Sunday actually had no koalas in it at all. It did have a lot of driving. It takes about 7 hours to get from San Diego to Tempe, particularly if you wake up late. But anyway, we found that there are only 3 choices for radio genres between El Centro and Yuma: Christian, country, and Mexican. Mexican was the least annoying.

Got home to a very annoyed Moira. Somehow, she’d eaten all her food and drunk all her water, so before unpacking, I had to remedy that. Then I had to try and catch up on everything I didn’t do because I was gone all weekend.

Saturday, we spent a lot of time at the San Diego Zoo, where we saw a whole bunch of animals including capybaras, pandas, guanacos, and polar bears. Not all the pictures turned out, of course. I blame part of this on using Stephanie’s camera, which I’m totally not used to. This picture was pretty good. I didn’t get a good shot of two capybaras nuzzling each other in the water, though.

The polar bears were interesting; they were either totally lethargic or industriously goofing around with balls. The pandas all had their backs to the audience. They took pictures of us as we were getting on the bus for the bus tour, but I blinked, so we didn’t get that picture.

After a day spent mostly at the zoo, we met Stephanie’s parents for dinner at a local Chinese buffet. That was a good cap to the day.

Getting here took a while. But that was OK. We decided to go out to Casa de Pico, one of those local Mexican restaurants that’s slightly locally famous. I think everyone and their brother had the same idea, since the place was so crowded that I think I got the last table in the restaurant. No matter. It took a while to get the food since the kitchen was swamped, but it was good when it finally came out.

The restaurant was really loud, though. It was almost impossible to hear people at the same table, and then a mariachi band started playing. This band didn’t include pan flutes, though.

Tomorrow: Zoo! Probably.

Thursday wasn’t really all that interesting, all things considered. Got some stuff done, but there’s still a lot more to do with a couple of projects. At least the rather annoying process of getting more disk space for the big NFS servers is well on its way.

I’m going out of town for a couple of days, since both Stephanie and I have Friday off work. This will be nice. At least it’ll be a change of scenery. Fuzzball won’t be happy, but then she’s never happy.

This picture has almost nothing to do with Wednesday, which was really pretty normal all around. The most exciting thing that happened was that we learned that the new disks we ordered are sitting on someone’s desk, and it may take days for them to actually get put in the right machines; days that it’d really be better not to spend. Sigh.

No Rock Band thanks to some other stuff involving Steve’s son and Ultimate Frisbee games. We may be rockless until the middle of October. However will we survive? Anyway, Stephanie and I finished off the last of the enchilada casserole.

This looked interesting, so I spent $20 on it. I don’t think it’s possible to buy another one of those now, though. The owner of that restaurant was apparently fired by a Pointy-Haired Boss, and when he was fired, a bunch of other employees walked off in solidarity, forcing the Buca di Beppo to close for the night. I hope it’ll be worth it. I’ll probably get to find out next week.

Tuesday had a bunch of relatively normal work things. Well, the database had a cow around 2:11pm, but that was relatively easily fixed. And that was about it for work.

Trivia: Almost everyone was there, except for Nathan. We won and almost got a perfect score. Apparently, everyone’s still planning on dressing up as superheroes for the Thanksmas thing, though it appears as though it’ll be held on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Zach said that he wanted to have everyone dress up as superheroes and then go car shopping with him, since he’s in the market for a new car. “Does this car have. . . shark repellent? What about a grappling hook?” OK, that’d just be completely silly, but it’d certainly give the people at multiple car dealerships something to talk about for several weeks.

Monday had less really exciting stuff in it than usual. This was actually a good thing. Anyway, dealt with work stuff, waited for some other people to get some stuff done, and generally had a productive day. Got home, Moira was meowing up a storm, so I tried to keep her happy while eating dinner and keeping busy. Not really a whole lot to report, actually.

Football! Sorta. The Cardinals were trying really, really hard to lose the game, but they failed. I’m sure all the NFL commentators will be saying, “What the @#$% was going on out there?” Bad timing between QB and receivers, too many 3-and-outs, and a running game that consisted entirely of Tim Hightower are just not going to scare anybody. But at least we got to see Adrian Wilson block a field goal. They really need to work the kinks out of the offense, or it’ll be a return to the old days of Cardinal football, when they were lucky to be at .500. Anyway. And the Lions probably should’ve won, but they got denied. Sigh.

My old digicam has apparently died after 8 years of faithful service. This is really annoying. My cellphone has a camera, but it’s got a really narrow aperture, a permanent wide-angle lens, and a half-second lag between pushing the shutter and actually taking the picture. So I’m looking for something that has decent optics and TTL. Nothing really cheap does TTL, which seems predictable yet annoying. This is why there’s no picture today—how better to show the loss of a camera than with no image?

Saturday, I made this enchilada casserole from a recipe that I’d had hanging around for years and never tried. It was pretty good, actually. And it made quite a bit, so there are plenty of leftovers for later.

Not that much else to say about the day. And tomorrow is the start of the NFL season, so we’ll finally get to see what the Cardinals are made of. The quarterback controversy didn’t really help them any, but they’re playing the Rams, who aren’t really that capable. We’ll see how it all works out.

Friday was a relatively ordinary day. Got sent on a wild goose chase by a user who couldn’t figure out why his inflammatory, ill-informed, and monotonous political rants weren’t drawing an audience. Unfortunately, “good customer service” prevented me from telling him the truth, which was that people weren’t reading his posts for whatever reason. The infrastructure was working perfectly as far as I could tell. His assertion that several people had commented on a post he made and those comments had been deleted was not borne out by examination of the database binary logs. Maybe that user was suffering from senile dementia, or wishful thinking. Both things are much more common in AZ than you might expect.

Went out for lunch, got meatballs, fried rice, and salad. It was tasty.

Moira was meowing like crazy when I got home. Also got a call from Pat, who wondered why there were so many crazy people in AZ. “100+ F heat for months at a time bakes peoples’ brains?” I said. This may be true.

Looking forward to the weekend. It’s NFL season! YEAAAAAH!