Tuesday wasn’t all that exciting at work. There’s a thing that has to get done that we can’t do, and it’s proceeding at a really glacial pace.

Anyhow, a longer description of the concert Monday night: The theatre was packed. That only figures, since apparently the concert was free. The Tempe Orchestra holds 4 free concerts a year. They played the Karelia Suite, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a piano/orchestra piece by Chopin, and Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin. They played with a lot of passion, though I heard them make a couple of small mistakes. But it was fun to hear some music that I’d never heard before.

There was no trivia on Tuesday. I learned this right before I was going to leave; John texted everyone at about 6:30pm. There was no trivia because the Suns were in the playoffs Tuesday night. So instead of going to trivia, I watched the game at home, which was fun because the Suns were winning as of 9:01pm.

We’re going to a classical music concert on Monday, so if this is all that’s there, I had no time to write something else up. Lots of busy work happening at work.

Tons of stuff happened at Kelli’s 1980s party. There was a cake with Pac-Man on it, and almost everyone who was there was dressed up as a 1980s character. Mike was the Karate Kid, Zach was dressed as George Michael from “Wake Me Up Before you Go-Go”, Patty was the young girl from “Adventures in Babysitting”, Spencer was a generic 1980s preppie, Kelli was Molly Ringwald from “Pretty in Pink”, Kelli’s parents were both dressed as Waldo from “Where’s Waldo?”, I was Max Headroom, Nathan was Garth from “Wayne’s World”, and on and on and on. Stephanie just wore clothes from the 1980s, but everyone liked her jelly shoes and side ponytail. One of Kelli’s friends was dressed as Magnum PI, and it was pretty amusing to see him doing the Worm across the floor.

The music was all from the 1980s, of course. Everybody danced to “Footloose” and “Oh, Mickey, You’re So Fine” and “Whip It.” There was a disco ball, which Nathan was responsible for. We also had a couple of TVs with 1980s video game systems on them. People were playing “Contra” and “Duck Hunt” on an old NES, at least. I brought a six-pack of “Messiah Bold” from He’Brew, since the party was in the event hall of a Jewish temple, figuring that someone might appreciate having kosher beer handy.

Anyway, there was a lot of talking, snacking, looking at silly 1980s bits of pop culture, and celebrating. Troy and Lee and Trevor want to go to game 5 of the Suns playoff series (if it happens, which is likely) so I’ll have to get tickets through work. It should be no problem.

I found that I couldn’t wear my full costume and actually do much. The sunglasses were so dark that it made it impossible to see, as the light was kind of low. But the party was fun, and I should’ve made sure to take my camera, because I didn’t get any pictures of the goings-on.

Saturday was relatively lazy, though I tried to go up to Scottsdale to get cheap tickets to a string quartet next week. That turned out to be a mistake. There was a culinary festival going on downtown there, so there was no parking available anywhere. So that was sort of a waste of an hour. Guess I’ll have to try again tomorrow.

The 1980s party is tonight. I’m scheduling this entry before going, but there will definitely be a disco ball of some sort there. Stephanie and I ate at a neighborhood Italian place for dinner, which was nice.

Something that happened on Friday that I’d forgotten about until now: That morning, we heard that we could print out a coupon for a free bagel. So some of us did that, and walked a couple of blocks to the bagel store. However, they said, “We can’t accept this coupon. This coupon is only good at corporate stores.” Fail! Sort of. Sherry wanted to get something after being denied a free bagel, so she got a container of bagel holes (like donut holes, but made with different dough.) So whoever put the coupon promotion together for the bagel joint got some additional profit without having to give away any free stuff. Smart. Semi-evil.

Friday, the big excitement was a database upgrade/rejigger that had to be performed at about 3am, and took a lot of time, and caused some dumb problems. I tried to deal with them, and it didn’t quite work right. And then, of course, there were problems with another team and some things that they had to rearrange, and that wasn’t happening for some sort of bureaucratic reason.

At least I got to go out to lunch. Yay for pizza!

And when I got home, I discovered that the splash guard for my shower had broken or failed or something. I had to remove it and attach the spare one. This must be a common problem. Wasn’t tough to fix, just annoying and time-consuming. Had coffee with Stephanie later that night, and after that, I found yet another thing that was wrong with the work database. I went in and fixed it—I sort of had to, though it was relatively late on a Friday night. This is all sort of expected when you do the sysadmin/programming work that I do.

This sign has been up near my bus stop for a long time. I figured I should take a picture of it since anyone who’s seen Star Trek:TNG will immediately think of 3 or 4 silly jokes.

Thursday was quieter than it could’ve been. There were still a couple of stupid problems with network things, followed by what I hope is the last of the RPM problems I have to deal with for a while.

Zach, Teh Nacho, and I are trying to set up some sort of rifle range day, maybe on the 24th. I guess Thunder Dan from upstairs also wants to go, so I included him in the mail. Stephanie apparently does not want to go, which I can see—shooting targets is one of those things that men like much better than women do. Zach is short on .30 carbine ammo, though, so I bought a couple of boxes from the Internet. It should get here by next week.

When you put together a sign like this, make sure you don’t accidentally make it so removal of one letter can make it say something like this.

Wednesday had a fairly normal workday, with more weird problems that I think I’ve finally fixed. Also, they still haven’t fixed the network permissions on a couple of machines, which is going to seriously annoy us in a couple of days. I don’t know what it’ll take to get that fixed, since the boss has spoken to the people who are supposed to be in charge of this stuff. It’s probably something simple that could be fixed in 5 minutes if one of us had access to the appropriate management tool, but none of us has access.

Rock Band was at my place, and I think we all played multiple instruments. That was fun, as always. It’s been a few months since I’ve looked at the music store there, so it might be time to look again.

Rarely is this question answered. This is sort of what I felt like today, as I got a series of totally unexplainable errors while trying to build an RPM.

Trivia: Just about everyone was there. Apparently, the 1980s party will include a disco ball, as well as a couple of TVs with some 1980s video game consoles hooked up to them. John T didn’t have time to put his costume together, so he’s apparently going as the kid from “A Boy and His Blob”, which is a little out there, but whatever. Zach has two costumes, which seems like overkill, but whatever. And we’re also trying to see about setting up another rifle range day before it gets too dang hot to go out there. Probably not this weekend, but maybe next weekend.

This is just silly. Even hairless cats like couches.

Found a bow tie, but paid far too much for shipping to be able to get it here before Saturday. Work was OK. Apparently, Wednesday Night Rock will be at my place again. I still need to go get some more library books.

The big thing on Sunday was getting almost all of the pieces to the 1980s costume that I plan to wear to the party on the 17th. Stephanie got almost all of her costume together too, and I think it should look very 1980s. I’m missing a bow tie, because neither the thrift store nor any of the stores in the nearby mall had any bow ties available. Nobody wears a bow tie these days. I may have to improvise.

The very incomplete “encouragement generator” thing that I built off Kari’s suggestion. Only the checkboxes do anything right now. I don’t know for sure what the target audience wants out of the page here, though, so I’m flying blind with a lot of placeholder text and snark.

Need to go to the library since I’ve read all my books, but didn’t have time today.