Okay, so I slept a fair amount today.

I can still be justifiably frustrated that I can’t go to sleep, right?

Grrr.

Hey, jerks in Singapore and Indonesia: I’ve just blocked the 202.152, 202.155, and 202.156 IP blocks entirely from being able to comment here on IJSM.

That should stop most of the dorks trying to exploit PHP via GM.

Hey, have you found anyone from that part of the world with anything to say about your site? Me neither.

I can hear Doug snoring softly. Poor guy–worked 3a-11a, drove up here, whereupon I took him to dinner, dragged him to my Bible study, and then had him help me rearrange the room a bit before we flipped the lights off.

I could probably have a huge party in here right now, and he’d stay sound asleep.

Well, my bed is unlofted. I think it’s going to stay that way for a while. I’ve been mulling doing it for a while, and until Chris Brown’s IPT team gets done with the semester, I can’t reclaim my futon from their room. When I do, I’ll probably re-loft the bed so I can put the futon under part of it, like I had in my apartment on Sparkman. Even Todd though that setup kicked ass.

I think my cough is finally breaking up. I still cough occasionally, but when I do, I’m not moving lots of junk as I was before. Yay.

Enough random pecking … time for bed myself. I love sleeping in the recliner.

So yeah, our shop is now working 32 hours a week instead of 40.

The salaried guys in the shop have been instructed to burn eight hours of vacation for Friday pay.

The contract we’re subbed to on these task orders expires 12/31/2003. That, plus poor management by our customer, plus the general NASA malaise right now, has me seriously thinking that civil aerospace ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

This must be what the late ’80s were like, when STS was on-the-shelf after Challenger and there was just no real new vision. [Mind you, Boeing had Freedom, but ... yeah.]

*cough* I’m thinking I may be sick tomorrow. The cough, which was almost gone, came back with a vengeance the last two days, probably because I stopped the regular Robitussin doses, which was serving to get whatever crap is stuck down in my chest out.

More Robitussin, then bed. Must not think about how much I hate work insecurity.

I am, indeed, alive.

It’s just been nuts.

I think I spend too much time at [caedmonscall.net] and not enough doing things for me at times, but …

… hey, I drove Derek Webb to his house. Isn’t that enough?

It is for me, in some ways … but not in a lot of others.

Oh well.

After visiting my folks this weekend, I drove north and east rather than south and east to head home. You see, Derek Webb, among others, was playing a mission benefit concert for a family from Nashville that’s going to go do mission work in Africa: specifically, Keith Chapman’s a dentist, so he’ll be pulling teeth all around Africa.

Anyhow, after the show, Derek’s wife Sandra went back to their house to go see about Levi, their border collie puppy. Because it was Sunday, Derek and Sandra had been gone most of the day, so she wanted to go see that their house was left standing. [Smart woman.]

This, of course, left Derek without a ride home.

Me, being a staffer for [caedmonscall.net], the fan-site that covers the band Derek was a part of for a decade, I had reason to be talking to Derek long after the concert was over. [Really ... we're setting up a live chat with him sometime next week.] As Derek relates the story, he glances my direction, and I quietly say, “I can give you a ride home.”

After the crowd disperses, he looks at me and says, “You know, I really could use a ride home, Geof.”

So … I drove Derek Webb home. He and I talked things Internet and not. He asked what I do for a living, saying, “You know, y’all do so much for us, and I don’t really know anything about you.” So we talk of things ISS for a while.

We pulled into his driveway, and Derek got out. He leaned back in and said, “Hey, I really appreciate this. Now that you know how to get here, stop on by any time you’re in town. We’ll make you a cup of coffee and sit and talk.”

Yes, I think you could say that this fanboy had a happy ride home to Huntsville.

Okay, I give.

I’m staying home today.

It’s been over two weeks. This isn’t funny.

NyQuil, here I come.

I hate it when I get in a blue funk.

I’m hopeful that tomorrow is better than today.

The sound you just heard was ten of our guys getting laid off out in the shop.

I’d heard whispers that it was happening, but … -sigh-

I have another potential contract to be working on around here. I think I’ll be talking to David about that …

This morning, I was trimming my beard when I decided to just shave it off.

I left the sideburns much as they normally have been viewed, but I decided that the beard had seen me through the winter, and now that spring is here, it is time to warm up.

Huzzah.

Well, about 2:00 last night I put my book down and went back to bed.

At 2:45 or so, the nice wireless door chime I bought a few months back started malfunctioning. At first, it wasn’t very bad, but after a while, I was fully awake and mulling calling the police to have them kneecap the drunk that had to be ringing my doorbell.

But as I laid there, I realized that the chime had to be failing, because there was no pounding on the outside door or rapping at the windows. [Had there been, given my mood, I might have shot whoever it was on general principles.] Finally, around 3:15, the failure stopped, so I went back to bed.

At 4:45, it started again, but it was very intermittent, and I was still pretty sleepy, so I stayed in bed.

At 5:30, it started anew, and I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I walked into the bathroom and unplugged the receiver of the damn chime.

I slept well after that, and got up just now, finally. I should have realized that the dogs slept well all night, and that should have tipped me off to the fact that the chime was just failing. Don’t you love stupid choices made in your sleep?

I woke up about ten minutes ago, looked at the TV, and figured that I’d slept all night.

Nope … the wind had woken me up after I’d slept about two hours. It just happened that Fox News was running the same show that they’ll run around 4:45 a.m., and while I’d slept like a rock, it wasn’t a full night’s sleep.

Now I have checked my email, deleted one, and realized that pushing to break my writing funk comes in little snippets such as this, designed to take the edge off of it all, really.

It’s so muggy right now that I almost want to turn on the air conditioner … but I recognize that the temperature will drop 20 degrees in about 30 more minutes, as a front is nearly finished passing. But the 40 mph wind gusts and driving rain, maybe they can soothe me back to sleep …

Columbia breaks up on descent, killing entire crew.

If I’m right, they were in LOS–Loss of Signal–at that point in landing, so we may never know what happened.

I better brush up my resume.