I decided to ignore work for the entire Memorial Day weekend — I don’t even think I saw any IBMers other than Diane. Instead, we geocached our neighborhood on Saturday and Monday, and visited friends for a cookout on Sunday (caching their neighborhood while we were there). We also made our first trip of the year to the Los Gatos Farmer’s Market; wild salmon is back, as are ripe peaches, plums, and apriums. Yummy!

Tuesday, although the holiday weekend was over, none of us made it to the office (or school). The father of one of the girls in Jeff’s class had died during the weekend; school was closed so that anyone who wanted could attend the funeral and shiva lunch. Diane and I both know the family, so we wanted to attend, too, so we worked at home before and after the ceremony and gathering. I can’t say I was very focused on work, though I tried.

Today, we were supposed to get back to normal, and all was going swimmingly until I started the rental Prius. Or, to be more accurate, I tried to start it. The 12-volt battery had gone flat over the long weekend (I don’t think I left any doors open, but maybe…) and couldn’t get the car going. I didn’t have time to call Hertz for assistance, so we carpooled, and I only got to work 45 minutes late.

When I got home, I called Hertz, and they said they’d send out a truck to jump the car so that I could drive it back to them and swap it. While I was waiting, I decided to try again, and the car started (very reluctantly) — so I phoned Hertz to cancel the service call and drove to the nearby Hertz Local Edition. Usually, if I have battery problems with a car, I hope the engine won’t die again until I’ve had a chance to drive it far enough to recharge the battery — but with a Prius, the engine stops as part of normal operation!

I made it there with no problems; I even restarted the car, but I could tell that things weren’t quite right, and so I was happy to swap for a Kia Spectra. It’s definitely not as nice a car as the Prius, but it’s much nicer than the Chevy Cavalier I suffered with last week — my only real complaint with this car is that the radio doesn’t sound very good.

We’re still on The List for a new Prius at four dealerships in the area; two of them have given us ETAs of next week, which would be just fine. I suspect we’re not the only ones on multiple dealers’ lists, either.

Oh yeah, I mentioned “work” in the title of this post, didn’t I? Power stayed up in my wing all weekend, so I didn’t have to do anything with my wiki server (and I could have left my refrigerator plugged in, though defrosting it was a good idea anyway). And I am continuing to work on my report and proposal to the CIO’s office, with increased urgency; I have a call scheduled for next Tuesday to make the case.

I’ve been running heads-down all week, making some progress on several fronts, but not enough on any of them.

At work, I’ve had three major projects going this week:

• writing what I hope will be a significant report to the CIO’s office
• building a combination blog and status report aggregator for my team (in other words, working with a colleague to put WordPress on a machine that he controls, playing with the theme, and pointing people at it)
• trying to migrate a wiki from MoinMoin to MediaWiki in hopes of getting it off the machine in my office before what I thought was going to be a lab-wide powerdown for the long weekend. There is no clear path between the two wiki syntaxes; I got partway there by writing a new formatter for MoinMoin, one which produces something close to MediaWiki markup, but the results still need manual fixup. But the good news is that they don’t plan to turn off power in my wing after all, so there’s no urgency.

At home, I’ve been spending too much time doing work — e-mail is never-ending, it seems. But in my spare moments, I’ve also been working on building a migration path from Manila to WordPress (well, most likely to RSS2.0 so that I can use the existing migration tool in WordPress from there); I’ve learned a lot about Python’s SOAP support in the process, since I’ve had to get around some non-well-formed XML produced by Manila (pages with subscribers or trackbacks are the ones affected). I’m not quite there yet, but I have hopes of moving content this weekend.

That, of course, assumes I do anything with the laptop at all this weekend; last night, I was sufficiently beat by the time I got home that I left it in the briefcase instead of working. And I enjoyed not working so much that I didn’t even check my mail this morning until I arrived in the office — and, sure enough, the world did not stop spinning because I waited. I’ll have to keep that in mind next week.

It looks like a great weekend for geocaching, too — temperatures are going to be very pleasant, and we don’t have anything on the calendar after services tomorrow (Diane’s reading Torah, so we have to be there). I picked up a Zire 31 at the Shir Hadash gala earlier this month with the specific idea of using it for paperless caching — it’s time to act on the idea.

Hmmm…3:37 on a Friday before a three-day weekend…I think that’s close enough to a full day for me!