Current mood: Cocky

Work has me scheduled for 77 hours next week. So, if I don't make many blog entries next week, you'll know why. I'll be passed out somewhere. Maybe I'll just sleep under my desk like one of my co-workers did when we did an early-morning release.

They offered to put me up in the Doubletree right next door, but what's the point when I live only a couple of miles from work? Maybe I should have taken them up on it and thrown some wild hotel parties next week.

It's not so much the long hours that bother me as much as what happens during those hours. Every little screwup by a user (many of which are temps) gets blamed on the system, as if it has some psychic power to divine what they’re trying to do instead of forcing them to work within the nebula of rules the business makes us implement. I end up sounding like a little kid, constantly saying “it's not my fault”.

Latest animal news: My menagerie went through a full feeder full of seed and an entire suet cake in one day yesterday. Wow. That used to take at least 3 days! On the bright side, suet is Atkins-legal. Maybe the birds are onto something. Maybe I should give up programming and become a bird myself.

Not much else to report. I still haven't completely unpacked from our trip this weekend. Too many other things that need to be done. I'll be doing laundry tonight, though, so I'll probably get my suitcase emptied at the very least.

I came home from work today to find Red sitting under our bird feeding looking like she is either pregnant or fat from eating the corn I leave out for her. I'm thinking it's the former, though, since I saw her partner (Mr. Red?) running up the tree next to the feeder with some long pieces of grass in his mouth while she ate. I think he was starting work on a little love nest…

So now I'm going to be feeding flocks of birds and a family of squirrels. This is crazy! I just wanted to look out my picture window and see some happy little sparrows munching away. Now I'm Doctor f'ing Dolittle!

But, you know I can't stop doing it. What can I say? I'm a sucker for cute redheads, especially ones with eight nipples.

Current mood: Confident

Amy and I needed to just get away from everything, so we headed down to St. Louis for a three-day weekend. About an hour into the drive there on Friday, work called. And, about a block away from home on Sunday, one of my co-workers called to discuss some things that are going on at work right now.

In between, everything was great. I got to push my car to 88 miles per hour for the first time for a minute on a long, boring, straight section of rt. 55! I got to cross the mighty (make that mighty boring) Mississippi River! I got to see the famous Arch (quite a nice piece of engineering)! I got to spend hours at a time in a hotel room with my wife! Oh, wait, that’s probably too much info. Let's try again. I got to be 250 miles away from work, school, and all the other things that drive me out of my skull sometimes. For most of three days, none of that mattered! For most of three days, I was relaxed and happy. For most of three days, I hardly had any symptoms of Tourette's syndrome.

Work called again at 4am this morning. They fired one of the two sysadmins, a good friend of mine, last Thursday. Since I was her backup for a few months before they hired the other admin as her boss, I was asked to take care of an issue that popped up in the wee hours of the morning. Oh, well. Back to reality. Back to stress. This isn’t a verbal tic, but it might as well be: FUCK.

By the way, the title of this entry refers to a command used on the “holodeck” in Star Trek: The Next Generation. There were two ways in or out of the holodeck: the door and the arch. The arch was just a doorway without doors — I think it may have been wider as well. The only reason I can think of for wanting to use an arch instead of a door is to move large pieces of furniture in and out of there. But, if the holodeck can recreate pretty much anything and anyone in history or fantasy, who needs to move anything into it? And, if things created in the holodeck are just matter manipulated by low-power tractor beams inside of it, and they cannot be taken outside of it, then why would they build an arch to get things out of it? What criteria define when one should use the arch and when one should use the door? Or, is it just a matter of who wrote the script being presented or a question of which large, open space was used as the holodeck set that day? Hmmm…