Monday, December 11, 2006

Another fine evening with Virginia

I've known Virginia since early 2000 when I worked for AAAS. She was a consultant that we used, and we've become good friends over the years. She lives in Florida, but we try to get together every 6-8 weeks since she's on a long-term contract here in Northern Virginia.

With finals and everything else going on, I put tonight on the calendar almost two weeks ago to be sure we had dinner and caught up before the Chrismahanukwanzakah break.

In addition to dinner, Spawny (her nickname from her incessant SPAWNing out to another process on VMS) (1) wanted to do a little shopping for her Salvation Army adopt-a-family, and (2) a client of hers that we're both acquainted with had their Alpha VMS system go down hard on Monday morning.

I picked her up around 7:00pm, and she was still on the phone about the sick Alpha. The syntax for the command to restore the tape wasn't working, so she called in someone else while we were in the car to see what we were missing:



Saved by a Sharpee and a fast food napkin.

While we were shopping, I pulled a "George are you near a computer? Google this for me..." phone-a-friend to figure out another problem. Finally their backup started restoring.

We went shopping in Pentagon City, and I pulled into the mall on the Costco side. Always a bad move, and as we were waiting for pedestrians I may have yelled, "Now we have to wait for the gaggle of Asians who bought their 7,000 pack of paper towels MOVE!". Apparently Virginia thought that was funny, just another day in the hood for me. We did pretty well shopping, though I inform her that the Baby Jesus is confused why she uses her "Sale-finding Spinning Menorah" to get deals on Christmas gifts. She's like, "ahh...it's just my Mitzvah". She's so sweet, I have no idea why she hangs out with me.

I took her to the hotel to check in, and we went to Rock Bottom in Ballston for football, beer, and the Appetizer Sampler of Mass Destruction (which gets four stars for tasty-while-drunk).

Always good times with Virginia. =)

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