Let there be WEEKEND!

Well, it’s only two hours later than I wanted to log off today…but, I had decided that I simply had to finish this one (1) little thing for the husband today.

How hard could it be?!

Uh-huh. Yeah. He’s…not asking me because he already knows what to do and just doesn’t feel like it…he’s asking because the guy who could probably do it while standing on his head whistling Dixie is way too busy to fuss with it, and everybody else has been beating their heads against the problem for a while now without much to show for it as of yet. Except for ‘max recursions exceeded’ errors and ‘how come it’s returning 8,008 rows for an entity that only has 700 in there?!’ issues.

So after I had officially quit for the day (ahem), I started with what they already had, and after I’d acquired a few lumps of my own on my forehead sat back and sent, “Whoa, hang on. Stop stop stop. What was the actual question again?!”

This is one of Those Things I find very helpful in my day to day working life; generally speaking, when I’m writing a query, it’s because I have a question I want to answer (I mean, duh, look at the word itself: query). But it’s easy to get so caught up in the code itself that you kind of forget what you’re actually trying to do…and if you stop and remind yourself what the actual question is, you’ll notice that you’ve written an entire encyclopedia about the wrong danged animal.

So then I threw everything out and started from the beginning, and started running into the same problem but then I went, “OH, for heaven’s sake, why are you messing around with that, IT ISN’T PART OF THE QUESTION!”

Then I stripped out 90% of the point-belaboring that I was trying to make this query do and bang. Got myself a query that returns exactly what we need in 13 seconds on my laptop across VPN against a development server far, far away. Boo-yeah.

And then I started feeling rather clever.

{…cue theme from Jaws playing in the background…}

So I shut down, quick, before the Universe could rear up and bite me on the arse again. Whew. I’m sure I’ll be keenly aware of my shortcomings as a SQL jockey by Tuesday.

But until then…weekend. Weekend, weekend, weekend.

I have a lot of home-related work I want to get done; but apart from the housework bits (blech!), it’s all kind of fun stuff.

Well. If resetting the so-called compost system around here can be called fun. Or fiddling with the semi-manual watering system, which uses a combination of gray and city water to provide drip irritation here and there around the place…it’s completely automatic, after you’ve figured out how to get the water into the storage tanks in the first place, and how to cut and lay the drip lines so that all however-many gallons you just got into the tank don’t just splurt in one glorious (and excessively enthusiastic) slosh into the bed, but, don’t just linger around in the tanks saying, “Here, little mosquitoes! Come breeeeeeeeed in meeeeeeeeee!!” – because that’s gross.

But, it gets me out of doing actual housework, like, say, cleaning my filthy bathrooms or picking up the excessive amounts of debris that have collected in the hallways and stuff, so, I’m excited about it!

Plus…my yard is perilously close to looking like something planned, instead of some kind of Hippies Meet The Clampetts Meet The Hoarders “not really reality because who would actually live like this?!” show set.

Or would be, if the husband hadn’t dug up most of the sprinkler system along the side of the house because one of the valves was leaking up front?

Sigh.

Well, one step at a time. Things are finally actually growing out there, and the weather is heading into those long, dry-hot days when tomatoes and beans stretch out and get busy, when watermelons and squash abound, when you can hear the corn growing if you pause to listen…although actually, I haven’t planted any this year yet…might just get a late planting in this weekend, though, even though I swore I wouldn’t and that I’d use my space for more sensible, nutrient-dense, soil-enhancing-or-at-least-not-sucking-dry food sources.

Yeah. Whatever. Corn, like watermelon, doesn’t exactly make sense for the survivalist…but hey.

I’m not a survivalist.

I’m a thrive-alist.

And sitting on your patio with a slab of good cold watermelon on a languid late-summer evening, after a dinner where sweet corn harvested just hours ago was barely shown the heat and then rubbed with butter and maybe a dust of sea salt before being dropped in the direction of the dinner plates only to be snatched out of thin air by greedy little paws?

That’s thriving, my friends. That is thriving.


Squash blossoms also know how to THRIVE…out LOUD!