Catching Up

The past few weeks have been insanely busy for me. I became sick the week before I moved out of my old apartment in Queen Anne, which interfered greatly with my ability to pack and move. The timing of my illness was especially poor: my entire team took three days off to celebrate shipping Visual Studio 2005, and I spent this entire time in bed. Were I lacking in sick days this would not have been a problem, but as it stands I still have 9 days that will expire at the end of the calendar year. Sigh. On the plus (?) side of things, I still have over two weeks of vacation time, even after my trip to Hawaii, so I’m not really hurting in that arena.

Hawaii was fantastic; I spent a week in Honolulu on Oahu across teh street from Waikiki Beach and my daily schedule looked something like this:

• Wake up around 8:30, go downstairs for the complimentary breakfast.
• Eat, shower, and lounge around for a couple hours. Occasionally Helen and I would spice this up by working for an hour or so, but this was relatively rare.
• Head across the street to the beach and lay there for 3-4 hours.
• Go back to the hotel and take a nap.
• Wake up in time to get dinner, and go wandering around afterwards.
• Return to our hotel room, perhaps watch Comedy Central for an hour and then fall asleep.
• Later, rinse, repeat. For a week.

I feel so much better now: relaxed, rejuvinated, and so forth. I didn’t realize how much I needed a break from everyday life until I was afforded the opportunity. Note to self: take more vacations :-).

Work this past week has been absolutely insane: we’re gearing up for a series of pre-Orcas reviews, and I’ve been spending every waking moment working on, thinking about, or fretting over my presentation.

The one real highlight of this week came yesterday afternoon when I finally received my dreaded EB Games phone call. I’ve been waiting to hear from the store manager to confirm my pre-order status for an XBox 360 on launch day. As it works out, my pre-order on June 17th was early enough to afford me one of the precious few consoles they have been sent. So, next Monday I’ll stay in Redmond until Midnight and then head over to the EB Games at the Redmond Town Center to pick up my new toy (woo!). I have Call of Duty 2 reserved, and I plan on picking up Perfect Dark Zero, Kameo, and Project Gotham Racing 3 from the MS Company Store Tuesday morning sometime.

I’d love to stay home from work on Tuesday to play around with the XBox 360, but Real Work Stuff conflicts and, of course, I need to be around to get my new laptop (Sony Vaio S580), which should be coming in on Tuesday as well.

I’m Minneapolis-bound on the Wednesday night Red-Eye, due to arrive around 5AM at the Humphrey Terminal (Sun Country Airlines flight). The current debate here centers around whether I should bring the XBox with me as carry-on luggage or not. We’ll see. It seems excessive, but then again, so does spending $400 for a video game system on the day of its launch.

I have pictures of Hawaii to put online sometime soon.