like Yul Brynner, but with hair

I'm back. Like a bad penny. Or like Yul Brynner in Westworld, but with hair.

Looking at the parcimonious number of entries for April, one might have reasonably come to believe in the demise of from inside the Tube. That wasn't it. The problem is that I was inside the Tube.

I had 8 hours of vacation left in my 2005 reserve so I used them the Monday after Easter. Taking a day off from work had the expected effect. Up to and including this last weekend, there were many long days, some of them 13 hours long, just to make sure the Big Programming Project would be ready for Phase Two of its testing this week. At least it signaled that we were starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This project has been an albatross from its very inauspicious beginnings exactly two years ago. I call it 'inauspicious' because, in early 2004, Someone High Up had declared that this must be completed by the end of June that year, or else the very existence of our team might be reconsidered. For me and for the project's testing user, that meant long stressful hours over a few months. But we were ready by the deadline. That's when that same Someone High Up decided he wasn't ready and the project was then put on hold. It came back to life last summer, in a revised form that meant revisiting the existing programming and adding some new stuff, but there'd be one more programmer who'd focus on specific areas while I worked on others, and there'd be more testers. And no threats were made this time. This Important Project frequently was bumped aside by other items that were deemed more important, but we'd come back to it. I spent 99.999% of my time proving to the users that discrepancies between the results and what they expected were almost all caused by their testing scripts. There were three issues that were real ones, but they all turned to be problems that nobody had until then noticed with the used-in-the-real-world programs that mine were modeled after. So, yes, the Project has indeed been an albatross, but I'm also quite proud of what I did. If the light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be a truck coming at us, it's NOT going to be because of me. Well, on June 23, I'll find out what the light is, with Phase One of the implementation. That's also the 12th anniversary of my becoming an American, but I think I'll hold off on the celebrations until the following weekend, with the implementation's final steps. Too bad they'll happen when Superman Returns premieres. I hope my pager doesn't go off because of catastrophic program failures just as the Last Son of Krypton comes back to Earth with what, based on photos I've seen, looks like anything but a soft landing.

There was also Sue's Spring Gardening. After my return from San Francisco, I spent most of Easter's weekend (including the aforementionned day off) doing the muscle work, taking new flowers (some home-grown) from their tiny pots into the soil (1), digging some up from last year's location to what she now considered a more suitable one (2), all of which left me with clogged nostrils from all the dust. And a mild awakening of my usually dormant tendonitis (3). What one does for one's beloved... Anyway, those were long days that had me so exhausted that we decided against celebrating Easter with the DVD of Ben-Hur for I knew I'd find myself nodding off within the first 10 minutes of a movie that's over 3 hours and a half long. Similarly-themed Monty Python's Life of Brian is much shorter, but the outcome would have been the same.

There's still some minor landscaping to be done. I spent the weekend after Easter fixing a sloped section of the backyard into a better-tiered one. I unfortunately did such an efficient job that there's now more room for planting than Sue has flowers for. What a shame. That of course forced us to drive to Santa Fe yesterday to buy and then plant more flowers. On the bright side, for the first time in a long time, it rained real rain for 2 hours, which means we didn't have to spend 2 hours watering the backyard. Oh, and I have finally completed my own front-yard project, begun in early March with the ripping-out of a huge cactus. The bird of paradise is now in the ground, encircled by tufts of silky-thread grass, and nice gravel covering the rest of the area, except for a small area due to my having run out of gravel.

Easter wasn't all work though... We exchanged gifts, with me giving her the DVD sets of some X-files seasons, then with me giving her something to give me, the set of Star Trek's second year, thus making my collection complete (4). As is our tradition, Sue and I then went to a local hotel that has a buffet on such special occasions. Enjoyable as usual, although we discovered upon coming in at 11:30am that they couldn't serve booze before noon. We didn't remember this being an issue before. It turns out that the state's blue laws have become even more blue because the cutoff used to be 10am even as of last year. That prompted a bit of reminiscing about our living in Toronto from 1986 thru 1988, and how similar blue laws had caused some negative comments to be made by, I think, Mark Twain in the 19th Century. That got us wondering if the city is still strict about that. And about businesses being open on Sundays. Montreal had similar Sunday laws circa 1980, although they didn't apply to grocery stores, which had led a bookstore to finding a creative way to stay open on Sundays, by selling not just used books, but potatoes too.

And what has been going on, besides all that?

In all this, I somehow found time to finish the Amelia Peabody mysteryLion in the Valley. It was a bit disappointing, maybe because it felt like a wrap-up of the previous novel's situation with that Master Criminal whose network was stealing Egyptian antiques. Oh well... I'm now reading Pierre Pevel's fantasy novel L'Elixir d'Oubli. I like it, although not as much as the previous novel, Les Enchantements d'Ambremer. Set in Paris in 1909, its premise is that, after the Napoleonic Wars, the wall separating our world and the world of fairies became thinner, mostly around Paris. Think of Minelli's Gigi with magical creatures walking around. Or sleeping, as there are winged cats, who actually learn things by sleeping on top of books.

Turner Classic Movies recently aired an early-Sixties comedy starring Chad Everett, a thing called Get Yourself A College Girl . Light on plot. Heavy on the musical guest-stars. At least I got to hear The Girl from Ipanema, and sung by the original lady, to boot.

We got our refund check from the IRS.

While the landscaping involved wheelbarrowing a lot of soil away and up the hill, my return to the gym on a regular basis left me a bit sore. At least, I didn't gain any weight while away from the gym.

Finally, my 71-year-old mom, back in Quebec City, just went thru some surgery involving the replacement of a hip joint with a metal one. She's fine, I'd say, from my call a few days ago. What's funny is that, as she was describing the procedure to me, she suddenly stopped herself, afraid I'd faint. You see, 40 years ago, I was this young boy who fainted after reading a story where another young boy broke a leg. During yesterday's conversation, I pointed out to my mom that I've seen worse on the Blood & Guts Channel (5). And I could have told her that I have a screw in my jaw because of a tooth implant. It probably wouldn't have made a difference because, to her, I remain 11 years old. Sue and I don't have kids, but I have this feeling that most parents are like my mom.

Got to go, but I'm hoping to post more regularly from now on, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And on other days, should inspiration strike especially hard.

Be seeing you.

__________

(1) Or what passes for soil here in New Mexico.

(2) Think of it as the outdoors slow-motion version of moving the furniture around.

(3) It was originally acquired during one of my earliest landscaping projects, the lesson of which was that, if a lot of soil must be chopped up before being carted away, one should use a big pickaxe, not a tiny one. Let that be a lesson to you.

(4) Yes, I do know that the series had a third year, but would I really ever want to watch Spock's Brain again, or Turnabout Intruder, which had given William Shatner the 'chance' to over-act even more than usual? The answer is a resounding nope.

(5) That's one of our names for Discovery's Health Channel. We have other names for it on those days when they focus not on emergency rooms but on babies or on plastic surgery.