Still something left to wash away...

It seems to me to have been raining, or at least drizzling, for days, now, with only short periods with no water flying through the air; no sun, certainly. The rain was drumming on the roof when I went to sleep around noon, and it was still playing a merry tattoo when I rose somewhere short of 6 pm.

Last night's shift went very well... not a moment was spent fighting sleep, which continued all the way to the point I crawled between the sheets. In between, the fellow who was supposed to relieve me at 7:30 am arrived at 9:30 am, after a telecon (a known risk assumed by the night shift person), and at about that time I became aware that my BlackBerry, which had hit a "Low battery" mark somewhere around 4 am, had charged only to about 30% via USB by the time my shift ended.

I had taken the step of shutting off the phone's wireless capability, to conserve the battery, but it didn't help much. To make matters worse, when the phone vibrated on the way home, it wasn't to announce a call, but to inform me of a voice mail that had been left. An email arrived shortly thereafter, carrying an assignment.

Pressing the button to activate the wireless function got me a "the wireless is turning off" message, which I assumed meant that, despite there being about 20% of battery charge left, I could not activate the phone part of the unit. Grrr.

In the end, after a visit to CompUSA and the purchase of a completely useless booster battery for BlackBerrys, I removed the unit's battery and reinstalled it to reset the machine. My phone came back up with all functions active. Go figure...

In the end, I scrambled to get hold of the sent files, check them out, and call my client to discuss deadline. After initially okaying an overnight delivery, the client called later to say the end client was insisting on a same-day delivery, so... I was out of luck. To tell the truth, after looking more closely at the file, I'm not exactly complaining.

In short: there was a whole lotta nervous energy spent for nothing. Oh, well... at least Verizon agreed to replace my battery (something I established on the last leg of the trip home). But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Before leaving the MCC, I called the dentist to see if, perhaps, he could arrange to see me in the morning instead of at 4 pm as I had agreed yesterday. It turned out, however, that my crown hadn't come in, so we agreed I'd come in tomorrow after my shift to have the thing installed. One less thing to worry about for the day.

* * *The CBS Sunday Morning program, which Galina enjoys, had an interesting piece on a young woman named Regina Spektor, who is a Soviet-born singer-songwriter with a classical piano background. Out of curiosity, I checked YouTube to see if they had any examples of her work, and it turned out there are, and my first impression is quite positive. (Is it positive enough for me to shell out mazuma for tracks? Hmmm. I don't know...)

While at YouTube, I whimsically searched for "rocket launches," found nothing more entertaining than what appears to be a Chinese-narrated sequence of a guy being launched into the water wearing a huge array of pressurized water bottles, and eventually - after changing the search to "Proton launch" - found that someone had posted an ILS video of the Hotbird-8 launch... one that I narrated, in fact.

One commenter made a crack about my work, which I answered, though I'm not at all sure he'll (a) read my comment to his comment, or (b) believe that mine was the voice narrating the clip. Still...

( For those who love watching rockets take off... )

A quiet night so far, though I suspect that I'll be fighting yawns in about 4 hours.

Cheers...