I went back to work today after having almost a week off. When I say time off, I really had it off. I didn’t work on anything related to my employment past Wednesday afternoon. I may even be done with working nights and weekends for awhile*. I got everything that needed to be done by the deadline done. The rest that needs to be done can be finished at a sane pace. Plus, we finally hired another person.

I did have the dryer break and ruin some laundry in the process, the tire rods on my car go out, a server blew a gasket**, my knee went through a glass window on my back door, the back on my computer chair broke and sent my head crashing into another window. Even with these mishaps, I do have things I can be thankful for:

1) Not only did my 20-ish year old dryer get replaced, we went ahead and replaced the 20-ish year old washer as well. Both are a little bigger, I have more settings, and a light in the dryer. My old dryer had a dark drum and no light, so I was always leaving something in it.

2) I purchased new clothes to replace those taken from me by the dryer. I also found another pair of monkey socks. That brings me up to 7 or 8 pairs.

3) Since I was going to be carless and on vacation, I had new tires installed, the radiator flushed, the oil changed, the rear brakes replaced, and battery stems neutralized in addition to my tire rod repair. I should be good for winter.

4) The harddrive survived and we have a spare server that could perform the duties of the prod server. Plus, now I have more incentive to upgrade my desktop and reuse the old components for the new prod server.

5) None of my encounters with windows resulted in needing stitches. Just broken glass and a headache.

Other than the above, it was uneventful and relaxing. After deciding to use MovableType for stuology instead of continuing programming it myself, I got quite a bit of it finished. Not that it will be that exciting, but I wanted to put at least a little bit of effort beyond just using the default templates.

I bought Pirates today, so instead of working I’m going to crash and watch it. Yummy Pirates :)
P.S. StuDayTM is almost upon us. You should begin planning your celebrations now. Take a day off of work or something.

*I swear, I completely missed the months of September through November. Anything exciting happen?

**A gasket would be the part that isn’t functioning, but I didn’t do enought swapping to figure out what. I think it is the motherboard and not the CPU.