So, ... how's your week?
I've had a fun 7 days...
First, to set the stage: Christmas should be a joyous time this year. Jon, Aarati, and baby Asha are flying in from Chicago; Abby is flying in from Amsterdam; Rachel, Terry, and baby Annabel live only a few miles away and will be joining us too, of course.
A few weeks ago, I finally went to the dentist, about 7 years behind. As expected, they said my gums were in terrible shape and I'd need some serious work, starting with deep scaling. I was expecting this and made the 2 appointments.
Now for this week:
12/10: First dental appointment - 2 hours to work on the right side. Very nice hygenist (my age) and the most painless use of needles I've ever had. Dentist comes in at the end, looks at everything and says that one of my teeth needs to be pulled. That's the good news - only one. The appointment is scheduled for Friday.
12/11: Pat and I listen to the sound of all our tall pine trees limbs breaking through the night. We lose power around midnight. The phone line goes around 6-7AM.
12/12: Pat and I go out at 8AM to move the large branches so I can get to the dentist. Pat worked the previous weekend and had already scheduled Friday off, thank G-d, or we'd have been up a lot earlier. As we're moving branches I notice my car is missing its rear windshield. Yup, it got hit. Further inspection shows that it also dented both sides next to the window, and made a small dent in Pat's car as well. I take Pat's car to the dentist and also to work, stranding her, but I don't have much choice: this weekend is a major implementation at work. The good news: Rachel is only a few miles away in her new house, and she has power. Pat works at home for a while, but eventually gives up when it gets too dark and cold and goes to Rachel's. We spend the night there.
12/13: I need to be at the office no later than 9AM for my part in the implementation, but seeing as how I haven't been able to get to my email, I'd like a little extra time to catch up. I'm scheduled for tasks at 9AM and 12PM. Hopefully that means I'll be home by 1PM to help Pat around the (cold) house. No such luck: The implementation doesn't go as smoothly as we'd like and I can't do my noon tasks until 5PM. By then Pat's given up (the house is too cold) and is back at Rachel's.
12/14: Not only was I part of the implementation team, but I'm also part of the 3-man team responsible for this month's scheduled shutdown. Since this brings down pretty much all of BWH's computing, it's scheduled way in advance and at off-peak hours. So, I'm back at the office Sunday night at 9PM getting ready. We've scheduled the development and Q/A platforms to be down from 10PM until 11PM and the production platform to be down between 2AM and 3:30AM. The production servers consist of about 70 windows servers and 7 UNIX "instances" on 2 UNIX machines. Most of our work is prepping everything so that the reboots of all the machines go smoothly and production is up by 4AM. Typically, even with a few "hiccups" I'm done and on my way home by 6AM.
12/15: Things don't go well. I won't go into all the technical stuff, but I'm finally driving home at 9AM. (Walter will later get a call that he has to file an "incidence report" to the hospital to explain why order-entry wasn't up until 8) I had to call Pat at 7 to tell her that I couldn't drive here to work and she'd have to get a cab. I decide to drive home, instead of going to Rachel's, to check on the cats and see if I have any energy to do a few hours housework before today's dental appointment. The good news: Even though I fell asleep at the wheel a few times, I didn't hit anyone. No luck at home - the house is just too cold to do much. So, at noon I go to the dentist to have the left side worked on. A few hours later I head back home to clean out my car and have the body shop come and pick it up. It's so warm outside (over 60°) that I open the side door, hoping to get some heat into the house. Nope - it's still about 40 when I leave to pick up Pat at the hospital and go to Enterprise to get a rental car (insurance pays for 80%).
12/16: I go in to work and spend the next 2 hours going through emails from all the chaos of the weekend, plus a lot of minor snafus on Monday after I left. I'm also told by the boss that he's scheduled me to give a brief 15-minute talk at tomorrow's developer's meeting. He tells me to use Powerpoint. Well, I'm a whiz a t Word and Excel, but Powerpoint? Oh well, it's time I learned. It's now 6PM and my slides are done, pending the boss' approval. I've just gotten a call from Pat. Half of the neighborhood is still dark, but all the power lines are back up, and there's a cherry-picker working on the line between our house and our neighbor's, so we've both come to the conclusion that once that's done they'll turn on power to the grid. I'm leaving work now and will swing by the house to check. We'll probably still eat with Rachel and give the house a few more hours to warm up, but I'm encouraged.
An eventful week…