No rest for the righteous or the wicked.
Work was work this week, and that's the fairest thing that can be said about it. It wasn't glamourous, it wasn't fun, and it wasn't an adventure, but it wasn't horrible, either. It's long, tiring, and a case study in how badly screwed up things can be without actually self-destructing. Consequently, I haven't been sleeping a whole lot, nor have I had the time nor energy to post here.
I have a cat in my lap that knows that I don't own a cat, and is ensuring that my good clothes (trousers, shirt, and waistcoat) will be covered with cat hair in time for the wedding ceremony later today. I need a roll of duct tape, and fast.
Yes, about the wedding ceremony... Elwing and Irregular Expression will be getting married a couple of hours hence, and they've asked me to officiate. To that end, I left work early yesterday, drove up to Maryland in general and Sugarloaf Mountain in particular, guided by my trust GPS navigation system, and discovered that I didn't know exactly where I was going because roads stop a) having names, and b) showing up in GPS maps that far off the grid. For those of you that've been there, it's only a few notches beneath the Four Quarters Farm in terms of technical accessibility. As it turned out, I was almost there, but didn't go far enough back on the road labelled 'NO ACCESS' in big, friendly letters on the sign. This meant that I got to the rehearsal forty-five minutes late and running on petrol fumes.
Those of you who know me are utterly unsurprised, I can tell. I don't hear any headslaps.
Rehearsal went as well as can be expected - better to get all the mistakes out of the way now rather than during the ceremony itself.
Weddings have their own special brand of worry and distress unavailable anywhere else, though accessible to anyone in attendance regardless of whether or not you're the people getting married. In my case, this means worrying about getting lost, running out of time, family crisis that no one can reasonably do anything about (like Uncle Foobar suddenly having a heart attack, cousin Alice and cousin Bob getting dry gulched by second cousin Eve because they drank the last martini at the rehearsal dinner the night before, or brother 'Checkpoint' Charlie suddenly coming down with a migraine headache and being rushed to the hospital with the wedding band still in his pocket), or most of all, whether or not the state of Maryland honours weddings performed by ministers of the Universal Life Church, which I happen to be.
This was almost a show-stopper last year at the wedding of 'lex and Marlise, but we managed to pull a rabbit out of a hat and make it work, no thanks to the state of Pennsylvania. In Maryland, however, all of my research shows that we shouldn't have any problems later today.
But I ramble. I ramble, but I worry.
After the rehearsal dinner last night, I stayed at the Marriott in Maryland because I was too tired to drive back home. I'm at Elwing's place right now with one of the cats in my lap typing this.
On other fronts, things are home are going extremely well. My mother is entering her fourth month of not smoking, an amazing accomplishment. My grandfather is doing much better these days, also. I miss hacking code. There are a lot of personal things that I need to finish but haven't had time or energy to work on. I wasn't able to up the bandwidth at home last weekend because our apartment is just over 14,000 feet away from the Verizoff central office, which means that trying to squeeze anything more out of the DSL line is going to make service unstable. No more bandwidth for me.