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at least the habañero sauce was good
Thursday, October 6 2016
I worked hard today in my remote workplace, mostly on refinements of the reporting system necessary to make it a good interfaces with a complete SQL novice. All of this work has a quality of "skunk works" (that's the term that comes to mind, but it seems it might be wrong) about it, since I'm officially supposed to be working on a totally different reporting feature which (thankfully) had been allotted an embarrassing excess of time. I also had to field some problems with a multilanguage thing functionality I'd recently implemented. Foreign characters were coming out mangled, causing a mass-mailing provider to choke on our data exports. The existing system had no way to go back and re-produce old acknowledgment letters, so I built a way to do that. This delighted Te in fundraising, who has typically had to rebuild mangled acknowledgment letters by hand. Te, in case you've forgotten, is also my hand-picked SQL protégé.
Gretchen and I had been invited to attend the birthday celebration of her bookstore coworker Quentin, who was turning 40. The celebration was to be held at the newish Santa Fe out on Route 28. Santa Fe is a southwest-style restaurant that started in Tivoli, but has since expanded to several locations. Gretchen and I went once or twice to the Tivoli location and didn't much like the food (even back before we were vegan). Tonight Gretchen was exhausted from her day and didn't want to go out, but after many hours of working hard in front of my computer, I was in the mood to go out. So I went by myself. As a gift, I brought along a pillow Gretchen had gotten from her parents. It featured a depiction of a black dog that looked a lot like Quentin & Natasha's dog Coach Eric Taylor. [REDACTED]
Once I got to Santa Fe and saw the people at Quentin's table, I realized it was a minor mistake to have come. In addition to Quentin and Natasha, there were the two familes of the people who own the bookstore at which Quentin and Gretchen work. And some other person. And that was it. I didn't really know any of these other people aside from Jackie, the woman who bought the bookstore to begin with. I sat near her and tried to muster my inner extrovert with mixed success. It was $5 taco & margarita night, though none of the taco options were vegan. I ended up ordering a burrito off the menu and telling them to hold the cheese and cream. When it came out, it was a flour tortilla wrapped around dreary, dry, flavorless pan-seared vegetables. The house-made habañero sauce was good, though, and to the surprise of my waitress I ate all she'd brought me (it had come in a little cup).
Later we were joined by a guy whom Quentin had met at the Comeau Property while walking Coach Eric Taylor. I always have a lot of material about dogs for those who are interested, so I told the new guy about how Neville had been hit by a car and how he now wears a GPS tracker. I also described the big scar on his back resulting from the time he was shot with a tranquilizer dart when he was a stray in Queens.
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