Improving

After last week's work-related ugliness, the weasels in California had a revelation: the problem which we were digging so deeply into turned out to be not in the systems we were told. Indeed, the problem seems to be a coding issue in the back-end core apps, completely unrelated to the web servers and translation proxies they had originally assessed as faulty.

So the many hours spent on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and all day Friday turned out to be a complete waste. Total.

You can imagine how happy I was at this news.

Since we didn't get to the trailer, we had an otherwise free weekend so I determined I should try to do what I was going to at the trailer anyway: cut myself off from the world and just read.

In all, I started & finished three books and got a good start on a fourth. We visited kent4str's mother in the rehab facility for her mild stroke --she's doing very well but still has some weakness on her right side. (She'll be released back into the wild in a couple of weeks.) And I wrote some good C2 choreography last night to be used later this week.

The reading helped improve my mood quite a bit. Paying some bills also lifted my spirits, even though the bank deposit from my latest pay period still doesn't reflect my raise or back pay yet.

My plan is to have a relatively relaxing Monday --as relaxing as Mondays can be-- and then join the gang for half-price burgers at Mr Henry's tonight. If I can, I'll try to generate a few more square dance sequences before the day is through but that'll be a bonus.

Visiting California

I'm heading to the San Francisco area yet again, visiting my corporate overlords at the mothership in San Mateo. In a nutshell, I'm arriving around noon on Tuesday, May 15, returning in the early morning of Monday, May 21.

Booking this trip was a much more painful experience than it should be. Ideally, I prefer to fly non-stop on Virgin America. My next preferred airline would be Southwest as I'm close to getting some free flights and/or perks. (For the record, I despise American Airlines with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns and wish United would burst into flames before collapsing into a point singularity, taking with them any trace of their prior existence.) I also prefer to fly into SFO since it's just up the road from the office and to stay at the Marriott Courtyard hotel just behind my office building.

That's the ideal trip: flying Virgin to SFO to stay at the Marriott Courtyard.

Problems:

1. Virgin America wasn't showing up in our in-house travel reservation system.
   
2. Southwest had no flights from BWI within my budget within my preferred date range;
   
3. In the range I could afford, there were no Southwest direct flights and none to SFO;
   
4. The Courtyard had no rooms past May 22.

Ultimately, through a painful series of compromises, I'm flying Southwest with a single stop in each direction, Dulles to/from San Jose. At least I get my preferred hotel, thank god, but I couldn't get a confirmation for my rental car so I'll have to do that manually.

I hope the trip itself goes off without a hitch, since booking it took a lot more time & effort than it should.