Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been busy elsewhere as of late. That is, if we include as of the beginning of June in “as of late.” It basically boils down to work although there was a brief interlude in California over the Independence Day holiday. So let’s recap some of the highlights.

Big in all of this, of course, is the lateral move at work into CM—something that happened in the middle of Elz’s hospital stay. Gone are the lazy days of writing VBS under the auspices of QTP automated testing. This was the position I was hired on to at [convergent telephony management software company]. Back then I could write a little code, refactor existing tests, and leave at 5pm every day. Now my life is consumed by a team of devs who are trying to repay about three years (and change) of technical debt fostered by purchasing a startup company with negligent agile methodology. The negligent piece being a total lack of refactoring and documentation.

Since the beginning of June we’ve come up to speed on an archaic, fragile, poorly documented build system. I, personally, have also come up to speed on the spanky new build framework homegrown by another dev team. We’ve more or less completely massaged this new system to incorporate most of what a less insular company would have adopted outright from the open source community. Instead of a stripped down implementation of NAnt (yes, we’re all .NET here unfortunately) we’ve backdoored the whole NAnt framework into the existing system.

In addition to coming up to speed and doing *gasp* presentations on this build system, I’ve been migrating modules into this new system. It’s all too funny because I am overcoming a lot of my own technical debt as it relates to learning the Microsoft environment, to include .NET framework, C#, and the generalities of building multi-million lines of code worth of application. In short, I’ve had a stretch of 60+ hour weeks since the beginning of June. Then again, I’ve learned and accomplished more in this two month period of time than in the previous two years. It really feels good to be in a dev position again.

Outside of work I’ve been trying to save the remnants of our tiny garden. This late spring/early summer has been extremely wet and what the rabbits haven’t gotten the weeds have choked out. All that remains are three stringy eggplants, four heirloom tomato plants, a single basil plant, and one extremely anemic pepper plant. The boxes haven’t fared much better as the only thing with any potential are the cantaloupes. We’re trying to grow them on a trellis and using panyhose to support any fruit hence our minting them “pantyloupes.”

Which isn’t to say there haven’t been some victories. The grapes look marvelous and the blackberry bush has been extremely productive. There’s just one bush but we’ve pulled a few quarts off it already and there’s still a lot of unripe fruit hanging. Blackberries + homemade vanilla ice cream = teh bomb.

Reports of the Egg out in Portland show she’s the very best baby two people can make. She’s awfully fond of sweet potatoes, has almost mastered crawling, is exceptionally mild mannered, and is cute as a button. I have a gallery/sub-site in the works but time has not been easy to come by.

I perfected my hippo impression in California. Not a day went by without me nose-deep in the backyard pool with non-Egg niece and nephew doing their very best to drown me. Photos of this are also in the offing.

Elz is the picture of loveliness as well. After her trying hospitalization at the end of May she’s kept herself relatively healthy. She’s also been a supertrooper w/r/t keeping on the O2 even though it cramps her style. The two of us spend as much time together as work permits and as we approach two years together things just get better. Not bad given I went into the relationship just looking for a quick bit of “female companionship.”

Anyway, I’ve droned on enough for the time being. Also, the VisualStudio SP1 install is finally drawing to a close so back to work for me. Thanks for getting this far, gentle reader, more frequent postings are [as always] promised in the future.