21 November 1997: Who Will These People Be?

Friday, 21 November 1997:

Who Will These People Be?

Well, I did finish my projects for our development deadline, which was this morning at 8 am. I intensely dislike these 8 am deadlines; to me, a deadline is at the end of a work day, not the beginning of one, so I aimed to finish everything by 6 pm last night, and left not long after that.

So today I worked on fixing some small problems with some internal software that I'm the nominal caretaker of. Found a couple of hairy problems, and got them fixed. A good feeling. Kind of a mellow day, despite being somewhat productive. Not a big surprise, I guess, given that it's the day before my vacation.

Yep, tomorrow I leave. Things have gone pretty smoothly so far, but it's dealing with the frikking airlines that's the big test. Commercial airlines have ruined air travel for me. Cramped seats, few non-stop flights, losing luggage, a shift from poor food to no food on most flights, and the outrageous prices. But the cramped seats are the worst. Argh!

Anyway. Have I bitched about this before?

I'm still trying to figure out what to wear to my high school reunion - and that's a statement I never thought I'd hear myself utter. I bought some Dockers tonight, which are better than the other not-quite-formal pants I own. I think I'm going to go the bland-shirt-with-a-sweater route, since I have a sweater that I quite like; it's pretty heavy, but that should be fine since it's winter (I hope). Maybe I'll look for something new back in Boston. I dunno. I don't want to kill myself over this.

I spent some time looking over my high school yearbook tonight. Actually I have three yearbooks, from sophomore, junior and senior years. The sophomore one is kind of useless (other than there being a photo of a girl who I had a huge crush on at the time, who moved away after that year). The junior one is handy because I had a lot of friends who were a year older than me. (I've always tended to have older friends. Nearly every one of my friends now is older than me, some of them over 40.) It's interesting to look at all these old faces I knew, and more that I sort-of knew, and many I didn't really know at all. I'm sure most of them will look very different, although many will look the same.

I thought of growing my beard for the reunion, but decided against it. Didn't feel like being scruffy. I might not grow one this winter; not sure yet.

I think I'm braced for many of my classmates being married; I suspect many are, although probably many have partners to whom they are not married. What will probably really be jarring is that some of them have kids. Some of these kids may well be five or six years old, or more. I think that will be very peculiar.

Yeah, I'm blathering, but that's okay.

So now I'm waiting for a friend to get home, since I need to give him a key so he can watch my cats for part of next week. And I'm doing some final cleaning so the place is fairly nice for him. Actually, I'm more concerned about protecting anything that the cats might decide to damage out of spite (?) while I'm gone. This is not really hard, though. I have pretty good cats in that way.

Newton has been rolling around on my desk while I've been typing this; he seems pretty happy. Or maybe he just knows that I'm going away, poor guy!

So I will probably log in a few times over the next week and write entries, but don't expect something every day. I'll see what I can do, however.

Later on!

Michael Rawdon (Contact)