Friday’s main event was going to the Phoenix Zoo. Stephanie had a couple of free tickets, and she bought a zoo membership, which gave her additional free tickets, so it wasn’t really that expensive.

So all of us walked through the exhibits, and we were a lot luckier than usual. The otters were awake and playing, the lion was awake and looking at things, the fennec foxes were awake, and I was able to get a bunch of pretty good pictures.

This picture was something else entirely. I thought this was a dik-dik (tiny antelope), but we saw its mother walk over to it a minute later and start licking it. It wasn’t obvious at first, but the high-resolution shots show that this little gerenuk (giraffe-necked antelope) had been born really, really recently, probably around 10:30am since the picture was taken at 11:04am.

We decided to pay a bit extra and feed the giraffes. This was interesting, even if it led to giraffe slobber. I didn’t get insanely great pictures of this, because the giraffes have figured it all out, and are extremely quick at grabbing the food pellets from your hands.

While we were eating lunch, Pat called me. This was interesting, since I haven’t heard from him in a very long time. Then we went back to seeing animals, though we stopped after seeing the vultures, prairie dogs, orangutans, and tortoises. The vultures are kept right next to the prairie dogs. So, one of the vultures took a short flight, and about 2/3 of the prairie dogs bolted for their holes as soon as they heard a large bird flying.

Anyway, after that, we all went home. I took a short nap and finished reading a book that I’ve been trying to finish for a while. Mom and Dad came over for dinner, so we had chicken, biscuits, leftover rice and vegetables, and cookies. We also tried to figure out what the heck we’re doing tomorrow night.

Tuesday: Not all that much happened. Wednesday: The family flew in to town, and didn’t get delayed or lose their luggage or anything dumb like that. This is always a good thing.

Then we had to get Stephanie and run out to Fountain Hills to visit a winery, because I’d bought a coupon that allowed 4 people to taste a bunch of wine and get one bottle of wine each. This had a few logistics problems. We could only use the coupon Wednesday, the winery was a long way away, and Mom and Dad were pretty tired. Also, we had to get dinner before going, and nobody knew where to go. I picked out a restaurant basically at random (“Señor Taco”, a little fast-Mexican joint) and it was actually much better than anyone had expected. Pretty cheap too. Sometimes, you get lucky.

The Casavino winery was pretty good too. There weren’t very many people there, we all got to taste 10 different kinds of wine, and we also got salty snacks and chocolate. The wines were a little hit-or-miss, but the sommelier explained a lot about each wine. We also got to taste ice wine, which Mom liked because she’d always wanted to try it and never been able to. So we picked out the wines we wanted, and had custom wine labels made, and that was interesting. Mom and Dad liked it, which was really what I wanted to have happen.

Thursday: We had a little more time, but Stephanie had to work. Went out to lunch with the parents, then after work, Stephanie took us all out to a pizza buffet. Then we spent some time at Bookman’s, which the parents really liked as the used bookstores they have are a whole lot smaller. Tomorrow: Zoo, probably.

Monday! Well, sort of. This Monday was actually my virtual Friday, since I’m off the rest of the week. I got some stuff done, at least. I figured out that we could get a bunch of disk space back by doing X. I wrote out steps to take if X didn’t work right, so that everybody else could fix things if X caused problems. We hope this’ll prevent anything stupid happening while I’m on vacation.

Stephanie came over after dinner, and she brought Pinto. Pinto explored everything and upset Moira to no end. But Stephanie arranged the presents under the tree in a pleasing fashion, and I got the kitchen into some semblance of order, and everything should be reasonably good. We hope. I still have a whole bunch of stuff to do tomorrow, but I have A Plan™ and should be able to get it all done barring major catastrophes.

The serial comma (Oxford comma) can be a really good thing, as this JPEG illustrates.

Anyway. Friday, I spent the whole day working from home, which was a nice change of pace, even though Moira decided to occupy my lap for most of the day. I spent my lunch break getting some shopping done.

Saturday, I put up the Christmas tree, and Stephanie helped me hang up all the ornaments. You can see the results in the JPEG to the left. It mostly worked out. Stephanie brought a pile of food over. We then finished watching “City of Lost Children”, which I thought was interesting mostly because it was so different from the way any American director/studio would’ve told the story.

Sunday, I did some more shopping, getting (almost) everything for the whole Christmas shindig thing happening in a week. There are still a few things to do. But at least we’ve got a bunch of main dishes, pop, snacks, and coffee. I made dinner (turkey, macaroni and cheese, salad, fruit) and we ate while Moira serenaded us.

So: Back to work tomorrow, though I’ve got Dec. 20..26 off. This will be good. I had originally intended to take the rest of the year off, but since Chris quit, and other people want to take vacation, I’m sort of stuck going to work from Dec. 27..31. Ah well.

Tuesday: relatively ordinary work stuff for the most part. The only odd thing was that someone had asked for a bunch of stuff two weeks ago, but phrased it really badly. The guy who did that stuff did what the user said instead of what the user meant. This didn’t work well. So I had to go back in and fix it—which really didn’t take all that long, but it was probably a tiny bit annoying for the poor users. That night, we watched the first half of City of Lost Children, a film with a lot of surreal elements. It was less weird than I remember it, though. Maybe it’s just that the weirdness bar has been raised a lot since 1996.

Wednesday: More pretty ordinary work things. Then we had Rock Band 3, with Chinese food, though my phone dropped its connection twice while I was calling the restaurant to order. We also had Aric as well as Steve. This was pretty good, though Stephanie and I had more problems than I thought we’d have singing harmony vocals.

Thursday: I was the only one from my team in the office. This could’ve been bad, but it really wasn’t. The worst problem was that a bunch of files weren’t where they should’ve been. After far too long, we found out that somebody in another department hadn’t imported those files, and everything worked right after he imported them.

I’ve gotten the last Christmas card sent out. Now I guess it’s time to wrap presents and decorate the tree. . . .

Monday was pretty odd in that it was raining off and on all day. This is unusual for the Phoenix area, even though we tend to get more rain in December and January thanks to weather patterns. Work was reasonably OK. Really only had a couple of problems, both of which responded well to a great deal of banging on them with a text editor and a fresh box of cuss words.

Stephanie picked me up from work, since she’d driven in. But while she was driving home, her left windshield wiper blade fell off. I tried to get it back on, but that didn’t work, because I couldn’t get the plastic swivel/hinge bit to stay on the blade’s pin. I thought the blade might need to be replaced, since the hinge was showing signs of wear. Of course, when we got to a nearby auto parts store, the guy at the counter got the hinge to stay on the pin in about half a second. *sigh.* After that, it was easy to get the blade back in place. This took at least 20 minutes, though, and it rained like hell as I was walking back to my place.

Tonight, I’ve been writing Christmas cards. As usual, I included the parody song from this Sluggy comic in a couple of them. Still have a few more to do.

Anyway. It really hasn’t been that busy, it’s just felt a lot like it. I still have to get a bunch of Christmas cards written, wrap a bunch of presents, and put the tree up. But Friday was relatively quiet, which was really nice as the earlier bits of the week were pretty hectic.

Saturday, Stephanie’s toilet overflowed, which was just slightly annoying. At least it was relatively easy to fix and only a few things got dirty. We also watched “Babylon 5: The Lost Tales”, which was a direct-to-DVD attempt by JMS to get the series restarted again. It didn’t work, but it was interesting anyway.

Sunday, I got groceries and made dinner. That was about it. I’m OK with having a boring few days, because there are sure to be interesting and/or stupid things happening later on this week.

Wednesday, the big excitement was what seemed like a never-ending raft of trouble tickets, a couple of which had absolutely nothing to do with us. Sure, something sourced from http://example.com/stuff/ may be giving a “500 Internal Server Error” for everybody. This doesn’t mean that I can fix it, even if ten people are all yelling at me to fix it right now, because I don’t have any access to example.com’s webserver. Fortunately, it didn’t take that long to fix once we’d found the right person to talk to at example.com.

The potluck went well. People liked the penguin appetizers. Some people asked me about them while I was riding the bus to work, since I had them in a clear plastic container. There was also macaroni and cheese with bacon, which was probably tastier than the penguins even though it wasn’t as eye-catching. There were actually a few penguins left over. I was surprised at that, but I ate one and took the rest home.

Steve couldn’t show up for Rock Band, since there were terrible things happening at his work. Stephanie and I had dinner without Steve, then I played through some of Dragon Age: Origins to show Stephanie what it’s like. It takes a long time to run through the adventure, though, which is why I’ve barely touched the game in the last year.

Thursday had even more trouble tickets. I got three or four at once as I was riding the bus in to work. Only one of them was a real problem. Then, I had to deal with being the only one of the team who was actually in the office. There was a really bizarre problem with the dev site that neither Bill nor I could figure out, though we were both looking at it. We finally said, “All right, leave it for now, come back a bit later and try again.” Then I took a good look at the directories. The place where everything worked had files 1, 2, 3, and 4. The place where nothing worked had files 1, 2, and 4. One of these things is not like the other. . . . Sigh. Well, once I’d copied the missing file over, the dev site started working, and there was much rejoicing.

I’ve still got tons of things to do, though. The cat above is engulfed by bunnies; I seem to be engulfed by problems that are a lot less cute and fuzzy.

It seems like there have been five tons of things going on recently, leaving me with little time or motivation for writing a blog. But I was off work for the last couple of days, which was nice. I made these edible cream cheese/olive penguins for the potluck at work on Wednesday, and this time, I got a picture of them with the good camera. Hope people like them—they did last year, at least.

No idea what I’m going to find at work when I get back. I guess I’ll find out.

Wednesday had fairly normal work stuff. Except for the semi-panicked attempts to learn as much as possible about the huge complex system that we’ll all have to rewrite and maintain in roughly 2 months. That’s going to lead to far too much work until February, for sure. And maybe beyond that. Not much that can be done, really. And the pace of “Could you do X if you have a minute???!” requests has not slowed down one bit.

But after work, Steve came over, and we had Chinese food. Apparently, he’s now a full-time employee, which will be great for him, since he can get cheaper medical insurance. His older son Adam did something stupid, though, so that was annoying. Stephanie came over as well, though she was late. We ended up talking and looking at the ThinkGeek paper catalog instead of playing Rock Band. The catalog has a ton of interestingly weird and geeky gifts, like caffeinated marshmallows and T-shirts that say, “The book was better.” Anyway, it was different, but interesting.

Thursday, I saw some interestingly obvious stupidity:

• In this established and semi-anonymous forum, 95% of commenters hate it.
• In this non-anonymous forum where all comments that appear must be approved, 40% of commenters hate it.

So, they appear to want to turn a thriving comment section into a moribund wasteland of suck. This isn’t entirely unexpected, just. . . really stupid. And of course, we also recently learned that there are going to be furloughs next quarter. Not everybody has to take furloughs, though. People who work directly for corporate don’t have to take them. Everyone else does.

On a slightly happier note, I did my annual donation to Child’s Play tonight. Hooray for helping kids out, or something.