It Is What It Is

Aside from wildflower trips to Death Valley the excitement has been limited over the past month, but here’s a recap of the non-happenings:

• There are obviously lots of critters roaming our neighborhood, and so long as they stay outside all is well. However, a while back we started hearing what I can only assume was a 70s-themed rat disco party in our attic, so we put a Dropcam and a live trap up there, thus beginning what Audrey has dubbed the “Rat Relocation Program”. We’re still searching for whatever opening they’re using to get in, but over a period of almost two months the program has had five applicants, each of whom was captured, photographed, given a drink of water, and then transported to the Ballona Wetlands Rat Sanctuary. I’m hopeful that the program is either nearing its quota or that we’ll finally find the entry to the rat dance club and shutter its door.
• After almost nine months the work Commerce Architects has done on the HEB.com website was finally ready to launch, and so about two weeks ago I found myself in San Antonio at 11PM in a room with 20-30 other people. In an unfortunate twist they decided to screen Interstellar while waiting for me to run critical upgrade scripts, so I performed my tasks while tense dramatic music blared throughout the room. Luckily things went fairly smoothly, and after a fourteen hour day I headed back to the hotel room at about 6:30 the following morning with bloodshot eyes but without having caused the site’s servers to burst into flame and burn down the data center.
• On the same San Antonio trip I was tapped to provide onsite support through the weekend, but after slow days on Friday and Saturday they decided no one needed to be in the office on Sunday so I took off on a twenty mile bike ride along the San Antonio Mission Trail. The trail, the river corridor it follows, and the Missions are ridiculously great assets for San Antonio, although I underestimated the sun and had to duck into the first shop I could find to buy a hat. I then spent the rest of the day playing uber-tourist as I visited three of the Missions wearing a “San Antonio Missions” hat, but my head remained pinkish rather than going full-blown lobster red, so if looking like a dork is the price to pay for not dying of skin cancer then it may have been a reasonable trade-off. On a side note, based on regularly biking 16-17 miles on my stationary bike at home I assumed this trail would be a piece of cake, but I forgot to account for the fact that the San Antonio B Cycle rentals are built more like tanks than bikes, contain enough steel to survive an atomic blast, and (apparently) don’t always have working shifters; there was definitely no need for a workout in the hotel gym at the end of this day.

There isn’t a lot of excitement on the horizon, but hopefully a few journal-worthy adventures will come up in the near future. Aaron’s leg is back in one piece and he’s attempting to snowboard again, Ma & Pa are making the best of their retirement and traveling all over, and Audrey is either singing or playing bass with about three hundred different groups these days, so all seems to be well with the world.