Reverse weekend

I've had a strange weekend. I stayed up late at night and slept all day. I'm not sure if I'm sick, tired, or just getting old(er).

On Friday I got up at 5:00 a.m. (after going to bed after midnight) and caught a plane to Southern California for a customer meeting. This is one of our oldest customers, and they keep having things go wrong, one after the other, so I suggested that I just hop down there and play with their system for a few hours, and try to find everything that's wrong all at once. To that end, I think I succeeded, as I found about eight or ten little things wrong, and nothing big that's wrong. Also, I had a good time talking to their admin, who I also took out for a good lunch.

I got done right after lunch, but the earliest flight home that I could get was hours later, so I hung out with acanthusleaf , who picked me up at LAX and drove me to Santa Monica. She was adding some of her jewelry to a store display (and nice jewelry it is), so we did that, then wandered around the downtown area and grabbed some pizza.

By the time I finally got home around 11:00 I was so tired, and I slept until almost 4:00 p.m. the next day. So of course last night I stayed up late, and got up late today. Unfortunately, tomorrow is a work day.

Talk like Dr. Stephen Maturin night

Last night, learnteach and some other friends hosted an Aubrey/Maturin dinner party. Wow. It was a sort-of costume dinner, in that we aimed for the idea of the time period, since very few of us have clothes from that time period. The food, however, was awesome. There was grog and port and assorted wines, a fish course that included what seemed to be lobscouse, plus a mushroom dish, some salad, ship's biscuit (as hard as a rock, but tasty once you soaked it in water), then a meat course with lamb stew and two types of pease porridge (both yummy), plus spotted dog for dessert. Yum. The company was loads of fun, too, with witty and interesting dining companions. I brought a CD of duets of the songs played in the Aubrey/Maturin books, so we had appropriate background music, though it was hard to hear with all the laughter. What fun.