my day and bonus footage

Well, I guess its not all that bad of a day, especially given how bad last Friday ended up. After having spent an hour explaining to my boss why the programmers didn’t have two of the large items from our upcoming release complete, even though we were a week behind as it was, I then spent till 6pm figuring out how to get it all done in the next week. Wasn’t a great way to start off my weekend. So, knowing I had nowhere to really go but up, I managed to haul myself back in to work today.

Things went a bit better today, in that the programmers stepped it back up and fixed one of the issues and made solid progress on the second. Lets hope the week continues that way. However, the day went downhill a couple hours prior to quitting time.

The sky grew dark and stormy. Clouds broke over the campus. The heavens opened up and dumped a metric ton or two of rain on the place. Sadly, given the radar pictures I was viewing, I knew I would follow it all the way home.

As usual, my boss paid me a visit a few minutes prior to quitting time, meaning I was stuck there late explaining all the things that had happened while she was in meetings all afternoon. Getting a late start out of the building pretty much ensures a nasty traffic jam trying to get on the interstate. When its raining, its even worse.

What is normally a 2 minute process, to drive the two miles from my on ramp to get past the city limited access highway, was 15 today. That was only the beginning. Remember that rain? Yeah, it and the slow traffic it caused kept with me all the way home. Sadly, that wasn’t the end of it all.

I get almost to the end of my interstate travel, about 35 of the 40 miles, and all traffic stops flowing at the bottom of a huge hill, right before the river. Seems that the expansion joints on the bridge are undergoing replacement, and thus the bridge is 1 lane for the foreseeable future. Of course, for me, that means I now foresee myself taking a different route home from now on. This delay is another 20 minutes in what is otherwise a miserable commute. It still gets worse.

I arrive at my house and, remembering tomorrow is trash day, decide to walk around the side of my house to lug the trash barrel out to the curb. I had spent a few hours this weekend cleaning up my basement, as disaster area was too kind of a word for what I had let happen down there. This created a great deal of debris, given the 4 used air filters I tossed out. Given that I change those about once every 6 months, that means it had been a solid TWO YEARS since I had taken out the basement trash. Whoops.

If you have forgotten, this weekend was time change. We fell back, everyone gaining an extra hour of our already too short weekend. The other side of that change is that instead of driving to work in the dark and home in the daylight, I now get to do the reverse. This isn’t so bad, or at least it shouldn’t have been too bad.

I am walking between my house and the house next door, into what is a very dark area, given the clouds and no light in that area. I am about 3 steps into the shadows when I realize that during the day, my neighbor, who is in the midst of totally renovating his place, must have had a backhoe in there today, because the ground is completely torn up, completely muddy and very slippery.

Thankfully, I have great balance. Otherwise, some part of my body would have ended up really, really dirty. As it was, only my mouth ended up that way, and that’s more from the filth pouring out of my angry mouth than any watery soil entering it. My pants, and more importantly my week-old new work shoes, are covered in mud.

I kick off my shoes at the door and toss my muddy clothes into the hamper. Those are problems for other days. Now that I’m home, I can relax and… oh, wait. Yeah, that’s right, I have a part time job. Time to log some more hours in the daily grind.

That said, I would like to share a video clip with you. I found it highly amusing and I hope that you do, too.