Beat

Long week this week, and I was not particularly good company. The good news, I suppose, is that there's not much company to keep lately, so I don't think I really ruined anything for anyone (so far; I still have the rest of today).

I ended last week with a trip to C's for a hectic round of massive video-game-o-rama, where we found that an RPG he expected to be two-player was just one—this sucked up about an hour and a half of story-line and plot, which was more or less okay, but not quite as interactive as we'd hoped. I ended the day late, and hit church early, which I think probably set things in motion for a longer week than it needed to be.

Monday was work-from-home, chiropractor, work-from-work, teach. It was actually good to fight a few people who weren't afraid of doing it with me—it's been awhile since I could really press, and not worry too much about injury. (Thursday's fighting was less kind to me, insofar as I was massacred by D. We need to fight more, since he'll make me better at it.) J has been sick as a dog lately, and so he had to leave early; but he warmly received the fish photos, and the other breaking clinic pictures were a hit. (One mother was running after me to give me a hug, but I had to get on the mat and stretch.)

Tuesday was a much longer day than I intended. K's audition was yesterday, or today, I forget which, and so we took the night off. This was good, but I was busy reading too much about chaos theory to really enjoy myself. The theory itself is fascinating, and I definitely must do better about getting into my books. However, it isn't light reading, and it was difficult to sleep that night.

This isn't a good thing for Wednesday, which was a lot of work. I was pleased to eradicate a bug with extreme prejudice for a customer from Germany, who was kind enough to set us up with a test bed, but it consumed four hours of my day. Customer complaints took up the rest of my time, so I was unable to make any progress whatsoever on longer-term projects that I had intended to do. I even cut off my AIM time in an effort to make it work; it was difficult not to chat about Dilbert jokes, but I did fairly well most of the morning.

At the end of it, though, I still had to do some work from home both Weds and Thurs, which was not really what I wanted to do. Thursday is a terrible day schedule-wise because the chiropractor wants to see me at 3:45, meaning that I have to leave work around 3:30. I usually don't get in at 7AM to make it happen (and certainly didn't this past), so I worked after I taught. I was absolutely starving when I got home, and ate roughly two-thirds of a horse before getting to work.

Friday was somewhat more relaxed; I completed most of the code integration I was trying to do and updated a few build scripts. Hopefully they'll all take well. We had lunch at a newly-opened Mexican place. The "lunch-sized" burrito put a hurting on me—it was so difficult to finish. Now I have a fairly big mouth (in more than one way) and a stomach sized to fit. I figured that the lunch portion would probably not be that big. I think roughly zero percent of it had digested by the time I had to teach Friday afternoon. This is not a good thing.

Now it's bad for more than one reason. Naturally, moving when you have a full stomach can be a little unsettling and crampy. But I am also dealing with children who have serious attention issues. There's roughly one way to get them to pay attention, and that is to let them hit you. And not just kind of tap, but to get them to whale pretty hard.

The reason this is necessary is because a sizable minority of them hide their thumbs in their hands when they hit—punching me in the chest is a good way for them to realize that they're going to hurt themselves if they continue the practice. Moreover, when they're really throwing, they tend to lunge instead of staying over center—it's definitely worth the shocked look in their eyes when I step back, and they fall over instead of hitting me.

Regardless, getting punched in a stomach full of industrial-grade burrito isn't the greatest thing ever. The good news is that it didn't last for too long, and I also had some additional teachers to help, allowing me to separate a few problem children and punis^H^H^H^H^Hteach them more effectively. Still some discipline issues, but it's much easier to deal with them in smaller groups than in larger. (My classroom management skills are not very good; I shall have to become more fearful.)


Afterward I made a surprise stop at Bible study; I expected not to go because J wanted to see 300. We did end up catching the movie, but it was a late showing (10.20). It was about what I expected—a bit of chest-thumping, sex, and motivational speeches that fell woefully flat because the rest of the movie was a bit meh. It's based on the comi^H^H^H^Hgraphic novel rather than the real battle of Thermopylae, though it retains a few historic facts. The battle of Thermopylae was Persia's Carchemish (after which Egypt was no longer a world power ever again).

It's funny, but I saw the movie with four people yesterday, all of whom have different names that start with J. I know too many people with J names. It makes it easy to obfuscate names on this blog, though.

It made for a long day, since the movie didn't let out until after midnight. I slept in a little bit today, which was nice. I'm working on transitioning some of my photos to a software package with a better workflow—it should make it easier for me to organize photos and hopefully to deploy albums. This evening is dinner with S, lately in from Wisconsin and her advisor's success in cracking Mock Theta functions (cool). M, K, and (yes, another) J may also come along. And thereafter, perhaps a trip to J's to hang out with D and H and (yes, another) J.

Ugh, losing an hour does not make me happy. Darned Congress.