Bill Roper's Journal

Today was just a lot of catching up on various things.

Tomorrow, I'm going to go watch a softball game for the first time since I finished coaching. It should be fun!

Gretchen spent most of the day driving a long loop to the Loop and back to pick up K after her trip to Ball State for orientation. Like, five hours, which is absurd. She was a bit late getting to the Loop bus station, but the bus was a bit late too, so it sort of averaged out. Meanwhile, it seems like all of the other drivers on the road were intent upon "interesting" maneuvers. But everyone is home safe now.

I spent time looping at work too. Happily, I was able to sort out one problem and characterize another so that someone more familiar with that particular area of the code can do the further sorting that is required.

And then on Monday, I hope to be able to code in a straight line again. :)

Thanks to everyone for the lovely birthday wishes.

I had a nice birthday. Aside from writing a new song, I had work to do at work. This included watching a project that I've been involved in and have been pushing since December get merged into the main codebase. This will fix up our JDeveloper build system to be a lot simpler and more maintainable. Different versions of this project have apparently been kicking around for years and this turned out to be the one that pulled all of the different threads together and got it done. Most of the changes were done by the build team -- I just got to keep testing it. :)

In and around that, I fixed a few bugs and managed to find time to duck out for a nice birthday lunch with Gretchen at City Barbeque. Gretchen made plans for dinner that involved pan pizza for us from Lou Malnati's while the kids ate macaroni and cheese, because they are not fond of pan pizza. This worked out nicely. Dinner was very silly and introduced me to at least one song that I am surprised that I haven't heard someone sing at a filk. (I suppose that I could pick it up, but it's not really my style.)

After dinner, K invited me to play one of the Mario games against her on her Switch. Since it was a game that wasn't likely to give me motion sickness, I said sure and we had a good time dodging piranha plants. After that, we all regrouped to the family room where we showed the kids "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". They had never seen the film, but now they know where all of the lines that we quote from it came from.

("Sharp pointy teeth.")

It was a good way to spend the day. :)

Today, I got some laundry and some cleaning done. I also updated the website to include the new song, which was useful, because it helped me find some more software that hadn't been installed yet on the new computer (Notepad++) as well as get my setup for Filezilla completed so that I could get to the website.

We've moved into the "shopping for series" mode on streaming. I suggested that we might try "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia", because we like the lead actress on "High Potential" and it's available on Hulu. Gretchen wasn't that impressed by the first episode, feeling that it was very predictable. It reminded me of "How I Met Your Mother" in some ways (I think it's a period thing) and I'd like to try a few more episodes to see how it settles in. We'll see what happens.

It was Awards Night over at Maine West for the entire school. K had been informed that she had won an award and I explained that she really needed to RSVP and show up. And she got one of a number of scholarship awards that went to folks from the Fine Arts department, which was great.

Now K had figured that a friend of hers was going to get the academic award from the Fine Arts department, which wouldn't have been a surprise from the amount of work the friend has done in music and drama. But as I carefully read the program, I realized that the Fine Arts department was giving three *separate* awards.

And K's friend won the award for Music.

K won the award for Speech, Drama, and Broadcasting.

I am very proud. :)

And it's good that we went...

We continue to lurch toward graduation with the final choir and band concert for the year. I had a good time listening to the kids. Music is good for me.

Two loads of laundry and a number of small errands done, we have managed to make plans for various summer festivities, including K's trip for orientation down to Ball State. This involved an unaccompanied bus trip both ways, which I suppose is a rite of passage. I remember riding the bus to and from Carbondale at about the same age...

Of course, that was 50 years ago. :)

Julie turned 17 today.

Birthday festivities will follow school today.

My kids are growing up. I am not sure I am ready for this.

I did a bunch of little things at work today and wiped out nearly 300 more warnings in our compile as we shift to a new version of Java. This is in addition to the 2000 or so that I killed off last week. A lot of this was due to the Number constructors having been deprecated a few years back, so all of those occurrences are now patched.

After school let out, I took K to the bank. She now has a bank account and a place to deposit her paycheck from her summer job.

And I made arrangements to return my new glasses and get a replacement pair, because I actually managed to find a pair of frames that were too big for my head. I did not think that anyone *made* anything that was too large for my head.

But I was wrong.

And tonight was the last performance of K's last stage show at Maine West. It was probably the best of the three performances, which is nice.

I will miss seeing her on stage.

K is off to the cast party. She has a ride home, so parents are heading towards bed. :)

Today was day one of K's last show at Maine West. This is not a show that I would have picked, but the cast worked very, very hard to pull it off. Good for them!