So, let’s see … the ear infection killed my Friday, so I didn’t go to visit my parents over the weekend as expected. Presumably, I was going to work. But no. I felt like crap all weekend. I went in to the office to get my work laptop around 0630 yesterday, came home, went back to sleep, got up in time to go to Hooters for my boss’s birthday lunch [it's his wife's idea; honest], came home, went back to sleep [for as much as I hate to sleep, I love to sleep when on vacation], and when I considered working last night, my ear got to acting up again. Gah.

I haven’t done diddly crap today, other than canceling my reservations for the chalet. I figured it was 50-50 that I’d still feel like dogmeat, and I didn’t want to be spending $200+ to feel like dogmeat in Guntersville when I could feel like dogmeat in Madison.

At some point, I still have to do some work. Oh, and my count for work phone calls this week is already at five. I have probably three or four hours’ worth of work to do, and then I can forget about work [yeah, right] for the rest of the week.

So what am I doing? Finalizing plans for the long-overdue desk-building in the loft [ready to be doing layout later this week ... am probably putting the chalet money towards prototyping], sleeping, and generally not saying a word. This probably surprises some people who know the gregarious, outgoing, extroverted me, but when I’m alone, I go into complete hermit mode. [This surprises exactly none of the people that have ever lived with me, however.] Also, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about random things, and that’s good. This is, functionally, a week-long passive soak. Intuitively, companies understand this, and that’s why I’m getting paid to sit on my ass right now.

I should’ve known better than to make any damn plans for my vacation. My plans never survive contact with the enemy. :casts an eye towards the motto of this Weblog’s jokey name:

I think I need to refine the Equation of Motivation for that pre-vacation period when you don’t feel like doing diddly-crap. I would, but I’m too apathetic [and have too much to do before I leave here tomorrow as it is].

I should try to do this week-away vacation thing more than once a year, given that I get three weeks’ vacation now. [I take a day or two here and there, sometimes to go to shows, sometimes to go to concerts, sometimes to just visit the fam.] Sure, I went to Ohio in May, but I drove way too damn much for that to be something I’d call a vacation.

Last week of the month, I’ll be off from work for a week [glorious!], without anyone calling me or me calling them [even better! I was in touch with the office all during my week out in May], spending part of the time with my parents and the rest of the time by my own damn self. I’m even going to Lake Guntersville for a couple days. But I won’t tell you when, Internet, so you don’t try to break in my house and steal my stuff.

[Besides, I boobytrap the place.]

Hey hey hey, we shipped some flight hardware … on Leap Day. This has been a possibility for a solid six weeks, and I’m giddy that it happened. Mostly, I’m just tired and want to sleep for about six weeks. But I’ve still got four programs and two proposals to manage [a third ships out this afternoon, huzzah]. I don’t know that life is gonna slow down much for me until March ends, but … I sure hope so. I kinda miss having the energy and passion to write.

Yeah, so … right there at the end of the year, I was finishing moving IJSM.org and all the other sites I administrate for myself and friends to a new server, which not three days later started exhibiting failures of both hard drives. If you start at that second link and go forward, well, you’ll see me slowly begin to lose my mind. :chuckle:

I think that everything is restored now, and I got a halfway decent night’s sleep last night, so I’m off to Tennessee today and some of tomorrow, since, you know, I got the flu for Christmas and didn’t get to see any of my family.

Just gotta roll with the punches. Plan B? I’m still working on Plan A.

So, let’s see …

• Tomorrow I fly back from Houston.
• Sunday is Consecration Sunday at my church.
• Monday, I’ll jump right back into the work scene after being out of the office for three days. I’m up on my email, though, so I think it’ll be okay.
• Tuesday and Wednesday will be prep days as we get ready for …
• Thursday, when I have program reviews with my VP. I’ve got some good news and some bad news. I’m gonna like giving the good news a whole lot more, but hopefully Monday through Wednesday will give me all the prep time I need to answer the questions I know I’ll face. Also, Thursday night should be the first hockey get-together of the season.
• Friday night is the first UAH home hockey game of the year. I’m so stoked.
• Saturday afternoon has the second game of the year, and Saturday night, it’s Derek and Sandra! Yes, hockey and music in one day. No, I’m not sure that I can stand it. And after the show, I’m sure I’ll be hanging with the McCrackenWebbs at my friend William’s house, because …
• Sunday I have a 6:00 a.m. flight to Denver to spend a couple days with Alex. I need some time away [and have a week's worth of comp time to use], and Alex offered. I’m really looking forward to it, and I hope to get to meet his cohorts at Crowd Favorite.

It’s gonna be a fun week. I’m ready to get started.

There comes a day in the not-too-distant future when I will use all the comp time that I’m banking up and will retreat somewhere. I’ll take my phone with me, but … yeah, that’s about it. Because, you see, I’m as worried for my sanity at this point as any of you are.

Too Darn Hot

Originally uploaded by Geof F. Morris

This is the temperature gauge on my WRX as I pulled into my driveway. It’s been 100F+ every day for a week, but this is the first time it’s been 104F after driving around for a bit and moving air across the thermometer.

I am so thankful that the air conditioner in my house is working. The system at work is unable to keep up with the thermal load being thrown at it: I start the day at 74F or so, and after noon, I’m above 80F. Suffice it to say that I come home sweaty every single day. Feh.

Now, it’s time to settle in and watch STS-118 go to orbit. My group at TBE built the carriers for Battery Charge/Discharge Unit and the Control Moment Gyroscope that are riding on the External Stowage Platform-3 at the rear of the Endeavour’s payload bay. [If I lapse into acronym speak: TBE built the BCDU and CMG FSE flying on ESP3 attached to the ICC. ]

Go, Endeavour, go! I need something good today after an otherwise craptacular one.

I sometimes wish that I cared less about what I do for a living. It sure would make the disappointment easier.

That said, I really don’t want that. I’d rather passionately care and obsess about this stuff, waking up in the middle of the night thinking about stuff, than just punching a time clock.

If you find yourself in a dead end job, you’re probably wanting to switch chairs with me. I tell you this: each situation has significant negatives that turn that suck knob to 11.

As the anniversary of D-Day dawns for yet another year, Dad is thankful that he got married on such a major historical day, making his anniversary terribly easy to remember.

Many, many, many, many, many more, y’all!

Jessica off-handedly mentioned it yesterday, but today is the Kings’ fourth anniversary. One would think that such a date would be easy to remember for me, seeing as, well, I was kinda there, but it’s made far easier by the fact that they got married on the same day, six years later, that I graduated from high school. Chances are that you don’t have to be an MSMS grad to figure out that I graduated high school a decade ago. Oi. No wonder I feel old today. [Couldn't have anything to do with driving 1400 miles last weekend.]

But anyway … happy anniversary to some of my favorite people.

While waiting for a telecon to kick off:

1. I sold Darlene last night. When my folks bought that truck, it had 28,303 miles. When I titled it over to my friend last night, it had 191,061. Ten years, eight months, and five days. Plenty of good times. Most of those 160k+ miles were solo, though. I’m very much a solo road-tripper, and it really only sat two anyway.
2. I have scheduled my nervous breakdown vacation for the week of 2-6 Jul 2007. Unless something really, really exciting crops up, I will probably spend it at home, sleeping in every day and generally not doing crap. Oh, and not taking any calls from work. I counted it up earlier this morning, and outside of all the family stuff I did in January, the last time I had two consecutive open-for-business days off was last May. The last time I’ve taken a full week off? Four or five years ago. Yeah, I’m due.
3. Oh, yes, I recognize that I’m copping out by taking what’s certainly going to be the easiest week to have off as a NASA contractor this summer. Before you swear at me, my response is that I’m so covered up right now that I’m taking that week off purely because it won’t be so damn painful when I come back from vacation. Nothing sucks worse than being out of pocket for a few days and coming back to everything on fire. [See also: last week.]
4. I have dropped ten pounds in the last three months. I need a long string of quarters like that in a row, but I’ll take it.

Telecon time.

My dumb ass left my cell phone at the office. This after leaving a key piece of recording equipment here at home, necessitating my trip home in the first place. I’ve also lost my Bluetooth headset for my cell phone in the last week and left everything up and running at work one night [with my door open, no less].

I swear, right now, I’m lucky to not walk into landmines or something.

Being largely out-of-town for more than a week does leave a feed addict like me with, well, quite a backlog. I must say, I wielded a pretty strong scythe to get down to zero this time, but I’m there now. Sadly, NNW still doesn’t do this as swiftly as FeedLounge did. I miss FeedLounge’s Ui but not its craptacular performance.

The best thing about resolving not to Really Try and Read all this stuff? I missed almost all the early bitching about the iPhone. [Yes, based on what I saw in the Keynote, I'll buy one; I'm already a Cingular customer, so I'm used to their rates and it's not going to be a huge cost increase over my Treo 650. Plus, it'll be something other than my Treo 650, which is a good thing. I keep waiting for Unit #3 to die on me.]

“I kept reading your updates from the road and was thinking, ‘Man, he’s got to be really tired.’ ” And, well, I guess that I am, in a lot of ways. But I’m ready to get back to things.

Other than, of course, getting back up with my alarm clock in the morning. I haven’t been beholden to my alarm clock for a week-and-a-half. The last time I could say that, I was a college student home for the summer after his first year off at school. Phew.

There’s so much that I want to write about the last couple of weeks that I just assuredly won’t do, because … well, some of it’s really personal, and some of it’s just hard to put into words, and on both scores, navigating those shoals usually leaves me without the desire to post at the end. But man … I have been sustained by your concern for me. It’s been a blessing.

Back to the grind in six hours.