Destruction of Property

Took the old BBQ grill apart last night. It all fit into the garbage bin for collection this morning. Was probably almost as easy to take apart as to put together. One phillips screwdriver and a vise grip. I suppose it was a little harder because I got bored at the end and wound up ripping the legs apart. And I broke a couple of the wood pieces off. There's something strangely satisfying about it. I need to see if we can get our hands on a new grill soon, and we're going to get a cover for this one to help it last longer than it would on its own. Elisabeth bought the old one with our garage sale proceeds in May of '99, so it was right about 5 years old. I imagine that if we'd taken better care of it, particularly protecting it from the elements, and if I'd been able to find parts that actually fit, it could have lasted quite a bit longer. But, hey, it was about $150 and we got a LOT of use out of it.

Rachel is officially a pre-schooler now. Even though we've been talking about signing her in to the pre-school instead of the toddler class, she was a bit apprehensive about it this morning. I got her to introduce me to the teacher, pretending I hadn't met her yet, and then it was time to go outside to play, so we lined up with the other kids and went out. We decided to use a little retaining wall around the lawn as a replacement for the step stones. After a few passes, she and her friend Jesse pushed me to the front door to get my helmet and then over to my bike. By the time I left she was running off to do something else and barely said good-bye.

A co-worker was asking me about my allergy treatments with my accupuncturist the other day. I feel almost like a cultist talking about it, but by mid-February I was up to the 24-hour Claritins. I remember telling my friend Holly in early April that I hadn't taken any allergy medicine, even homeopathic, in at least two weeks.

So, here I sit at work. I'm trying to continue on the project from hell. I thought we were out of budget, so I stopped at the end of the day Friday and actually got to work on a couple of other things yesterday. My boss and the project manager agreed that I could take budget from other parts of the customer's overall project while they work on getting a new Service Order for the overage. But before I could get back to it, I had to jump in to fix something for our 800-pound gorilla customer, and now we can't seem to get the appserver to talk to the new database. So, the project from hell is still on hold. Not that I'm really looking forward to getting back to it, but it would be nice to get it done, once and for all. I guess I'll see if I can find anyone else who knows how to manage DB2 client config.