Today is my first day of taking the official Sunday shift (as opposed to just being paged out and getting stuck with it.) I have been working every Sunday since mid-January so just being scheduled and knowing that I will be working on Sunday is, in a way, quite a bit nicer than being thrown into it each week at the last second when I had been planning on doing something else with that time.
I am working from my newly built Windows XP Pro workstation today and, so far, so good. It has been pretty stable and the fresh install is most definitely a bit faster than the old one. The newer, main hard drive may have a bit to do with the snappiness of the system although most likely it is just having the drive be mostly empty rather than mostly full and having everything be in fresh shape without a lot of kruft laying around the system. The extra memory will help from time to time but not likely with my daily work.
I found out today that someone was shot in front of The Spot last night. The Spot is the restaurant that opened up in downtown Newark just down the block from 1180 where Dominica and I lived for the last two years. I used to walk Oreo by The Spot a few times per day and a few times he even got to go in there. Apparently there was still blood on the sidewalk while people were in eating lunch today!
The sun is out in force today. It is going to be a hot one. While working in the basement this morning I discovered a garter snake sunning himself (or herself, I really don’t know) on the cement of our back porch which gets a fair amount of sun in the mornings. He hung out for a good twenty minutes and I attempted to get some pictures. We will see if they turned out or not when I finally get a chance to upload some of my pictures again.
It definitely got hot today. Ninety degrees in the shade. Ouch. The house was way too warm all day. It didn’t take too long before I was able to convince Dominica and Liesl that they should come down to the basement and hang out with me down here today. The basement probably never climbed over eighty degrees while the rest of the house eventually got warmer than the outside. It felt like an oven in the living room with all of its exposed windows.
Today Liesl discovered the world of evaporative cooling. She was so warm that she was really unhappy today. So, to cool her off, we took a wet wash cloth and moistened her skin with it. She liked that. I would then blow on her to make the moisture evaporate. She would shiver and shake and laugh. She loved it. We did it over and over again. Each time she would act so surprised. She would be a perfect candidate for some commercial for minty fresh gum where she takes a bite and is surprised by the blast of cold or something like that. It was so cute! After a while she took the wash cloth from us and was rubbing it on herself.
I talked to Andy a little bit tonight. Tonight is the official decommissioning of the Waste Watcher which he and I designed and developed back in March and April of 2000. While we were talking about it I realized that he was bringing down the old application exactly nine years after we had first starting using it. What an amazing thing that is. We would never have guessed that that code that we were designing back then would continue to be used for an additional nine years. We were thinking that it would have been completely replaced long before now. There isn’t that much code in the world that actually manages to stay relevent and to be used, in production, for nine whole years and to have it keep working the whole time. Not that there were not ever any changes but not too many that were actually significant changes but just a small amount of bug fixes and some feature additions – mostly around 2002, I believe. There has been almost no change to the original code for the last several years.
Dominica and I watched some of the Gilmore Girls but as I had more work to do we could not watch very much. She stayed in the basement and just watched stuff at her desk on her laptop while I worked.
Dominica ended up going to be probably around eleven or so. I stayed up and worked until one or one thirty at the latest. Oreo stayed down in the basement with me sleeping on the cinema seating. It was quite cool in the basement and even in the living room but the upstairs was stifelingly warm. It was probably still eighty degrees up there, even with every window open and the ceiling fan running.
Tomorrow Dominica and Liesl are driving down to Hasbruck, New Jersey to go on a play date with Dunia and Landen. They are going to something like a mommy and me gym class. I am not completely clear on the details. They will be leaving mid-morning and will get lunch while they are out and will then go to Orange County BMW, which is pretty much on the way home, to drop off the title to the 330 while picking up our X3’s manual, spare key and getting the fog lamp replaced that Art and I noticed had burned out last week.
Oreo and I will just be staying home to get lots of work done which is good. It has been such a crazy week that having just some simple, quiet time will be really good for me.