Wow... busy week! Let me catch you up.

Wednesday the 5th was my first day at work in the office! It was great getting to start setting up my office and get to put some more of my geekware to good use. Thanks to Captain Technology I acquired a licensed copy of Readerware (awesome)... which allows me to scan my books into the computer using a barcode scanner (came free with the software), and then it looks up the book online and downloads all of the relevant information about the book into the database. It automatically alphabetizes the list and has options for checking books out to people. There are also versions available for movies and music... and since I'm kinda' geeky about technology (or had you guessed?) I got the combo package with the optional Palm Pilot extension added in for good measure =o).

Thursday was my Friday (not so long of a week after the holiday, eh?), so I scanned in some more books, got my payroll stuff set up, got myself a new email address for work, figured out how to reset the password on my voicemail (since the person before me changed it and didn't tell anyone what it was), recorded my new greeting, and had a meeting... the end.

Friday -- ahh Friday! Friday Fuego and I took Ginger to go camping with Sadu Crobinhobin and Jane (of "Jane's Blog"). We went to Big Basin in the Santa Cruz mountains and it was just amazing! Aside from copious amounts of good wine and beer, we also had great food and great company. I got to MacGuyver ("who?" my YG kids would ask) a grill since the fire circle didn't include one... okay that's not exactly true. There was a grill of sorts, but it would have been next to impossible to get the fire close enough to the edge of the circle to make that three inches worth of welded metal grating actually cook anything. So I bent some roasting forks, hung two of them between the truncated grill stump they offered and the edge of the fire circle, then suspended another between them, allowing for two more to be suspended from that one to the lower edges of the fire circle. We then placed a grill that resembled a cookie cooling rack on steroids on top of the fork suspenders. After a failed prototype involving less bending of the forks, we had a successful grill which we used for dinner! (and there was much rejoicing -- yay). I was kept up Friday night by the sound of what could only have been raccoons gnawing away at our unopened food bags in the food locker and sharpening their claws on the box housing our remaining wine (NB: it wasn't boxed wine, but rather just wine which happened to be stored on its side within a box... wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong idea ;o). I woke up with some trepidation the following morning, unsure of just how much clean up would be required from the nocturnal invasion, only to find that nothing appeared to have been touched. ?? Finding a small rodent poop in the wine box, we surmised that it must have been a much smaller creature than a raccoon -- and since we liked the cute little chipmunks we saw scampering about, we decided it must have been them (a convenient naivete).

Sadly Fuego and Ginger and I had to leave at 2pm on Saturday so we could get home in time for me to write my first sermon at Saint Episcopal-Church-where-I-work's (Yay!).

I must say that one of my favorite parts was watching Ginger go completely nuts down at the creek! She ran, she leaped, she bounded, she splashed, she dug in the water, she blew bubbles, she grabbed huge tree roots and tried to pull them out of the water -- basically she had a puppygasm of fun. Dog's rule.

Sermon yesterday went great! It's always difficult preparing a sermon for a new community, so I was up preparing it until about 2am with Fuego asleep on the sofa (her favorite spot). One long Sunday later (including a pizza dinner welcome from the youth group -- they even baked cakes!) I was home again and very ready for a long overdue sleep.

Perhaps I failed to mention (okay not perhaps) that I did get a replacement Palm Pilot!! It wasn't free as a trade-in on the deceased one, but it did qualify as a professional expense (thanks St. ECWIW's!!), so I was able to get it on Thursday after work (sweeeeet). So I was up until about 4am on Friday morning upgrading software to account for the new OS and transferring my precious data to the new Palm Tungsten E2 (fitting since E died -- how did they know?). It has some fancy new features, but overall it is pretty much the same device except for the obvious difference that this one works. I may get the other refurbished and give it to Fuego.