Feeling maybe normalized again after a rough emotional week. In between running kids to formal events, rehearsal, and Irish Dance Spectaculars, I got a lot of video game time in…knocking out wave after wave of HYDRA goons and demons in Mid-Town Manhattan in Marvel Heroes can, in its own way, be meditative.

On Sunday after my shift with Irish Mystique, the girls and I had a nice dinner out with friends, just chatting and eating sushi; it was nice.

Like I said, last week at work would have been a banner performance. This week, so far, is a bit more normal. Somebody screwed up the batch timing on the mainframe side over the weekend (why, in modern times, are we still dealing with overnight batches? Or mainframes for that matter? the whole business could run on my phone processor…more on this later), causing an interesting hiccup; we’ve also been chasing some errant “space” characters showing up in fields – like something is dropping into two spaces over. My theory, as posted on social media yesterday:

today’s testing adventure: files are failing because of a seemingly random number of spaces showing up in key fields.

I just know we’re going find out that somebody near the mainframe brought their toddler to work over the weekend and the kid’s been banging on random keyboards….

Anyway; no confirmation on that yet, but honestly, at this point, nothing would surprise me.

Also on my plate yesterday – a big dog-and-pony-show/town hall meeting all day on Thursday in Columbus OH; notification of which was passed to me after close of business on Friday. I don’t really feel like doing a 48 hour drop-in to the midwest, but this meeting is actually relatively important to what I’ll be doing the next couple of years (another decade long modernization project like I wrote about from 1998 through 2013), and maybe fixing some of those parenthetical issues from the third paragraph of this post.

This is still theoretical, because nobody’s approved my travel authorization yet, and my flight leaves around 2pm tomorrow. we’ll see. I’ve done my due squeaky wheel dilligence.

Oh, and it was raining fiercely this morning, and the interstate was filled with erratically moving big trucks. I survived.