Friday had less going on than usual. We still planned out a long and somewhat complex series of things we’ll have to do over the next month. And we went out to lunch at a Japanese place a few blocks away. I ordered the lunch special, everyone else ordered other stuff, and it took much longer for me to get my food. Ah well.

Don’t have a lot planned out for tomorrow. Think I’ll buy groceries and sleep.

Monday, we slept late, got up, ate breakfast, and drove back to the airport. The flight was delayed by about 15 minutes. It was a good thing we didn’t have a connecting flight or anything like that Moira was really annoyed at me when I got back, but she calmed down after a while.

Hm. Not a lot else happened on the Santa Fe trip. I’ve covered most of the events of this week here already.

Thursday had yet another run-in with what appears to be a bad network interface on one machine somewhere. It’s the only one in that rack which is giving us any problems at all. It looked like things were going well, but we’ll see tomorrow.

I’ve been re-reading my collection of posts from the Monastery—it’s been a year or two since I’ve looked at that. It’s interesting how so many of the posts I’ve archived relate to stuff I’ve experienced at work or in real life. Well, when you’ve got a few hundred grumpy old sysadmins posting about whatever they’re interested in to the Net for 10 years, you’re bound to find something useful or interesting in there.

After dealing with digestive trouble in the morning, we drove about 50 miles out of Santa Fe to Ghost Ranch, where Georgia O’Keeffe lived and painted for many years. They’ve got a resort/retreat and a bunch of hiking trails there. We took one of the shorter hiking trails (1.5 miles, ~600 vertical feet) and ended up overlooking the view here. That was neat. One of the other hikers on the trail had a tiny Yorkie dog who was going much faster and displaying much more energy than any of the people on the trail. Dogs are like that sometimes.

Then we drove back to Santa Fe, stopping at the Buffalo Thunder casino for dinner and gambling. I won $1.50. Yay, or something.

Saturday afternoon in Santa Fe, we spent some more time wandering around the downtown area, looking in all the little shops there. All the art galleries looked way too expensive for us. Then we went back to the hotel, changed into dinner clothes, and went to Inn of the Anasazi for a fancy dinner. The picture above is what I got, “Ancho-dusted diver scallops”. It tasted really good. However, it must have had something off with it, because the next day, I had minor digestive trouble all morning.

This is the salmon that Stephanie got, which didn’t have anything wrong with it. I had a bite of this. It was tasty too. Everything we had or saw at that restaurant had red chile powder on it, though. I guess this is only to be expected; they put chile powder on just about everything in New Mexican cuisine.

Trivia: Not that much to say. Spencer’s trying to write a play. We got second place. Moira was apparently a real pain on the third day that Kelli took care of her. We’re still trying to figure out what to do about the Vegas trip. John says there’s no way he can run for President of the USA because “Tyldesley” is too long to fit on a bumper sticker.

Spent the last few days in Santa Fe. Here’s a picture from when we were wandering around downtown, and saw a gray cat prowling on the rooftops.

Anyway, we got a good deal on the rental car, possibly because it was a Toyota Camry and people are scared of Toyotas right now thanks to the media. It drove fine, but it wasn’t very exciting. The flight was delayed about 15 minutes, but that wasn’t a big deal since we didn’t have any connecting flights.

So Friday, the first day we were there, we got to the hotel, then ate a very good dinner at a nearby Mexican place called “Adelita’s”. The reviews on Google were mixed. Whatever. I thought the food was good. Then we basically zonked out even though it was early. Traveling wears people out.

Saturday, we bought some groceries because eating breakfast out is expensive, then spent most of the day in Santa Fe’s downtown. The Georgia O’Keeffe museum is a point of local interest, but it’s really pretty small. We ate lunch at the Ore House, but not on the balcony because everyone wanted to eat there since the balcony has a view of the Plaza.

Cecil Adams finally answers the question that you’ve always wanted to know: How much flatulence would it take to become airborne? The answer is too much. So the sculpture here depicts a fictional event, which is probably a very good thing.

Thursday was pretty much OK at work. No, the fun started after work. They wanted something done, then changed a dinner I couldn’t attend to a lunch I couldn’t attend. Food paid for by the company, and I can’t eat any of it. Sigh.

Updates may be sporadic, short, at odd times, and so forth over the next few days.

Pinto, who you might remember from an earlier entry. He’s feeling a lot better now, and the last time I saw him, he decided to sit on my lap and demand to be petted. He’s fairly shy, so I suppose this is a good thing.

Wednesday had a meeting that only took 1.5 hours but seemed a lot longer than that. Some meetings are like that. Then we had the usual Wednesday night Rock Band, which was fun. This time Steve and I both tried to play a few songs on Hard at the same time. It seems like I can now get above 90% on Hard guitar on the easier songs in the game, which is OK. I wonder when I’ll have time to practice enough to get better than that, though.

Tuesday was less like this picture than Monday was. Not that much actually needed to be fixed.

Trivia: We had to sit outside, because some other group grabbed the large table. Well, everyone but Nathan and Trevor was there. So we had dinner and played trivia, where we noticed that they’d recycled at least 6 of their questions from months ago. Patty is apparently traveling a lot for work in the next month—she said she was going to 4 different cities in 5 weeks. Yikes. Sarah and Nathan are very happy that the school year is ending soon. Apparently, 2 weeks from today, the Suns are going to play game 4 of their series against the Fakers Lakers here in Phoenix. That might be neat to go to. I don’t know whether I can swing it though.

This Swedish key violin is a bit strange. What would it sound like when played? There wasn’t a recording of a similar instrument in the nearby sound box.

Monday at work was relatively normal. Dealt with something stupid in the morning, added a few additional monitoring scripts for a few additional things in the afternoon. There’s a dinner event on Friday for those of us who were involved in one project. I won’t be able to make that though.

I put together another monitoring script for this web host that was supposed to write to a logfile and restart apache and mysql if the system load got over 5. That didn’t work. Somehow, the system load on this box went from under 3 to over 60 in the space of one minute, so the whole thing was unresponsive for an hour today. I’ve redesigned the script, but have no idea whether it’ll work or not.