It’s sort of amusing that the only physical token of appreciation I’ve received (so far) for SysAdmin Appreciation Day came from someone outside of my office:

That Mari, is she all nifty and thoughtful and stuff or what? Yay!

If I don’t update here very often for the next week or so, I have good cause for my silence. See, I have company coming. Over the course of the next week and a half I’m to be visited both by Dawn and by Kim, who’s flying out from New York to take in the experience that is The City Of Roses. So when I’m not working or taking care of my other obligations (hey, kids, I got the new Sailor Moon today!) I’ll be showing one or both of them around town.

There are worse reasons to be dragged away from the computer, to be sure…

So it’s still over 80 degrees out there, a bit after midnight. I don’t even want to think about what temperature it is here in my room. I’m going to try to sleep again anyway, because I’m effing tired, dammit.

The last two days have not been fun. It started out Thursday morning when I went to make a new playlist on my Neuros (portable music player). I was prompted to upgrade the firmware, and since that’s normally a good idea I went ahead and did so.

This promptly rendered my device unusable. As of this writing I’m still going back and forth with Neuros’ support forums about how best to resolve this mess. (So far the instructions have only made things worse. Argh.)

And then there’s my workdays. I worked an eleven hour shift Thursday, leaving at 8pm. (But hey, I got two plates full of yummy Bamboo Grove food for my troubles.) I got home, puttered around a bit and finally fell asleep around midnight… and an hour later my phone went off. Turns out the guys working on the UPS managed to kill power to the entire facility briefly. So I got to trudge down to the office at 1:30 in the ay em on an hour’s sleep to resurrect all of the servers and other equipment. There were no major casualties this time, but we did have a serious problem with the Cybex KVM switching system that took until about noon to resolve.

I finally got out of work almost exactly twelve hours after arriving… only to walk headfirst into the hottest damned day of the summer so far. My bedroom’s a freakin’ sauna… but I had to sleep anyway. At least, I tried to. I’m pretty sure I got some sleep anyway.

I’ve spent the last few hours alternating between hanging out downstairs (watching Stargate and Scrapped Princess by turns) and coming upstairs to check the Neuros forums for new ideas to fix my dead device.

Now, though, I just need to lay down. I’m tired, dammit. And it’s damned hot in here…

I haven’t seen The Imperial Princess of Cute very often lately, what with my busy life and her busy life not giving us much in the way of coinciding free time.

We remedied that for a while this past weekend. I trekked out towards her place Sunday morning for a round of shopping and lunching followed by crashing out on her couch watching silly DVDs. Oh, and I gave Mari a nice score on Sutek’s Tomb so she’d get a new Neopets avatar. What are friends for, eh?

Then Doug got home, and Lilith and Geoffrey and Anxiety-the-younger-demonspawn came over for dinner and a movie (A Fish Called Wanda, which turned out to be both more and less entertaining than I remembered it to be, for some reason). We also all hung out and chatted like we usually do, though this time it included poking some well-meaning fun at a forum post Lil’ and I had seen online.

Alas, it was a Sunday and most of us had responsibilities early the next day, so my fellow guests and I departed shortly after 9pm. All told, it was one of the more enjoyable Sunday afternoons I’ve had in a while. Thanks for having me over, Mari!

Normally, especially in the east side of town, if you have a dwelling with windows that open to the east and west, and you open them, you get airflow.

For some reason, this is not the case today. It’s icky. It’s hot. It’s effing muggy. Fans aren’t helping. Cold beverages only take the edge off briefly.

Yay, summer. *sigh* And here I was hoping to get some decent sleep tonight…

So I staggered out of the office a little before 9am, having put in damned near 23 hours straight. Yes, the voicemail system works. Whew.

I only vaguely remember the long hike downtown (stupid frelling bus service on Macadam anyway) and the MAX ride and the walk the rest of the way home, let alone the staggering into the bedroom and shucking clothing to collapse on the bed.

I do, however, remember waking up at about 2:30 drenched in sweat and breathing heavily. Man, my room gets hot in the midafternoon. So I got up and stumbled downstairs with a book to read and grabbed a bite to eat.

My accomplishment today? I finished off that massive volume of Arthur C Clarke’s short stories I picked up a few months ago. Good stuff, mostly.

Then I decided to go have a real meal. Mmmm, ribs.

Now? I’m taking it easy, but in a few minutes the roomie and I are going to attempt to make better use of our living room space by virtue of assembling an “entertainment center” cabinet to put all of my equipment in. This… should be fun. Heh.

At least now I’m awake enough for it.