I greet you, the reader, from the beginning of the new public sector fiscal year. It appears that my section of things will be spared shutdowns at least, though other parts aren’t quite so lucky. This is the world we live in.

I am reminded of this, because it seemed that the contracting shop didn’t even try to start working the contract to support my corner of the world until late Friday, requiring me to spend a bunch of my weekend time on my work laptop reviewing things for technical acceptability and dealing with last-minute pricing evaluations. The good news is I apparently have a team this year. That bad news is that I don’t have any development money, so I basically only get to adjust the status quo instead of innovate like I wanted to. Oh well, me and the new team (who is part of the old team) will work through it and come up with a thing that works for us. Bleh.

Otherwise, the weekend was a mixed bag. Beyond all the interruptions from work through the whole thing, the family had a pretty good day at the dance competition; my lovely wife danced the ghillies right off a bunch of teenagers to take first one of her events, and advanced to the next level of competition. Yay. Afterwards, since we were most of the way there anyway, we popped up to Center of the Universe Brewing Company for the annual release of El Duderino white russian stout, which is one of my favorite things that comes out every year; my friend Chris and I call it “our pumpkin spice latte”. I’ve also received requests from friends in other states to procure some for them; just a matter of getting things in their hands, which we’ll make happen.

Oh, and I woke up Saturday morning to find that my personal laptop shit the bed. It’s toast. I cracked it open, and found the board crusted with smelled like dried cat pee. Awesome. I yanked the hard drive and stuck it in a USB enclosure, though, and found it functional, so at least I didn’t lose all my data. I broke down and ordered myself a new one (I have a pretty decent credit account with Dell with no penalty for pre-payment), an Inspiron 7000 (series 7570); essentially budget gaming machine, but it’s got a dedicated video processor, which is nice and tends to speed things up all around, and is a step or three up from what I had (which I’d had for six or seven years…I guess it was time); but I’m essentially without (except for a MacBook from 2009) for a week or two. I’ll live.

I also got a nice bike ride in on Sunday, which felt good – weather and stuff kept me out of the saddle for about two weeks. Looking like good weather this week, and I’m set to hit the dirt again after work. That’ll feel good after the nonsense I’m sure to hit today.