Back to reality

Well, I was back at work today after 3 weeks of vacation. Nothing has changed.

The day started off with me realizing that I may not be able to remember my password to login to Windows on my work laptop. I had not thought about it until this morning just as I was leaving home. Of course, when I got to work, I tried at least 3-4 passwords before I was locked out. I had to call the IT Helpdesk to fix this little problem.

Once I managed to login, I checked email. I knew it was not going to be a pretty sight, so I went to get a coffee. I think I had something like over 400 emails to sift through, and that was after Outlook had already moved a few things according to some already-defined rules. Yay. So it took me most of the morning to sift through what was left. There were a few emails for some requests, but I will assume that they were taken care of.

By lunchtime, some software I was waiting to be released for testing was released. So I downloaded it and prepared to have it loaded on the test node. Luckily I hadn't encountered any mjor problems. The only thing I noticed that was different about this software was that there was an extra script that was part of the package. Hmm..

Anyway, I started the implementation of the software. I didn't come across any major hiccups with it, but I will still need to check the logfiles tomorrow to ensure everything was hunky-dory. In all, this thing took all afternoon for it to complete implementation. Yuck. Well, a friend did stop by my office and we talked about my trip and stuff. So in the end, I ended up leaving work after 7PM. Oh well.

Yesterday, I was pretty ambitious and seeing that the weather was going to hold (it was originally forecast that it would rain), I decided to head over to the local nursery to get some stuff for my little patio garden. I drove over and arrived there just as they opened. There were already some people there. I knew I wanted to get some geraniums (inspired by my trip to Italy), but what shade of red did I want? I decided to get the hot pink geraniums. It's not terribly garrish, but I did not want to get the traditional red ones either. I got some purplely-green grassy stuff to plant with the geraniums. I also picked out some ivy-type stuff. Since I really liked the violas, I got some violas and blue lobelias to plant together. As well, I got a whack load of herbs (rosemary, basil, thyme, sage) to pot up together.

After I got home with my haul, I took a breather before gathering enough courage to go ahead and do up the planters. The planters still had the remains of last years plantings. So they all had to get cleaned out. I had also bought a bag of potting mix. It turned out that I only needed to top-off a few of the planters and fill a few of the pots. I still have some leftover for when I get the tomato plants later.

So that has been my life post-Italy.