Waking up at home this morning felt like a ridiculous luxury, even though I was running a little bit late -- needed to get through breakfast quickly and go catch the horse for our 9am farrier appointment. Got that done, visited with Jim Hagen (the farrier) a bit -- my ritual is to make black tea & put it in a carafe before he shows up, and then after we're done with Julian, he comes in and we drink tea & chat while I write his check.

Anyway, only having to walk to the dining room to "be at work" is a delicious feeling. Granted, I haven't actually "logged in" to do any Ponte work yet, but I will. I think the desired state for the end of the day, today, is to have the test config (master server/slave server/client) tested, and then have it rolled out to all the affected machines but not enabled/in use. That gives tomorrow for me to roll it out while onsite, and fix any issues that pop up so it's all happy for Friday.

Made use of the Hoooge Lump o'Meat that was lurking in the fridge from my last grocery run - a 5lb chunk of pork butt roast. I sliced off a thick piece for lunch, and then browned the rest of the roast in butter/veggie oil, then deglazed the pan with red wine vinegar and put everything into the crockpot with bay leaves, salt, and pepper. So that's simmering away for dinner. I then repeated this on a smaller scale with the lunch piece (using some merlot for the deglaze step, since I was out of red wine vinegar), and braised it on the stovetop for 20 minutes or so. Came out a deep nut brown, and tasted delicious.

This tiercel hawk has been hanging around lately, perching in the oak trees and preening, then swooping to another for a better view. They're fascinating to watch. Our admin at AltaVista was a falconer, and she got me much more tuned into the behavior of birds. I also saw a hummingbird for the first time in weeks -- guess they're coming back with the longer days.

Nice to have a relaxed day at home to catch up on personal mail and other cruft. I've been socializing, evenings I've been in the BA, and contracting at Ponte means I'm working, very intensely indeed when I'm there. The pace of contracting is quite different. So the email has piled up. I unsubscribed from a few less-interesting and high-volume things, to cut down on the interrupt rate, and am working to keep my inbox from becoming a big pile of things I thought I might want to do and then fell down on doing. (That's a project in process, really, but I found some interesting stuff at http://www.davidco.com/ that's helped me make better use of my Palm, and I'm waiting for their book to arrive from Amazon.)

Conversations with chrysoula and tersa lately have tempted me to create a community for housekeeping discussion. No, seriously. Any interest?

Missing elflet very much indeed, but he'll be back Saturday. Patience is called for. Got any to lend?