After all the wildness of the weather yesterday it was a bit odd to wake this morning to relative quiet outside, and to drive to work with the sun actually daring to show itself from behind the clouds. All through the day we would occasionally glance wistfully outside at the beautiful, perfect day – the river so blissfully calm and the sky so blue. Why couldn’t this nice weather come on Thursday, when we have the day off from work and can take advantage of it? Instead there is more rain predicted for New Year’s Day – and while I fully intend to be as lazy as possible that day I had pondered the idea of taking a short bike ride in the morning, just to kick the year off on the right foot. Ah well.

I have been having fun at work these past two days since my boss gave me more things to build in the database – things that required some marvelously long bits of code to write, so as to execute all the appropriate functionality. There were times I just had to stop and stare at the table structures for a while, or scribble random things on paper in order to try to figure out exactly how to make it all work, and a few of the pieces had my brain spinning ever so slightly, and it could have been a lot more complicated except that my boss decided at the last minute to make a tiny change that made it all so much simpler. Plus there was a brief discussion in the morning on what-if’s, having to do with huge piles of data that currently live in spreadsheets, and whether it might be easier to manipulate them in their current location or pull them into Access. I sense more code writing in my future. I love this job.

Richard’s parents came up to take us out to dinner for Richard’s birthday. We went to Chevy’s, where we all made very sure to inform the waitress that it was his birthday so they would come and put a sombrero on his head and sing (loudly and off key) to him at the end of dinner. Because, really, what better way to show the true depths of your love for someone than to dress him up and laugh at him?

And then after dinner we came back home so he could open his presents and so we could all laugh at Allegra, who was working herself into a fine snit and was randomly either telling us all off, or reaching out a paw to smack whoever was closest on the head. She wasn’t using claws, at least, which is rather restrained for her when she is in full snit mode. I think it helped that Richard’s presents came with a large paper-filled box, into which she promptly settled, still grumbling at the world in general even as she burrowed into the paper.