bagels of Doom, or of Peace?

A lot of time was spent by yours truly inside the Jefferies Tube over the weekend, what the last-minute news from my manager that my big project's tight deadline had been moved to April 14, one week earlier than originally scheduled. Oh, and new requirements have been added to the project, making the deadline really tight. Any tighter and Reality will collapse into a singularity. All this to say that I worked for 6 hours on Saturday starting at 3am, and six hours on Sunday starting at 2am, which goes to show the amazing things a 50-year-old can do with coffee. But I got the new requirements's programming changes ready for testing. And did I get any gratitude from my manager? Was an email instead sent to the whole team that chastised me for some minor procedural mistake in another project (1) ?

On the bright side... I've completed the penultimate phase of the front-yard's landscaping project. Thankfully, I didn't have to move half a ton of dirt away and up the backyard's hill after all. Just a few wheelbarrows's worth of what it is generous to call soil. I dug a deep hole in the middle of the area, filled it up with better-quality soil and with mulch. Right now the area is a gently sloped mound of bare dirt with a depression in the middle. It kind of looks like something out of which Giant Mutant Ants should come crawling. Even when the birds of paradise have been planted, the depression will be lower than the mound's summit, allowing water to pool in there without any waste (2). The ultimate phase of the project will involve covering the mound with nice gravel, which I'm hoping to be done with by the end of the coming weekend.

Back to this last weekend... I don't know why I keep bothering with the 'original' movies aired by the Skiffy Channel. Actually, I know why. They sometimes do show movies that are worth watching, but it's been a long time since Riverworld (3). Still, when they advertised SS Doomtrooper, it sounded interesting in a junky way, what with its plot of Nazis in Occupied France turning an SS into a souped-up version of the Hulk. Unfortunately, the movie didn't have Captain America available to use his Mighty Shield against the Bad Guys, with Ben Cross as the Bad-if-not-Mad Scientist. The plot boils down to StarGate's dull Corin Nemec and his Allied Soldiers running into the Monster, getting soldiers killed, running away and hiding while the Monster has drifted who knows where, until they again run into the Monster, get themselves killed, run away and hide while the Monster... You get the idea. The 'best' scene comes when one French Resistance guy who stops being really obnoxious toward the Americans until he finds that one of the soldier used to run a bagel store, and the Frenchman too was a baker before the War.

But then those two get killed.

__________

(1) It's more fallout from what I mentionned last week, about a team's overall low rating possibly resulting in nobody getting a bonus. It'd be more bearable if our boss's attitude wasn't so obviously motivated by a desire for good managerial appearance.

(2) I know what you're thinking and I agree it'd be very silly to plant something on top of a mound without such a depression. But even when I plant something with no mounds involved, I always put the plant lower than the surrounding ground. I'm big on depressions.

(3) It combined elements from the first two books in the Philip Jose Farmer series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go and The Fabulous Riverboat, and it did change some other things in the process, but it was quite entertaining in its own right, especially on a TV budget.