Category: General

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Beer Food General Work

Weekend Report: Backyard edition

Been a very busy week. So let me start off with…

Monday (Memorial Day): as Kelly wrote, my friend Jenn threw a big BBQ / Housewarming. I was there far too late and had far too much beer (from a keg of IPA from Pelican Brewery), but it was a blast. Though I paid for it on…

Tuesday: the final push week for a development cycle at work. The company has engaged in something known as a ‘release train’ model, whereby every 6 weeks the company will release a new versions of it’s products. In this model there are three weeks of development followed by three weeks of quality assurance testing. This means that at the end of the dev. cycle, the developers begin work on the next release, while supporting any bugs that QA finds. So basically, development and QA happen at the same time, just for different releases. Since we’re just now getting on this model, it’s been hectic. ANYway, it was a mad rush to try and get everything done by the end of the week. Fast forward to…

Friday: barely got everything done for a 4pm demo to the company. Following that, the company held a big happy hour bash. Since the company has gotten so big, it’s been decided that once in a while each department sponsors a happy hour, complete with a small budget for whatever it is they want to do. This first time out, the engineering department got the task, and decided to go with the theme "ice". The break room windows were blacked out, there were blue glowing things (both to wear, as well as set around the room), buckets of dry ice pouring vapor all over the floor, and images cycling on the big TV of glaciers, snow-covered mountains, and Vanilla Ice. Hehe. It was pretty fun, and I didn’t get out of the office until a bit after 7:15pm. Waited a painful 40 minutes for a bus to arrive and finally made it home a little after 8pm. Kelly and I sat in the back yard for a bit before I grilled up chicken (both real for me, and fake stuff for Kelly) and ate dinner. Then I fell asleep on the couch shortly after 11pm. This leads me to…

Saturday: Woke up just before 8am and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I shuffled downstairs, made coffee, and though of all the things I was going to try and get done today. Once I had a cup ‘o joe in hand, I went upstairs to my office and sat at the computer to read some news for a bit. Well, I got heavily distracted (mostly with this blog) and didn’t end up doing anything I thought I might get done. Oh well I guess, it was a fun nerdy day. You might notice one new feature of the blog, there’s now a ‘Random Image’ sidebar item that’s pulling images from my new photo gallery software (Gallery2). One thing I was trying to figure out was how to more tightly integrate that application with my blog. I’m a bit frustrated with one of the blog plugins (it’s not working quite as well as I want it to) but that led me to do all kinds of other things (more behind-the-scenes) to the blog software iteself. Still tinkering, but thought I’d write a bit here before I lose myself in nerdiness again. I’m finally sitting outside (now that it’s not so damned hot out), beer in hand. Ahhhh.

Other interesting tidbits: It’s been hot this week, very hot. It hit 90 once already, and it was still May at the time. Even today the temperature was about 13 degrees F above normal. We basically went from winter to summer with only a couple weeks of sprint-like weather inbetween. *sigh*. InfoWorld posted a positive review of the product I’ve been focusing on for the past several months. Also, as of next week, I’ll have been employed at SuperSweetCo for a year. Man how time flies!

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General

Happy Birthday Kelly!

Happy Birthday to Kelly! Everybody go 'round to her blog and say hi. 🙂

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General

The Return of the Ants

3:15am. Awake suddenly, moments later, I hear a smoke detector sound downstairs and notice light flooding up from the stairway. I rush out and downstairs, finding Kelly standing on an end table while the detector screams intermittently. I jump up and help disconnect it while ants are crawling up my arms and across the ceiling above me. Run to the sink and shake the detector while trying to quickly open the battery compartment door so I can disconnect the battery and end the horrible sounds. Finally disconnected, but the more I shake the thing the more ants fall out into the sink. Kelly tries to vacuum up the ones on the floor and by the ceiling where the smoke detector is embedded into the ceiling. This is the same thing that happened just over a month ago. Same location.

Needless to say, after Kelly killing the ants that were crawling on my back as I was trying to empty the detector, we finally went back to bed. However, after an event like that, I found it very difficult to fall back asleep. My sense of touch was on high alert. Everything felt like there was an ant crawling on me. Took me a good 40 minutes to finally doze back off. Though ruining my chance at a full nights sleep.

Going to cover the top of the detector with Terro and screw it into position in the ceiling, see if the ants take the bait up there. If this doesn't work I'm going to HAVE to pay Orkin for the exterminator service, because this can NEVER happen again. Ever.

Categories
General Travel Work

Finally, a post

Finally a followup to my last post since returning from London. The cold I got at the end of the trip lasted quite a while, much longer than I'd hoped (and then, sadly, I gave it to Kelly), and since then I've been getting back into the normal life.

Over the past couple weeks I've gone out with friends, visited with family, and have been very busy catching up with work.

I'm still working on adding captions to my photo site from the trip, though at this rate it's going to take forever to get it all sorted. I also want to set up a sub-gallery of the 100 or so 'top' photos of the trip. However, I suspect it may be a little while until I get it set up, so hopefully you all don't get too bored with the mess of photos that I posted.

Some potential good news (trying not to jinx things), Kelly's had a couple really positive interviews for a job opening that would be perfect for her. I'm keeping fingers crossed (and you should too!). 🙂

Categories
Beer Entertainment General Movies Work

Unghhh

What a week, and what a day.

The past week has been pretty crazy at work. SuperSweetCo is prepping a new version of the software that I worked on a few months back. The UI is changing a little bit, which means that there's quite a bit of work for me to do. I can only hope the changes are received as big improvements. Stress!

After work yesterday I decided to walk homeward for a bit, the weather was nice, and I needed the physical and mental break from the week. I ended up walking about halfway home (at little over 3 miles) before catching a bus. Once I got home I drank a few beers and watched some movies from Netflix that K had already seen during the week. One of them was a pretty good (and quirky) romantic comedy called Happy Accidents. In general, anything with Vincent D'Onofrio I like… and Marisa Tomei isn't hard on the eyes either.

Today I had to get up early to help my friend Jenn move. In general helping a friend move is relatively easy, not because I'm all that fit, but it's normally pretty straight-forward… move stuff from point A to B. However in this case my friend Jenn swapped houses with a friend who lived about 3 blocks away. This might sound simple, but it's not. It meant that myself and the 10 other hard-working blokes had to fill the moving truck for a couple hours (climbing and descending steps and stairs, weighed down with heavy boxes, furniture and appliances), only to get to the other house, unload all that stuff, only to refill the moving truck with the stuff from the other house… effectively starting all over. Despite a couple beers and a short pizza break, after four hours I was exhausted. I'm not used to that level of strain. Oh, and the best part was about half-way through it started raining. Whee! All my complaining aside, I was still happy to help Jenn move. Just hope I never have to help move a house-swap ever again. It's a bit like rubbing salt in a wound. 🙂

After getting home and washing the stink off, and spending a couple hours relaxing (and letting the soreness set in) K and I joined Mr & Mrs Ghost Dog at the Mash Tun for a fantastic meal and some delicious beers. One of the beers that both GD and I enjoyed was a brown ale called Turbodog from Abita Brewing Co. in Louisiana. It was a delicious, quality brown ale with a slightly sweet and bitter flavor. And, it's got a cool name! 🙂 Had a great night, but I'm feeling very sore. I suspect tomorrow is going to suck.