You can't make friends with salad.

Condition: Too much time on hands/lack of motivation
Symptoms: Daily blogging, mostly about nothing.

Example: see below.

So first, a bit of excitement I forgot to mention in yesterday's post. I got some QT with the CTO of my company last week, and one of the things we talked about is getting me some more DBA training, and perhaps an MS certification or 2. Our company needs a certain percentage of MS certified people to maintain our platinum hug status, and I need some more formal training with the DB stuff as my role seems to be expanding. He said I should go through the program and who am I to argue? So that should start soon, although he also gave me a couple of other books and I've been trying to have some sort of structured learning bits with that. I'm trying to do an hour a day of SQL Server school, but it's hard to motivate. I need a proper work area, which means I would have to clean my desk and get an actual chair and well, you can see the difficulty there.

The rest of my Sunday was pretty tame. Pandora continued to make sweet love to my auditory channels, and I quilted. In the afternoon HN and I went to the state fair, apparently because I am a masochist. I always think those things sound so fun until I get there and remember I hate people. The agro parts were fun, and were I to go again I would just stick with that stuff. We spent a fair bit of time at a cow beauty pageant, where the announcer was a man trained in judging livestock and impressively thorough in his assessments. Every heifer, he would tell us what he would change about a cow if he could change just one thing. i.e. "This heifer is gorgeous, she's got a relaxed gait, she's calm, her haunches are just exciting but if I could change one thing about her, I'd bring her shoulders up a bit and just square her off" There was even cow drama!

I think some of the cows it was their first time being shown, and so they were a little surly and not that well behaved, and they were all being shown by kids under 14. There was one little girl who took a head between the shoulder blades- her cow was just mean man, woah! She got a little scared (can't blame her really, that cow was totally out to get her) and some old dude stepped in to deal with her cow. Then right after her, there was another little tiny blonde girl who was walking her cow when it also flipped out, only this little miss was a no joke cowgirl in the making. She was maybe 60lbs soaking wet, a complete willow of a thing and when her cow flipped out, she just very calmly took the fucker on. It was no doubt the highlight of the day to see this little girl start to get pulled all around by this cow, then with the calmest Marlboro man cowboy face I've ever seen just dig her fucking heels right into the ground and yank right back on the cow. She wasn't mad, she wasn't scared and she was most certainly not losing control of the cow. She gave it a solid yank and had the cow bowing to her, and even though it was off in a corner happening everyone was watching her and the place went absolutely wild. Even the old stack of actual cowboys in the corner were grinning and clapping, and when one of them finally went over to grab the mad cow he gave her a solid handshake and a big pat on the back. It is TRAGIC that I didn't have my camera. But that was my fave moment of the day. Yes, I went wild in the stands at a cow show. and immediately I wonder if that's more appropriate for my inner monologue, but it's too late.

The rest of the very brief fair visit was spent wandering around the rest of the grounds, basically dodging old ladies waving corn dogs and nattering to each other while looking anywhere but forward, and weaving in an out of the gauntlet of 30 ft wide baby carriage SUVs and screaming mothers/children. Was. Too. Crowded. HN wanted to go on a ride, and since his taste runs to the upside down, spin around rides that make me vomit I got to pick, and I chose the ferris wheel. Wouldn't you know it, this is the one ride he can't deal with and he spent the entire time being very uncomfortable with the whole thing and talking about all the things that could go wrong/made him nervous about ferris wheels. Once I confirmed that he was in fact scared on the lamest of rides, but would have happily gone on the casino showdown spin/flip/motorcoach from hell I did what any good girlfriend would do and proceeded to rock the cart while taunting him. You think you know a person...

After that I started having issues with the crowds. It was just not ok, you couldn't even walk more than 5 steps without someone smashing you,stepping on you, or just stepping out in front of you and coming to a stop. I hightailed it back to the swine area, where at least the occupants have an excuse for the way they look and smell and after a little more livestock surfing we packed it in. I can say I've done that now thank you very much.

I think that's about all I have spewing around in here today. Work should be reasonably light, so I'm hoping to get out and get a card reader. This is just ridiculous, plus I want to show what I made! and I also want some of the AK pics. Part of my present from HN was he printed a bunch out and made a thing for me, and I'm tantalized so I might be motivated enough to want ot see the rest.


Cheerio motherf*ckers!