Head Banging Day

Up early, got to work in plenty of time for the 9 am team meeting. Our Belgium crew has been down to one guy, the other guy had a heart attack about 3 weeks ago, but was well enough today to have lunch with the one guy, and receive our get well card.

Spent most of the day banging my head against an automation script which should have been a simple cut and paste from something I had already written for 10 programs on 4 ports to 96 programs on 4 ports. But they changed the numbering of some of the items, and it was not simple at all. Got 3/4 of the way through by EOD.

Lunchtime found me at the UPS store nearest work/apartment, paying too much for a mailbox. But it gets me 24x7 access to the box, and they are open late enough weekdays and Saturdays to pickup packages too large for the box. New apartment overlords will be cutting back office hours thusly:
Tues-Thurs 9:30 am-6:30 pm
Fri-Sat 8:30-5:30
Closed Sun-Mon

I have been leaving work at 5:30 to allow me to get home in time to pick up packages, have a snack, recuperate and get to rehearsals. After the show is over it's back to 9-6.  Came home today to pick up a package, UPS re-delivered the one I asked them to return to sender. Apartment minion forgot to write anything on it like "refused", so of course it came back. Told them to try again, I've already received the refund.

Picked up a package from the Amazon locker, a set of Scottish fudge and toffee (butterScotch).

Headboard company sent a link to a Fedex URL which let me schedule a pickup and return for tomorrow. I taped up the box somewhat, taped the shipping label and a copy of the pickup order and it's now leaning against the side of the apartment by the front door, in a covered walkway.

At the same time they asked me to fill out an online review. Gave 'em 1 star and included a photo of the crushed main post.

Rehearsals were a huge clusterfracas again. The director staged three scenes and a "country dance". In reverse order. Many people were missing, and a lot of it he was pulling out of his ass. It's going to not work when the missing people show up. And then we ran through all four. He had plenty of fun ideas, but the audience is going to see the My Mother's Wedding Day scene and go WTF all over the place. So will the soloist, who was not there and should have been.

I put the tin of toffee on my props tray, as a hint to the props lady, who somehow thought the candy man's tray should be all bread rolls, buns and a cherry pie. Those replaced the Styrofoam donuts.

No rehearsal till Wednesday.

Changed my Amazon and eBay shipping address to the UPS box and added it to Paypal. By the way, even though I didn't fill in the business info part of the form because I'm not a business, they sent me a gizmo to plug into my phone to swipe credit cards. Somewhere along the line I got a business account (it was free) to help with eBay sales. Maybe I can run around cons asking for donations.

Got a card from my ophthalmologist for an appointment in late June. It was supposed to be April. Hmmm.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Lunchtime: either go to the PO and cancel the PO box which I no longer need, or got to Patelco and close my account. Probably the former.

Tuesday feels like Thursday

I was planning on being asleep an hour ago but wasted a lot of time posting about 200 photos of Scotland on FB.

Was up until 3 am watching Francis get popified. I enjoyed his sermon's message. It is difficult for my AR mind to fail to notice that it was all based on the myth of Joseph, about whom almost nothing was written in the Gospels. OTOH, It was his Day, and as a good preacher, Francis pretty much was required to weave his message of "protect each other" from the Joseph mythology. He also threw in a New Testament passage about Abraham, which caught me by surprise, I'd completely forgotten about that. I also enjoyed the diversity of the other readers, speakers and singers. Francis made the event to not be all about him. I kept switching between CNN and ABC, whose commentators were sometimes helpful, and sometimes drowned out the ceremony in favor of crap they'd dug up which could have waited till after. I shut it off as soon as CNN's pet priest launched into a recap of what we'd just heard the Pope say, as if this was a state of the union address.

Okay, so I know he's against gay marriage, contraception and women in the clergy. And I know he's basically an Italian pope who happened to be born and served in Argentina. But he smiles. He dresses simply. He asks us to pray for him. He isn't the intellectual giant JPII was, but he's a welcome relief from that German guy.

Staying up late made me late for work, but only by about 10 minutes. I continued to beat my head against the wall on this one long automation script. By lunchtime I was 95% done, and it looked like a timing issue easy to solve once I figured out where to put the delays.

No lunch again. I went to the PO and had them close the PO Box, but it wouldn't give me a refund. I'll have to email their customer service about that. The clerk tried what she could, but the system doesn't have a "he changed his mind" button.

From there to Patelco, where they closed my account and cashed me out with a cashier's check. Turns out, she said, when I thought I was closing my account months ago, all I did was disable my check card.

Walked to Rite Aid, got some things on my list, including a hollow easter bunny for the annual head-biting ceremony. And honey grahams to help settle my tummy, ( TMI )

Back at work, Automation Guy found a serious bug in an area for which I'm the expert. I verified the bug, which rendered my test machine inoperable for most of the afternoon. Good thing I was using someone else's machine for the scripting thing.

Got the script to run all the way through by 5:30. Letting the machine run overnight to make sure it stays stable. Tomorrow I'll add 3 more tests to the suite, all based on this one. "Should not take more than a day" he says, knowing it never works that way.

A cousin of the husband of the friend who was killed in the car crash has set up a web site to keep us current on husband's condition. He was driving the Porsche, and was critically injured. They sedated him heavily so they could operate on his broken legs, but they had not looked too closely at his head injuries until now. The cousin posted that the doctors suggested that relatives come now, it doesn't look like he'll be waking up any time soon. Very sad, I met him at my nephew's wedding October 2011, and we hit it off like we'd known each other forever. It's hared to know what to feel, because if he survives he probably won't be all there.

On the way home I stopped off at 7-11, picked up two things from Amazon, a GoPro camera and the micro-SD card for it. Got that home and played with it, set it up, upgraded the firmware, could not get it to sync with the phone app. Minor issue, the stop/start button is easy to reach even on the head band mount. I tried to get some video of Kaan playing fetch, but Domino decided to guard the bedroom door, and Kaan chickened out. Maybe tomorrow.

Dinner was matzo balls, chinese BBQ pork, tail-off shrimp, chicken bullion soup. Yummy. Watched an episode of Steve Harvey while I ate. Not such a good show this time, a forced "beach vacation" theme but the vacations they gave away were for a ranch in Arizona to a man who said Disney World's weather was too hot, and two other non-beach ones.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Have an actual lunch break
Rehearsal