This is not to say that anyone's been unhelpful, but I think there's been an understandable dialectic between glee and expectation-dampening for the office. Poor little missionaries. Quite obvious why I had to be the guy called there, sometimes. Among other things, I have the right mix of naivete and raw cynicism...

Go ahead, ask me about my budget... Yeah, you, too, pal. Anyroad, I haven't got one. That is, they've never had one. I'm reverse-engineering one from expenses to major vendors in the last 3.75 years, as pulled onto paper from our current finance system. So there I was with a dozen pieces of paper, Notepad.exe, Calculator.exe, and terror in my soul... Well, not quite. But I ended up with distressingly small numbers after crunching.

Lots of fun stuff during the week, and had to walk away from a machine getting patched w/ XP SP2 at the end of the day, because it was still running... Bah.

Took off semi-on-time, because we had dinner at somebody's home, which my wacky-Brit Int'l IT guy was cooking for (I'll rave about him later, he's crazy but mostly in good ways); 'twas to be a festival of Thai food. Mmm... Thai food... Got home to a phone call from our godson, which was awesome. Then had encounter with Denver traffic. To sum up: Whatever drugs PennDOT is on, they're dealing the good stuff to whoever "designs" (and I use that term very loosely) the lanes out here. Construction + crack-addled lanes = mucho fun! So we arrived doubly late, but there was curry left, so all's well that ends well. Got to socialize a bit with a bunch of the crew, a bunch of whom are also newbies. Good stuff, but between the week's week in the new place, and the inherent extroverting, we took off about the same time a wave of others did, damping the buzz on the party a bit, which I felt somewhat bad about. But not too bad: I was exhausted, ready for some introverting. Did get to meet and chat briefly w/ a Brit missionary who's in charge of the language school for ACME in Japan; she's been there for something like 16 years or such. So that was cool.

Saturday, I have no recollection of what I did, but I'm sure it could be characterized as "vegging". We'd planned to get up to the mountains this weekend, but that didn't happen until...

Today. Slept in late, got out of bed eventually and found ourselves selecting from the subset of churches with morning service times equal to or greater than 11am... Bit a largish E.Free church west of us a ways, and it was not bad. Highly kids-friendly (I think there's an associated school, too), which made the place lively; music wasn't what I'd like (and piscis had technical criticisms, too), though its content was pleasantly not bad like I've become accustomed to. Sermon was okay, thought-provoking in some ways -- liked the angle he took on child-rearing as geared to 'raising up an image-bearer to grow into Christ's likeness' -- and he did talk about the importance of this coming from our own experience of God's grace. Could be better, could be worse.

In the afternoon, after a pizza lunch, we drove out into the mountains, through Evergreen, and around in a large loop. Took a few pictures, maybe to be posted later, but they won't do the mountains justice. I could complain about a variety of things here, but never the mountains, I think. Very cool (esp. where the snow was blanketing the ground)...

This evening, tried to get a six-pack (wow! so small!) to watch baseball with, but was thwarted by the crazy suburbia close-early syndrome; I'd got used to the (union-assisted) state-monopolist dysfunction of PA 'state stores', back home, but had expected more sanity here. That was provided in small measure by going to the non-union Safeway grocery store (!) and getting a local brew in the aforementioned, near-legendary, "pack auf sechs".

And happily, Boston has now got their crud together enough to take the curst Yanks into extra innings, holding off elimination... Time to watch this 10th inning. Pax, to yinz back home and everywhere...