December 1. Samantha died that day, so it’s not the world’s best day, at least not for me.

But anyway, it was cold and cloudy on Tuesday. Stephanie had problems with her car’s tires. I had problems with RPM Dependency Hell on a couple of test machines. But the vast majority of stuff is working OK, as far as I can tell. I also spent a bunch of money buying stuff from Amazon for Christmas, since a lot of family and friends have Amazon wishlists. Whatever.

Trivia: Was rather sparse. Only John, Zach, Sarah, Kelli, and I were there for most of the competition. We got second place, though. John took the oil painting that Spencer made for Zach and propped it up behind the bench, so that anyone walking by our table could see it. A few people noticed it. In honor of this oil painting, our team name was “Ceci n’est pas un Zach”, but I don’t think anyone got the reference. Sigh. Well, Kelli showed us her pictures of her new cat, which was interesting, and Spencer said that he’d worked about 10 hours and was going to work more, since he’s now salaried, and they can make him work more than 40 hours/week without any penalties.

Monday had a bunch of totally normal work things. Which was a relief; it could’ve had a bunch of totally bogus work things. But that was mostly it.

No, the thing that consumed much more time and effort was taking care of non-work things, like getting tickets to events and finding out what everyone wants for Christmas and going out and getting a few of those things before the mooing hordes of consumers make it impossible to get to any stores and find anything. I’m pretty set for material goods this year. I think that what I really want is more spare time. That and some cat tranquilizers for Fuzzball.

Also, the fine folks at Penny Arcade are doing some worthwhile charitable work, and I donated a game to my local hospital. So, help them out if you can.

Sunday was pretty relaxing, though I heard far more Moira meow than usual. She was still upset about me being gone for so long. I saw this van in the parking lot when I went to get groceries. It was kind of interesting, though I don’t know what the owner’s neighbors think of it. “This vehicle art lowers our property values!!1!” is what I think they’d say. Maybe I’m underestimating people, though.

Right after lunch, I started hearing a loud alarm. I thought it was one of my neighbors. I wondered why they weren’t taking care of it. I finally went looking for the source of the alarm, and found that it was a leak detector in the closet where the water heater is. It was going off not because of a leak, but because its battery had run down. Sigh. I replaced it, and it stopped making noise.

Stephanie came over for dinner. She brought over some pastry made from daikon and rice flour. This was interesting, but it was a bit bland. No problem. It complemented the spicy chicken dish I’d made well.

Work tomorrow. Oh joy. Well, at least they pay me to go to work, and I have some vacation time to use up in December. This’ll mean a couple of 4-day weeks, which is always much more fun than 5-day weeks.

Finally, back home. Spent most of the week either traveling or visiting the folks. That was interesting, if tiring.

Tuesday, Stephanie and I left early in the morning to fly to Michigan. No real problems getting through security, since the terminal we went to didn’t have any of the new backscatter machines and it was really early in the morning. However, I found that I’d left my cellphone in my car. Oops. But we made it to Chicago and Saginaw without much trouble. However, Stephanie had a bad cold, and Mom wasn’t feeling that well, so we didn’t get a whole lot done besides eating dinner.

Wednesday, it was really cold and windy out, and nobody wanted to go out or do much. So we stayed in. Stephanie still wasn’t feeling well. I got a lot of reading done. (OK, I was reading Changes by Jim Butcher, not anything classic or mind-expanding, but it still counts.)

Thursday was Thanksgiving, which we celebrated in usual style with a huge amount of turkey and side dishes. And we watched the Lions lose horribly, which is also a Thanksgiving tradition. We didn’t have any relatives over; it was just the four of us.

Friday, Stephanie and Mom were feeling a bit better. We didn’t go shopping at 4am, though. Stephanie cooked a huge pot of chicken noodle soup, and we all ate that for lunch, then met Sandy and Al and went with them to the nearby casino. We heard about everything they’d been doing, then I lost $5 on video poker. Stephanie was luckier and only lost $1. After all that, we went back to the house and had yet another Thanksgiving tradition: turkey leftovers!!1!

Saturday: Got up way too early (again) and got to the airport. It felt like it took forever for Stephanie and me to get home. But we did, and that’s the important thing. Moira was really, really happy to see me, and meowed incessantly because of that. The pet-sitter said she’d behaved well, though.

Monday! Well, I didn’t have to go to work, which was nice. Stephanie wasn’t feeling well in the morning. Moira was also meowing a lot and getting on my nerves. I think I’ve gotten everything in a reasonable facsimile of order, which is nice as I’ve got to get up really really early tomorrow. I took a brief nap in the afternoon. That helped too.

There was a really funny headline in the local paper today: “TSA becomes object of public scorn”. I mean. . . really, becomes? More like “has been an object of public scorn for years and years”.

Sunday didn’t have that much going on. I was thinking about taking an old motherboard and CPU combo up to a Boy Scout computer swap meet in Scottsdale, but I slept in too late. My fault. Will have to do that next month, if I can. Sigh.

Not that much else. Stephanie’s parents were supposed to be coming into town, but they were delayed thanks to car trouble. Moira’s been acting more fractious than normal. I think she knows something’s up, since I’m going to be leaving for Michigan relatively soon. One of my neighbors did something dumb and set off either a smoke alarm or a burglar alarm, and the high-pitched alarm whine has been going off for at least 5 minutes. Sigh.

Saturday, very little happened. I spent most of the day relaxing, when I wasn’t doing laundry. Everybody needs a day like that once in a while.

Sometimes, words mean different things in different places. Or something like that. That’s the only possible explanation for this sign. I think.

Friday was pretty quiet—good thing, too, as there were a bunch of people on vacation or working from home. They’re also ripping up the street at a major intersection very near me, which is playing hell with the traffic. When a 3-lane road turns into 1 lane due to some problem with water or sewer lines, it always causes problems.

I took Stephanie out to dinner at Picazzo’s, which was pretty good even though it took a long time. Well, most places are really crowded on a Friday night. It wasn’t all that expensive either, since I’d gotten a coupon from Deal Chicken earlier this week. I saw at least 2 other people using coupons from the same place. We got a ton of food, so there are leftovers for at least one more meal.

Argh. Was too tired to do an entry yesterday. But anyway, on Wednesday, the plan was for Steve and Aric to come by for Rock Band after work. I ordered enough food for everyone from the local Chinese takeout place. However, Aric didn’t show up. This left me with a lot of leftovers. There’s nothing wrong with that. It was just a little odd. So Steve and I rocked out; Stephanie was doing a bunch of other stuff that night.

Thursday was relatively quiet. Well, I saw a woman in a bikini leading gigantic otters to revolt against a horrific alien invasion early Thursday morning, which is always interesting. Everyone else in my part of the cube farm was either working from home or on vacation. This could be a little disconcerting for some people. I didn’t mind. I had plenty of stuff to do in tracking down various stupidities related to CSS and a really old version of an include file. Also got to apply a bunch of patches and updates to about 40 machines. This sounds a lot more exciting than it is.

Tuesday, something that can only be categorized as “badly configured DNS entries” caused a great deal of annoyance. At least I finally figured it out, and changed a bunch of stuff that should prevent the problem from happening again. Sometimes, we can’t move forward, we can only hold the line against the forces of stupidity and ignorance.

Speaking of stupidity and ignorance, this article about a guy who ghostwrites papers for college students in exchange for money should irritate the @#%$ out of you for several reasons.

Trivia: Not everyone was there, but Stephanie and I went, because I hadn’t been in 2 weeks. We ended up getting second place, which is a lot better than nothing. They’re planning a big Thanksgiving event on Nov. 27, which I probably won’t be attending due to travel plans. Apparently, everyone’s going to dress up in superhero costumes for this. I’m sorry I won’t get to see that in person, because some of the group are really serious about costumes and dressing up.