When It Rains, It Pours

What is it with my life, where everything happens all at one time? Let's recap the past three days, shall we?

Friday: Total outage of the entire building housing our company's headquarters resulted in a hard crash of every single computer. We spent all day scrambling to restore systems to a reasonably stable condition. Needless to say, we are holding an ass-kicking contest at the power company next week.

Saturday: A major software deployment and hardware reconfiguring project rolled out to the data center. We started at 5am and didn't finish until.. well, truth be told, we're still doing parts of it. We lost a day in preparation for this (see above) so we came in Saturday morning with a sense of fear and trepidation we haven't had in releases past.

Sunday: I have a mid-term exam due by midnight. I just finished the damn thing and I need a stiff drink! Another one of those "tell me everything you know about ______." Nine of those questions and 4 hours to answer them, one shot, no repeats. I'd be hard pressed to give good answers if I had four days!

And now, for the monthly news...

A quick update on school: I got an A for IT Security, even if the professor did have a typo in my grade. All I have left is the capstone course, already in progress, and IT Project Management. After that, one HELL of a long nap to make up for all the late nights studying and scrambling to complete assignments on time, then on to graduation. Followed by a party that will probably make international headlines.

A quick update on my transition into management: some days, it sucks being the boss. You try to find ways to make things work, help people out, and you get kicked in the nuts for your efforts. There are days where all I hear is bitching and whining; I'm getting good at tuning out the noise and perking up only at the parts where I can do something about it. Still, it's therapeutic for them to vent, so I let it ride, even if it does get me down at times.

A quick update on family: The Skating Gnu had a great hockey season. They made it all the way to the semi-finals. She's made honor roll again, a perfect record for the entire school year. Mrs. Gnu is doing well, still putting up with my crap. God only knows why, some days I can't stand myself.

A quick update on me: I'm still kicking. For now. Who else did you think was writing this!?!?

Who Finished Who?

Well, the garage is clean. So is the office closet. I wanted to tackle the other closets and the filing cabinets but I have filled up the dumpster to capacity. So the rest will have to wait until another time. Still, I can look back and see the progress I have made and tell a real difference in the way these two parts of the house look. In a total of two intensive working days, I have thrown out enough stuff to fill up a big roll-off container.

Unfortunately, there were some brief side effects to all this.

About 2am this morning, I woke up with chest pains, shortness of breath, cold sweat, dizziness and nausea. The Missus roused the Gnu Herd in an air raid scramble and broke her personal best landspeed record rushing me to the emergency room. A bunch of checks later and we have ruled out heart attack. I'm home resting. That's the good news.

Bad news is, no one is sure what hit me or whether it was a one-timer or something that's coming back. We'll find out soon as I pursue answers. Wish me luck.

I Like Pie!

She's my cherry pie,
Cool drink of water,
Such a sweet surprise.
Tastes so good make a grown man cry,
Sweet cherry pie!

Warrant, Cherry Pie

So, I'm working from home this week, and it's been an absolute zoo. Work is going crazy, and I had a paper due last night. I'd been working on it since Saturday, and by 1:00pm yesterday afternoon, I had exactly one paragraph written, and that one had been scrapped three times already. Needless to say, I was stressed to the breaking point. Finally got it turned in, all 5 pages with 7 minutes to spare. Talk about cutting it close! It's probably not my best work, but I was at least able to cover my main points and reach a point of satisfaction with it before time ran out.

Today, work is more of the same, insanity from the start. Mrs. Gnu, using her superpowers of intuition, (namely, listening to me swear like a sailor all morning) figured I could use a pick-me-up.

She came in to the office around lunchtime and had in her hands, a delicious, piping hot, homemade cherry pie. With a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side.

God, I love that woman!

Now, if only I could get her to dress up and do a remake of the video...