A bit over a week ago on a Saturday evening I got to rewatch one of my childhood movies, Kiki’s Delivery Service. Couldn’t remember hardly a thing about it except there was a blimp or something. Real fun times. Afterwards we had a round of Betrayal at House on the Hill.

Sunday rolled around and I’d been tapped to host a Sunday Church Movie Night, featuring The R.M. However, just before church I got a text from a close friend, she was having a group of other close friends over to her new place in the evening, and won’t I join them. Through some deft maneuvering I got myself out of hosting movie night, so I could attend. Great times had by all; got to catch up with a couple of married friends I hadn’t seen in a while.

As the evening was winding down I got a text from a buddy of mine asking nicely if by any chance a mutual friend of ours could crash at my place for a couple days. Turns out she was having a bad allergic reaction to the place she was staying. I said of course, and went back to put together the guest room for its first emergency arrival.

This is where the “omen” from earlier comes back – my new house-guest is seen napping in the first pic, taken a day before she moved in.

It’s kind of funny, I’ve never had more than 24 hours’ notice before getting a new roommate. This one’s been great, finally someone around who gets full usage out of the kitchen. She’ll be sticking around to the end of the month till she finds a place of her own.

Not much to report for the rest of the week. On Tuesday night I had some bad eye irritation, thought nothing of it until I woke up with it still bothering me. Wednesday night was really bad, so Thursday I stayed home for fear of spreading pink eye or something, and went in to see an eye doctor at noon.

Turns out it’s a “corneal ulcer”, basically a scary term for a bacterial infection. I got put on a steroid+antibacterial eye drop and sent on my way. Unfortunately I’ve had to wear my back-up glasses, the ones I got just before heading into the MTC like ten years ago. They don’t fit my head very well, and like an idiot I insisted on getting Transition lenses, so now whenever I’m out in the sunlight I look like an edgy teenager.

As I wasn’t infectious I headed in to the office. It ended up being a pretty interesting work day. A bunch of people were in town for a summit, and I got invited to sit in on it. Met some people I’d been working with over the past while, people I really only saw in person whenever I got a chance to head down to Mountain View.

Side-note: it was kind of funny how certain parts of the summit seemed just like a rough Sunday School class, not a huge amount of participation, leading to awkward silences.

After the summit the participants all headed out to a restaurant, and once again I was invited along. Food and conversation were great. There was a funny scene though, at the end, where a co-worker and I were standing around while our manager and a higher-up chatted; neither of us could leave, as our manager had been our ride in, and neither of us felt comfortable making our impatience more visible; we were an L4 and L5 waiting on an L6 chatting with an L7 🙂 Eventually things wound down and we all went home.

Friday was the beginning of a major slog. Some people wanted some functionality in place by a certain date or they wouldn’t ship our stuff. It fell to me to implement what they wanted, get it tested, reviewed, and submitted, and make sure all the deadlines leading up to the final ship date were being respected. So Friday was implementation- and testing-day, my favorite part of these sprints.

That evening was an Ensign Symphony and Choir concert. I always describe it to y’all as UVMCO-lite. This time they really lived up to their moniker; the final piece was Amazing Grace, as performed by MCO. In fact, the director had distributed that very video when describing to the members how it’d sound like.

Jolly good show. Afterwards I chatted with someone I’d overheard talking during the intermission about volunteering to teach programming to high school students. I’ve been thinking about getting into that space. The guy extolled the virtues of the program, called TEALS, where industry professionals team up with certified teachers to build up a school’s CS program. It looks like a big time commitment, gotta agree to show up at 6 or 7 am every day for an entire year. Maybe I’m more cut out for ad-hoc tutoring…

After the show my group found out I had never visited the iconic Gum Wall, and we had to make a pit stop.

Saturday I did some more testing on the work I’d done on Friday, then headed off to see Uncle Dave in Bellevue. He was in town presenting his audio-over-Ethernet solution at a Christian ministry convention. Had an awesome time chatting about the tech, and spit-balling ideas to increase the system’s security.

That evening I had dinner with a friend, after which we watched Star Wars: Rogue One. A very polarizing film, my favorite but others’ least-favorite.

Sunday was such a nice day out that I decided to hold Teacher Council out-doors.

That evening I drove out to Snoqualmie to have dinner with cousin James and Karen. Their kids were just awesome. It was make-your-own-Pizza night, after which we traded riddles and played some games.

On Monday the slog turned into a bit of a death march; ended up being a 15-hour work day getting everything through the testing pipeline.

Today was the culmination of all that; by 3:30pm everything was in place and I was no longer in the spot-light. Headed home early to catch some Z’s.

The day was punctuated by a visit to the eye doctor, to check up on how my treatment was progressing. As some people react to steroids with increased eye pressure, they wanted to make sure that wasn’t happening in my case. While I’m safe from that, I am now sporting a nice scar on my cornea, from the infection. It’s below my iris so it won’t affect day-time vision, but if my pupils dilate enough at night I could get some distortion. You’d think they’d’ve called that out the first time I was in, something like, “Hey be sure to keep to the treatment regimen or you could scar up.”

Blegh. One more week of these glasses before I can get back into contacts.

This evening a friend came over and I helped her edit her writing sample before sending it off as part of a grad school application. Gonna get some sweet fruit salad out of that arrangement.