What with the holidays and the year-end schedule at work I haven’t had much time to think about blogging. So I’ll use a written montage to communicate what’s been going on lately

• Chris driving to home from Birmingham after the end of the PeopleSoft upgrade (“Eye of the Tiger” is on the radio)
• Sharyl driving to the mall in holiday traffic
• Chris working at the computer, trying to wrap up another project before the end of the year
• Sharyl on the couch, intently going over shopping receipts
• Chris doing one-armed push-ups on the living room floor
• Sharyl in a department store doing arm curls with two large gift bags
• Chris wrapping Christmas presents with one hand
• Sharyl downing a glass of raw eggs
• Chris chopping firewood in the backyard
• Sharyl on the couch again, this time the shopping receipts are piled high around her
• Chris and Sharyl cleaning the house
• Chris and Sharyl exchanging gifts in a winter wonderland

This post was inspired by Slate’s retrospective of Rocky montages. 

I’m back in the ‘Ham for the weekend to wrap up a two-and-a-half year project at work. It should be a busy weekend.

This weekend will be the final step in upgrading the Human Resources information system and HR usually goes all out to accommodate people who work extra hours and to show them they are appreciated. There will probably be a couple of tables in the back of the department loaded with snacks and beverages. The last time I was up here they had brought in a giant Bluebell ice cream freezer stocked with frozen goodies. And when lunch and dinner roll around they send out for even more food. There will be cots and air mattresses in some of the larger cubicles so the tech people monitoring the upgrade can catch a nap now and then. I may need to lie down after all the eating.

The tech team (my team) will work most of the day tomorrow. Then HR staff will come in Sunday to test the system. And on Monday we go live to the whole company.

There will no doubt be a big celebration in the main conference center Monday afternoon, and bonus checks will hopefully be handed out. I think my teammates and I find this particularly amusing. We’ll appreciate the bonus and the party of course, but it will seem premature to us. Without even having the system up for a full day, we’ll be declaring, “mission accomplished.”

I think most tech people are naturally pessimistic about their work because they understand just how much could go wrong. I can guarantee that at least one member of my team will have to leave the celebration early to deal with some upgrade-related problem that has cropped up since the party started.

Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to wrapping up this project, and spending a little time with my teammates who I never get to see. And hopefully, a nice, fat bonus.

Click the picture to see my second birdhouse. This one is a bit smaller than the last. Crown molding adorns the façade, while a tin roof adds a folksy charm.

Actually the roof didn’t come out quite right. I had hoped to use 1” thick wood on the roof, but I ended up having to use 3/8”. The sides of the roof are at a 60 degree angle, which would require the ends of both roof pieces to be cut at 30 degrees where they meet in the middle so they would fit together. If I had made the angle of the roof 45 degrees, I could have simply placed one side of the roof overlapping the other, and they would have fit flush, creating a 90 degree angle at the top of the roof.

Long story short, I can’t make a 30 degree cut across eight inches of wood because I don’t have the tools to do it. And even if I had the tools, I can’t promise you I’d know how to make a cut like that. So the solution was to overlap two thinner pieces of wood and then cover the joint with a bit of aluminum left over from my old shed.