Where Dustbunnies Go To Die

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.