White Lightning Axiom: Redux

Ok,ok, I've been bad and I know it. I promise to fill you all in on my the lengthy period of incognito. I just need to wrap up the mess that has descended upon my life because of my lengthy absence. What can I say, the home-land was calling. All Hail Minnesotica! I will try to make a daily update till all the mysteries have been revealed. I swear!

Much to my dismay, my first day back at work has not measured up to my angst fueled fears. The day started out pretty mildly. We woke to Jacobs pleas for mercy at 5am. His exuberance for swimming yesterday left him with more water in his system than the flimsy little diaper could hope to hold. He was sopping wet. I crept into the Child Detention Cell Block A and extracted him from his Retention Unit. He was pretty excited to see me so I had to hoist the mega-ton toddler and get him to the Master Suite as quickly as possible. Did not want to wake up Alexis. That would certainly spoil her mood for the day. The Mrs and I gave him a bottle, swapped his drenched clothing for some nice dry ones and let him snuggle down into the Mile Wide Water Bed. He was happy for an hour or so. Then, when he started getting antsy, I went out and brought in Alexis while he watched 'Bear in the Big Blue House' on the TV. He was neatly seated on the pillows at the end of the bed, behaving like a little angel ... certainly not his modus operandi.

After the seriously delayed morning routine had finally been wrapped up, I went on my VERY SHORT commute to work. Got going at 7:30am, got there at 8:15. Not too bad, traffic was light and vaguely polite. Things were moving quickly even in the usual trouble spots. The weather was nice so I kept the car windows rolled down. Nice. Not the 16 hour driving marathons of the last two weeks. My lower back is still punishing me for those sins.

I mucked around with the Liz Clairborne Gift wrap project for 4 hours this morning just to prove that they had not fixed the problems on the Amazon side yet. Not very difficult. Hand craft 3 separate XML files to specify the product SKU, the price and inventory. Push them up with three different commands and copy the output to show that the product was set up properly to be 'gift-wrapped'. Then, send up and order and get slammed for trying to do a gift-wrap. Four hours. Heh, nice way to come back from vacation, prove that something is broken. While I was gone, the dba folks were busy beating themselves to death with the sequence things. I could only shake my head in dismay. I could create the three sequences in about 15 minutes. That includes the 10 minutes it takes to type in the file to run that contains the commands. Apparently, it took all day to do this task. They are paying heavily for their own design sins. On top of that, they mis-named the sequences because some-one didn't read the documentation. It was easier to have my code changed to match their errors. Tre funny. I'm spending the last 4 hours looking at this SkyMall project for the Sponge-Bob/Nickelodeon project. More hackerism. <SIGH>

I talked to the Lovely and Exceptional Mrs MDMHVONPA today about the dogs. We are going on yet another vacation in a few weeks. This time, to Hershey park ... the sweetest place on earth. At least the drive will be a fraction of what we did for the Minnesota trip. This time, the dogs are going to the 'Holiday House' kennel at 21$/day. Is that each? I forget. In any event, I'm hoping that this vacation will not take years off my life. It just may be relaxing!

# posted by mdmhvonpa @ 12:13 PM