A long night

Last night was a long night. Or perhaps it was just that yesterday was very long and the night too short?

I do have to note, however, that the highlight of my day yesterday (Wednesday) was taking my mother out to tea at Lisa's Tea Treasures for her birthday, and then wandering around Santana Row with her. She'd never been, and it was fun! I find that my perspective on name-brand clothing has changed somewhat, in some indefinable way. G and I have been fans of Bravo's assembly-line contest programs such as 'Top Chef', 'Top Design' and 'Project Runway', and now although I still tend to walk past stores dedicated entirely to one clothing line, I now look at the window dummies thoughtfully rather than not understanding why the price is so high. Anyway, we walked down the main strip and back (I had a meeting to return to), and I'd like to go back there with her sometime to take a closer look, when I'm not bound by a time limit.

Of course, by the time I got home, the meeting had been cancelled because someone else couldn't make it. Le sigh. :-/

The day ended up having some virtual pots on the stove, though, as we had some project status meetings on Thursday morning, with unresolved project design questions that I needed to research.

Oh, and my email has been on the blink for the last couple of weeks, in that I haven't been receiving emails sent to me from outside, including forwards from my external email accounts. I've had a technical support case open since late last week, and they've been puzzling over the tangle that my email configuration has become over the past 10 years as we've migrated to different email tools, servers, etc. The good news is that it was fixed at around 2am, by a very nice support fellow in Brussels who saw that I'd just updated the case (reporting no progress), and figured if I was awake and online, that I'd answer the phone. This was true, though a bit unfortunate for G. Anyway, I agreed to his proposal to convert my whole configuration to the new setup, eliminating the whole mess caused by being a hybrid account. The price was losing all the email that had been 'blocked' by the problem.

It turns out that the problem had been blocking some business emails, too, but I hadn't realized it, through the magic of having people waiting for your response to email that you hadn't realized that you had been sent. Sigh.

Anyway, fixed now.

However...did I mention that my main LCD monitor has been overheating (I think) lately? It has been suffering moments where it shuts off, and I have to turn it off, pause, then on again via the power button, where it works again for a while. Rinse, repeat. The period of working-ness has slowly been getting shorter, and I finally reached zero velocity. This leaves me doing work-work from a laptop instead of on my pretty widescreen, and my gaming machine unusable. I toggle between the two with a KVM switch, which I suspect has shortened the life of the monitor somewhat. Meh...welcome to modern technology, I suppose, where features are bright and colorful and eye-catching, but relatively short-lived and expensive if you want to keep using the Latest Thing(tm). Which I don't, really. But...but...have I mentioned that LCD flatscreens are really cool? :-) Someday our descendants won't understand why we used to use monitors and TVs that were difficult to put on a wall.

So I may go shopping......on Friday for an LCD monitor. Or, to make them last longer, two, so I don't have to use the KVM to toggle between them, though I'd still use it to switch over my mouse and keyboard.

Why Friday? Because I stayed up all night researching a problem that had a go/no-go meeting scheduled this morning (Thursday). I went to bed at 6am, bowing out of my weekly 8am group meeting in preparation for my project meeting at 10am.

It's almost noon, now, and I've had a cup of tea and my morning frozen blueberry waffles, all while doing phone meetings. I'm *mostly* awake, but still dragging, and shudder at what my skating is going to be like at my 7pm game.

Oh, and did I mention that I have foster kittens? They, of course, need to be taken to the vet today. Actually, they should have been taken in last week (for Pyrantel...which is, uh...deworming?) but I was having so much fun with them that I completely spaced about the bring-in scribble on their paperwork. The mom needs to be taken in for shots on Saturday. Should I wait til then? Can she be done early? I dunno, my brain is fried and I'm rambling.

Zzzzzzzz......