You can thank Ginny for pointing out this video to me… :-)

Happy birthday, hon… hope it’s going well for you, and looking forward to celebrating many more with you. :-)

Well, it’s a Sunday night, and I’m just sitting here talking to Misty and watching some Cops. I’m also tired as hell for some reason, but I’m willing to bet that might be because I still haven’t fully recovered from the late night Friday. I can’t say I’m entirely ready for work tomorrow, but I’ll have to manage regardless.

I had to go out to our Oklahoma City branch this past week because we were cutting the network uplink for our branch there over from a VPN over DSL to a dedicated point-to-point T1 line. I also planned on reloading a PC there, but I later learned that wasn’t going to be advisable. I arrived in Oklahoma City at around 4 PM; the flight itself was uneventful except for a turbulent landing, but I WAS annoyed at IAH by a TSA employee who wasn’t too willing to deal with the fact that my boarding pass was on my cell phone. I arrived in Norman at around 5:30, got to my hotel room, and did a bit of work before going over to Saltgrass for supper.

Thursday was fun; after work, I got ahold of Jeff and Malinda, and Jeff came by to pick me up from the hotel. From there, we went to their brand new house. I have to admit the house is damn nice, and they got it at a steal, seeing as the previous owner didn’t take good care of it. They have a pretty large living room, and their backyard even has a fish pond. :-) Malinda cooked some homemade lasagna for dinner, which she made with spicy sausage instead of regular sausage. To the surprise of myself and Jeff, it was damn delicious and probably the best lasagna I’ve had in a LONG while. After supper, we sat down and watched the latest episode of Torchwood, and from there Jeff and Malinda took me back to the hotel.

After I got finished with work on Friday, Jeff and Malinda picked me up from the hotel, and we went over to Ted’s to pick up dinner. Once we picked up dinner, we went back to their house to eat. After eating, Malinda started setting up the table to play the board game of the night: Arkham Horror. Once Karen (Jeff and Malinda’s friend/honorary little sister) arrived, we sat down and begin playing.

Arkham Horror is a board game that is based on the Cthulhu Mythos. The game is the first one I’ve ever played where it’s all players working together against the game itself. The players play as investigators in the fictional town of Arkham in the early 1920’s; the object of the game is to pass through and seal the otherworldly gates that keep appearing in the town, while dealing with random events and battling/avoiding monsters that come through the gates. If too many gates open, an Old One manifests on Earth and the game goes into sudden death (kind of fitting) where the players have a very very very slim chance to defeat or be devoured. The running mood of the game seemed to be best described by two recurring comments during the night: “oh FUCK” and “we are so screwed”. The low point was when Jeff’s character was in another world, and he drew an encounter card he had never seen before. As I watched, his face fell into an expression of shock. His character had to fight a DIFFERENT Old One, Shub-Niggurath, on his own. He barely got around it. In the end, we were almost ready to enter and seal the final gate when a badly drawn card caused Nyarlathotep to materialize on Earth, and despite our best efforts it defeated us. We may have lost, but it was a damn fun game. From there Jeff and Malinda took me back to the hotel, where I made my farewells.

Saturday was busy as hell. I got to the airport at 10 AM, which was well before my noon flight. In fact, I got there right before they boarded the 10:20 AM flight to Houston. As I watched, they had everyone board the flight. Then, after a couple of minutes, they got on the airport loudspeakers and asked for a certain passenger to come to the gate and board ASAP. A few minutes later they made the announcement again. After a bit, they gave the seat to a standby passenger, closed the plane door, and the jetway moved away from the flight. The plane sat there for a few minutes more, as the pilots presumably did the pre-flight check. At this point, the woman who the gate personnel had been calling for arrived at the gate, and was absolutely incensed that they would not let her board the gate. (“If we let you board it would delay the flight.” “THE PLANE’S STILL SITTING THERE!”) I was a bit amused, because the gate people had been diligent in looking for her, and she should have been there at the appropriate time.

I wish I could have gone home as soon as I got to Houston. Instead I had to drive to the office and pick up backup tapes and a couple of handheld barcode scanners. From there, I went to the datacenter and swapped out backup tapes. After I was done there, I had to go to the Creekmont facility to assist in the final steps in putting them on our ERP software. When I was done there (at around 6:30 PM), I decided to go straight home. Brent and Vada invited me to go to a comedy club with them, but I was tired and just wanted to go home.

Today was uneventful, except for this morning. After I got up, before having breakfast or anything, I decided to weigh myself. I have no idea how (especially as I didn’t exercise and wasn’t as good as I should have been eating-wise while I was gone), but I lost three pounds this past week. I’ll probably exercise in about thirty minutes to make up for not having done so yesterday, but still… nice to know that I didn’t lose any progress in my weight-loss quest.

As for the rest of this week, I don’t really know what I have planned other than doing work at Creekmont and also doing a bit of work at the corporate office in the morning. I might end up doing something with Brent later this week, but nothing’s decided yet. Ah, well… I’ll just take it as it all comes. :-)

I think my coworker Cherry now has carte blanche to say, “I told you so.”

This morning, after I got up from bed and started going downstairs for breakfast, Mom caught up with me on the stairs and said, “Let me get ahead of you. I want to show you something.” That’s never a good sign, but I let her pass me and we headed downstairs, and we went past the gate at the bottom of the stairs and went to the gate at the entrance to the kitchen.

Before I continue, I should explain the gates to those who haven’t heard me mention them before. When we got Star back in 2004, we didn’t realize at the time that she was not cat-friendly. As a result, we ended up putting child gates at the entrances to the kitchen and at the bottom of the stairs so that she couldn’t get upstairs and harm or kill Gus and Ringo. The gates have been pretty effective in maintaining order.

Anyway, Mom and I get to the entrance to the kitchen, and we saw Taz laying on Chase’s bed. Upon seeing us, Taz and Star both got up from where they were resting and came to the gate, with both standing up and putting their front paws on the top of it. Mom frowned and said, “I guess she’s not going to do it this time…”

At that point, Taz steeled herself and jumped over the gate to us.

Mom then opened the gate and ushered Taz back in. I asked Mom if she had done it before this morning, and she said that she had done it last night as well. In fact, Mom was surprised this morning because she had expected to see Taz in the living room. Instead, she was in the kitchen quietly laying down, but as soon as she saw Mom she leapt over the fence to be with her.

The funny thing is, Cherry had said this would probably happen when I first told her about Taz. I can’t wait to see the look on her face when I tell her about what happened. The only worry I have now is whether she’s going to pull the same stunt to get past the fence at the bottom of the stairs…

I originally saw this posted over on Jenn’s LiveJournal, where she put the subject line as, “For people who like the 80s, or like logo design. It’s orgasmic if you love both.” It’s a music video by a band called Justice, for a song called “DVNO”. I figure that at the very least, Louie will get a kick out of it; he loves collecting bumpers, and this is made up entirely of parodies/homages of 80’s logos and bumpers. :-)

This is weird. My employer gives us Good Friday off. I admit, I’m thankful for the three-day weekend. However, it seems like of all of my friends, I’m the only one who gets today off. (Those teacher friends who have Spring Break this week don’t count.) Even Misty, who works for the state of Mississippi, doesn’t get today off. So, while everyone else gets to work today, I got to sleep in and not worry too much about work. Just in case, though, I have my work laptop up and running in case I DO need to log in remotely and fix something.

On a brighter note, I did weigh myself this morning. For some reason I was worried I wouldn’t have lost any weight. I certainly didn’t feel like I had. In retrospect I shouldn’t have been worried, especially as I had to miss lunch Wednesday and I had been good about what I ate otherwise. I lost four pounds this past week. In total, I’ve lost 13 pounds. I think I’m doing well. :-)

I don’t really have much planned for this weekend, either. In about an hour or so, I’ll be going with Dad to DSW to get new shoes for work, and then Dad wants to go into Hobby Lobby. Mom’s working today, so we’ll go to the Red Robin by her office for my splurge meal. I’ll take the rest of the weekend as it comes, though I will probably wash my car tomorrow as it’s still covered in mud from the rain storms earlier this week.

Ah, well… for now, though, I’m going to just relax and enjoy not having to do anything for a while. This should be a good weekend. :-)