odd week

After ten days of not feeling well, I finally recovered enough to say I was over the recent nasty sickness. Even though I was at work for the first couple of days this week, it seemed like everything I touched went wrong. Maybe it was the sickness looming over me and maybe my mind was not clear enough for intensive work conditions. Whatever it was, I was not very encouraged by my slow progress on my tasks at hand. Just about when I was ready to give up all hope, I finally found a way to fix the bugs I was slaving away on all week. It has happened to me several times in my long career in software development.

In addition several other things happened yesterday of note. At lunch a friend of mine, who is a mechanic, showed up at our house to fix my car, which had a check engine light on for the last several weeks. The Nissan dealer told him it would be six hours minimum as the manifold would have to be removed in a long timely process. Being the experienced mechanic he knew to try other things first. He found and fixed the problem without the labor intensive procedures the dealer had suggested. The best thing of all was that the charge was half of what he originally estimated, which had to be at least half of what the dealer would have charged me.

Then when our kids got home from school, I was appointed to take my son to get his drivers license. Seeing that he had hardly driven, the end result was predictable as he failed the driving test. The people at the license office were not very friendly and were definitely intimidating, which definitely did not help matters at all. There crabiness never prevented a single accident or drunk driving teenager death and yet for some reason they spread their unhappiness to all who entered attempting to get a new license.

To top off the day, our son was to arrive from California, but his flight was canceled due to bad weather in NYC. He missed all of the flights for the evening and at the minute we are still waiting to see if he makes it on the next flight as a stand-by passenger. A typical end to a most unusual week.