Where Dustbunnies Go To Die

As the subject of this post suggests, this has been a rather hectic week. So hectic that I haven't yet had time to post about the weekend.

Saturday afternoon, I went to the annual Eye Of Harmony barbecue. I didn't get much of an opportunity to talk to some of the people I wanted to talk to, because I was drawn almost immediately into a lengthy conversation with one particular person. (I won't name names, even though I don't think he'd ever see this, but I will say... he's someone from Buffalo who is not ennisdl, whom most people would have walked away from after five minutes. I guess I'm more patient than they are, which isn't necessarily a virtue in this case, or in the case of a certain ex-Montrealer I often find myself spending more time with than I would prefer.) I did manage to have conversations with a few other people, though, including theengineer, his brother, and the Penneys. Attendance seemed low this year, though perhaps it picked up after I left to go downtown for Lance's Fabulous Evening Of Shenanigans Part Two, aka the second installment of the gathering to celebrate my turning 40.

A mostly-different group of people were there: plaidlibrarian, whitesangria, aprilsnark, kaelsu2, protegeboy, scapersuse and indydark made up the dinner group. summ3r_daze joined us for dessert, and then we made our way to the karaoke bar, where Declan met us (having had to fight off a couple of guys while he was waiting, who thought that he might be looking for company). (I think I remembered everyone who was there... apologies if I forgot someone.) Only problem was... karaoke had been cancelled! :( Apparently the host had suffered a nervous breakdown and been hospitalized. I hope it wasn't caused by the monotone "Hey Jude" we all suffered through the previous week... So we sat down and had a quiet drink together, and some good conversation. Not all of it was about Polaris, either. :) Thanks to everyone who came out for either (or both :) ) halves of the celebration!

Sunday, I had a very productive meeting with whitesangria and Monique M. to discuss Polaris stuff. Afterwards, we went for Japanese food, for which kaelsu2 joined us. I don't recall the name of the place, but it was on the south side of Front, just south of the St. Lawrence Market. It was quite good - I had a breaded chicken dish that I forget the name of (it was a curry, but it wasn't spicy at all), and we shared some appetizers.

So that was my weekend. Now I'm ready for another where I'm not quite as busy. :)

Long day today. So very, very tired.

I got up on about 4.5 hours of sleep so that I could stop off at the passport office with my application, having registered via the ePass system on the government website as per electricland's suggestion last week. However, what I didn't know (having already printed the forms and gotten theengineer to sign them as my guarantor) was that the form generated by the online system, although it has the same information on it, is slightly different. So when I arrived, I was told that I had the wrong form for taking advantage of the online system. So I got to sit for an hour or so and wait with the rest of the people there. Add in the time spent in line to have my application pre-screened and get a number, and the time actually at the window, and I was there for an hour and a half or so, all told. *headdesk* I'll be writing a sharply worded letter to the Minister of Immigration and Citizenship - it should be clear on the website that the regular form and the one you're supposed to print from the online registration system are different.

As a result, I didn't arrive at work until about 11:30 this morning, and there was an email from our client waiting for me listing five problems they'd identified today, one of which was in the new Professional References page I created last week (the phone number fields weren't accepting non-North American numbers). I fixed it (finding in the process that the data type called "PhoneNumberType" only accepts digits - no hyphens or parentheses), along with one of the others.

I then went back to the new Pastoral References page I'd been having trouble with. Combined with Friday and yesterday, and I probably spent four hours trying to figure out why I was getting an "invalid object" error when I was trying to call a stored procedure to access the database - and after all that time staring at my C# code, and not seeing anything wrong (I was going to say "not seeing anything missing," but if it was missing, I wouldn't have seen it, now, would I?), it occurred to me, "Why not try executing the stored procedure independently of the code and see if I've made an error in the SQL?" It turned out that in doing a copy-and-paste, I was inadvertantly using the stored procedure name instead of the table name in the select statement within the procedure itself. Note to self: selecting data from a stored procedure doesn't work. *headdesk2* Well, that's what happens when your procedure has the name of the table embedded in its own name...

The good thing about today, however, was that thanks to my wait in the passport office I finished the newspaper about 15 minutes into my ride home and was able to call Ambrose. We hadn't been able to connect in several days (okay, last Sunday when we met up at Starbucks - oy). I thought that I was going to miss him again because I remembered that he usually works the later shift on Wednesdays because he goes out to karaoke on Tuesday nights at Crews/Tango, and I did get his voicemail, but he called me back about ten minutes later when he was on his break. His timing was good - about three minutes earlier I'd felt an itch on the back of my neck, and when I went to scratch I found a rather nasty insect crawling on me. (!!!) I flicked if off and had a look - it looked like some kind of beetle. Weird. (When I told Ambrose, he said, "Wow, the bus must really be rocking if you have a Beatle on board!" That boy's predilection for puns is almost as bad as mine. *grin*) Had he called me three minutes earlier, he probably would have been horrified to hear me shriek like a little girl. (Okay, I only do that with spiders. *grin*) Anyhow, it turned out that I hadn't been able to reach him on the weekend because he worked Saturday and Monday, and Sunday was his father's birthday. (I think I remember him mentioning the birthday last weekend, now that I think about it.)

So... I'm considering postponing this Saturday's birthday festivities to next weekend because gurudata and iangurudata's mother passed away this morning, and the funeral is this weekend in Montreal. I don't know how many people are planning on making the trip up, though. If anyone who has RSVP'd has changed their plans and is now going to Montreal, please let me know so that I know whether to reschedule - I've made reservations at Hot House for 7pm and Fiddler's Green for 10, both for 25 people (although I haven't gotten 25 RSVPs yet, I was assuming that I would by the weekend) and I need to call them both back if plans need to be changed.

I hate my printer. I'm trying to print out the passport renewal forms, but I don't print stuff all that often, and the nozzles seem to be clogged every time, so everything comes out illegible. Nine pages of garbage.

Mind you, it was given to me for free, so I can't complain (well, obviously I can, and have :) ). And when I do unclog the nozzles, it tends to work fine (if painfully slowly).

Now I have to find somewhere to get photos taken. I know there's a place downtown near where I used to work, but that's no help. I think there's a camera store a few minutes' walk north of where I work - I'll have to pop in there at lunch tomorrow and see if they do passport photos (I think most camera places do, no?).

It's my own stupid fault - I kept thinking to myself, "I must renew my passport before going to Dragon*Con," but I would never remember to actually print the forms until after I'd shut off my computer and gone to bed, or when I was out somewhere. Fortunately the government website says that if I take them to the office in person, I can get my passport back within two weeks. (I may have to get to the office at oh-dark-thirty in the morning to be reasonably certain of not having to wait in line, admittedly.)

And yes, all this passport renewal talk means that my birthday is coming up soon. Painfully soon. I don't normally talk about it (in fact, I was considering not talking about it at all) because I don't like acknowledging my birthday - the last one I went out of my way to do something about turned out to be a huge disappointment. Not that I'm bitter, if you know what I mean. ;) But it occurs to me that this one is kind of big. So I'm thinking that maybe I should do something a little special a week from this Saturday, which would be August 11. Problem is, I have a TCON Board of Directors meeting the next day (my actual birthday, but going out on a Sunday night is probably a bad idea), so it would probably be a good idea to have sobered up by then. ;)

So here's where I ask you, my friendslist, for input. Those of you who are in or near Toronto (unless you're willing to travel the requisite number of hours and/or cross the requisite number of oceans or borders to help me mourn turning 40) let me know if you'd be interested in a night on the town with me. I don't know what I want to do yet, though dinner would certainly be a part of it. Alcohol would be another part of it, I'm sure. (Getting sufficiently liquored up to enter the Best Legs Contest at Woody's might be amusing, if this were to happen on the Saturday night... hell, getting sufficiently liquored up to enter the Best Ass Contest on the Friday night would be even more amusing. Or possibly nauseating.) Maybe karaoke? Cosmic bowling? (Hm, I should probably get a session in before the new season starts in a month, though cosmic bowling probably isn't the best way to do that.)

Any suggestions?