tales of an ordinary girl

I'm flying out on Thursday evening for Dragon Con and I can't wait. Even if I do have to dial into a conference call on Friday and even if I do have to be on call Friday night, it's going to be a great vacation. I can't wait to see Jantis and Winterfleur!

The week isn't exactly zooming by, but yesterday went pretty quickly. Today I'm waiting on a server migration and I can't seem to find the people who are working on it in order to get a status. It's a bit frustatrating because I can't leave until this is done or at least until the application team is satisfied.

Server migrations have been hellish lately. Last Thursday I was up until 6 AM on one and then got woken up at 8 AM by a call (not an important call, mind you.. I should have left the phone in the living room) and then I was up all day fighting through getting another migration ready. It didn't work out, hence being on call while I'm on vacation.

The only thing I'm going to miss is seeing Matt. He's staying home while I'm going away. He's been working an extraordinary amount of hours (12 hours 6 days a week) and it's been pretty bad. He thinks this might go on until the end of October, which would be far too long. I miss him and I feel so bad he has so little free time.

The weather has been nice, high seventies, today and yesterday. The showers have passed and the grass is getting green again. I hope it doesn't take 3 months to have a good rain (if a tad overkill) again.

The house is mostly moved out of. I'm going by today to clean out more things. All of the furniture is out and all that's left is odds and ends in the bathroom and kitchen, mantle and other shelves. I've hired someone to help with the cleaning. Matt and I haven't been able to do much with our work hours. Hopefully, I can show it to a realtor next week when I'm back from vacation. Hopefully it'll be on the market shortly after that. It all depends on how much I get done today and whether it looks good enough to show next week.

I like our apartment, even if it is small. The location is definitely better and it's so much easier to clean a few rooms rather than an entire house. I almost dread looking for a new place to live in a few months. It will be nice to have a bit more space again though.

And, well, I'm just rambling now.

Who's up for some Meat Pie?

For some time now David Plotz over at Slate has been writing articles on the old Testament titled Blogging the Bible. I've read the books he's commenting on.

As a child I had a goal of actually reading the Bible, 5 chapters a night. I got to Kings before I gave up. I can't say I remember a whole lot, but his references bring back thoughts I had when I was reading.

Anyway, this is an excellent article about the contradictions in the Bible, both good and bad.

I finished reading The State of the Art and Old Man's War over the last week. Both of them were pretty good. I liked the short stories in The State of the Art more than the actual self-titled short story, but it was still pretty good.

This morning I picked up Galapagos on the way out the door today to read, but I think I might actually start on another instead (can't remember the name). I really need to read the rest of the books that Ben lent to me though (about 5 of them at the moment).

I'm also still working on Inversions mostly at night because I can't lug around a hardback in my purse for work. I ended up putting it aside as I was reading Old Man's War.

I really want to read The Ghost Brigads now too and any other books by Scalzi I can get my hands on.

Life has been uncharacteristically sedate. I've been working a lot. I've started cooking again, at least during the week. It's not too bad really. I could use a bigger kitchen, but I like the apartment in general.

I'll be glad to have a weekend off again. I am scheduled for at least one server move this weekend, on Friday night. And I have one move currently scheduled for Tuesday. There are still a lot of details to iron out on both though.

I'll be away over Labor Day visiting sunny Atlanta for Dragon Con. I don't know where the time has gone. I'm not ready to drop everything and leave, but I'm sure I'll have a good time. I'm hoping to find internet access there and check email and blogs from my Jornada.

We still don't have the house on the market, but I'm hoping to around the time I get back from Atlanta. We still have some boxes in the house and have half the kitchen/bathroom left to pack. There's nothing there I couldn't live without though, so I'm not too worried. Yesterday we went by and put out more bulky trash (miscellaneous furniture we're not taking with us). All that's left really is getting the rest of the things out and cleaning. I'm going to go by Wed and pack up another car load. It'll be so good to be done and have the house sold. I'm worried about the leaves now that Fall is so close.

I had a strange dream last night. I have strange dreams often. But this one was just strange enough to write about. I was living with my parents and we were all much younger. We were in a hurry to get out of the house because one of our neighbors was going to kill us.

It was early in the morning and as we're making whatever preparations (I have no idea why we were dawdling), there was a knock on the back door. It was Pat Robertson. He had an evil gleam in his eye. He asked to borrow a couple of tools and then left. As he was leaving he pointed out our fire hose that was installed because the firestation was so far away. Umm. Ok.

The back deck was up three stories with stairs down to the ground. As he left our property he cut our telephone wires so that we couldn't call for help. And then, I woke up.

Yeah, strange.