It took me 2 hours to get to work this morning. A little excessive compared to normal. Part of that was due to my finally taking Pinot to doggie daycare this morning – I figured that she deserved to romp around with the puppies all day since
- I was going to be at work later than normal
- She’s been cooped up indoors for much of the past week
- There is a snowy weekend ahead
Normally dropping her off doesn’t take too long, but this morning it was compounded with an accident on the beltway that slowed my speed down to a (lucky) 5mph. Aaah well. The drop off this morning wasn’t great either – but I must becoming more immune to it -Pinot did NOT want to go to daycare. Not wanting to go meaning sitting down next to the car, refusing to walk towards the door, shaking and trying to run away. In the beginning, she’d do this and I was lucky that Nick was there to get me to walk away. I’m now learning that she actually has fun once she gets inside, and am much more willing to pick her up and walk her to the door, only to check in on her on the webcam an hour later and see her grinning and running around like the morning had never happened. It’s all about the separation anxiety I guess – she doesn’t want to be away from us.
Anyway – I did finally make it in to work, and I did end up working late. I’m assuming you can guess that leaving late and picking Pinot up meant that my commute home was 2 hours too. Being reunited with Pinot was much more happy than the drop off this morning, which is always nice. But really - 4 hours on the road today? Yikes. It took a lot out of me, and rolling into the house after 6PM found me snoozing on the couch for an hour, rallying to have Annie’s mac and cheese for dinner with Nick, and then proceeding to go right back to bed when he left for the late volleyball game that I was missing due to another early morning (complete with another early meeting) tomorrow.
But onto the picture for the day. As some of you may know, I have never considered myself to be a good coder. I don’t enjoy doing it, I tend to oversimplify things – or do them in the most inefficient way possible. I’m continually astounded at people like my husband, who just ‘get’ it and can do it without much thought. With all of that said, a few (7!) years ago now at work, I was a code monkey. Specifically, I was a code monkey who was coding for an embedded system to talk USB. It was a rough journey. USB was newer back then. I had one specific task and it took me months and months, but I did finally get it to work – it took quite a few posts to Linux mailing lists, but I got it to work. And for that reason, I’m always floored when, now, years later, someone random emails me about it. Today it was a professor from an embedded computing department in Vienna, Austria. Wow – call me silly, but that is exciting. Now, if only I could remember exactly what I had to do to get it to work….

I've had people ask me how I did this in the past, but I've never been told I could be one of the heroes - neat
In other news, we’re apparently heading for another snow storm that is just as big as the one we had in December. Doesn’t the weather realize that I moved “south” to avoid this sort of thing? Is it a coincidence that we’re at exactly the same point in our training that we were the last time this happened due to the re-shuffle with which race we were planning for? Aaaarrrrrrgg – I despise treadmill running, and it seems that is what awaits me, all weekend long.