Not sure why but I am guessing that it is because of the heat but I am really looking forward to this weekend. I suppose that it could also be because we are not traveling and that makes it a lot more like a normal weekend rather than just working somewhere else. I am actually planning on not really working at all this weekend. By not working I mean that I won’t be doing any systems administration. I will be doing some programming instead (I call it programming as opposed to software development or some other term because what I can do could only loosely qualify under any definition of development.)
The horrible heat broke late last night around eleven o’clock. What a relief. We were able to sleep in peace last night. Boy have we been needing that. Thunderstorms rolled in and brought a small amount of rain. Not much but it made the difference that we need. Now we are back down to normal summer temperatures. Just in time for the weekend. That is awesome. Otherwise we would have been spending two whole days sitting in that hot apartment wonder how to stay cool. It is bad enough with just Dominica there but with both of us and both of our computers running it heats up even more.
I have been getting busier and busier at work recently. Today was a very triumphiant day as I finally managed to get full access to everything that I am aware of needing to have access to – which means that I now have full access to everything that I need to be working on even when I am at home. That was the final frontier of missing access up until this point. So I am quite relieved about that. Now I don’t have to plan my time at home based on the type of work that I am expected to have to perform on a particular day.
I was so nice to leave work this evening and not have to walk into a heat wave. It is still quite warm but not hot so much anymore. I didn’t have to stay late tonight either even though it is a Friday night. My work that would normally require me to stay late on Friday was pushed off until Monday so I get to go home and enjoy my weekend.
Dominica and I went to the Omega Diner for their Friday night dinner. They have a special on Friday’s that is really amazing: crab cakes with mac and cheese. Sounds weird but it is absolutely awesome. It is the best mac and cheese that I have ever had short of the Black and Tan Mac & Cheese that they do at The Heights in Ithaca. And they give you such a huge portion that you can easily take most of it home to have as leftovers and to sweeten the pot the whole thing reheats really well too! So it is a really good deal that shouldn’t be passed up on the rare occassion that we are not leaving town on a Friday night.
Dominica spent the evening as she did her day working on her homework for her classes at SUNY Empire. She is quite behind and has some huge projects to work on. Her database design class keeps her quite busy as she is doing far more than expected in an introductory class but it is really good for her and she is learning tons about database design as well as how to really use Microsoft Access 2003 although way too much of the learning has had to be about Access in particular instead of about serious database topics but it is a start. She is definitely getting more out of the class than the average student would. Lots of work but really valuable and she is, for the most part, really enjoying the database stuff that she is learning. Maybe she will decide to focus her career on the database side of things. We will see.
I spent the evening continuing to work on an asset tracking system using PHP and MySQL. That is going to keep me quite busy all weekend. It is a pretty large project for me to be doing alone.
Once Dominica had burned herself out on homework we watched the final three episodes for the first season of BallyKissAngel. It did turn out that I had seen the first season previously but I think that it must have been a really long time ago. The show first ran in 1996 and it must have been right about that time that I first saw it. 1996 was the very last time that I had regular access to television so it had to have been around that time for me to have seen the entire first season and not just a random episode here and there.
We ended up staying up very late working on our database projects. It was probably three in the morning when we finally headed off to bed.