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shivverSo when we last left our heroes, Mother-in-Law had asked my husband for a suggestion for a birthday present for me. He suggested a jigsaw puzzle, and after I expressed how much I loved the DW puzzle she sent me, she spoke to my husband later and said how pleased she was that she thought of getting a jigsaw puzzle, ticking him off to no end.
December is his birthday month, and so MIL sent him a present, and lo and behold, it's a jigsaw puzzle! And before you ask, no, he doesn't like jigsaw puzzles and has never liked them. MIL used to do jigsaw puzzles while he was growing up and he declined to participate. Moreover, the puzzle is a photograph of a pile of candy. I realize it's been twenty-five years since he lived in her house and she might not know who her son has grown into, but you'd think she'd try to get something she knew he might be interested in, like a dragon or a spaceship, or even one of the other DW puzzles. As it is, now we have a jigsaw puzzle that's just going to gather dust, as I have no interest in it either.
Now we're waiting to see what she sends for Christmas...
My husband, by the way, is appallingly bad at jigsaw puzzles. He helped a bit with the DW puzzle (only because it's DW; he's otherwise never had any interest in working on a puzzle with me), which, as I mentioned is a grid of TARDISes. Because of its grid nature, you can have a good idea of the orientation of the pieces: if it has a thin blue line, that's the side of a TARDIS, but if it has a thick, fixed-width blue line, that's the bottom of a TARDIS. Each row of TARDISes is backed by a colored pattern that corresponds to the Doctor/companion combination, so yellow was Nine & Rose, orange was Ten & Rose, red was Ten & Martha, etc. I'd pick up a piece, turn it so that it was in the right orientation, and hand it to my husband and say, "This is the correct orientation and it's blue, so it's here, in the middle of Eleven/Amy," and he'd immediately start searching all around the board, turning the piece this way and that, trying to fit it in everywhere. Insert eye-roll here. ;)
As I noted before, work has been stressful. We were going along swimmingly for a while, then, a week before Thanksgiving, a Group in the client company said, "Hey, we promised one of our customers to have this Thing ready for them in December." We said, "That Thing was never finished, because you guys said it was never going to be used, and if you want it to be ready by December, we have to have it done before Thanksgiving, and that's impossible." And they said, "You'll have the Thing done before Thanksgiving." So that was a horrid three days, and then the next week as we got the Thing up on the servers and out to the customer, while also continuing to work on the other regularly-scheduled Things.
By the way, the Thing doesn't actually work. It's composed of three pieces of software: our bit, the client company's other Group (mentioned above), and a third-party piece of software that the other Group has to interface with. Well, the interface with the third-party bit doesn't work. *shrug* At least it's not our fault. (Update: Just got a message from the Group: it still doesn't work, and maybe it might start working today, but maybe not.)
On the other hand, client company also decided to give their people two weeks of holiday, from this coming Monday through new year. They told this to our company, and so our company has followed suit and we are on paid holiday for two weeks! Interestingly, client company has not told their own people that they're getting two weeks of holiday, and of course, since they don't know, we're not allowed to mention that we're gone for two weeks until they're told the same. This has led to some interesting conversations in which they're trying to schedule work, deadlines, and meetings, and we're not agreeing to them without explaining why.
With two weeks off coming up soon, we're making all these plans to clean this up and fix that thing and get this other thing set up. I'll predict right now exactly how many of these tasks we'll get done by the new year: 0.75. That's half of one done and a quarter of another. And that's an optimistic prediction. ;)
What we'll probably do is find ourselves a new computer game to play together and waste two weeks losing ourselves in it. Possibly. We haven't actually found a game like this in years, so wish us luck. Otherwise, we'll spend the whole time playing co-op Starcraft 2, which is only ten years old....
December is his birthday month, and so MIL sent him a present, and lo and behold, it's a jigsaw puzzle! And before you ask, no, he doesn't like jigsaw puzzles and has never liked them. MIL used to do jigsaw puzzles while he was growing up and he declined to participate. Moreover, the puzzle is a photograph of a pile of candy. I realize it's been twenty-five years since he lived in her house and she might not know who her son has grown into, but you'd think she'd try to get something she knew he might be interested in, like a dragon or a spaceship, or even one of the other DW puzzles. As it is, now we have a jigsaw puzzle that's just going to gather dust, as I have no interest in it either.
Now we're waiting to see what she sends for Christmas...
My husband, by the way, is appallingly bad at jigsaw puzzles. He helped a bit with the DW puzzle (only because it's DW; he's otherwise never had any interest in working on a puzzle with me), which, as I mentioned is a grid of TARDISes. Because of its grid nature, you can have a good idea of the orientation of the pieces: if it has a thin blue line, that's the side of a TARDIS, but if it has a thick, fixed-width blue line, that's the bottom of a TARDIS. Each row of TARDISes is backed by a colored pattern that corresponds to the Doctor/companion combination, so yellow was Nine & Rose, orange was Ten & Rose, red was Ten & Martha, etc. I'd pick up a piece, turn it so that it was in the right orientation, and hand it to my husband and say, "This is the correct orientation and it's blue, so it's here, in the middle of Eleven/Amy," and he'd immediately start searching all around the board, turning the piece this way and that, trying to fit it in everywhere. Insert eye-roll here. ;)
As I noted before, work has been stressful. We were going along swimmingly for a while, then, a week before Thanksgiving, a Group in the client company said, "Hey, we promised one of our customers to have this Thing ready for them in December." We said, "That Thing was never finished, because you guys said it was never going to be used, and if you want it to be ready by December, we have to have it done before Thanksgiving, and that's impossible." And they said, "You'll have the Thing done before Thanksgiving." So that was a horrid three days, and then the next week as we got the Thing up on the servers and out to the customer, while also continuing to work on the other regularly-scheduled Things.
By the way, the Thing doesn't actually work. It's composed of three pieces of software: our bit, the client company's other Group (mentioned above), and a third-party piece of software that the other Group has to interface with. Well, the interface with the third-party bit doesn't work. *shrug* At least it's not our fault. (Update: Just got a message from the Group: it still doesn't work, and maybe it might start working today, but maybe not.)
On the other hand, client company also decided to give their people two weeks of holiday, from this coming Monday through new year. They told this to our company, and so our company has followed suit and we are on paid holiday for two weeks! Interestingly, client company has not told their own people that they're getting two weeks of holiday, and of course, since they don't know, we're not allowed to mention that we're gone for two weeks until they're told the same. This has led to some interesting conversations in which they're trying to schedule work, deadlines, and meetings, and we're not agreeing to them without explaining why.
With two weeks off coming up soon, we're making all these plans to clean this up and fix that thing and get this other thing set up. I'll predict right now exactly how many of these tasks we'll get done by the new year: 0.75. That's half of one done and a quarter of another. And that's an optimistic prediction. ;)
What we'll probably do is find ourselves a new computer game to play together and waste two weeks losing ourselves in it. Possibly. We haven't actually found a game like this in years, so wish us luck. Otherwise, we'll spend the whole time playing co-op Starcraft 2, which is only ten years old....
