ass-monkeys who need to be rounded up and shot are screwing with an online poll.

Here’s one of the photos from the Phoenix art museum, a photo of a photo that depicts an Indian monk wearing a funny hat. Sorry about the bad focus; there’s not a whole lot I can do without a tripod since flash photography is not allowed there.

On Saturday, a whole bunch of us (all the core group from trivia but Trevor and John, Nacho and his wife, Mike, and my parents) got together at a nice restaurant in south Chandler called Cork. This place runs things in courses; you get multiple small plates containing a saucer full of good food. I had a salad, split a mac’n'cheese appetizer with my father, and had a duck breast with a berry glaze served on risotto. It was delicious, but it took a long time to get there. It didn’t help that I was suffering from a nasty runny nose, so by the end of the nearly 4-hour meal, I was more interested in getting home than in providing good conversation to entertain my friends and family with. Gah. Being sick is annoying; I’m glad I don’t get sick that often now.

At least the company was good. I guess they’re not having trivia on Dec. 30 (Tuesday) so I won’t see everyone again until Jan 6, 2009. After dinner was over (at about 10:30pm), the plan was to go back to Nathan’s house and play some Rock Band Track Pack 2. I had to decline due to being tired and sick. I hope everyone had fun, though.

Back to work on Monday Dec. 29. Oh well, at least I get Jan. 1 off. . . .

This painting was in the Phoenix Art Museum, which we all visited on Christmas Eve. More photos from that will feature in later entries.

So, Christmas was pretty good. The parents came over at about 9am, and we opened the presents. The big excitement was Mom’s gift; we got her a Wii and an extra Wiimote. We managed to hook everything up fairly easily, and played Wii Bowling, which is surprisingly fun. One real problem with the Wii interface, though, is that player 1 is the only one who is guaranteed to control actions. Some things in the basic console interface (like the Mii Channel) should be accessible to player 2, but they aren’t.

For Christmas dinner, we had turducken breast, rolls, a really nice Pinot Noir, and mushroom pasta. Then we played some more video games, including one of the gifts that I got, “Lego Star Wars II”, which was fun (if silly.)

On Friday, we went out shopping (of course.) The parents bought me another Christmas gift, a rolling chair. Well, for the last 8 years, I’ve been using a standard kitchen chair as my computer chair, so this is a welcome upgrade. We then went to eat at a little cafeé that had French food, then went to Fashion Square in Scottsdale to see how the other half shops. This was anticlimactic. 90% of the stores in that place sell expensive clothes, and there’s no bookstore in that mall, so I was bored. Oh well. Went back to the condo, ate leftovers from Christmas dinner, and played more Wii Bowling.

The image is recycled. The sentiments are not. Get together with your family if you can, your friends if you can’t, and have a good time today. I know I’ll be out there trying. We’ve got a pile of presents, a turducken breast, a bottle of good wine, some side dishes, and a mostly functional family unit. All of that is reason enough to celebrate.

The normal quota of day-to-day stuff and snarky observations will resume later.

The parents are here! Of course, they were delayed due to bad weather all through the Midwest. They finally got here around 3pm AZ time, and got to my place a bit after 4. We were thinking about going out for dinner, but we’re going out on the 24th and 27th, so I just grabbed some chicken and pasta and cooked. They were tired, so we didn’t do much besides eat. I have no idea what we’re doing on the 24th, but we’ll find out.

Laundry has its own hazards. This shirt used to be black, and somehow it ended up going in the same load with T-shirts, socks, underwear, and some bleach. Now I don’t know what to do with it.

Not a lot going on. Cleaning the house and getting last-minute groceries for the family, who are flying in from Michigan provided the weather cooperates.

Full update later on. Watch this space. It’s kind of late and I’m kind of tired, so this will post at 6am and I’ll edit it later and add more stuff.
Went over to Kelli’s on Sunday afternoon to see everyone and play trivia. Miguel was there, which is rare since he spends a lot of time traveling around. We had some snacks, then plugged the Judge (a rugged electronic buzzer system) in. Instead of going through its self-test, it got about 1/8 of the way through its test and died with a pitiful electronic squeal. Nothing we did could bring it back to life, though we checked all the obvious electrical connections.

John had a backup plan: 8 small hand bells. This sort of worked. We all went through 3 or 4 trivia packets using that system. I didn’t do so well, mostly because 80% of the questions were about TV, movies, and sports.

Then we all went to dinner, though it took us forever to decide on a place to go. Wherever we went had to be close to a Best Buy, because Kelli needed to go there to buy a present for a cow-orker. But we found a place eventually, and ate, and discussed Christmas plans. A lot of people are having family come here. Some people are going away to see other family. None of Zach’s family are showing up. The plan is still to have almost everyone go out to dinner on Dec 27, but we still don’t know where we’re going. Oh well, we’ll figure something out.

So Zach, Juan, Mike, and I went to the rifle range on Saturday. That was fun (as usual). I tried a 5-shot .357Mag revolver, which was interesting, and some other rifles that I’d shot before. I also bought a pair of -25 dB earmuffs before getting to the range, since while earplugs are great, they’re a pain to remove and put back in.  Zach got his .22 target rifle out and then realized he’d left the bolt for it at his house.  So he had to borrow my 10/22 to get his small-caliber fix.

And then I got a call from Zach’s wife, who said, “Where the heck are you guys? Jen and SteveDave are there and they can’t find you!” Zach and I tracked them down—they couldn’t find us because they had gone to the main range, while we had gone to the side range because the main range was crowded. Oops.

Then we all had lunch, which featured too many “Yo momma” jokes and an invitation to poker/video games at Jen and SteveDave’s, which I had to decline. Juan and Mike had to leave after lunch was over because they had things to do in Phoenix

Went back to Zach’s house for a bit, where we had planned to have cigars but were prevented from doing so because the tobacco store in Casa Grande has closed down. Sigh. So we had no cigars, and talked about dogs and home improvement and what we should do with the time off almost all of us have now. The plan is to go over to Kelli’s house tomorrow afternoon to play trivia or Rock Band or Killer Bunnies or something like that.

This is . . . not everything, but pretty close to it. We’ll certainly have a bunch of presents to open on the 25th.

Friday was a quiet day. I found that the great database catastrophe was due to a single malformed query that happened back in October that ate a couple of columns. The sad thing is that if we’d just known about it a week or 2 ago, it would have been relatively simple to fix. However, we only keep 1.5 months of full database backups. Ah well.

The plan for Saturday is probably going to involve spending some time at the rifle range in the morning.  Zach and Juan wanted to go, I think I can spare some time, and Steve might join us.  Well, whatever.  It will probably be a lot less crowded than any mall in Arizona.