Thursday, the big excitement was figuring out what to do with a problem we can only characterize as “a bouncing chicken”. That and dealing with a number of other minor crises, including one that was due two days ago that I was not informed of until 11 am, and another one that had been happening for days that I was not informed of until about 5 minutes before quitting time. Really. I don’t know what it is, but people have seriously lousy timing when it comes to telling me stuff.

Also finished reading Outrageous Fortune, a book that Tyldesley gave me in the unilateral gift exchange. It’s quite possibly less coherent and more confusing than Illuminatus! for most of its length, which is really an achievement. Yet in the last ~80 pages, the author makes the previous few hundred pages make sense in a twisted sort of way. Which is all good. Tyldesley said he gave me a copy of the book because he felt that he needed to inflict it on somebody else. OK then.

All in all, it was kind of a loooong day. I spent some time petting Moira and chatting with Stephanie on Skype after dinner. And learned that apparently, I’m invited over to Stephanie’s house (again) for dinner tomorrow. I guess there are a bunch of leftovers, and someone has to eat them, so it might as well be me. (This is not a bad thing. . . .)

Wednesday had a raft of relatively ordinary work things, including instructing another guy about how best to re-partition and resize a filesystem on an older Redhat box. Also, there was an LED sign at work that had been completely horked up for days, and they finally fixed it by replacing a circuit board. That whole procedure took much, much longer than it should’ve. At least the sign works now, which is most of the battle.

Steve’s still in New York. So Wednesday night, instead of having Rock Band at my place, I took all the stuff over to Stephanie’s place, where we had dinner and Rock Band 3 and Rock Band Beatles with her parents. That worked out pretty well. Her parents had never seen or played Rock Band before, but we convinced Susan to sing a couple of Beatles songs. I’ve been playing similar games since 2008, so I know how they all work, but modern video games can be confusing and complicated for people who aren’t familiar with them. For example, I’d be totally lost in a modern FPS, since the last FPS that I played in a semi-serious way was “Marathon”.

This is a picture from the menu at Hash House A-Go-Go. Yeah, the item on the bottom must be really popular. I don’t get it, but hey, everything’s better with bacon.

Tuesday had more than the usual number of things that had to be fixed at work. I think this was because I’d been gone for four days. But that was reasonably easy. I also managed to get rid of about 8G of data that we seriously didn’t need anymore on a box that has limited disk space. This will pay off in the future.

Trivia: Almost everyone was there, and we were doing pretty well. We told Spencer, Patty, Zach, Sarah, and Stephanie some of the stories of the Vegas road trip. Yes, we threw pitchforks[*] at the SUV with the big U of A bumper sticker; yes, they passed us yelling like crazy; yes, we passed them again, throwing pitchforks again; yes, they finally passed us going about 100mph. Also, as we were walking between Excalibur and New York New York, a homeless guy yelled something kind of crude and embarrassing at Kelli. Sigh. And apparently, Spencer called the police because of a customer who was behaving badly and managed to get that customer arrested, but I didn’t hear the full story on that because the music was too loud.

[*] Yes, I did too, even though I didn’t go to ASU, but to U of M.

Well. I was in Las Vegas from Friday to Monday, with basically no Net access, so that’s why there were so few updates.

Kelli, John, Nathan, and I decided to go to Vegas for a couple of days to throw Trevor a surprise 40th birthday party. This worked out reasonably well, but there were a number of annoyances. If you’re a bakery in Vegas, you should have someone who can draw a poker table, poker chips, and 2 aces using icing. . . right? No, the cards looked like dice. Also, the scheduling got totally messed up; Trevor was 1.5 hours late for his surprise party, which got everybody else just a bit annoyed. Anyway. The trip was (mostly) successful, I won a total of $20 on various games, and we all got to see the Blue Man Group. John and Kelli went to see Barry Manilow before seeing the Blue Men, and they enjoyed that. At a Barry Manilow show, the ushers give out glow sticks to the audience before the performance starts. I wouldn’t have thought of that, but whatever.

We made good time back to Phoenix on Monday, but I’m pretty tired and that’s why this entry is so compressed.  More later.

Anyway. A while back, I thought, “How is it possible to reconcile having both an omniscient deity and free will at the same time?” And while trying to write it down, I saw some logical holes in what I was writing. Also, I don’t think anything that’s constrained by/part of the physical universe can have perfect knowledge of that universe, and anything that isn’t constrained by physics is unlikely to fit any extant religion’s definition of a deity (possibly excluding Buddhism or Deism.) So: punt, try again when I regain possession of this metaphorical football. . . .

Traffic downtown was mangled all day because of a “block party” that occupied a big chunk of an important street. There were also a few bands playing on a big stage, and that made the windows in the office shake. Well, at least there were bagels and cream cheese in the conference room. And there were no really hideous crises all day, which was nice.

Stephanie ordered food from Golden Eggroll and invited me over for dinner. That was nice. Well, Steve’s still in New York, so we can’t really do the whole traditional Rock Band Wednesday night thing. And we’re trying to organize stuff for this weekend, which is going a little slower than I’d like, but whatever.

Bleah. Yesterday, there was some stuff where they said, “Really, (guy) is doing that, so no need to worry about it.” Of course, that guy was busy doing a ton of stuff, so he didn’t check it all, so we did need to worry about it. This cost us some time and effort today when it really would’ve been better to spend that time yesterday. Sigh.

Both Stephanie and I were too tired to go to trivia. So I’m not sure what was going on there, but I guess I’ll get the skinny later. Also, traffic downtown is going to be totally horked up tomorrow, since they’re closing several blocks of Van Buren street. I wonder how much later I’ll be.

Monday, there were about 12 tons of people who wanted to look at the website. So I spent most of today shuffling things around so they we could handle higher traffic without falling over and giving dreaded timeout errors. It mostly worked. One of my co-workers had to go through what seemed like an enormous amount of frog-walking to get permission for a very important new device to be able to talk to various hosts on the Net. Apparently, it was still easier that way than it was to plug that device in to a box on the internal network. That was basically it for work, but it was enough.

Hm. Not much else to report. Kind of tired; glad I’ll be taking Friday off for a wonderful 4-day weekend.

Sunday, I got together with Dan, Dan’s wife Andrea, and Zach for some range time out in Casa Grande. This went pretty well. The range was a bit cold, but nothing I couldn’t handle. Zach had a gun that I’d never seen before, a .357 lever-action carbine with a scope, and that was kind of fun. I tried that out with .38, and that was interesting, but it was very difficult to hit anything far away because of the low muzzle velocity of standard .38 . I also set up a pop can on top of a box at about 50 feet. I missed the stupid thing 6 times before finally hitting it. Sigh. Dan and Andrea tried out Zach’s top-break .38 S&W revolver, which was apparently made 120 years ago and is interesting in that almost all operations on it can be carried out with one hand if you really want to do that.

Zach wondered if he could handload .38 to stupidly high pressures. This is possible, because the .38 was designed as a black powder cartridge, and smokeless .38 cartridges are typically less than half full of powder. It’s just not a good idea to load high-pressure .38 into a firearm that’s not designed for it. So if he’s careful, it’ll work, and he’ll be able to put 10 .357 equivalents into his carbine’s magazine instead of just 9.

Then we had lunch. That was also kind of fun. It took a while, but whatever. Dan said that the soup he ordered was “made entirely out of cheese”, which doesn’t sound all that good.

Got back. Cleaned the guns. Had Stephanie over for dinner, which was various leftovers combined with one package of the frozen ham from Christmas. Very little effort was required for dinner, which was nice.

Caturday! The big excitement was taking Stephanie out shopping, something I’d said I would do at some point. I offered to take her out before Christmas, have her pick some stuff out, and pay for it. She wanted to go after Christmas, because the sales and selection would be better then. So I took her out today.

And while I was driving her back home, I got a text from work. The (probably schizophrenic) guy who killed and injured a bunch of people in Tucson had caused a minor crisis at work, since the event made everyone and their brother want to look at the website. Two of the other guys backed and filled trying to rearrange stuff so that we could handle it. I couldn’t help with that, but I was able to get all the monitoring systems to handle that rearrangement. I know I’ll have a bunch of work to do Monday morning to deal with that long-term, though.

Quiet day otherwise. Going out to the rifle range tomorrow with Thunder Dan, Thunder Dan’s wife, and Zach.