Late Sunday Hmmm. I want my weekend back.

Last week was long and intense; I spent so much time working, wither at my desk or at home, that I very nearly spent my time either working, or sleeping. I don't recall eating, although I must have done that somewhere. So, this weekend it was time to relax, right?

Yeah. That's it.

Keri found a nice new couch for the living room; we needed one, so she picked one up for a very nice price. To be delivered Friday night. I was promised that it was a good "man couch"; tough and durable, but very soft. Apparently my brother Dan, who was along for the ride, fell asleep sitting on the couch in the store. OK; very good.

The couch arrived, and of course, only one delivery man. Hmmm. Did I mention we're in a second floor apartment? We started bringing the couch up, and it wasn't all that bad, except that on the first flight of stairs, the delivery guy slipped, and I caught couch and supported it for a moment with my left arm and chest. But, we got it the rest of the way up, paid the man, thanked him, and he left.

Problem one; I was a little out of breath. I wrote it off to too much desk work lately and forgot about it. I shouldn't have, but I did. Medical people might be putting two and three together about now...

Problem two; couch delivered and in place, I picked up my laptop out of my chair to get back to work, and noticed that SSH had disconnected and mail wasn't working. WTF?? Oh, no problem; the network dongle fell out of the card. It does that; IBM apparently doesn't like putting locks on their dongles. Fish for it on the floor, plug it in... er... it's not fitting. Why not? Oh, well, because it got stepped on.

Piffle.

OK. No more connectivity out of my laptop for the night. I have a spare NIC - at the office, and I'm not about to drive down to the office at 9:30 to get it. Work from Keri's machine. Hmm. All the data is on the laptop. Well, copy it...

...um...

Or not. Well, get some work done, then go to the office tomorrow and work from there, with the spare card. Gotta go in anyway. Chatted with friends, relaxed a little (yeah right) and grumbled about my shiny laptop becoming an island.

Woke up Saturday in agony. My left chest burned, I couldn't find the strength to pick things up with my left arm, in general all bad things. Investigation revealed a nasty bruise on my chest, and a huge knotted muscle overlaying the ribcage. A long shower and some careful stretching eased things to the point where it wasn't a problem; I wrote it off to a bad bruise from the couch encounter and left.

Now, a normal person would have said, "Gee. That couch has round, wooden feet, and one of them contacted my chest there last night. I should get that checked." But, you see, I'm not a normal man. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am an idiot. I naturally have a fairly high pain threshold, so I tend to ignore things I really shouldn't. Keri, and my mother before her, generally know that if the word "Oww" escapes my lips, it's time to go to the doctor. This time, time pressure and stress made me unreasonable, and I refused to go.

Got to work. No keys. What do I mean no keys? I mean I'd left them in my desk on Friday. I have a bad habit of doing that, and I fix it by needing those keys to drive home. This plan backfired Saturday; Keri had picked me up from the office. Oh well.

Someone arrived fairly quickly, and I settled in to work. New network card, watch ALL that email roll in. Get to work on the systems in the office. One of my tasks was a large Perl script I had written to accomplish various routing tasks on the main routing server; I had spent days on this script, it worked great (on my machine) and I was hoping it wouldn't take any changes to make it work on the server.

It didn't run.

Two hours and many consults from fellow Perl Monks later, I realized why; Perl wasn't installed. Piffle. No, that's not a piffle. That's a flat-out, no-holds-barred, Tom-Syroid-approved <CENSORED> Me Drunk. Not only can I not believe I did that, I can't believe it took me two hours to figure it out. At that, someone pointed me to it. Thanks, jcwren, mdillon, neshura, and chromatic; I owe you all a beer or beverage of choice. Or several. Sigh.

My penance for said foot-shooting (no, no, that wasn't a foot-shot; that was a strap-TNT-to-my-foot-and-detonate) was to post the entire story here. So there it is. Sigh.

I took time off Saturday night to take Dan to see Titan A.E.; good animation, excellent voices, wit great dialog; Joss Whedon of Buffy and Angel fame wrote the screenplay. The plot was predictable; I don't recall being surprised at any point. Still, it was fun, in it's own way.

Sunday, I woke up worse than Saturday. Hmmm.

Took more time off; mini-golf and bumper boats. Did you know the vibration of the bumper boats can aggravate injuries? I didn't. Well, I did, but I was still refusing to admit that I had an injury.

So now, what;s the story? I get to wear a sling and swallow lots of Tylenol. Cracked rib, most likely, but nothing to be done about it but wait for it to heal. No splintering or nasty breaks, so all I can do is protect that side as best I can, not use the arm for much, and avoid deep breathing. Why deep breathing? Because I just took one, and it hurt. Remind me not to do that.

Let's all hope this week is better, eh? And as long as I have my health... oh.

Umm... As long as I can still laugh? Hmm. Nope, that's painful.

Oh well. There's always next week. <SEG>

9:00 AM Yes! I made it! I'm out into the light!

Wait a minute. How in the hell is it Thursday? What happened to the rest of the week?

Actually, I really, really meant to make a post yesterday. Then I got sidetracked... onto the trans-continental railway. Ah well, such is the life of a professional geek.

The firewall is running and more-or-less complete; there are bugs to squish, features to add, and changes to make, of course, but it's in place and running. Did a full-up torture test yesterday, and it passed with flying colors. My desk is a shambles; I'm not even sure what some of this stuff IS. The calendar over my desk is covered with scribbled notes that mean nothing to me; hopefully they will become clearer as the dates they are scribbled over draw nearer. But the firewall is done.

Which, of course, means it's time for more projects. I still don't have the plans in place for new hardware, software, and personel. Hmmm. I should do that one of these days, huh? Especially since the calendar shows a new developer starting on the 5th, and the 3rd and 4th are both holidays. This could get interesting. The build-out for our real offices is proceeding, and it looks like this time they're actually (gasp!) going to start construction. People keep muttering my name and the city name "San Mateo" in the same sentence, but never a date or a duration. And there's a stack of paper that wasn't here last night that apparently I'm supposed to go through.

Just another day in Paradise, I guess.

Thanks to all of you who inquired as to my health. Yes, I am OK, aside from the hole in my head; X-rays don't show it, but it must be there. I am healing nicely, and am in fact no longer in pain; I have noticed, however, that this is a temporary condition, ended by doing something stupid. Not that I ever would...