So two weeks has passed and I am once again in bed and have once again spent the last 20 minutes playing with my paint program working on “The Cypress Swamp,” which is sure to garner world-wide interest among artistic circles. The lines, the colors, the…swampiness of it simply cannot be understated.
It is a Saturday morning, but the cats didn’t really care about that and rousted me from a most delightful slumber at 5:45 this morning. Little bastards have really got to figure out the whole “day of rest” thing at some point, but I’m not holding my breath. So, after feeding them and the outdoor critters (Buddy and Brooks are still regulars, though I haven’t seen Daphne in quite some time), I put on some shorts and a jacket and set out for a walk. Got about 8.5 miles in and came up with a new path that has potential – though I was certain that I was going to be road kill during one mile-long stretch with neither sidewalks nor shoulders.
That took a couple of hours and I got back to the house and back in bed by about 9:00 (for those of you doing the math, yes – I killed an hour watching television between the cat feeding and the walk); and I’ve spend the intervening 3 hours catching up on email, booking a hotel in Waukegan for next week, reading my messageboards, and – of course – painting “The Cypress Swamp.”
The last couple of weeks at work haven’t been half bad, actually. I finished up with my year-end review stuff (didn’t have the actual review, but wrote down all the stuff that I think I accomplished in the last 12 months and sent it to my boss) and spent most of my time working on my automation projects – one of which will be used by me tonight when I go in (at midnight) for yet another upgrade procedure. The last time I did this, I didn’t get out of the office until 9 in the morning. Here’s hoping that tonight is not a repeat of that fiasco.
A lot of my effort for the automation stuff has been focused on trying to connect to and get information from a number of UNIX servers. So far, I’ve managed to connect to the things and send a few simple commands; but I’m still having trouble with more advanced stuff that, while extremely simple to type at a terminal, is proving to be a real bugger to program. I have a few ideas about the problems, though, and will no doubt spend most of tonight’s upgrade session trying them out. I think I mentioned in my blog post on the night of the last upgrade that, no matter how long the whole thing takes, my part – thanks largely to my automation – lasts all of about 5 minutes. The rest of the time, I’m just sitting there on the phone, amusing myself in whatever way possible, and waiting to see if I’m going to have to roll back my five minutes worth of changes because the people taking 9 hours have screwed something up.
I played the last of three Red Kettle gigs last night and was extremely disappointed in the other 4 people who were playing with me. I’m not a world class musician or anything, but I find it hard to believe that any supposedly talented person can get lost – and stay lost – while reading Christmas carols that, on average, last for about 45 seconds. Time after time last night, however, one or more of the people in the quintet missed repeats and became hopelessly confused. Not to toot my own horn (both because I’m not that good at tooting it and because it’s kind of like bragging for not falling over when taking a step), but I was the only one of the 5 who didn’t get lost….and even had I done so, I wouldn’t have wasted the rest of the tune floundering around trying to “fit in” to a carol that any 4-year-old can recognize.
The RK gigs, at any rate, are over for another year.
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| The Cypress Swamp |
Did I mention that my work schedule is changing again as of tomorrow? Yeah. It is. I’ll be going M-F, 8-5 now. This won’t last long. Word is that the schedule will change AGAIN in mid-late January. For the record, yes, I *did* bitch on my year-end stuff about the complete lack of a standard (or even non-standard, but at least long-lasting) schedule over the last year…and I don’t particularly care if my boss takes offense at the fact that I blamed the lack of such on his leadership skills. The year-end stuff is supposed to be when you let your boss know if you have any problems with him. I’ve never had any before, but this schedule thing is really chapping my ass.
Waukegan next week? Yes indeedy. I still had a couple of vacation days to take, so I burned next Thursday and Friday (Friday being 12/21/12) and am planning on driving up Thursday morning and spending a few days with Amy. Still not sure if I’m working on Christmas or New Year’s day, but the early word is that the call center will be closed – which means that I won’t be.
Not that it matters, of course; because, according to the ancient Mayans, the world will end on 12/21/12. So at least I’ll get to die in a northern state.
That’s a good thing, right?
TWD