Monday, April 12, 2004

Today was a day of near misses, the type that make me irritable and panicky while they happen, and then grateful afterward. It could have been so much worse.

  • I figured out this morning that I'd never received my W2 forms. Fortunately, the university payroll office can produce duplicates in a matter of seconds. Everyone I asked for help along the way was able to point me in the right direction, promptly and courteously. It's hard to complain about that. My taxes are done now.
  • The Thursday deadline for the extended abstract is soft. I don't intend to stretch it, but that's still reassuring.
  • The power went off for ten minutes in the middle of the afternoon. When it came back up, a few of the file servers were gone. It turns out that there's something screwy with the uninterruptible power supply (it appears to interrupt itself), but they were able to restore the file servers by late in the afternoon. The server with my directory on it was one of the last to be recovered, but since I spent the mid-afternoon working in a coffee shop and the late afternoon buying toilet paper -- have I mentioned everything in the apartment was Patxi's? -- it made little difference to me.
  • I got home and checked e-mail just before Patxi unplugged the cable modem and took it to his new apartment. There was an alarming mail from Sanjay saying that a funding agency needed something from us by tomorrow. I came into the office, since I thought I might need the network resources, and I might end up burning the midnight oil for his request. It turned out that what they needed was one paragraph, and he just wanted a sounding board.
  • The microwave was gone, so I didn't heat the enchiladas I'd planned to have for dinner. But I had a slice of olive bread, some cheese, an orange, and some apricots, so that was fine.
  • I couldn't find a hot water pot in the grocery store, but the hot water spigot in the kitchenette has finally been repaired, and so I still had my evening tea.

The day turned out well. I can't complain.