The Long, Long Weekend

This post goes into more detail about work than I normally post, but I don’t think there’s anything in here that shouldn’t be.

This weekend was crazy. For most people, it was a long weekend, but for me it was a long, long weekend. I had to work Friday night, for a deployment, so that pretty much mucked the whole thing up for me.

I woke up Friday morning at the regular time. I would have liked to have slept in, and got some extra sleep in preparation for the late night, but unfortunately Andrea had to be at work on time, so that was out. I wasn’t disappointed, though, because sleeping late in advance of a late night doesn’t really do a lot of good.

I pretty much worked a regular day on Friday, except that I took it really easy in the afternoon. Most of my colleagues, in preparation for the late night, left the office around 1:00 or 2:00, but again, Andrea wasn’t able to leave work early, so I waited around for a normal day. I wasn’t too disappointed by this, however, because I knew if I’d gone home I wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway. I did, however, leave the office around 2:00 for a late lunch, which I had at the Keg. I had a great steak and a beer; how often do you get to have a nice leisurely lunch like that?

Friday evening, Urban Promise was having an end-of-year pot-luck dinner, to which I was invited. So I basically just dropped Andrea off at home, and went straight to the church. I stayed until around 8:00 or so, and then got back in the car and went back to work.

I brought my guitar with me, and spent some time at the office learning a song that I had to play for someone on Sunday morning. I got an odd look from the security guard at the building, when I came in guitar in hand, but oh well.

After I’d learned my song—or as much as I could, anyway; I realized I’d need Andrea to help me figure out some of the chords—I did some work. And almost messed up one of the test environments we have; I must have spent an hour trying to get it back up and running. Oh well; it gave me something to do, until the deployment could start.

The deployment started at 12:30, and involved two pieces: my piece, which was smooth and flawless, and then another piece, which I had to test against my piece. My part was done around 1:30, then tested, and got the green light. Everything was tested successfully. We then had to wait around until about 2:00, for the other piece to be done, so that we could test.

At 2:00, we checked in with the other team doing the other piece, and they were having problems. We scheduled another checkpoint for 2:30. And then for the rest of the night/morning we had checkpoints every half hour, until about 5:00. Then we had to have all kinds of other meetings, and I finally left the office around 8:00.

At 9:00AM, Andrea and I headed back to church, for Jehovah Shalom choir practice, for our concert on June 17^th. Practice went from 9:30–12:30, including some extra setup Andrea and I had to do before and after.

After practice, we went to the grocery store, to stock up on groceries, for Saturday evening. Did I mention we had company over on Saturday? Oh. Well, we did.

By this time, I’d been awake for 30.5 hours straight, so I was exhausted. From 1:30–5:30 or so, I slept.

Company arrived some time around 6:00. Maybe a bit later. It was Andrea’s family, and we had a great time. The food wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t overwhelming, either. I wish I was a better cook. I got performance anxiety cooking for Andrea’s aunt, because she’s a great cook. But nobody made fun of me, or spit their food out into the plants, so I guess it went okay. (That being said, I should check the plants when I get home.)

I went to sleep around 11:00PM Saturday night. And then my cell phone rang at 12:30; they were re-doing a piece from the previous deployment, and were hoping I could do a quick test from my side. I did the test, and got back into bed around 1:00. The phone rang again at about 5:30AM, because my system was down, and they couldn’t continue their testing. I wasn’t, if I may be frank, at my best, performance-wise, so I didn’t do a lot to figure out what the problem was, but it soon turned out that a separate back-end system, that my system depends on, was down for scheduled maintenance. So they let me go back to bed, and waited until everything came back online, to finish their testing. (As a side note, since I don’t mention it later, the testing went well.)

Sunday was a fairly normal day; church in the morning, choir practice in the afternoon. There was a tense moment during the morning service, when I was supposed to be playing for the woman doing the special music—this is the song I’d practiced for Friday night—when I picked up the guitar, to start playing, and somehow the E string was way out of tune. The poor woman was standing there, ready to start singing, and I had to re-tune. Luckily, however, it only took a few seconds (although that must have felt like an eternity to her—it did to me), and we were back on track. She sang beautifully.

Monday I slept in until noon, and then we didn’t do anything special for the rest of the day.