What passes for normal around here.

The man arrived home at about 11:45 last night. Of course it was too much to think he'd be able to get himself to bed without waking me. I had to tell him where the plug was for his apnea machine - you know on the table where the machine goes is apparently too obvious.

The boy was very happy to have his daddy back. Apparently the man thought it was a good idea to wake him at 6:00am to tell him he was home. I'm not sure what the logic was there, but the boy was very tired tonight.

Seems the man didn't have as good a time on his own as I did on my trip. He said it wasn't much fun and he missed us. The convention stuff wasn't as interesting as he'd hoped and there wasn't as much to do as last year. When he was bored he watched some of the tapes on his video camera of the boy playing in the snow and openning Christmas presents.

Now as the boy said in the car on the way to camp things are regular again. The only burr in my saddle is the lack of a dryer. Perhaps I'll do a little laundry while we're at grandma's this weekend just to tide us over.

Work was particularly frustrating today. When on arrival there's an email from Sunday saying that I have to be in a meeting all afternoon on Monday it sets the wrong tone. When the meeting for a major bit of new software has the feel of people just starting to talk (as opposed to about to sign the contract) it gives me the woolies. The last major software development was the web software. It was never completed to meet the contract, late and over budget, and we ended up so mad at the developing company we stopped speaking to them.

So I get to write a document to define the contractural support of 2 of the applications the software will have to interface with. The first is not too bad, I've spoken with the functional area expert. The second I have no clue about, and no good way to get a clue. Ack!

I get back from that meeting to yet another request to "fix" some data. This seems to be a monthly occurance now, all at the last day or two of each month. This time, however, I said no. The user wanted me to change the market value, units and cost of of a group of funds. The change was a magnitude of thousands of dollars different. I don't think she'd even considered the fact that the total is a fixed number and if I randomly add money it has to come out of somewhere else. We'll have to sort it out eventually but right now I'm pretty peeved about it. What started as me fixing unavoidable errors has turned into me tidying up sloppy user entry and lack of preparation. Makes me grumpy just thinking about it.