The bunnies heartily disapprove of being placed in coffee mugs and having silly Internet people look at them. Just so you know.

Hm. Sunday didn’t have a lot to report. Did some chores, cleaned the house. I ran into Zach and Sarah completely at random at Bass Pro Shop. They were shopping for warm clothes to wear for a winter campout that may happen on Jan 16 and 17 next year. I was there to look at the handguns, because they have a decent selection of handguns. I didn’t buy anything though, because I’m trying to be fiscally responsible and all that.

One odd thing: I went to Toys R Us because I’d found that they had donation boxes for “Toys for Tots”. Apparently, they don’t accept new toys after December 6. I had a Lego set that I wanted to donate, but they didn’t want it there. However, Bass Pro Shop had a toy donation box for a family shelter in Mesa. After I saw that box, I went back to my car and got the Lego set. When I walked back into the store, the greeter saw the box I had, and said, “Are you returning something?” “Oh heck no. This is for the toy donation box,” I replied, and put the Lego set in the box. Here’s hoping it makes some kid’s life a little better.

In other stupid news, I decided to have one of the Czechvar beers I bought the other day. And I stupidly hit it with my elbow after I’d had about half of it, which spilled beer all over the carpet. Party Foul! I cleaned it up, but wasting beer like that is a complete pain and probably offends multiple deities. Oh well.

The parents will be in Phoenix on Monday. I’m going to make a Bonehead Lasagna for them, so that we’ll have at least one home-cooked meal before the holiday round of parties and whatever.

I really hope this isn’t the latest fashion trend for guys. People would forget to feed them, or something, and that’d be bad.

Saturday wasn’t a lot to write home about. Lots of running errands and trying to get schedules for things later on set up. There’s supposed to be an e-mail coming soon about where the heck we’re getting together for the Jan. 2 shindig, but it hasn’t shown up yet. And I’ve had a Lego set in my trunk for almost a week because I haven’t seen any donation boxes for toys anywhere. Might have to make a special trip tomorrow to get that dropped off. Ah well.

This is the Chris Burton Flamenco Ensemble performing at the Luminarias. The guy all the way to the right is Chris; the other two guys are Flamenco and Ensemble. Until I saw these guys, I had no idea that “The Little Drummer Boy” could be made into an instrumental and transformed into a totally different musical genre.

Friday: The big excitement at work was dealing with a couple of overloaded database boxes. And then dealing with them again when they got overloaded again for no reason. Grr.

The big excitement outside of work was going over to Nathan’s house for dinner and various games. We had 2 different kinds of pasta, lemon butter pasta and pasta fra diavolo (which I heard as “pasta Ebola” for some reason, oddly enough.) And there was salad, homemade salsa, beer, and mulled wine. We played “Settlers of Catan”, which I had never played before, so I didn’t know all the rules or how best to place my settlements and roads. So I didn’t do well. The game didn’t proceed the way that game normally proceeds, since “the map was weird” and there was a severe scarcity of sheep. (Yes, people said, “I have wood for sheep” several times.) Then we played Taboo, after Sarah won the Settlers game.  There were an odd number of people, which doesn’t work for that game, so I served as the timekeeper for about half an hour before leaving at 10pm.  Everyone else seemed willing to keep going into the night, but I wasn’t that hardcore.  (Me getting up at 5:45am may have had something to do with that.)

I also heard that John S. has been laid off (for stupid reasons that’d only make sense to Catbert the evil HR Director).  This is annoying.  There’s essentially nothing I can do about it though.

Wretched excess! Get your wretched excess here! Thing is, the mass of presents under the tree is probably smaller than the mass of presents we had last year. Ah well, no worries. Fuzzball has decided that the ribbons on some of the presents make great chew toys.

Thursday was relatively uneventful except for a series of database errors mostly due to a really ancient and outdated table design, followed by an incorrect latitude and longitude. It all got fixed, at least.

There might be something going on Friday night for a partially late celebration of Nathan’s birthday. Nobody’s said anything, though, so I don’t know what if anything is going on.

This is the handbell choir that was at the Luminarias. I think they were attached to a Methodist church in Paradise Valley. They were pretty good, and the room where they were playing was packed.

Apparently, Wednesday is Stephanie’s designated “ride the bus” day. So instead of reading, I spent the morning bus ride talking with her. It’s a nice change of pace.

Wednesday really didn’t have much happening in the way of machine trouble. I don’t think anyone wants to put new code in place or fool around that much with old code, since there are a bunch of people gone now, and many more people will be gone next week and the week after that.

Steve is leaving for NYC soon, so Wednesday was the last Rock Band night of 2009. Ah well, there will be more in the years ahead. We played a bunch of challenges. “Let There Be Rock” is on far too many of the harder challenge sets. I thought there should be something like “alternate sets” for challenges, where one song could be replaced by a song of similar difficulty, but then I thought that the people who are super serious about playing Rock Band would have a fit about that. How is challenge X comparable across many groups if you can beat challenge X by playing songs 1, 2, and 3 or playing songs 1, 3, and 4? This is one of those things where the interests of casual players diverge from the interests of fanatically obsessed players. No clue how much time the developers have spent thinking about this. Ah well.

Another Luminarias sculpture, though this one wasn’t really that interesting.

Tuesday at work, one of the internal boxes had some sort of runaway process on it that disrupted a bunch of stuff for about 10 minutes. We got it under control, but it was a little nerve-wracking.

Trivia: We were sitting in a totally different spot than we usually sit at. John had sent out a text to everyone to tell them this, but he didn’t remember that there were 2 people named “Matt” in his phone’s address book. So I didn’t get the message. I found everyone anyway. And heard about various things that are going on, like Spencer getting fired (never did get the full story on that), some clandestine weirdness involving Thanksmas, probably held on Jan. 2, and something about Nathan’s birthday being celebrated on the 18th. Also, Zach traded his AR-15 for a stainless Taurus 66 7-shot .357 and a .270 rifle with a hair trigger. I’m not sure why he did that, but whatever. If the Sunday range day thing happens, I should get to try both of those out and see what they’re like. We ended up getting second place, which was OK. There was a weirdly phrased question about a metaphor that I managed to get, and a sports question that Zach somehow knew the answer to, but we missed a few questions about music and movies.

This was one of the better sculptures at the Luminarias on Thursday. The main problem with the sculptures was that they were all bronze, and not that many of them were well-lit. Bronze is too dark and matte to show up well in low light.

Hm. Not much to say about Monday. Apparently, one guy on the team is sick, and another guy found that he had a bunch of vacation time that he had to use or lose. So we were short 2 people, which could’ve been bad if anything bad had happened. It didn’t, much to everyone’s relief.

After work, I took an affidavit to a notary downtown, then took that notarized document to Teh Nacho. I hope it’ll help. Nacho said that the receiver on Jason’s CETME rifle had cracked the last time we were all out at the range, which is a little disconcerting since I was the last person to fire that rifle. But anyway, we’re thinking about going out to the rifle range on Sunday, which could be good. I’m pretty sure I have time to go if I get all the Christmas chores done by Saturday evening.

In what’s now an official tradition, the Christmas tree had a ton of penguins on it. (Larger JPEG on the penguin tree.)

It apparently rained on Sunday, since I saw a few wet cars drive in to the parking lot. I didn’t notice any rain happening here though. Long weekend’s over, time for actual work to get done. I have to drive in early on Monday, so I have enough time to go get a letter notarized and then deliver that letter to Nacho’s workplace. (INS wants a metric arseload of documentation and notarized letters from him, because his wife is applying for a green card.) Anyway. While I have the tree up, I haven’t put any presents under it yet. Plenty of time for that in the week ahead. . . .

This is mostly what the whole Botanical Garden looked like on Thursday. Some of the larger trees had lights on them, and there were bags with candles in them marking the paths out.

Saturday: Not much happened.  Well, I got a lot of household chores done.  Also, all of the voice actors for the game “Overlord 2″ sound like they’re British. In that game, you’re an evil overlord, and you have minions, and those minions talk. I guess the developers figured that evil British minions sounded funnier than evil American minions.

Here’s one of the Luminarias pictures, showing Anthony Wakeman playing the flute for a crowd of people. I took several pictures of this guy, but this was the best and it isn’t that great. Low light levels for the lose. I didn’t use a flash because I felt it would be disrespectful, and people who are performing hate flashes going off in their faces. Anyway: Anthony Wakeman is a Native American from South Dakota, and he played several varieties of flute and told stories for all the people who were walking on the trails at the Luminarias on Thursday. The only problem is that he’s a much better flute player than he is a storyteller. But we listened to several songs and a story, partially because Michelle wanted to hear some flute music. More pictures later, and they’re all better than this one.

Because I was on call last week, I got Friday off. I did the last of the Christmas shopping for presents, cleaned up the house, got some groceries, catered to Fuzzball, and all that jazz. Not a really noteworthy day, but enjoyable.