The Breville had a good run. The first one I had was bought for me for my birthday by my mother-in-law. Shortly after bringing it home it needed a repair so I sent it to the company and instead of fixing it, they sent me the next version up. It lasted ten years or so - I don't remember exactly - and I've been nursing it along. That's about 3,650 lattés, give or take, a good run.

It finally died yesterday: a clog in the pump, I think, and Brevilles are desgined to not be user serviceable. I took off the back panel but there wasn't anything I could reach without a major tear down and nothing obviously wrong. Repairs must be done by a Breville approved service center, and (I know from experience) are more expensive than just buying a new unit.

Routine is vital for me. It's how I'm wired. I know it probably sounds weird, but a latté has become a part of my morning routine and it takes me much longer to come up to speed without it. It's not the caffeine, it's the ritual of making the thing: the sounds, the smells, the activity. It's especially important now that I work from home: it takes the place of the drive to the office. And I'm definitely one of those "Don't talk to me until I've had my coffee" kind of people. Mornings suck.

So when I came upstairs from my workbench dragging my repair failure like the train on the British royal robes, Michelle immediately insisted I order a new one. I was going to let it ride, spend a long time shopping on Marketplace or Craigslist and she's all, "No. I have to deal with you in the mornings. Order it. Now."

I still managed to be somewhat frugal. I ordered a better machine than the one I'm replacing, but bought used so got it for less than the cost of the first, cheaper unit. Well, "used", I think it was a demo unit, an open box thing. 

I can't make these kind of purchases every day, but I'm grateful to be at a place where I can do it once in a while.

In the meantime, I brought up an old Mr. Coffee, $40 "espresso" machine. Those machines have a particular smell to them as they work, and it brought back some memories of mornings long past. It makes acceptable, very strong coffee that is at least better than Scooters or Dutch Brothers.

I'm going to give the Breville to Kate to take apart. The new machine should be here this weekend. It's a definite upgrade and I'm looking forward to it.

It took me about twenty-four hours, but I finally got a pet project finished for the DayJob.

Anytime you finance a vehicle, there's about a dozen forms that have to be filled out, right? Since all that information is already in our system, we have a PDF of each form and the system fills them out automatically.

The pet project is an interface that allows us to map recordset data onto a PDF form by clicking and dragging and then saving the new file. Before you could click and drag and it would give you the x/y coords, but you had to copy and paste them into the file yourself. Now it's all automatic. Probably the most useful interface I've ever designed, and I'm pretty happy. It will save oodles of time, where "oodles" is any number greater than zero and less than infinity. It's a fairly large number, I'm thinking. Using it, I was able to make adjustments on a 50 point form in just about half an hour. It would have taken at least two hours the old way.

Go me.

Other than that, I'm sorry to say, today wasn't a good day.( Courtesy snip so you can avoid aspergers angst if you want to... )

Tomorrow will be better. Friday, right?

I didn't know I was thinking this way, but I really did want a Christmas tree. I was cleaning and rearranging my office area a little bit - trying to find a permanent, out of the way home for the laser printer, an 18" square behemoth that I love as much as I can love any office tool - and ended up clearing a space large enough for our small pre-lit tree. I made a clean spot, stared at it for a couple minutes, and it came to mind that nothing else would do but to fill it with a 4', table-top tree.

We haven't decorated it, no balls, no tinsel, no candy canes. We'll see what Booplesnoot does with it, and if she can mind her manners, we might throw some tinsel on and see how it goes. For now, it's enough to have the glow of the lights and a place to put presents.

Ho ho ho. 

Not bad, not bad. Nothing to write home about, and I can barely remember yesterday, but not bad.

If there is one downside to having my office upstairs and in the center of the house, it's that I am obliged to suffer through whatever is on the TV. Since Michelle is unable to do much else day-to-day, the TV is on a lot. I only work half days in the office so I'm home for a lot of it. Over the last winter it was British crime dramas. This summer, all seven seasons of Supernatural. These Hallmark holiday movies that Michelle has been wading her way through since Thanksgiving are kinda like campaign promises: completely interchangeable, formulaic, insincere, poorly delivered, cynical, and ultimately forgettable.

We're not precisely weather-bound, I just have no real motivation to go out. Groceries I handled on the way home from the kids' performance yesterday and I don't need anything at this point for the dye machine. Driving yesterday was no fun. I rarely have any trouble getting around, age has taught me caution and patience.

I think I managed to salvage the dye jobs. There's something about the dark brown dye, I've never gotten a job that wasn't splotchy. I keep it on the shelf for marble jobs, and used it mixed with camel for the latest job - camel is tough to get smooth, too. It was a match made in hell. For the overdye/correction, I subbed in a different brown and it seemed to do better. The two jobs together streaked in different places, and on average came out okay. Maybe. I haven't seen it in daylight yet.

Back to work tomorrow. Not looking forward, but for no reason in particular. Just don't wanna, Need a break. It's cool, though, I'm just whining.

When I learned about our PayPal account being hacked, I immediately filed a case with PayPal (or twenty-three, their system only takes them one at a time) and got on the USBank website looking for the number for their 24 customer service and fraud department. I called the number on the back of the card, but that was - haha - bankers' hours and I wasn't about to wait.

( Read more... )

Quite the weekend. I'm exhausted, so I'll sum up.

Performance Saturday night. Was more "on" than I have been in a long time. Very sparsely attended, no surprise there; so discouraging. May try an online concert after the first of the year, see if removing geographical/travel barriers helps.

My voice needs more exercise. I'm losing my range as I get older.

Productive day, today, but not in the way I thought. The dining room carpet get vacuumed and shampooed and vacuumed again, and the room got a general dose of cleanup.

I've just about had it with the kitchen floor. The old tile is so damaged it's hardly worth cleaning anymore. Sheet lino as soon as I can find one I like and can afford.

Big, big meltdown/tantrum with Jami tonight. He started threatening self-harm, but I don't think he was serious but just grabbing for attention, and by sonny jesus he got it. We've told him that we have a limited - read: zero - tolerance for that, and that should we ever suspect him serious, into the hospital he goes. All this over requiring him to read a fiction book - any fiction book. He'll read dictionaries and encyclopedias all fucking day, but just try to get him to read Laura Ingalls Wilder or Terry Pratchett. We were considering putting him in public school, but that's put quit to that.

Anyway, internet is gone until he reads a chapter of something fiction. I guess that's how it's going to have to be: he can buy internet time by doing the reading he's assigned. I hate doing it that way, but if that's what it takes, that's what it takes.

I can watch horror movies and walk away unaffected because they're not real and they don't matter. My son is real, he matters, and now I have a migraine. Yee haw.

Tomorrow starts six months of being the only tech guy with Day Job. DataGuy has taken a contract assignment elsewhere until our business improves. DayJob just can't afford to pay us both, and most of the work needing to be done now is mine. This will likely mean not having to drive to Liberty every day if at all, and I'm totally cool with that. Just have to work it out with MoneyGuy so I can get paid via some other means than paper check. Shouldn't be an issue.

So very tired. 

If you have to drink instant coffee - and at the office, that's the best option since my coffee grinder died - then you can do a whole lot worse than Starbucks' Via. It's almost indistinguishable from a regular old brewed pot, and while spendy, it's worth it.

I was shocked this morning when DataGuy asked me how The Machine was coming along. I sent him a link to a YouTube video where I give the overview, a sort of "so, this is my current hobby" and he shared the link with MoneyGuy. I'm not sure why, but it caught in both their imaginations. As I was chatting with DG about it, I was again struck how much fun I'm having with the thing.

It's just been one problem after another, to be sure, but I'm under no deadline except my own and so I can take my time with each one that comes along. My deadline is that I Really Want This Machine Done, and that's good motivation. It's allowing me to be creative without pressure, to problem-solve without oversight. It's one of the reasons I started writing software twenty-five years ago: mental challenges, logic puzzles, problem solving...

and coffee.

In my experience, you can't have one without the other.

Once I got over the shock of the election and got the poetry and anger out of my system, I fell back on a saying I took from Terry Pratchett's Nightwatch:

"You do the job that's in front of you."

The election can't be changed. It probably won't affect my family very soon if at all - as I said on Facebook the machinations of kings and princes usually have little effect on the commoners. My country will survive, we'll have the opportunity to fix our mistakes in four years, and in the meantime?

I have a job. There's software to write, and tights to build. I have a home and food on the table. These circumstances are likely to continue without significant interruption.

Besides, we can't move to Vancouver until the bankruptcy is discharged, anyway.

We're in Sioux Falls, SD, for a feis. It's a very small event - about two hundred dancers - which is perfect for Katie, who hasn't competed in a while and who hasn't been doing well since her hip injury. She did very well today, taking first place in two dances, though neither had enough dancers registered to count toward moving her up to "prize winner." (There must be at least five competing or it doesn't count.)

Even so, she's happy. It was a good confidence booster and motivator for her. We thought earlier in the week we wouldn't come, but it was an easy drive north - straight up I29 - and she needed it.

On the way home, we'll detour through Nebraska City and environs, visit the ol' family homestead in Weeping Water. I haven't been there since...2011?...when we passed through on our way to Oregon to visit Frank B., and I feel like I ought to pay my respects at mom and dad's and David's graves, give our daughter a review of who's who and who they are to her. One of her maternal great-g-grandfathers is responsible for founding the town, after all. I more or less grew up there, though I was officially raised in Independence I have at least as many memories of south-eastern Nebraska as I do Missouri.

We've seen very litle of Sioux Falls, the town. The feis wasn't done until mid-afternoon and Michelle crashed pretty much the minute she got back to the room. Fine with me - there isn't much to see except the falls and we saw plenty of them when we were passing through on the way to Oregon. Our hotel is in an industrial area on the NW corner, and there are no eateries within a twenty minute drive in any direction. Took me half an hour to find a Starbucks, and I can usually sniff out one of those in under five minutes.

Katie spent an hour or so in the hotel pool - more of an indoor water park for the kiddies, so nothing deeper than 3'6". She took the water slide three times and on the third scraped her big toe - shallow damn pool! - bad enough to leave a rather impressive trail of blood on the tiles. She wisely got out of the water, I found a first aid kit and a clean rag, and we got it taken care of. The kid in charge of the area was completely unphased. Grabbed the spray botle of disinfectant cleaner and wished us a better day.

To be honest, I slept most of the day away myself. I can't decide if there's something wrong making me sleep so much (blood sugar or something) or if I just have my days and nights turned around. I need to see my doc about it, but she'll just order another sleep study or prescribe another sedative that I can't take. There's no such thing as "no rebound effects" when it comes to me and tranqs. A quarter of a pill she said she gives to her five year old daughter knocked me for a loop for two days. No thank you.

I need to meet with her anyway, do a med review and physical. I am now the age my dad was when he started showing symptoms of the brain tumor, and given the number of headaches I get a week it'd be nice to have a clean CT scan on my chart. Took the man six years to die and it was grueling for him and everyone around him, including me. It's one of the few things I truly fear.

Exhausting day, though I've hardly risen from my chair for most of it. The morning was spent fixing bugs after a code move - there always seems to be so much of that. Our customers use the system in ways that we never think of, so there's always a ton of catch-up to do. It was bad enough this time I had to roll back the code completely. Thankfully, I'd made a complete backup so the rollback was just a matter of renaming the base folder. High, high stress.

Add to that the need to get an order of four tights done and shipped for a deadline it'll be a bloody miracle if they meet. I had hoped to shift my day around, do the sewing early and the programming late, but no such luck. I ended up dropped them off at the post office today, but too late for the final pick-up of the day. At least I can say they shipped.

So, brain and eyes are fried. The positive part is that I'll end up getting to bed much earlier than I would have otherwise. I'll go out and see if I can get some crickets for the lizard, then it's shower and off to bed.