In past years, I've always had some post-Christmas blues. Sort of, anyway. More like post-Christmas disgusts, actually, after family members spend absurd amounts of money on stuff we neither need nor want, leaving us with wads of guilt about what the heck to *do* with the stuff, plus the inevitable "we didn't spend enough on THEM" stuff, and so on.

This year, due to a combination of factors that led to our relatives not having time to buy so much crap (and therefore spending more money on one *decent* present, off a list of things we suggested), plus our endless complaining about not having any room in the house, we actually didn't have that happen. We got some quite nice gifts, we managed to buy stuff for relatives that *they* wanted rather than feeling like we had a quota, and we don't have a houseful of stuff to find homes for.

It's progress. Perhaps next year we'll persuade them that alternative gifting (heifer.org, and the like) really *would* make us just as happy as still more material possessions.

Meanwhile, my husband has the week off, and incentive to help with the basement (making room for the pottery wheel I bought him!) so hopefully we'll make some housecleaning progress. I also commissioned his brother to do some of the kitchen work that we now have even less time for, and he properly installed our stove while we were gone this weekend (the previous stove was a built-in, and this one's not, so it's been sitting an extra 3-4" up on the cabinet base for I-don't-know-how-long). Progress, hurrah.

Every year, there's a Christmas present that stands out, one I'm really proud of... I've either scored a great deal, or found something that's exactly *perfect* for someone, or something like that.

This year, I think The Gift is chartreuse maggots. We were in the sporting goods store, picking up handwarmers and whatnot for the hunters and fishermen in the family, and I was looking at the wide array of really weird baits. (Catfish baits don't count. They're *beyond* weird.) I'm not really sure why, but for some reason they feel compelled to put fluorescent dyes in stuff, as if trout are some deep-sea fish or something. I mean, the glitter I can see, it looks like fish scales, sort of, but I don't know why panfish are attracted to freaky colors. Apparently they are, or at least bait-buying fishermen are, so there they are. And I looked at all of them, and found... chartreuse maggots. I'M GIVING MY FATHER-IN-LAW CHARTREUSE MAGGOTS FOR CHRISTMAS!

No, I don't know why I'm so irrationally pleased about it. He's also getting a neato handmade pigsuede notebook, so it's not like he's *only* getting chartreuse maggots. (The suede is not, be it known, chartreuse. It's a dark, almost-black blue.)

While I've certainly programmed in a heck of a lot of languages, I haven't spent quite so much time doing heavy programming in two at the same time. Or really, four, since the MS flavor of SQL is substantially different from the MySQL version, though the Gamehawk use of MySQL is rather lite compared to the rather ugly nested subselects I'm doing in the office.

I think the problem is that Delphi is too similar to Perl in superficial details, so I can't keep it as distinct as, say, RPG and Perl. Tonight for the first time I started to type a line of Perl code and had to stop and think about a quite simple function.

Or maybe I'm just getting old.

Our church advisory council, of which I'm a member (actually, one of the few members, since it's been losing members to moves and whatnot and we've been too busy to find replacements), is having their annual Christmas dinner tonight. Five couples, and this year because of the church finances we're opting to have a semi-potluck at a member's house instead (read: I'm in charge of the budget and I'm not gonna spend big bux at a restaurant). Semi-potluck, because I'm assigning people to bring stuff, and only two of the other gals are helping. We're fondueing, because I own four fondue pots, two of which date from the 1970's.

So we just chopped up beef tenderloin, made reuben balls, breaded cheese, and we have cocktail franks (those are hard to find... there are eighty-leven varieties of "little smokies" but that's different) that'll be batter-dipped. Whee. Oh, and a goat-cheese snowman (three cheese balls rolled in sauteed garlic, fresh-ground black pepper, and sauteed rosemary, with rosemary arms and a carrot-and-peppercorn face).

And bagna cauda.

Like good self-respecting geeks with no Italian ancestry, we were of course introduced to it by way of Babylon 5. I just finished making it, and testing it with a Wheat Thin, being that one of the other gals is bringing the veggies for dipping, and the other the bread. Yum. I can feel my arteries hardening already...

Yay for my husband, who did a lot of the work because my back's still out, because I hauled laundry to and from the basement yesterday. I thought I was careful, but I guess not enough so.

Aside from actual "job" work (I hit the $1200 mark today, which is pretty cool), I haven't gotten anything done in the last few days, because I've managed to Do Something to my back. I'm not sure what, or how... aside from a bit of sciatica when I was pregnant (par for the course), I haven't had any back trouble to speak of. This has felt like the typical worked-too-hard lower back ache, except multiplied quite a bit. Very odd. I bought a fifty-pound bag of dog food Monday, but a clerk insisted on loading it for me and all I had to do was tip it out of the cart into the back of the van, so it's very unlikely that was it. I've been sitting goofy at work because I'm wedged in next to a desk, at a folding table, but aside from a too-high keyboard there's nothing *that* weird about it and I usually feel bad keyboarding in my shoulders and upper back. So I'm mystified, but it seems to be getting better, so I guess I just must have lifted something I shouldn't have, and that I don't remember.

So the Christmas tree still isn't up. Bah.

I guess I'm going to have to change my sig. It's looking more and more like I'm going to hire on permanently.

I've stubbornly put off learning JavaScript, though I picked up the O'Reilly rhino book (for a buck; it covers up to JS 1.2, and I have *no* idea what's current these days) awhile back figuring I'd add some bells and whistles once the core of Gamehawk's written. But this project involves web front-ends, and lots of hiding unnecessary selection boxes so as not to confuse the end user, and lots of form validation so that the Delphi program never re-presents the submission form with "fix this please"s (if the validation is inadequate, you get a simple warning or error and have to use the back button... they still don't do enough distrusting of the submission form, but I'll be teaching them otherwise). So I'm learning some of the useful bits of JavaScript, and getting paid for it. Sweet, even if I do have to use FrontPage. (Well, I don't *have* to. But everyone else does, and to appearances lives in the direct-HTML-editing tab as much as I do, so it's really more like "Notepad with some context highlighting and a GUI viewer" and that's fine with me.)

The house isn't getting any more organized, though. Not sure what to do about that.

Okay, so I haven't exactly *mastered* Delphi, but I compiled a program today, and I think I've assimilated all the basics. It's really, really similar to Visual Basic, assuming *that* hasn't changed in ten years, so it's not a great leap. After two days of voodoo programming (copy-and-paste from the nonweb version, into the web version of a different report), today I got to debug, so now I've figured out what's actually happening. The only really new stuff is the way declarations and dependencies happen, and today was all sorts of insights about that.

My husband, meanwhile, is waxing enthusiastic about the potential for quitting *his* job and writing the Great American Novel when our son goes back to school. A bit premature, but at least the extra money's going to come in handy for Christmas.

Whoa, I'm having flashbacks, here.

I actually did very little Delphi work, and it was with pretty much the first version that came out. But I have a pretty strong background in VisualBasic (before I converted to Perl because I couldn't afford all the libraries for Internet tools; they're all integral now, I'm sure) and some Access, and various other Windows-based things. It's just been awhile.

So what they're doing, they're converting Delphi backoffice reports into Delphi web reports... tacking on an HTML front end with selection boxes, and a PDF-exporting caboose.

And now I'm in an XP/IIS/SQLServer/Delphi/Frontpage environment, and no, there's not the slightest chance of converting it to Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl/Pico, where I'd much rather be.

Eventually, I'm sure, I'll be re-addicted to all the happy shiny GUI development tools. Right now... whoa.

But the cleaning/remodeling project has had about as much progress as this journal. Sigh.

And as of today, I'm making it worse. I just took a contract programming job (I gotta relearn Delphi!) which will eat up probably 20 hours a week, maybe more.

But how could I refuse? They're buying me a laptop and all.

No, I haven't posted. And no, I haven't made any progress to speak of. I was afraid this would happen... I had to pause the moving of the business in order to actually *do* the business. See, a good chunk of the business is costume-making, and logically enough Halloween is a popular time for that. Much of it's farmed out to other seamstresses, but the custom stuff I have to do myself.

The good news, though, is that fur sales have also picked up, so I've gotten rid of some of my back stock without having to sew it up at all. Less profit margin, but I should probably minimalize my EOY inventory anyway.