weaktwos

I am now home. A glance at the odometer tells me I have driven 254 miles today. It was a day of rushing. It was not a day of sitting still to be sure.

This morning I had to go to our San Francisco Staff Counsel Office to assist one of our new attornies with his new laptop. We have some security measures that make it quite challenging for new users, so I was happy to assist him with this configuration.

However, it was time consuming, and lots of little traffic issues made for a 3 hour trip each way to the City. I had no time for lunch until about 4pm. I was trying to get back home to the office before 6pm to take care of some things, but that didn't happen. Ah well.

At 6:30pm I picked up textivore to go see "Cloverfield". He scored free passes to see the preview in Davis tonight. But since I was running about 15 minutes late, we got there when the theatre was mostly full. Only front row seats were available for us.

Now stop for a moment while I impart this tidbit of information. I'm rather prone to motion sickness. Oh yes, I am.
( Cut for Cloverfield spoilers or the easily squicked )

To summarize, I loved Cloverfield. It made me puke. Go see it. It's a love story!

Well, it's a busy day at the office, featuring running queries that have a little downtime for me while I run them. So, I leave you with this interview of Seth Green on NPR about his current project, Robot Chicken.

I used to have fantastic On-Call Karma. This would mean I would be on call for two weeks with n'er a single call in the wee hours.

That karma has left the building, the greater Sacramento area, and possibly the state.

Off I go into work.

Last night, I snug in my bed. I was in the state of descending into sleep. You know, it's the point where you can feel your body relax, and you begin to lose awareness of the physical world.

The phone rings. I'm yanked back to consciousness and I answer the phone. It's the command center. Yes, I'm on call. One of our servers didn't come back from an upgrade. The server team in San Antonio can't see the server on the network and continue their work.

There's nothing to do but get in the car, get to work and fix it.

Once my mind overcame its disappointment at being delayed from its sleepytime, I began to enjoy the commute into the office. No one is on the road but a few folks. As I enter the freeway, AC/DC's live version of "Thunderstruck" c!omes on my ipod.

Angus! Angus! Angus!

And then his opening guitar solo.

Thunderstruck is a great driving song.

Other songs that kept me company on the drive out and back: Gabriel's Shock the Monkey, Cash's Hurt, Dave Carter's Tillman County and Happytown.

As long as you're not crippled by exhaustion, driving down the highway in the middle of the night with good tunes is a very good thing.

I resumed sleeping procedures by about 2:20am.

And so ends my long streak of good "On-call karma". It's been quite a while since I was rousted out of bed in the middle of the night for a server problem.

I think I'll go into work a bit later.

After watching Season 2 of Lost, I realized I had a Lost moment recently.
( Spoilers, if you haven't seen S2 yet )

Today at work was rather good. There were two items of interest.

Item 1: I was not able to get to the gym today, but I did go out and take a walk around the walking track for a light workout. Mid-way through my planned workoutlet, my mind is enthralled with the music I'm listening to on the ipod, and my head is tilted downward. I'm listening to the music, looking at the rocks in my path.

Suddenly, I see a rock fall in front of my feet. Then another.

The geography of my company's campus is such that one side of the walking track is about 30 feet from an elevated portion of Arden Way. I look up and see a bunch of punks. They are looking at me and laughing.

My thought processes intrigue me. I was not afraid. I was just amazed that these kids were trying to throw rocks at me. I just kept walking and staring at them. They kept trying to throw rocks at me, and kept missing.

I was still rather flummoxed that this was happening to me, and I was pondering my response to these events when I realized, "Duh" that I have a cell phone. Eventually I turned around to look at them, and then I noticed two other coworkers walking on the track, and they started throwing junk at them as well. As I watched this, I whipped out my cell phone and dialed campus security.

The kids though I was calling the police, so they broke into a run and called me a "Bitch".

Punks. The Police were called, but I'm not certain that the kids could be found by the time they arrived.

It is also interesting to note that someone started a fire along the embankment between Arden Way and our property, which is roughly the same area where the punks were tossing rocks at me. Part of me wonders if they caused that problem as well.

2. My mother, who works elsewhere in the same company that I work at, came to my desk and asked me to help her operate the photobooth. The purpose of the photobooth is to take pictures for an online profile directory so that employees around the company can see what each other looks like.

So, she pulls me aside to complain about how uncomfortable the booth is and how it's hard to operate. This is funny, considering people have been using it for years without incident.

But after she got that out of her system, including complaints of how uncomfortable it was for her to pose for the camera, she ended up taking a bunch of goofy photos. Sadly, we could not save them. But they sure were funny.

I just calculated my annual leave accrual for each year at my current accrual rate. Not including holidays, I get 5 weeks and 12 hours off per year. Now, that does include sick leave, too. I have seven weeks saved up so far.

Cool.

The power outage wasn't that bad. Getting home before 3am is a victory.

Now to sleep.

What time is it?

Hmmm...clock says 2:21am.

Where am I?

You're here at work.

And I may ask myself, "Well, how did I get here?"

This isn't your comfy bed! This isn't your lovely home!

But I'm about to fix that.

Better turn up the music, Sunshine. It's going to be a fun ride home.

It's Saturday morning, and off I go into the breach again. The move crew has been working all night. Let's see how everything turned out.

Gosh, I hope it doesn't turn into another 11hr day.

In other news:

-Last night's Battlestar Gallactica was enjoyable. Still loving Starbuck!
-Chai Soy Milk is tasty. Try some today!
-Mean Girls and 13 Going on 30 were cute movies. They were indeed light weight films. Just what I needed while working last night.

I hope everyone else's Saturday went well.