Biff faces lunch! Several of us went out to lunch today, even though it was Monday. The beef stew that Jason got had a ton of mushrooms and no carrots or potatoes, so he didn’t like it very much, ate hardly any of it, and didn’t get charged for it. So. Then there was a lot of CD swapping and typing long involved Kickstart lines into a KVM, as we finally got the go-ahead to do a bunch of stuff to 4 new webservers. This will pay off later, as this means we can take several smaller boxes out of the webserver pool and make them do NFS serving, which will free up one of the NFS servers to do big important internal app jobs. That means an internal app will run faster, which everyone will like. We hope.

And apparently, one of Sherry’s female friends doesn’t have a date to Sherry’s wedding. We learned this sort of late in the afternoon. Oops. I know several single guys, but this is awfully short notice, and so forth. Who knows what’ll happen there?

Sunday was, again, not really all that interesting. Did regular household chores. Amused Moira. Talked to the parents on the phone. Cooked dinner (Mexican chicken lasagna) for myself and Stephanie.

And that was about it. I’m on call starting Monday, though, which will probably be semi-annoying at some point. It’s always something.

Sometimes, it’s a good idea to invoke a higher power. This may be one of those times. But anyway, Saturday didn’t have all that much that was exciting. Laundry, groceries, doing Federal taxes. But that was actually just fine. I’m sure there will be more stuff tomorrow.

Friday, not all that much really happened. I was feeling well enough to go to work, so I did, and then did ordinary work things. Sherry’s wedding is next week, and she’s got a whole bunch of her time blocked off for last-minute planning and stuff. “Really, Matt, you should elope if you can,” she said, but I don’t think she was being entirely serious. Had lunch. Then after work, Stephanie took me out to dinner. Moira meowed a lot.

Quite late Wednesday night, I thought I was getting sick. I took some over-the-counter antihistamine, thinking it might help.

Thursday morning, I knew I was too sick to go in to work, even though there was a meeting at 9:30 that I was supposed to go to. I wouldn’t have been able to make any contributions other than coughing and blowing my nose if I’d been there. Felt a bit less miserable after lunch, and I should be OK to work tomorrow even if I’m less than 100%.

So I didn’t get a whole heck of a lot done. This is always a problem when you’re sick. Moira appreciated that she got a whole lot of lap time, though.

And apparently, the annual condo association meeting is next Tuesday, which means I won’t be able to go to trivia next week. Le sigh.

Wednesday was relatively normal. Well, until the afternoon, when we heard about some stuff coming down the pipeline that will involve a ton of work. I won’t have a huge amount to do at first, but after some other folks have gotten the groundwork done, I’ll have to do a bunch of stuff.

Did Rock Band with Steve and Stephanie and the usual Chinese takeout food. This worked well. We had most of the Rock Band 2 songs available, and we bought 4 Lady Gaga songs on Stephanie’s urging. Then we did the 20-song epic road challenge, and did pretty well at that. I don’t think Stephanie got any studying done for her exam, though.

Tuesday. Back to work. There was a really long meeting, but that was about it, apart from the standard hassles with a few machines running out of disk space and a bunch of other people not having enough time to do things for us. One exchange from the meeting:

“What’s this new application going to do?”
“We think they want it to do everything. And the kitchen sink. Without them having to do much of anything.”
“Unfortunately, the Mind Reading Markup Language hasn’t been invented yet.”

Trivia: Went reasonably well. John brought a small book, All my Friends are Dead, which was written in the style of a children’s book, but was reasonably twisted and funny. I think everyone at the table read it, and so did our waitress. Apparently, Sarah’s having a baby shower in a few weeks. I don’t think us guys are going to dress in leathers and crash this party with a quarter barrel of cheap beer, but I could be wrong. We ended up getting second place.

Why was there no update yesterday? Personal stuff that took kind of a lot of time.

Anyway: Spent the last couple of days taking a mini-vacation to Scottsdale with Stephanie. On Friday, we checked in to the hotel, then went to dinner, then went to a drive-in movie theatre. Stephanie had never been to a drive-in. So we went, and saw “I am Number Four”. This was an OK bildungsroman, with aliens, but since so many of the scenes in it were dark, it was difficult to see what was going on during those scenes. Ah well.

Saturday, we were going to go hiking. Then we looked at the weather forecast (rain! all day!) and decided to go on a different sort of hiking—urban hiking, about a mile down to Fashion Square. The Borders store there was going out of business, so we browsed through there for a while and found some stuff for about 20% off. Then we got lunch and looked around some other stores. Walking back to the hotel was a little more annoying, since it had started raining for real while we were shopping. But we made it back OK, despite high winds and slippery sidewalks. And we went out to the Melting Pot for dinner. That was a little pricy, but totally worth it, since the food was good. Went back, and attempted to watch a DVD with my laptop, but couldn’t for a while, since I’d forgotten to enable the a52 USE flag for xine-lib. sigh.

Sunday, we really didn’t do that much. We both needed to get home and see about the cats. And neither of us have to work on Monday (yay!) so that’s all good. Long weekends are totally excellent. . . .

Thursday had a reasonable number of ordinary work things. It also had a free lunch courtesy of work, where we learned that Sherry got an award for doing some stuff that another department was very impressed with. Sherry is, of course, leaving the company on March 1. (Figures, eh?) This means we’ll all have to do all the stuff that she was doing, since it will take a while to get a replacement for her. And also, they wanted me to do something semi-complex right as I was leaving to catch the bus.

No matter. I’ve taken Friday off, so Stephanie and I are taking a mini-vacation in town for a couple of days. That should be nice.

I’ve been reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Haven’t really digested all of it yet. However, the second part of the book is interesting, more for its ancient perspectives and naïve look at the future than his attempt to sell “logotherapy” as the greatest thing since sliced bread. When Frankl wrote the book (late 1940s), Freudian psychoanalysis was still very fashionable, so everything’s couched in those terms, and it’s totally retro. Frankl also says, “Automation should greatly increase the leisure hours afforded to the common worker,” and you all know how accurate that prediction was. Anyway, there’s probably some useful stuff in the second part of the book, it’s just surrounded by outmoded jargon and a really inept shilling job.

Wednesday included a reasonable amount of fooling around with a recalcitrant database. I also went and gave blood, since they were doing a blood drive at work. That went pretty well. However, I was awfully tired after doing that, and so canceled the normal Wednesday Night Rock. So, I’m hitting the sack early tonight instead of rocking out. I did spend some time figuring out how to export all the songs in Rock Band 2 to Rock Band 3, though, so there will be plenty of songs for that next week.