Saturday didn’t actually have a lot going on. Fuzzball was awake and meowing all day, I got some reading done, and I finally got Teh Nacho’s Christmas gift out. Seriously. I was going to give him an Amazon gift certificate, but I forgot to bring it to the last rifle range day. So I used the gift cert myself, and picked out a couple of things from his wishlist, which means that he’ll be getting them sometime in early February.

What else. . . one thing that I forgot to mention yesterday: While I was waiting for the bus on Friday, there was a guy waiting for the light rail across the street. This guy suddenly started shouting about how “They” were going to drink his blood, and that “it was all bulls**t”. He said that at a fairly high volume 5 or 6 times—I could hear it across a relatively busy street, after all. I didn’t really know how to respond. Dealing with someone who’s probably mentally ill is different from dealing with someone who’s just being an ass but I think I would’ve reacted in a similar fashion if I’d been near the guy instead of across the street.

A woman who was waiting for a bus expressed concern about the crazy guy, then asked if I’d seen the 542 bus. “Nope. I saw the 532 a few minutes ago, but I haven’t seen the 542.” I looked at the bus schedule when I’d gotten home and saw that there isn’t a 542 route in the greater Phoenix metro area. I wonder if she ever got on the right bus.

Caturday, and the cats are singing old Bruce Springsteen songs.

Friday was pretty good, except for a series of problems that all happened one right after the other around lunchtime. One of our customers had a database problem. Then a bunch of our machines freaked out for no apparent reason. We got it all under control, but it was nerve-wracking while it was going on. I celebrated by getting a chimichanga and a side salad for lunch.

Not sure what I’ll be doing with the weekend just yet. I’ll think of something.

Thursday was a lot less hectic that Wednesday was, mostly because nothing broke horribly. And we had a short informal meeting about what we might do if we had some new hardware that had more RAM and CPU than the stuff we’ve currently got. That’s always useful.

What else. . . not much, really.

Wednesday, I worked from home. Mostly because it was time to take Fuzzball to the vet for her yearly checkup. She was really happy about this. Especially since when they drew some blood for routine tests, they had a problem getting enough out of her back leg because she’s so small. However, when she got home, the first thing she did was find her bed and fall asleep for about six hours. Being in a state of high anxiety at the vet’s is obviously very tiring.

Good thing she fell asleep. I spent most of the afternoon dealing with one problem after another. The worst was one of those problems that should absolutely never happen that somehow did, and it messed up almost everything for over an hour and was hard to find. I don’t know what they’re going to say about it on Thursday.

Did the usual Wednesday night Rock Band, though Nathan wasn’t there this time. One of Steve’s sons is doing some sort of science project involving World of Warcraft, artificial life, and game theory for school. I don’t think I ever managed to work playing computer games into a school assignment, but whatever. I guess education marches on.

Work: Not a whole lot to report, though there are reports of ominous nebulous project requirements that will take plenty of time and effort over the next hill.

Trivia: The big news is that a number of people are planning some sort of 1980s party that’s going to be in April. And it’s going to be a costume party, where you dress up as your favorite 1980s TV or movie character. The women seemed really excited about all this, and had all sorts of ideas about who to dress up as and which music to play. (Yes, “Carry a Laser” is probably on the playlist.) I don’t know. At least I have some time to think of a character to dress up as. I didn’t pay that much attention to pop culture in the 1980s, and probably watched half to a third as much TV as the average kid did during that time. Whatever. At least we won the trivia competition thanks to some lucky guesses.

Wednesday, I’ll be working from home, because I’ve got to take Fuzzball to the vet for her yearly checkup. This should work out OK, but it could take some time and be annoying.

Apparently, the machines and the software on them handled the really high load very well last week. Or at least, that’s what the guy who’s higher on the departmental food chain told us on Monday. Heck, we might get some new hardware, or get allocated some older hardware that nobody else is using. This could all be good.

I had no idea that people collected old powerline components. But after looking at the pictures, I can see why people might want to do that.

Someone put together a narwhal made out of bacon, chicken, and cheese. And they left directions on how to to do it. So if you have a spirit of culinary adventurousness, get going! I am not that hardcore, so I made a tuna noodle casserole instead.

Sunday was really not that exciting. Well, there were problems with one of the important servers at work, which I noticed right after I’d woken up. By the time I’d gotten my brain together, the guy who was on-call had rebooted the broken machine. So that was good. Then later while I was talking with the parents on the phone, another machine had a fit, but I was able to get in and fix it without a great deal of trouble. This is pretty much par for the course.

Movie ideas that are completely silly? On the Internet? It’s more likely than you think.

Saturday didn’t have all that much going on. Did laundry, catered to Fuzzball, read a book, relaxed.

Sometimes, you can fits in these pants. Or something like that.

Friday was good, mostly because it was a Friday. There were a few work annoyances. About twice as many people as usual wanted to look at the website throughout the day, which meant I was constantly fiddling with things to make the performance not suck. It was bad enough that I said, “I’m not walking a few blocks away to the good sandwich joint. I’m walking to the cafeteria, because if I get out of the building, something bad will happen while I’m away, and I don’t want to risk that even if I’ll only be gone for 15 minutes.”

It didn’t rain much all day, though there were plenty of clouds. It rained for an hour or so after I’d gotten home and had dinner, but then it let up. Outlying areas of the greater Phoenix metro have had problems—there’s a house that might fall into a wash, for instance—but the central areas have been fairly quiet.

Sometimes, you just have to show off the classic cartoons of the 1980s. “Pear Pimples for Hairy Fishnuts”? Genius! (link goes to full cartoon)

Thursday, it was raining almost all day. The greater Phoenix metro area didn’t actually have a lot of problems despite the rain. Well, they canceled incoming flights in the early afternoon, which annoyed everyone. There were more problems up north in the mountains (heavy snow, accidents, stuff like that.) It wasn’t even raining that hard when I got off work. However, there were multiple problems at work with many machines getting overloaded, so I was busy all day putting out fires.

The bus ride home took longer than usual because of traffic, but that was it. I’ve finally finished Brave New World, so I’m through all of the books I got for Christmas. It’s surprising how dated the future depicted in the book seems now. Oh well. The future marches on; slime molds placed on a map of Japan with food placed where all the major cities are can recreate something similar to the Japanese railway network. All hail our new slime mold transportation engineer overlords, or something. Wonder what Huxley would’ve thought of that.