Month: September 2004

  • Tonight’s the night, baby.

    If all goes well, this website (among a few others as well) will vanish from the Internet for a short while, shortly after midnight.

    If all goes well, the UPS will become fully operational with its new logic board and a whole truckload of batteries. (I’ve seen the truck.)

    If all goes well, I’ll probably be home around 3am. I hope nobody minds if I come in a wee bit late tomorrow… (Too bad I can’t take the whole day. Bah.)

    UPDATE, 9:30am the next day: We had a false start, but other than that things went pretty well. Nothing seems to be the worse for wear, probably due to our actually getting to shut things down cleanly. Huzzah. Let’s now pray that the UPS doesn’t bother us for at least another year…

  • How about my keychain?

    I plead unease of the intestinal tract and equilibrium. See, I fought mild-to-worrisome nausea levels all day yesterday. (Bless my friends for putting up with my whiney-butt self all day. Bah.)

    The kids arrived home from Arizona yesterday evening. As Wendi had a gig, I became the designated (quicker?) picker upper. I was dropped off at the airport, still concentrating on keeping my insides in, and made my way to the ticket counter to get my “parents pass” (for lack of a better phrase).

    See, there are only three types of people allowed through the security checkpoint: Employees of the airport or an airline, ticketed passengers, and parents seeing off their children or picking them up. And that’s only one parent, not both, as we learned when we sent the kids off a month ago. So I got my pass and proceeded to the checkpoint.

    The contents of my pockets: Loose change, keys, more keys, wallet, and… oops. My Leatherman Micra.

    See, because I wasn’t actually flying anywhere, I didn’t give a second thought to the contents of my pockets. (Not that day, anyway. I’d thought about it the day before. Just not enough to actually take the Micra out of my pocket. Duh.) Had I been traveling I’d have been extra-careful about what I tried to get through the checkpoint. Really.

    So the very polite, if not terribly friendly, TSA folks confiscated my Micra and provided a mini-lecture. Thanks, guys.

    I did, mind you, get it back after the kids had arrived. But there are two amusing parts to this story:

    1) Not one hundred feet from where my Micra sat in the TSA “office” drawer I saw an ad for… Leatherman. I couldn’t help but think, “Does this make sense? Advertising for sharp objects on an airport concourse, right near the security checkpoint?”

    2) The ever-so-watchful TSA folks who spotted and snagged my Micra totally failed to notice that my “keychain” consists of an old, small pocketknife…

  • Quoth the Cat…

    I’m going to quote one of the few Garfield comic strips I can still remember:

    Labor Day, shmabor day,
    what a dumb day
    to hire some jerk
    then send him away
    to celebrate work
    by playing all day

    Playing all day? Sounds good. Especially since the 48 hours immediately after I arrive back at work are going to be very un-fun… Le sigh.

    Have a good weekend, all.

  • Note To Self #3,591,831

    Under no circumstances whatsoever should I be drinking iced tea after 10pm on a work night. Possibly even 9pm.

    (Bleargh. Who needs sleep anyway?)