My obsessions du jour

[bjarvis]

While my skating and concert plans were derailed by the weather yesterday, we still made it down to Annie's Steakhouse for dinner with friends. The snow emergency had been lifted by 3 PM so the regular parking had re-opened along 14th, 15th & 16th Streets NW but word clearly hadn't circulated yet: there was more available parking than I've ever seen on a weekend.

Usually, I'm in penny-pinching mode when we dine out: I prefer to eat cheaply as there always seems to be a bill or close relative who needs my discretionary funds. However, since I still had $80 of the $100 I pulled out of the bank a full week ago, I let myself go a little and enjoyed a small steak with two vegetable dishes. Hey, I'm a cheap date.

There were nine of us in our little group, the core of our Friday night happy hour crowd whom we haven't seen in a while since we rarely have the energy of late to get to happy hour on Fridays. All appear to be happy & thriving in our absence.



Work has been a flurry of activity through the morning, some catch-up from weekend activities, some new assignments and a stack of preparation tasks for the upcoming two weeks. I've created a long list of to-do items for the night shift and delegated some tasks to others in my team for the coming days. At the moment, I believe I've tackled all but one of my outstanding tasks, and that little number comes up next.




The upcoming week is going to be more interesting than usual. Because of the snow, the DCDD concerts of Saturday & Sunday have been scrubbed in favour of a performance tonight. Kent will probably head to the space directly from work and I'll zip down around 9:30 PM to collect him and the set pieces.

Tuesday night, we're calling for the Chesapeake Squares' regular club night. This year, it's a Valentine's theme but I've yet to pick out suitable music. With a little luck, I'll find enough in our collection later tonight.

Because of conflicting appointments, I'll be working from one of our DC offices tomorrow rather than trekking out to Urbana. Since my DC office parking privileges have been scrubbed, I'll have to take the subway in. Whee.

Later this week, I'm also upgrading the operating system on a server with high visibility. The night crew has blown it twice before so I'm going to tackle it myself. It's not that I don't trust them... well, OK, it is that I don't trust them. My fingerprints have been all over this project for three years and I'm not going to let anyone block my victory lap, esp. people from my own support team. This means I'll work the night shift Wednesday night, at least 1-6 AM, but I'll have Thursday day shift off and Friday was already booked as a vacation day to prep for ACDC. Victory will be mine on this particular project even if I have to leave deeply embedded boot prints in the butts of anyone who gets in my way.