Making Things Happen

Just thought I’d stop in for a proper journal entry for once, since the interval between the present day and my last post on here is starting to elongate into a yawning chasm once again.

I don’t really have much to complain about. Nothing, actually. I’ve been pretty busy these last couple of weeks, but it’s all been good — very good. With the exception of the air conditioner, but…well, meh. That particular incident has been counterbalanced by so much excellence lately that it barely even merits mention.

Things started to get busy a couple of weeks ago, when my parents came into town to visit baby Connor (oh, and us too I suppose). It had been a while since Connor and his grandparents had last met, and we were wondering how he would react to them. It took him all of about five minutes to warm up, and soon he was smiling and giggling and playing happily with them just as he plays with us. I am having a hard time imagining how a child could be more ideal than Connor, quite honestly. He’s so well-mannered, so happy and sweet, so playful and energetic without being rambunctious and crazy. He’s a miracle baby, in so many ways.

We’ll soon be taking Connor on his first vacation: a road trip down to San Antonio, a place none of us has ever been, but which my great uncle “Tex” always used to hold very near and dear to him. It will be fun to finally see the fabled Riverwalk and all of the splendor which my friends (all of whom have been to San Antonio) have told me to expect. Since it’s our first trip with Connor, we’re planning to not do too much planning if we can help it, since we’re not quite sure what to expect. It’ll be more of a freeform trip, where we hunt down some local eateries on the way, take lots of walks and soak up the sights, and do some reading in the evenings. I’m not bringing a computer — only my phone and my Sony PRS-T1 eReader. What could be better?

Speaking of work, I’ve had plenty of that lately too, although it’s all been pleasant. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been involved in several new things, both at my day job and with a side project, that have pushed the envelope of my skills, or at least gotten me out of my comfort zone. The short-notice project at work kept me up till sundown for three nights straight last week as I engineered a frontend prototype for a new web app. After we gave a demo of it, the client was so pleased by what they saw that word of it got round to their parent corporation — who, it turns out, had been trying to put together their own version of a similar app for quite a while without success. Our client demoed my prototype to the corporate guys, and reported back gleefully that their business analysts said “they wanted to cry” when they saw it, since I had built in three days what they’d been spinning up for two years. All in all, the project looks like it’s going to be a big win for us.

On the side, I’ve been helping out a longtime client with a web application that they had custom developed a little while ago but which has been stagnant since their developer bailed on them and stopped responding to emails. At first I wasn’t sure if I had the chops to dig into and correct the issues in the old legacy VB6 that the site was built with, but I’ve had surprising success at finding and squashing bugs. We’ve made a lot of good progress on that project so far and I was just recently authorized for another block of hours — hours that the customer was originally preparing to give to another for-hire developer. As a nice bonus, I’m getting some decent money for this work which I can use not only to help my wife get her fabled new iPhone 5 (or whatever it’s called) when it finally launches this fall, but also to put towards finally resurrecting and transporting the classic Trans Am that’s still languishing in my grandma’s garage in Michigan. Yep…I’ve decided that it’s time to finally put up or shut up with the old T/A and bring her to her new home at last. That’s a whole other story though, which I don’t want to jinx by talking too much about.

Even the little stuff has been falling into place. Like the Xbox 360 game [amazon_link id=”B004ML7WOK” target=”_blank” ]The Darkness II[/amazon_link] which I ordered on Amazon two nights ago, because I saw the price had dropped to $20. Not only did it arrive today, a full day early, but Amazon sent me the Limited Edition of the game! That was definitely not the edition I ordered — in fact, I did not even know there was a Limited Edition since their product page makes no mention of it — but it was a nice little surprise.

And yeah, somewhere in there our home’s air conditioner failed (the bearing went out on the condenser fan motor) and it was a pain, and it took two and a half days to fix, and it was 99 degrees and humid during the outage. But you know what? Stuff is just so good right now that I don’t even care. I’m chilling out in my own little happiness bubble here, and while it’s still intact, I’m going to enjoy it.