What happened to Monday?  I know I was here working.  Damn, Monday flew fast.

Weekend was good.  I spent a good solid  10 hours working on the workflow database for United Health Care.  Monique and I worked together on a lot of that on Saturday mapping out import files to database fields.  It would be nice if her team would get me *all* the workflow input files and be consistent in their structures and follow the rules I set for these things (single sheet per workflow, single row headers, etc).  But it's been fun and interesting working out new ways to handle their inadequacies.

Patriots!!!!  Woo-hoo!  18-0!  'Nuff said.

Monique is at some sort of seminar just south of Hartford all week, so the company got her a hotel room at the conference center.  It's about 15 minutes from my work.  I'm going to stay there all week becuse it beats going home at 35 - 40 minutes one way, it will be a nice change of pace and because I get to spend nights with Monique instead of home alone.

Monique's birthday was yesterday.  I remembered about 11:30 to call in a flower order.  I had already bought her a lovely earring and necklace set.  Chris and Amy were going to make her lobster for dinner, but we went out to dinner at Red Lobster instead because we had two reasons to celebrate.

Chris got a job yesterday.  He'll be working for RR Donnelly, a printing firm in Danbury CT.  Now that he's employed, he also got to fulfill the his agreement with Amy.  They agreed to wait until he had a job to tell all the family that she's pregnant.   So he made a lot of family calls last night.  It was kind of funny to see how excited he was about it.  Chris *HATES* talking on the phone.

Enough blather for one morning.  I've got a long 14 hours of work ahead of me, so I should get to it. ,

Yesterday was so busy and hectic I didn't have time to write.  

I NPCd Isles this weekend.  It was a rare combination of things that led to me having some free time, so I made the last minute decision to go.  The worst part of the weekend was bashing the back of my head on a stone wall Friday night.  For the first time in my life I can say that I now know what it means to 'see stars'.  Fortunately, the thick Pierce skull saved me and I walked away from it with nothing more than a goose egg on the back of my head.  I'm thinking I was pretty damn lucky.

I got much quality time NPCing with some wondeful people, jjmarikawho left Saturday noon so we didn't get to perform together :-( , darkwhimsy(I think), Serin (whose LJ handle I don't know) and stableyr.  It was nice having people I knew well and who had NPCd the game before to help me break into it.  A really funny moment for me was when it dawned on me that I knew Serin by her eyes.  She plays Najat of the Anaketh at Madrigal and we'd been talking for quite some time before I realized I knew her from some place.

The game world has a fairly rich back story.  The staff is pretty creative and all very good to work with.  The players seem like a good bunch.  The game has a lot of good potential.  It sort of uses the Accelerant rules but definitely has a NERO feel to it.  It's almost like it's made of a bunch of people who *want* to play an Accelerant style game but haven't quite made the leap.

Over the course of the weekend I played members of three different tribes of natives, an Aberrant (sort of half undead),  a wolf, a lynx, a dead spirit and a water spirit (complete with blue makeup.  I feel typecast.).

The highlight of my weekend (definitely not the fight with the rock wall) was the Bardic Circle Saturday night.  As always it's just a joy to listen to arianhwyvarsing and of course you all know how much I love to play.  To make it even better, after the competition, she and I worked together.  She quickly picked up "Hunting the Hare" and we put together a flute/voice duet.  It was wonderful.  i hope to be able to play more with her in the future.  Sadly, she doesn't get out to Madrigal much anymore and I don't know if I'll ever get back to Isles.  :-(

I left Saturday night around midnight because I have a database project that I'm working on for United Health and they're getting a little antsy about the progress.  Besides that, I had a rehearsal of the Silver Village Flute Choir at my house at 6:00 and I was fairly certain the house would not be up to visitor standards, so there was cleaning involved.

I slept in until 11:45 on Sunday.  I haven't done that in forever.  It totally shot my day and I was sort of groggy and unfocused most of the day.  I may as well have stayed at the game for my productivity levels on Sunday.

Oh yeah, and the Pats kicked some serious Cowboy ass Sunday: 48-27!  Go Pats!

All things considered, it was a pretty decent weekend.  Now back to your regularly interrupted work week.