Brother-in-law, his wife and stepson arrived. He's SpouseKitty's younger brother. He's a good person, though a bit self-centered and immature. We've been cleaning up the place for his arrival (mine and my in-laws' place both.)

Let's just say he didn't take my in-laws' decision to move up to the Pacific Northwest with as much grace as I expected.

There's a lot of bad air there. I'm not sure which is better, to share my worries and have them be for naught, or to just keep them stifled and then post an "I knew it" blog entry if it goes bang in my face.

Right now, it's nearly midnight. I'm sleepy. My day at work was interesting. One of my coworkers left the company last week. I commented to his manager (who is under my senior manager, thus close to me) that his four machines are likely to walk away if they're not claimed.

Somehow, I ended up offering to park them in my office. I recently inherited five machines from my manager. My manager used to be responsible for having a pool of machines for people to use as testbeds. I have them now. Of course, I already had five machines of my own for testbeds. And my 'development' machine (the one that I use to work, not test). And somehow, I ended up with one more. The machines must be reproducing. I don't know how, but I've now 16 of them.

So today I was re-imaging (fancy word for reformatting and reloading the operating system) the four. Now that I've gotten the wiring set up, I'll also re-image the five my boss handed off to me. Dressing the wiring took some time: I hate having tangled runs of cabling, so I create bundles of KVM + RJ45 + power to go from the back of the machine to the power strip + KVM switch + network switch. Four sets of those, bundled with zipties and labeled with coloured tags (so I can tell that machine X has red tags, so the red power cords goes to that box) took over two hours. I had some parts left over, so I made three more sets, just for me to use later. Imaging the operating systems off the net were good, but turns out my volume license key doesn't work with the net install image, only the one on CD. Redo!

Went out to have dinner (so as not to mess up the kitchen) came back and SpouseKitty had to spelunk online for a trip to American Girl Place with Kitten. If you thought Disney parks are beswt designed with the single-minded intent to part harried parents from their money, let's just say they either have competition, or have been eclipsed.

Speaking of eclipses, Kitten has Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" running non-stop in her mind, and out of her mouth. I like the song; actually, I LOVE the song, but still...

Anyhow, the stress is constant. Like just about anything else constant, the human mind adapts to it. Minor stuff, we learn to ignore. Major stuff (like SpouseKitty's chronic back and neck pain) we learn to work around. I forgot the operating system / program, but one error message was, "Ouch! Don't do that!" Chronic pain will say the same thing, and you'll learn to not do this, or not do that in a certain way.

I fold when I'm stressed. I've some pictures (I purchased a 6MP digicam as part of my 'retail therapy' that I allowed myself.) but I don't want to post them until I'm done with this layer. Folding is rather mind-numbing. Assembling is the 'good' part, if you call low-level frustration good. While folding, I had a chance to think about how many pices this level will require.

I came up with over 1300. Ouch. An icosahedron has twenty sides, twelve vertices, and thirty edges. Each side requires a base of 12 squares, a group of 9 squares to 'join' the base pices to the 12 squares arranged in a certain shape to be added.Each side has three independent points, so each one costs 4 squares. 33 + 3x4 = 45 x 20 = 900.

Each edge requires 10 pieces x 30 = 300

Each vertex requires 10 pieces x 12 sides = 120

1300+ pieces? That's a many sheets of paper in the first 'Epcot Ball" layered origami.

Yeah, I fold when I'm stressed. Yeah, I'm stressed.

G'night!