Another early, cold, exhausted morning. I can’t wait until Sunday when I actually get to sleep in a little bit. Although, of course, the joke around the office is that the production data center will go down on Saturday as developer and contingency have gone down the last two weekends like clockwork. If so, no sleep here.
Dominica got a chance to talk to her job in New Jersey (she has been on maturnity leave which is set to end soon) yesterday. When she left there was a discussion about the possibility of her working from home, possibly part time. That would be highly dependent both upon them remaining short of staff after all of this time and that they would have implemented a work from home technology solution. That is on top of the need just to get approval for someone to work from home. So we were not planning on this in any way but the final decision was not being made until yesterday. So we officially know now that Dominica is not going back to work (there is no way for her to drive that far to the office.) She will be focusing now on her certificate in System Administration and her second bachelor’s degree until she finds a really interesting work from home position – which could be a very long time.
Today was fairly busy at work. Working the early shift on Friday always makes for a really long day since I am always stuck working quite late regardless of when I start in the morning. Today was no exception and I worked until around seven in the evening. Good for overtime but bad for getting a chance to relax.
We are dinner and finished watching the third season of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. The third season is the where MTM starting falling apart wearing more and more outrageously hideous outfits (she was always the example of managing to pull off unflattering clothing but in this season it got away from her and she was constantly upstaged by Valerie Harper no matter how much dressing down they tried to do to her to keep Mary looking better), caking on makeup so that even on non-DVD based viewing of the show it looks like crusty gunk on her face and then, to top it all, towards the end of the third season suddenly she barely looks like the same person (or a person at all) after she undergoes a very obviously failed face-lift.
It is so sad that MTM could go from sex symbol on the Dick Van Dyke show and in less than a decade be a poster child for celebrities who panic and destroy their looks thinking that surgery will keep them looking young. Now websites call her the “cryptkeeper” as she has undergone one surgery after another and looks completely inhuman. She has managed to make herself look like she is Michael Jackson’s real mother. So sad. It is extra sad when you realize that she was in her mid-thirties then and that she is now in her seventies. She has lived half of her life with a surgically altered face and the vast majority of her adult life with it.
After finished the MTM show we watched some of Lou Grant, a spinoff series featuring Ed Asner as the city desk editor for the LA Tribune. It was a highly award winning show with a good cast that was eventually pulled from the air because the network on which it was running supported the US invasion of El Salvador and Ed Asner did not. Sad that the few good shows out there are at risk because someone has principles. I suppose that it is more sad that good people lost their jobs because the network took the moral low ground. The show is good. It is an hour long drama instead of a half hour sitcom. I am looking forward to watching it. Ed Asner is a really great actor.
While we were watching Hulu, I also worked on finishing Final Fantasy III. That did not end up working out, though. I made it all of the way to the end of the game, right to the very final battle, and then I died. Hours of gameplay without a chance to save! 🙁 It would not have been hours of gameplay for normal people but having a dog and a baby who need constant attention it takes hours to do anything. I am still hopeful that I can finish the game tomorrow. I have so many Nintendo DS and GBA games that I want to play but I am attempting to limit myself to playing only one at a time. I used to play several at once and that made for a lot of confusion and a lot of never finishing games. Recently my gameplay habits have changed completely and I am getting good at actually finishing things.
Tomorrow morning I am getting up at a quarter until seven to start work. Then, once work is done, the next job is house cleaning since Jenn and Angelo will be arriving sometime around noonish. Sunday I do not have anything scheduled – yet. I really need the day off.
I started working with Groovy and Grails just a tiny bit today. Mostly making documentation for myself on how to use Grails in comparison to Rails which I have been using for several months now.