Sunday, Stephanie and I went to Seaport Village, a little shopping center in downtown San Diego. This had a bunch of small independent shops, with a bunch of specialized (and highly priced) stuff. Stephanie bought me a coffee mug. We had lunch at a little seafood place nearby, and had shrimp, fish, and crab cakes. The food was really good, and it wasn’t all that expensive either. The seafood had probably been swimming in the bay less than 24 hours before we ate it.

Then we drove to Coronado, an island near San Diego proper. It was about 2pm when we did this, though, so there was no parking anywhere, so all we could really do was drive around and look at stuff. On the island, gas was about $0.20 more than in the city, and I’m sure prices in the stores were jacked up even more than that. The island was pretty. I’m not sure I would have wanted to pay lots of money for the privilege of being there, though.

We finished off the day by meeting Stephanie’s parents. I got a brief tour of their house, but Stephanie’s dad was very annoyed that I’d seen the place. Apparently, he hadn’t known that I was coming over. Anyway. We went back to the Viejas casino, since they said they were going to take us out to dinner there. They had a coupon for the buffet, or something. The main problem was that everyone else also had a coupon for the buffet, so the line was hundreds of people long, and they said it’d take at least 2.5 hours to get to the front. We didn’t have that kind of time. So we ate elsewhere. Stephanie bought a bunch of “tripod keychain flashlights” that were on sale in the outlet mall nearby, and I bought a couple of them too. I then lost $5 on video poker. Stephanie won $1, but she was playing for lower stakes and being more conservative. Anyway.

Monday, we got up and went to the airport. No trouble getting there or returning the car, but the San Diego airport is really cramped. They built it in a place where there’s no real room to expand, so everything’s set up for a 1980s level of traffic. Anyway, we got home without all that much hassle. Moira was glad to see me, and wanted to be petted a lot.

Spent the last few days taking a mini-vacation in San Diego with Stephanie.

Friday: Drove to the airport, flew out to San Diego, rented a car, and got to the hotel. This actually worked out pretty well. It was more expensive than driving, but it was also only 4 hours instead of 7 hours. Met Stephanie’s parents at a local joint where we had fish and chips. This also worked out well. Then we drove up to the El Cajon transit center, where we got on a free shuttle bus to the Viejas casino/outlet mall. Stephanie’s parents like going there because you can gamble or shop. We wandered around the stores and bought some stuff, then went back.

Saturday: We got breakfast, then fiddled around for a while before meeting Stephanie’s parents for lunch at a Chinese buffet near Sea World. This was pretty good, and not all that expensive. Then Stephanie and I spent a lot of money on tickets to Sea World. To get our money’s worth, we spent about 8.5 hours there and ate dinner there. No problem. We saw a bunch of the attractions, including the penguins, the sharks, the dolphin show, the tower ride, and the killer whale show.

We got to the killer whale show a bit early—good decision, because it was really popular. A guy sat next to me, and he had a huge tray of food and a drink. He balanced the tray on his knees and started eating, but a few minutes after that, he dropped the tray and food went everywhere. He was trying to clean it all up, and he almost knocked his drink over, but I saved it and kept it. He then went to get replacement food. I held on to his drink for about 15 minutes. I began to wonder where he was, since the show was about to start. Finally, about 10 minutes after the show started, he showed up again. He was glad that his drink was still there, and thanked me effusively.

Of course, I didn’t get any pictures of Sea World, because I’d left my camera in the hotel room. sigh.

Six years ago, I found Moira wandering around outside my old apartment in Lansing. She’s not content, but she’s probably a lot happier here than she would’ve been wandering around outside in Michigan.

Wednesday, I had the day off. I spent it doing laundry, reading, and taking some canned goods to the food bank. Steve and Stephanie came over for the usual Rock Band 3, and we heard that Steve’s starting a new job on Thursday, which is excellent. Steve’s older son is apparently going to join the Navy, which might actually be a good thing for him. Stephanie didn’t sing or play guitar or drums; she brought her violin and tried to play the melody line on the songs we chose. This was apparently difficult on some of the “angry white boy music” songs.

Thursday had relatively ordinary work things, though there was a bunch of stuff that had piled up from Wednesday. No matter. Got the vast majority of it done/fixed/whatever.

Going on another mini-vacation Friday, which should be interesting.

After the last entry on Sunday night, I hit the sack. I got a trouble ticket about an hour after I’d gone to sleep. It was a serious trouble ticket, but it was really annoying to have to get up and do stuff late at night. And then I saw additional problems that weren’t quite as serious on Monday morning before getting on the bus and going to work.

But anyway, Monday and Tuesday were reasonably normal in terms of work stuff. It was sort of a relief to have some normal days after having a bunch of trouble tickets. Monday night, I went over to Stephanie’s for dinner, and we had grilled chicken with rice and homemade salsa.

I have the day off Wednesday, which should be nice, even though I’ve got a bunch of errands to run on that day.

Sunday was actually fairly relaxing. Did a bunch of laundry, made dinner, and Stephanie and I started watching the last season of “Babylon 5″. Didn’t have any work calls as of 8:20pm, and I really hope that continues.

Apparently, Bank of America recently sold my mortgage to another company. This isn’t that terrible; mortgages get bought and sold all the time. However, a recent thread on Fark had a law-talking guy saying:

there has been a massive call for Doc Review Lawyers (we are the migrant farm labor of the legal world, we are brought in when there are millions of docs to comb through in advance of huge lawsuit) in Charlotte NC—which just happens to be the Home of BOA. This tells me SOMEONE is preparing a Massive lawsuit against them and they may finally take it in the shorts after all.

This makes sense, actually. If Bank of America needs cash right now to defend against a massive lawsuit, they’d probably sell off some assets like mortgages that are being paid in a timely manner. I just hope this other company (Green Tree Financial Services, LLC) isn’t as evil and stupid as Bank of America has shown themselves to be.

Anyway. Friday was a fairly ordinary day at work. We all went out to Five Guys, since a couple of us hadn’t been there before. We found that they give you a whole lot of fries, so ordering fries individually isn’t really the best idea. But the food was good, which was really all we wanted.

Of course, I got two trouble tickets that night while I was eating dinner. This was pretty annoying. All through this week, I’ve gotten trouble tickets while eating dinner every single day except Wednesday. This is really annoying, but it’s sort of part of the job.

Saturday was a bit more relaxing. No going to work, only one trouble ticket. I spent more time than usual sacked out on the couch.

Wednesday was a lot more annoying than it should’ve been. A third-party vendor ran a DROP DATABASE on the main database we’re replicating, and that broke a bunch of our stuff. What really made me feel good was the way a “tech” said, “Oh yeah, there’s some instability with the system, so errors build up, and the only way to remove them is to drop everything and restore from somewhere. . . .” Seriously? This is a widely-used and pretty well-tested open-source database, not some Microsoft product. We’ve been running a set of much larger and more complex databases for years without needing to do that. It makes me think their application design and/or DB structure is totally pants. But anyway, that ate large amounts of the morning and part of the afternoon. The hassle also made it so that I couldn’t go give blood, which was also annoying.

Wednesday night, Stephanie and I went out to a nearby pizza place for dinner, which was nice. We had plenty of food, enough so that we both got several slices of pizza to take home.

Thursday started out a lot less hectic than most of the other days this week. And then I got a trouble ticket while I was eating dinner. It’s always something. Well, it only took about half an hour to fix, but it was really annoying. I’m really glad the week’s almost over. I don’t think I could handle it if every week was like this.

Tuesday had what seemed like a never-ending stream of meetings, semi-dumb queries, problems, and trouble tickets. And, of course, I got yet another trouble ticket while eating dinner. So. . . not a great day. I could rant more, but it wouldn’t serve any useful purpose. Well, at least the D-Backs beat the Phillies, which is always a good thing.

Monday. Heck. It seemed like a long string of relatively minor requests, punctuated by more complex and time-consuming stuff. And it all mostly worked.

Until I got called after I’d finished dinner. Someone somewhere had approved a project/something that was using a bunch of code that was never designed to do what they wanted it to do, and they’d just now found some problems, and could we please drop everything and work on it until it was fixed to their satisfaction? Even though they’d never asked anyone technical about requirements and what could go wrong? This sort of thing is really frustrating and depressing to those of us who manage technical things. It all could’ve been prevented if some suit somewhere had invested a bit of time and effort into thinking ahead. Sigh. Well, maybe they’ll learn. . . .

When I lived in Ann Arbor, I don’t think my rented housing was ever more than a mile away from this place. It was your average greasy, unhealthy, and really good hamburger joint. I also don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat there again thanks to geography and being too old to deal with high-fat cholesterol bombs. But anyway.

Sunday was fairly relaxing; did a bunch of laundry and made dinner. Moira meowed a lot. Stephanie came over with a bunch of vegetables and salad, so we had a nice and mostly nutritionally balanced meal. Totally unlike what you’d get at Blimpyburger.

Apparently, Kari’s thinking about having a correspondence page in “Shards of Glass in Your Eye #6″. I wrote a snarky letter to her, so she might publish it or parts of it in her next zine. Whee!