Tuesday, the big excitement was dressing up and going out to dinner with Stephanie, since it was our one-year anniversary. It was quite tasty, and the place wasn’t very crowded, since everyone had gone out to dinner on Monday. The only bad thing was that we couldn’t go to trivia—just not enough time.

Yep, one year. Time flies, doesn’t it?

Happy Valentine’s Day! Lots of stuff, some of it that’ll make things very interesting in the next couple of weeks at work, but I’m too tired to write it all up right now.

Teh Nacho decided that he’d spell out some things using 9×18 Makarov ammunition, because “it was the easiest to work with”. So. This is one of the things he put together, but everyone knew that already, right? :-)

Sunday: Not really that much, though I went out and did some shopping for Valentine’s Day, since I didn’t get the specifics on what Stephanie wanted until far too late. Ah well. Then made a dinner of tasty chicken enchiladas. Moira did far more than her share of meowing. Stephanie and I have been (slowly) going through the episodes of “Bablyon 5″, since I got some of the DVDs of that for Christmas. It’s been interesting. I’ve forgotten huge amounts of the plot, since it’s been ~13 years since I watched that series, but the writing and special effects have held up pretty well.

Back to work tomorrow. At least it’s a 4-day week.

Saturday. Always a good day, since there’s no work. Spent the morning doing laundry and getting groceries. Didn’t do that much after noon, but Stephanie made dinner. Yay! It was a good, relaxing day.

Friday. Well, there was some sort of hideous networking failure at about 6:58am, so instead of getting on the regular bus, I had to log in to work and fix everything. This actually worked. However, it took me longer to update the mandatory, useless McAfee antivirus crap and log in to the VPN than it took to fix all the problems. Sigh.

Work was mostly OK in that I was able to improve some junk. And we went out to lunch. However, the place we went to was short-staffed, and apparently there wasn’t any change in the cash register, as they couldn’t give me change for a $20 until another guy paid in cash with a $10. Things were relatively calm until about half an hour before I had to leave, when they called me with a problem that had been going on all day, and wanted me to fix the whole thing immediately. This took longer than that. Good grief. At least most of it was working when I left, and I’d handed off all of the info to another guy who was working later. I hate those kinds of problems.

So then I walked over to Stephanie’s office. This is about 1.3 miles, but it didn’t take that long. I saw a house at 12th Ave and Jefferson that had a whole bunch of graffiti on it. This graffiti was actually English words that appeared to be arranged in grammatical sentences, not tags. I wanted to read some of it, but was running late. Stephanie drove us to a restaurant, where we met one of Stephanie’s old friends from work, ate dinner, and talked. And that was pretty much that. Long week. Glad there’s not much planned for the weekend. . . .

Hmm. I wonder if I should stop updating this on Wednesdays, since it seems as if I hardly ever have any time those days.

Anyway: Wednesday, there was a weird problem that had been happening for months, but we never got told about it until that afternoon. Apparently, there was some logic that was messed up in one of the forms (in an include file in a disused directory with a sign on it saying “Beware of the Leopard”) where if there was an error in the submission, all the data a user had entered would be erased. Once it was clear where the stupid problem was happening, it was relatively easy to fix, but it just took far too long to find the silly thing.

Had the usual Rock Band with Steve and Chinese food at my place, though Stephanie spent a lot of the time studying instead of playing. We also tried to export the songs from Rock Band 2 to Rock Band 3, without any success. I must be doing something wrong. Oh well, there’s plenty of time for that.

Thursday, there was another weird problem with some stuff right around lunchtime, which was reasonably easy to fix, just annoying. We talked about an automated procedure that should prevent that particular problem from ever happening again, and I set that up, so that should help with stuff later on.

Tuesday, some people were out in front of the office giving away free samples of some new instant coffee thing that Starbucks is peddling. I got one, and tried it out. It wasn’t as good as regular coffee, and it left a bunch of bitter brown powder in the bottom of my coffee mug after I’d tried it. So: regular coffee if it’s there, please.

Trivia: We did better than usual, mostly because almost everyone was there (still no Trevor, though.) Second place and a $20 gift card, which is all good.

Monday. Blargh. Well, at least whatever stupid thing happened with the network at about 6:30am was reasonably easy to fix once I got in. Imagine a Stegosaurus on rocket-powered roller skates, and you’ll get an idea of the elegance, stability, and ease of crash recovery of our network in the last month. But after that, there were some minor problems with a few things that I think I was able to fix to everybody’s satisfaction.

Then, when I got home, I found that one of the fans in my computer case had died horribly. Well, it was running, but it was making a really loud noise, and there was no easy way I could see to turn it off. So I got the screwdriver, knife, and scissors out and performed major surgery on the computer, because the fan that had broken wasn’t one of the easily-replaceable parts. Fortunately, I had a spare fan. The main problem is that the new fan doesn’t have the appropriate power connector, so the little switch that allows you to control the fan speed for that fan doesn’t work now. No big deal. I’d rather have a working fan that I can’t change the speed on than a non-working fan.

Sunday was much more relaxing than it often is. I didn’t pay any attention at all to the Superb Owl, mostly because I don’t care that much about the teams who are playing. Made dinner; gave some of it to Stephanie; she made some lunch for me. Moira meowed vociferously through most of the afternoon. All in all, a pretty normal day, which is OK since I’ve got to go to work tomorrow. . . .

Saturday was relatively relaxed. Teh Nacho took this photo of Darlin’, his Chihuahua, and I added this somewhat silly caption to it. Stephanie and I also met Nacho and Luly at Red Robin in Tempe for lunch. That worked out well. We gave Nacho and Luly presents and a Chinese New Year card. Nacho got a can of Tactical Bacon, which is somewhat silly, but will ensure that he has sufficient bacon in case of Zombie Invasions or something equally bad.

Not that much else to report. This can be a good thing.