An update because it's been a while.

[nolawitch58]

My weekend officially began a few hours ago after the last conference call on an issue we had been trying to resolve since Friday. I spent all day on it at the office yesterday with two coworkers and two guys from the vendor. Diagnostics finally found the problem with the database. It was up to over three million records when it should have been in the neighborhood of 35K. Appending instead of overwriting for some inexplicable reason. I'll have to get a consensus on why. We fixed it and the software ran the update within an hour of our resuming the effort this morning. The incident report will be a lot of fun to write.

I'll need every minute of my upcoming vacation to recuperate from these past few weeks. I am so tired and so sore. Even if it's a staycation, which it won't be because I'm going up to Shreveport, I'm going to enjoy the downtime. I'm disappointed I don't get to go to Europe, but I think people and things to visit will still be there next year. Perhaps I'll have a reason to hold my head high and be proud to be an American if the election turns the fascist assholes out of office. If not, I'll brush up on my French and try to pass for Canadian. (Kidding.)

Wednesday, I'll be flying to New York for a conference. Thankfully, my boss and the assistant manager are going too and we're all staying over for the weekend. They will be shopping, because that's what they like to do, and I will be visiting voxwoman. Hooray for me! I'm lucky to get to meet her in person finally. I'll be even luckier if she sings something for me. While I'm there, I'm going to try to swing by the WTC site to pay my respects to my former colleagues who died there. I've also planned to go to Montefiore cemetery to visit my first husband's grave. It's been a millions years since I've been to any of the museums. I'm really fond of the Natural History Museum, but I also love the Museum of Modern Art. I don't know if I can take all the schlepping around on foot, so I'll have to choose one out of the numerous great attractions the city has to offer. And I've got to remember to get hmc_lavadogs a t-shirt or he'll be mad. Unfortunately, CBGBs is closed. It was the one place leftover from the halcyon days of punk rock when I lived there back in the late '70s.

There's so much political outrage, I don't know where to begin. FISA is a clusterfuck. Those of us who are not billionaires and who are whining about the economy are suffering from mental recession. That asshole should be waterboarded. I see the Red Cross finally found its cojones and is calling for prosecution of the Bush maladministration for torture and other crimes. While on the conference call yesterday, one of the guys told us Tony Snow had died. I remarked that the greater loss to civilization was the recent passing of George Carlin.

On a more local political scene, I see Bobby Jindal has to have the proverbial gun to his head to do the right thing. He was planning to sign the pay raise for the legislature into law until someone started a recall petition on him. The state of Louisiana still cannot see that the man has no scruples. He has never completed a term of any elective office he's held in the past several years. Every time a better position opened up, he ran for it. If McSame offered him the VP slot, he'd leave the governor's mansion in a New York nanosecond. I have a feeling the only reason they were even looking at him was to counter Obama's blackness with some brown-nosing brownness. The election is months away, and I'm already sick shitless of the whole mess.

Our dove had two eggs in her nest after the last clutch flew the coop. I only see one birdie from the recent clutch in the nest today. I haven't been spending enough time in this room to know what happened to the other one. We've been feeding her parakeet food. She'll probably have a few more sets of eggs here if the Wikipedia entry on mourning doves was accurate.

I watched the two-part BBC production of Casanova with David Tennant on YouTube recently. He's just good all around. I thought he was a good Doctor, but the more of his work I see, the more I like him. If you haven't seen Blackpool, hunt it down. It's a real treat. Then there was another strange little flick where he played a driving instructor with such optimistic sweetness. I predict that his best role is yet to come and he'll have to endure much acclaim. I'm glad to have my weekly fix of Doctor Who to make up for my deficiency of House. Gotta love the English (or Scottish in David's case).

There are probably a lot of things I'm forgetting. I guess that will be my impetus for another update.

Comments

[pecosdave.livejournal.com]

If not, I'll brush up on my French and try to pass for Canadian.

I'm honestly curious if this could be pulled off. The Louisiana Purchase and the French Canadian areas are both a long time separated from France. I wonder if someone from the swamps of Louisiana could speak to a French Canadian or an actual French person in French, or if it would be a complete head scratching failure like happened with the exchange student we had from Spain at my high school when the Mexicans tried to talk Tex-Mex to her. She finally had to say English! I can't understand anything you're saying!

Have a good time on your vacation, I know you've earned it.

[nolawitch.livejournal.com]

I don't speak Cajun French. I learned my French in high school in Indiana and in college back East. I'm pretty sure that version of French would be closer to what they actually speak in France, albeit without charming colloquialisms. For that, I bought a book called Merde! which gives all the curse words and such so that I could be just as obnoxious bilingually.

Several years ago, I came across some French tourists who were puzzled about some directions they had gotten. I apologized for the poor quality of my vocabulary and pronuciation. I helped them as best I could and then hauled ass. I felt like a freakish trained sheep.