Panic @1700!

I had a plan yesterday, and it was a good plan. I found out early on that I would not be working that evening, so being the diligent, studious fellow that I am (ha,ha!), I blocked out some time to settle down with the laptop and my HTML book and write some code. It was a good plan, really it was! I got the laptop all set up and deployed the catshield powercable protector, plugged the external HDD in and the 8GB flash drive where my HTML projects live, and I was ready to go! Jennifer and I had planned to watch the cable TV show "Psych" at 2100, so I had a good block of time to get some serious coding and learning in.

I went down to the Secret Underground Lair to get the book I've been using, and it was not where I thought it was. A trait of mine is that I love organization. The problem, as Jennifer has often (and most pointedly) observed is that my flavor of organization closely resembles the leftovers and castoffs of various space programs that orbit the Earth: it doesn't look like organization to the casual observer. Still, I can generally amaze her with my ability to find the things I claim to have organized.

Back to the book. I had taken it downstairs the previous day, and was going to give it a home, whereupon I discovered that no suitable shelf space existed. As a good many of our overflow books are in a similar homeless state, they typically end up in stacks, double-parked on shelves in front of other books, or on any available flat surface. So, I remember doing a bit of reorganizing of just my I.T.-related titles to make space for this one smallish (just over 400 pages) volume, and many books had gotten moved, and the HTML book presumably had found a new home. However, when I went to look for it, it was just not anywhere. And I did look everywhere- several times. At one point, I had the sinking feeling that it might have been mixed in with several library loans we returned earlier in the day.  Jennifer was fairly confident that this was not the case, and after a bit of discussion so was I.

After about 30 minutes of frantic searching, I decided to give it a rest. In lieu of coding, I tackled my spreadsheet, which after the evening's work is now up to 9100+ rows that have their new ID, ~36% of the total. I still have a way to go, but it certainly felt good to put a dent in it. I also added a small bit of data to a few of the tables in the database.

Finally, as 2100 approached, I went downstairs to grab a soda to have with dinner. I grabbed a Diet Pepsi and turned to go back up. There was the book- I had walked past it at least a dozen times in my earlier search! I grabbed the book and described my discovery to Jennifer. Then I said, "See, I even got something that won't keep me awake."

She smiled knowingly and said, "That's diet, not caffeine-free."

Well, at least I found my book.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.