Friday! I was actually the only person from my team in the office today. Everyone else was off. It could’ve been bad, but the things that cropped up didn’t require more than one person to fix. Also did some investigation of new database stuff, which should pay off in the long run.

Stephanie drove to a restaurant near my office, and I met her there for lunch. That was nice.

And then, while I was taking the bus back home after work, it had some sort of mechanical failure. This has happened before. But this time, they found us a bus that was working, drove it near us, and then shut down the entire Interstate while we all walked over to the new bus. I don’t know why they did that. It definitely inconvenienced a bunch of commuters while they did. But I eventually got home, only about 40 minutes late.

Wednesday had mostly ordinary work things for most of the day. Then I went to pick Trent up, since he was in town for a conference. Then, we attempted to go to a restaurant I’d never been to before. This took much longer than it should’ve, because the street sign for the street the restaurant was on was covered by a tree branch. So I passed it at least 4 times, wondering where the thing was.

Anyway. We all had dinner with Stephanie, and that worked out fairly well. Got to hear all about what Trent was up to since Sarlaac. I guess he’s been a reporter, a dot-com guy, a real-estate salesman, and a business analyst. He said that being a former reporter got him several interviews. (Reporters are often paid about $0/hour and micromanaged by complete nitwits, so the people he interviewed with might have wanted to treat him the same way.)

We were hanging out after that when I got a call from work. I spent about ten minutes on the phone trying to help the other guy fix everything, and thought it was mostly solved. Then went back to talking with Trent about work, Life, and all kinds of stuff. Both of us had to work the next day, so I started driving him back to his hotel about 9:15pm. Then, of course, work called again, saying that things were still screwed up and could I please fix them? Argh. I had no real choice but to drive Trent to his hotel as fast as I could, then drive home as fast as I could, then log in and spend about 45 minutes getting all the badness fixed. Bleah. Not exactly what I wanted out of seeing an old friend for the first time in 15 years.

Thursday was generally less hectic, though there was an “emergency meeting” about some stuff that doesn’t seem well-planned out. Oh well. Got at least part of what they want done by the end of the day.

The big excitement Tuesday involved a sports data provider who’d decided to upload an XML file for every pitch thrown in every baseball game. This, naturally, caused some stuff to break. When you’ve got 50,000 files in a dir, stuff that expected there would be at most 1000 files in that dir sort of has a cow. It didn’t take that long to fix, but it was a great example of the “What the @#$%? What the @#$^ing #@^% are they doing??!” that characterizes this business sometimes.

Anyway. Stephanie and I went to trivia, where we were trailing badly at the half. There’s going to be a birthday thing for Kelli this weekend, which should be neat. The set that Nathan built for “The Mousetrap” looks really good. The plan for tomorrow isn’t Rock Band with Steve et al, but going to Four Peaks with Trent and Stephanie, which should be an interesting change from routine.

Monday had relatively ordinary stuff at work. Apparently, there was a date that had been badly entered that was causing something to say “This is expired!” when it shouldn’t expire until 5/1. Finding where this bad date was took more time than fixing it. Also, there are rafts of extreme stupid on the horizon, since some people who know nothing about technology want to use some stuff they don’t have a clue about. Also, this puts the Gallery of Regrettable Food to shame.

Sunday. It was still relatively cold in Phoenix, which is kind of odd for April. I don’t think the temp broke 70° F. I poured some Multi-Grain Cheerios into a bowl for breakfast, and a couple of them fell onto the kitchen counter. I didn’t think anything of that. Then Moira jumped up on the counter and ate the Cheerios. About 10 minutes later, she threw up all over the kitchen floor, because Cheerios and cat digestive systems are not compatible. Sigh.

But anyway, there was a lot less going on than yesterday. I did laundry and got groceries. Stephanie got back from L.A., and I brought her some of the chicken and pasta I’d cooked for dinner. Work tomorrow. Well, it’s better than not having a job. . . .

Saturday, the big excitement was a cold front with a bunch of moisture in it that rolled over Phoenix. This made it rain all morning. Of course, Zach, Dan, Andrina, and I had scheduled a rifle range day for that time. But we decided to ignore the rain and go out to the range anyway.

This mostly worked. However, it was pretty cold, and there was a lot of wind blowing off the nearby mountains. Dan’s .22 pistol kept jamming. Zach bought himself a Romanian AK, so we tried that out. It had something wrong with its bolt or something, though, so it refused to chamber a round if it was held sideways. Hm. We set up a bunch of targets at the 200-yard berm, including a dead hard disk, some bad ramen noodles, and a helium balloon. We fired a bunch of rounds at them with Zach’s AK and my Saiga. We destroyed every target except the dead hard disk. Sigh. Andrina tried out my .45, which she was actually pretty good at.

After we’d finished shooting, we went back to Zach’s house and picked up Sarah, then went to lunch. I got a chimichanga which was freaking huge. Dan and Andrina said that they had converted to pescatarianism, because “mammals and birds are too cute”. Zach then said that cute animals taste better. Me, I think that evolutionary history shows us what the reasonable approach is. The robust australopithecines (all vegetarian) are all freaking dead. The gracile australopithecines (all omnivorous) are modern humanity’s ancestors. Our ancestors killed or outcompeted the vegetarians.

Trent R. is flying in to Phoenix tomorrow to do something for the nonprofit he’s employed at for a few days. I hope we’ll be able to get together some night for dinner and/or drinks, because it’s been a long time since I’ve seen him. Fifteen years ago, we lived in Sarlaac House for a summer. Before that, we talked on the BBSes that were there before the Internet. I wonder how much has changed with him. I’ve changed a bit since Sarlaac, but I think I’m fundamentally the same person. No idea what other people would think. . . .

Friday! I didn’t have to work, since I had an on-call day coming from being on call all last week. So that was nice. I dropped off some canned food and dried rice at the food bank, ran some errands, spent some time reading on the couch with Moira, and checked up on Stephanie’s cats. Pinto hadn’t eaten anything weird, which is probably a great thing.

Also filled out my state taxes. isecuretax.com, the tax preparer I’ve been using for the last few years, apparently decided that Arizona was not worth writing code for this year. As a result, I couldn’t e-file my state taxes with them. I would’ve gladly paid $18 for the privilege of doing that, but they didn’t seem to want my money. Ah well. I’ll be using a different tax preparer next year. However, someone in the AZ government must’ve been thinking ahead, because they made it relatively easy to retrieve income tax forms and fill them out. I’ll have to print them out at work on Monday and file them via snail mail, but it’ll cost less and I won’t have to deal with isecuretax.com’s incompetence.

Wednesday had a bunch of moving servers around. That all worked pretty well. Then I left work, and went to the ATM to deposit a check and get some cash. There were two people ahead of me, and they were both doing very complex transactions that took a long time. So I missed my bus, and had to take the slightly later bus that goes the wrong way, and walk about 3/4 of a mile farther than I usually have to walk. And when I got home, I saw Moira had barfed on the carpet.

Then there was rock, with Chinese food, and at least that went well. Steve wants to buy a cheap house, and might be able to since there’s at least one foreclosure in his neighborhood.

Thursday was relatively normal. More work stuff, but some of us are trying to set up a rifle range day on Saturday. It might rain Saturday, which is a bit annoying, but whatever. Stephanie’s driving to Los Angeles with one of her friends tomorrow; they’re taking some sort of professional engineering exam there. I’ll be checking up on her cats and making sure Pinto doesn’t eat any more long pieces of string.

Earlier, I posted a picture of the food I’d cooked on Sunday to Facebook. Brian saw this. He asked, “Are you still making those enchiladas? And could you put some in a box and ship them to Iraq?” It’s been a long time since I’ve made classic Bonehead Enchiladas. So I wrote, “I need to make some enchiladas, this time with dead mammals.” Zach wrote, “Marsupial enchiladas. Make it happen.” This might be more difficult. AJ’s does sell roo meat, but it’s expensive. I don’t know how well it’d work, either, because roo tastes like venison, and the recipe I use works well with pork or beef.

But anyway, there were relatively ordinary work things. They’re painting a nearby building, and it looks sort of garish. I was also surprised to see the workers painting with rollers instead of using a paint sprayer, but there may be environmental regs or city rules that prevent them from using a sprayer.

Monday was mostly taken up by a long meeting about chickens. People want a large number of features, as soon as possible, and this is going to mean a lot of work for most of us. I’ll have less stuff to do than some other folks, but there will be plenty of fooling around with databases and scripting and machines. At least they bought lunch for us.

Brought some leftovers from Sunday to Stephanie’s place, and we had dinner. That was nice.