That cliche about "the more things change" seems apt

So yesterday was my birthday, which was low-key and lovely. It’s hard to do tone online, but trust me, I’m using both “low-key” and “lovely” as big positives. I’ve reached the point where not only do I not need for my birthday to be a big deal, but I kind of like it better when it’s not. To some extent I had little choice in the matter since my birthday fell on a Thursday, and I don’t have any spare leave hours to blow on a personal day off for either Thursday or Friday, so it was up early and off to work and back home to relax before getting the necessary sleep to face yet another day of work, thus precluding any crazy trips or tomfoolery. But, at the risk of sounding like I protest too much, this really was A-OK with me. I will say that those precious few hours of home relaxation were sublimely pleasant, which I attribute entirely to my wife Kitsune: she took care of 98% of getting little Wiley ready for bed; she let me choose our take-out dinner (Outback) and went to pick it up, while leaving me with a selection of beers and a delectable cheese-and-pepperoni tray; she had further obtained an awesome chocolate-mousse-ganache for dessert; and she filled out all the paperwork for Wiley’s new year at daycare, an onerous task which I would have taken no but was really happy to have skipped. So all I had to do was eat a ton of food that I love, field phone calls from the family, watch the NBC Thursday night lineup (I always like Parks and Rec, The Office and Community and find the SNL Update stuff pretty hit or miss, although this week Keenan Thompson doing Whoopi Goldberg slayed me) and open presents. Kitsune got me a messenger bag, a robe and slippers, all things I needed and wanted and asked for and was thrilled by. Wiley got me a pair of Simpsons lounge pants which I really, really wanted to wear to work today. But casual Friday at the government offices only goes so far, sadly.

I’ll come back to the government office again in a second, but before I leave the topic of my birthday I just wanted to acknowledge that lots of people pointed out that because I was turning 35 and our base-ten culture tends to make an extra showy observance of divisible-by-fives, it might be a more momentous milestone than others. I got a lot of “So how does it feel to be 35?”s. And I answered, honestly, not much different. At this point the evidence seems to be mounting that I will never hit a certain age and suddenly feel everything pivoting in a new direction on its significant axis. That’s cool by me.


Anyway, work. Bit of a comedy of errors the last couple of days. I was hoping that our old website hosts would finish copying our data and get it in the mail on Wednesday so that maybe I could roll up my sleeves and work on it myself Thursday, if it arrived. But when I e-mailed my contact to ask where things stood on Thursday morning, he was forced to admit that he hadn’t finished on Wednesday and would update me soon. Apparently “in seven hours” is a lesser-known but acceptable definition of “soon”. Still, the word by end of day Thursday was good, specifically that the data drive had been FedEx’ed. I even got a tracking number. So when I got into the office today, Friday, I plugged the tracking number into FedEx’s website and saw that the drive was due to arrive by 10:30 a.m. And I got excited. I quickly realized that I was getting excited about the prospect of beginning the process of data copying, with all the thrills of watching paint dry that you would expect, but that realization didn’t make me want to kill myself, so I just enjoyed feeling any excitement about work at all.

The package showed up at 10:03 a.m. And I tore into it and pulled out the drive and then shook the box to try to dislodge the cable that would connect the drive to my computer. No cable. So I found myself holding a slick electronic brick with all my data trapped inside. Undaunted, I contacted my IT department to ask if they had a spare external drive cable. Annnnnnnd that was when I found out that even if they did, my computer can’t read from an external drive. None of the computers on my office network can because it’s against the DoD IT policies. You have got to be kidding me. I swear it’s like every time I climb over one wall around here I find another wall behind it which I didn’t even know was there because I couldn’t see it past the previous wall. Boo hoo hoo.

Luckily I make friends fast and I’m already in good with IT, so as I type this, my new IT best friend is trying to implement a workaround which I probably shouldn’t speak of in detail due to security concerns. I really only have the most tenuous grasp of what secrets my Secret clearance exposes me to and what things I should keep under my hat, so I’ll err on the side of zipping it.

Maybe by next week I’ll actually be rebuilding the website on the new host network. Maybe not. I’ll let you know.