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St. Patrick
Tuesday, March 17, 1998 Today I was totally blocked at work for hours on end. This is what comes of being a good citizen! I run a stress tool on my secondary machine, and that's the machine that has the sound card so I can play CDs on it. Well, stress failed on that machine last night, so I had to wait until a developer debugged the problem before I could reboot the machine. (That's where being a good citizen comes in; I could have just gone ahead and rebooted the machine.) So the new CDs I bought last night couldn't be played. I was also blocked on my main machine. First, the bugs I could have been following up on require the new version of my product which is on the secondary machine. Second, the mail server was barfing on me most of the day, and dealing with my bugs requires sending mail to external websites. So one way or another, a frustrating day. I'd write about my new CDs, but I haven't listened to them yet!
St. Patrick's Day was my mother's birthday, which was why she was named Patricia, maiden name Kelley. It would be hard to find a more Irish name than that. I think she enjoyed having a birthday that folks could remember. Every year she got quite a variety of special St. Pat birthday cards! How could the card companies have sold enough to justify printing them, when only about 1 out of 365 people are born on this day? When I was living near my parents as an adult, we'd often go to lunch on my mom's birthday: my mother, my godparents, and me. (My father would stay home.) Of course, the last place you want to go near on St. Patrick's Day is an Irish pub or restaurant! We usually went to a Chinese place, I think. My godparents, Uncle Harry and Aunt Jo, were originally friends of my father's. They all met each other during World War II, I think, living in the same boarding house in Washington, DC. They were a very nice couple, childless and devoted to each other, and very good to our family. My sisters and I have taken them as a model for taking an interest in or helping other folks' children. I don't know if it was my maternal grandfather or great-grandfather that was born in Ireland, and if you added up all the genetic inputs, it would be stretching things to say that we were of Irish descent. But that's the branch we know the most about, so we think of ourselves that way.
When I got home this afternoon, I saw there was a note from Federal Express on the door: the special package I'd been expecting had arrived! I could either sign the form and they'd deliver it tomorrow, or I could drive down to the King County Airport (a little past Georgetown where I was Saturday night) and pick it up tonight. So I decided to go and get that package on the way to the Cacophony meeting. The meeting was fun, and we've got lots of good plans for next month. I was a bit sleepy though, since I was up late last night and up at my usual time this morning. So now I could write this entry in the way all those transvestite fetish letters begin in Variations: "As I sit here writing, I'm wearing my cinch-waist red flowered satin bustier, with the lace top stockings and matching..."
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