(no subject)

[stormdog]

I finished up at about twelve-thirty today as wooisme showed up to pick up serinthia and I from work. The three of us went out to the Thai place I've mentioned, the Thai Noodles cafe, where steviemaxwell joined up with us. Now we were hoping this would be good; it's been a long time since I had good Thai, or even Thai food at all. None of us had ever been to this place before, but when I saw that it was built into an old house that I could tell the owners still lived in the upstairs portion of (I saw empty shoes at the base of the staircase as I came in through the back entrance), and that the clientele was at least half non-caucasian, I suspected that my hopes were going to be fulfilled.

And I wasn't disappointed. I looked through the menu and couldn't find the noodle dish I was used to at Sala Thai out east, but I decided on pad thai as being pretty appetizing. The others at the table chose either zero or one star food on the spiciness rating of zero to three stars. I almost went for two myself, but I'd been really craving something hot and didn't want to disapoint myself, so I jumped right into the deep end and went with the three star rating.

It was really good! A great dish of rice noodles and chicken and egg and onion and shaved carrots and...and... stuff that I can't identify. And it was hot too. Pleasantly so. Stevie said that he could smell the heat from across the table, and it was a welcome reminder of what I love about Thai cuisine. That said, it just wasn't quite as hot as I would have liked it. When I was done I had a bit of a tingle in my head, but I didn't have the full-on dizziness inducing rush that I used to get, and as I pointed out to Andrea in the car as we were on the way home, my mouth wasn't burning. I'm used to having to keep occasionally fanning air onto my tender tongue for ten or fifteen minutes after my meal, and today's fare just didn't have that affect. I definitely want to go again, but maybe I'll see if they're willing to do a special four star order for me.

Afterward, Stevie brought Serinthia back to Kenosha while Andrea and I detoured to Waukegan to drop off her paycheck, and the four of us met up again at our place, along with todd_riverden who wanted to join in the DDR that the rest of us planned. After a while of that, Stevie had to leave for work, and Andrea needed to leave to catch her train to Chicago in Waukegan, so the three of us that were left went northward to Todd and Serin's place to watch Baptistman (a rather indescribable movie that I think I broke Todd's brain with) followed by a Stargate special relating to the two-hundredth episode. I have to admit that I haven't followed that show for a long time so I'm sure I didn't appreciate it as much as some might, but it was still nifty. And finally, about nine, the two of them went out for food while I went home to scrounge something from the kitchen (turned out to be biscuits with cheese and bleu cheese dressing on top, a dish that I described as 'what the market will bear'. In fact, it was pretty good. I'll have to suggest it to my sweetie.

Though it was growing late, we met up at my house one more time for a game of Settlers of Cataan, which Todd handily won, and as it came up on midnight the two of them went home for the night, leaving me with a wonderful warm feeling by telling me that I am welcome to come by any time over the weekend. Friends are such a good thing.

Of course, it's good to have some quiet time by one's self too. I cleaned up the table, let the dog out for a few minutes, then came upstairs and started working on the server that's been sitting mostly untouched in my closet for the last month. I've spent the better part of the last hour sitting on the floor, Neil Young playing on my desktop that I'm remotely controlling with my new laptop from work that's perched on the chassis of another computer in front of my desk. I'm configuring it with Firefox, Thunderbird, VNC, Trillian, my home VPN connection, and all my other standard programs for my home machines. To my left, on the floor beside me since it's too big to fit on my workbench, sits a hundred and fifty pound Proliant ML570 quad Pentium III Xeon server, exhausting hot air onto my leg via the fans in it's dual redundant power supplies as I go through the process of installing Windows 2000 server on it.

Sometimes, dealing with all of the stuff that I do at work, I get a little disillusioned. The joy I get out of sitting down and problem solving takes a back seat to the frustration and annoyance of dealing with so many demands on my time, the boredom of the endless administrative work of adding and deleting user accounts, or the resignation of calling a vendor for the fifteenth time to ask why they haven't registered our warranty services when I know I'm going to get exactly where I got the last fourteen times. Having a chance to sit down and play with my own systems for a few hours is a wonderful reminder of the accomplishment and fulfillment I get out of taking lifeless silicon and steel shells, spending hours on the internet tracking down all the information I need to get them running, burning CDs and imaging disks of setup software, and, finally, making them stand up and dance to the rhythm of my hands on their keyboards. I feel so at home here among my computers. My computers. Not the VP of finance's who can't access a database, or the local receptionist's who can't get her printer to work, or the road-warrior's who's trying to get his Blackberry to synch with his email but doesn't have time to troubleshoot with me and just wants it to work now! Mine.

I just have to sit back for a little while now and then to remind myself why I got myself into all this computer stuff....

I should sleep soon; I have to haul major appliances around in six and a half hours. Just a few more things to do to the server first....