Sunday didn’t have any jammed copiers. Just laundry, cooking dinner, and finding some cat tranquilizers left over from years ago. (I wonder if they still work, but they’ve probably expired by now.) Not all that much really happened.

Would you break up with a nice guy because he has a Yooper accent? That’s what this advice columnist answers. Ya eh, dat don’t make a whole lotta sense. You betcha.

Friday was relatively normal, minus the dreaded Disk Full error on a semi-important box. Then we all went out for lunch and spent what seemed like a long time sitting outside and talking. After work, Stephanie and I started in on the 3rd season of “Babylon 5″, which looks like it’s going to be interesting.

Saturday had much less going on. I ate lunch and took a nap. Then I brought Moira over to Stephanie’s house, because Stephanie had cooked dinner—clams, jalapeño bread, and bok choy with chili sauce. Moira meowed at Stephanie’s cats a lot. When I got Moira home, though, Moira fell asleep almost instantly.

Thursday didn’t have any really horrible things happening with the computer systems, which was a relief. And I think I’ve got an automatic procedure to get rid of the worst of the problems that an intermittent runaway process is causing. Won’t know for sure until tomorrow morning though. Also got the schedule for furloughs hashed out, we hope.

What else. . . I tried to feed Moira the rest of the canned cat food she ate yesterday. She turned her nose up at it. This was just a bit annoying, since canned cat food is expensive. Tabitha, my parents’ old Siamese, used to do similar things. It’s really a bit annoying. The next time I feed her canned food, I’ll try microwaving the leftovers to room temperature the next day.

Wednesday started off great, with a monitor from work saying “OH @#$% STUFF IS BR0KEN!!1!” right as I was eating breakfast. Then the VPN barfed as I was trying to log in. I was eventually able to log in and get the worst of the problems fixed, but dealing with the cleanup took the rest of the morning. This sort of stuff has happened too often in the last few months. And then there were normal work things after that.

I fed Moira some new canned food before dinner, to see if it’d keep her quiet(er). It’s “Mature Adult” food, and instead of chunks, it’s mush. She seemed to really like it, and she was a lot quieter than usual.

So after work, we had the usual Rock Band, with leftovers instead of Chinese food this time. Stew, casserole, and garlic bread. Steve’s older son also has a job now, which should be useful and/or interesting. I got tickets for the baseball game next week, saving a few bucks. They seem like OK seats; hope it all works.

At First Friday, we saw the Phoenix Ghostbusters with their replica of Ecto-1. We talked to a couple of them; they were basically hanging out and collecting money for charity. They said they were going to make an appearance at Phoenix Comicon later this month, and gave us a brochure. They were also selling Beanie Babies. And apparently, Bruce Boxleitner is going to be at Comicon, which would be kind of neat to see. (He played Captain Sheridan on “Babylon 5″.)

Tuesday had some disturbing news at work. They’re planning on doing a few really stupid things, which will A) not make anyone any money B) cost a lot of money. In addition, everyone’s going to have to take a week of furlough. The first is actually more troubling. I don’t mind some extra unpaid time off. I do mind stupid, especially when it’ll make my life more difficult and cost money.

Trivia: We were doing reasonably well, or so we thought. Nobody knew who was President in 1914, though, which didn’t help. And apparently, Trevor’s now single. We didn’t get the whole story on that, though, because he wasn’t at trivia. At some point, we might get the whole story on what happened, or something. Patty and Spencer said they have to write their wedding vows. “Meow meow meow squeak squeak meow meow meow I do” is apparently not an option, though. (They have several cats and chinchillas, which is why she wrote that as a joke. . . .)

Monday. Well, there wasn’t a whole lot of terrible stuff involved. I spent a fair amount of time trying to improve a process that’s required human intervention, and I’ve got the human intervention down to about half of what it was, which is always nice.

After dinner, went to Fried Electronics with Stephanie, because she wanted to get a digital TV to composite-out converter. They only had two brands of converters available, though: Coby and a very expensive brand. I’m not convinced the Coby people have any idea about anything other than low prices, though, since Stephanie’s old DVD player was a Coby, and it barely worked. So she’ll probably find another converter over the Net somewhere.

Mother’s Day! Here’s a shout-out to all the moms out there!

Sunday was a lot less busy than it sometimes is. Not much happened. I did laundry and made dinner. Stephanie came over. We finished watching the second season of “Babylon 5″, which was kind of neat. Moira meowed a lot but finally shut up after getting about 20 minutes of play time with the fuzzball-on-a-stick. Back to work tomorrow—but that’s all right.

Friday, I didn’t have to work. Neither did Stephanie. So, we spent the day doing errands and laundry. This is all sort of to be expected.

After dinner, though, we decided to ride the light rail to First Friday, and saw the picture to the left. This worked out well, though it took a while to drive to the park-and-ride and then ride to downtown. We took in most of the Roosevelt Street stuff, including a set of booths that hadn’t been there before. We could’ve had Cajun food or gourmet hot dogs or Mexican from a taco truck if we hadn’t eaten at home, but whatever.

I saw some interesting art, but nothing I actually wanted to buy. One of the galleries on the south side of the street had a big drawing/painting that Jen Urso had been working on for over a year. (a picture of part of the drawing from Mar 2010.) This was sort of interesting, though this artist’s art is awfully abstract and has tons of eyeballs in it. There was another gallery that had many covers of celebrity magazines that had been dipped in saturated sugar solutions and allowed to dry, so you could see pictures of some pop tart covered in small sugar crystals. OK idea, but neither visually interesting nor profound.

This piece was interesting too. It was part of a set of pieces that were put together in collaboration with the Phoenix Children’s Museum. A bunch of kids put a bunch of blocks together into this sculpture, and signs said that viewers could move the blocks around if they wanted—but that hardly anyone would do that. I took that as a challenge, and moved one block from one place to another. In the same gallery, there was also a simple picture that looked a lot like Londo Mollari from “Babylon 5″, without the hair. (It was mostly due to the shirt with horizontal stripes, and the “I’m way better than you” attitude the figure was projecting.)

We didn’t get back to Tempe until about 10pm. Kind of late. But that was OK, because First Friday is one of the (few) things that’s neat about Phoenix, and I think it’s worth going to a few times a year even though it takes some time and is slightly inconvenient.

Saturday was a lot less taxing, mostly. Stephanie made chicken stew for dinner, and invited me over.

Depressed about the way the stock market’s going? Try the sock market!

Wednesday had relatively ordinary work things, with a few additional hassles. Instead of having Rock Band 3 at my house, we had it at Stephanie’s house, which was a little different. I messed up the A/V connections to her TV the first time, because her TV isn’t set up as conveniently as mine is. Oh well. We had dinner, then played a bunch of songs.

Thursday had a change: Stephanie took the bus in the morning, because she had to attend a meeting at the capitol building. At work, I had to do some stuff with mail filtering that I hadn’t done for a very long time, so I had to Search The Fine Web for how to do things I’d last done about 5 years ago. And then, of course, I’d made a typo in the filter script, so it took about 20 minutes longer than it should’ve to make everything work properly.

Been reading Black Blood, by John Meaney. This is basically a police procedural set in an alternate universe where necromancy works, and zombies and wraiths walk among humans. It’s interesting in some ways, but it’s totally divorced from reality, which might actually be a good thing. If they ever make a movie out of the story in Black Blood or Bone Song, then the set designers and cinematographers will have a field day with the lighting and effects necessary to pull off the über-Gothic scenes that’d be necessary.

I’ve got Friday off. I’m going to spend some of it sleeping, and possibly some of it at First Friday, since it’s been a while since I’ve been to one of those.

Well. Monday had more stuff than I’d thought. Normal work things, followed by a long session of taking Moira over to Stephanie’s house and letting her interact with Pinto and Anna. This didn’t go as well as it could’ve. Moira refused to leave her carrier and made horrible noises for a long time. And I accidentally sent blank text messages to two people from work, then called Zach. If I bend the wrong way, buttons on my phone get pressed, and stupid things happen. I need a cover for my phone, or something.

Tuesday had even more stuff, but no phone problems. The standard meetings took about twice as long as they usually take, and there was a bunch of stuff to get through.

Trivia: Almost everyone was there, but we didn’t even place. There were a bunch of movie questions that no one knew, which killed us. Anyway, a bunch of people planned stuff, and it looked like John had a new date/girlfriend/something along. Her name was Sarah, which causes a namespace collision, since we already have a Sarah, but this is really not a big deal.