Da Godfatha

Today was a special day... baby Olivia, my cousin Jim & his wife Mari's 3-month-old daughter, was baptized today, and I am one of her godparents. This was the first baptism that I was officially part of (I have a godson in the Philippines, but I did not attend his baptism, and in fact have not even met him yet). I'm so honored that Jim and Mari chose me to be one of Olivia's godfathers. We also celebrated Sebastian's 3rd birthday today. He was very sweet to his little sister during the baptism ceremony, and also very talkative. :) Little Reese was a good boy too during his siblings' celebration.

The festivities were a nice way to wrap up the long Thanksgiving weekend. I spent Thanksgiving day with my family out in the 'burbs mostly, first at Jon & Pepper's house for lunch, then at my parents' house for dinner. Friday I stayed in and did laundry and stuff around the house. Yesterday, I attended the DePaul-Northwestern basketball game... I was supposed to meet up with my friends Stephanie and Mike from work, but either their plans changed and they ended up not going, or they sat somewhere other than the DePaul student section and I didn't see them. Anyway, it was a good game, and DePaul won 59-49! Last night I went to dinner in Greektown with my parents, Lori, and Tita Marie & Mark. I have so many leftovers from there, as well as from today's party, that I may not have to cook dinner all week, LOL.

It's gonna be hard to be at work tomorrow. Hopefully we won't have too many support incidents. I also hope that the cold I think I am coming down with doesn't get too bad. So far, I'm only suffering a bit of sneezing and itchy nose, and just a slight feeling of sicky-ness. I'd like to at least remain healthy enough to be able to see the new Harry Potter movie with Kathy and Patrick some time this week! :)

Pick up the spare

And here it is, Monday again. At least it'll be a short work week with the holiday.

My "birthday weekend" turned out to be quite nice. I took Thursday (my actual b-day) off work to relax and do a little last-minute studying for my Econ final exam. I also stopped by Best Buy and picked up the second Harry Potter movie on DVD (I have the other two already) as well as Carrie Underwood's debut CD. :) The Econ exam went okay; I had a couple of those oh-crap-I-forgot-everything-about-this-topic moments but I managed to get something written down eventually. :P On Friday night, I went to a Lioness Club bowling fundraiser w/my parents. Let's just say that I am glad that the funds being raised were not dependent on the bowling scores! In three games I bowled a 48, a 68, and a 78. Maybe if we played another game I would have broken 90, LOL. Also I fell down two or three times (thankfully none of this was captured on film). Anyway, I had a good time despite my horrific bowling performance.

My best pal Mark G treated me to dinner on Saturday (we went to Artopolis in Greektown), then we went to Jaclyn's b-day bash at John Barleycorn up in Lincoln Park. Jaclyn was surprised (hopefully pleasantly, hee) to see us, since we're kind of "old farts" compared to the majority of her friends (she just turned 23). Rhoda and her posse stopped by also, as did Vince. Rhoda, Jaclyn, Mark and I did a shot together, which I found out later was a "Jager Bomb" (jagermeister in Red Bull). It was actually not too bad. :) Thanks for the invite, Jaclyn, I don't really get out to the bars much so it was fun! Finally, yesterday I went to church and lunch w/my family as per usual. I got a nice J.Crew sweater from my parents. While lunching at Quizno's my dad kindly pointed out that I had a few gray hairs on the back of my head. Gee thanks! :P

I can't believe it's already Thanksgiving week. Lori comes home from IU tomorrow. I *think* we are having TG lunch/dinner at Jon and family's house, but I'm not sure about that yet. Then Sunday is Olivia's baptism. I can't wait to "officially" become one of her godparents!

Bring me to life

Ever since I brought home one of my mom's bougainvillea plants from my parents' house a couple months ago, it has been on a steady decline. It kept blooming, but some of the leaves started to turn yellow and fall off, until eventually there were no leaves left at all. And then even the flowers started dropping. I figured it was a goner, but Mom encouraged me to keep watering it anyway. Happily, over the last week or two, it has started sprouting new leaves!

These pics were taken last night...



Whew! :)

It's chilly, mac

Man, it's gotten cold. My grandma and I nearly got blown over by the wind yesterday in the Panera Bread parking lot when we went to lunch w/my parents after church, LOL. Other than that bit of "excitement" my weekend was pretty low-key. Did some housework, and watched a lot of tv. Also, I took advantage of a sale at Staples and purchased an external hard drive (200GB Maxtor OneTouch II) to back up my desktop pc, and make it easier to transfer my data over when I get a new computer (which will hopefully be by Christmas time).

My dad was sick with a cold yesterday, and my friend Jason at work had the flu and missed over a week of work earlier this month, so I'm afraid it's just a matter of time before I come down with something. I've been taking my vitamins and trying to stay well-rested and hydrated, so hopefully that will help keep me healthy, or at least keep whatever I catch from hitting me too hard.

I recently learned that my work teammate Ken and I will be kept on our current project through March. Starting next month we'll transition the ongoing support to client staff and/or another vendor. We're both glad about this; it's been a decent assignment, but we're both ready to move on to something new, hopefully development work as opposed to production support.

The "highlight" of this week will be my birthday on Thursday... unfortunately, I have my Econ final exam that evening. :P On Friday my mom's Lioness Club is having a bowling fundraiser event that I've been coerced into attending. I'm a terrible bowler (sub-100 average probably... I don't bowl often and it's been a few years since the last time) but hopefully it'll still be a fun time. At the very least I hope to get some good photos of enthusiastic Filipino bowlers. :)

Back to studying...

Bulletin!

Please visit my LiveJournal for an extremely important message regarding the future of my blogs. LOL.

1-2-3, 1-2-3

Last night I attended a dinner/dance fundraising event with my parents, for a social organization they belong to that donates money to charitable causes in the Philippines. The "highlight" of the evening was a choreographed waltz that they and several other couples performed (the theme of the event was a wedding anniversary celebration for the group's members). :) Happily, they got through it without major errors, hehe. I helped out with checking guests in and distributing dinner tickets. For the most part it went okay but being the type-A personality that I am, I kept finding ways to make the process more efficient, LOL.

I can't believe there's only one week left in the school quarter for me (well, two weeks including final exam week). I managed to get an A- on the second exam in my Econ class, so I'm carrying a 95.5% average into the final. Thusly, I will be rather upset if I blow the final and end up with anything less than an A! </nerd>

For kicks, I registered for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) the other day. We'll see if I can get a "novel" even started, let alone finished, before the end of the month, but it should be an interesting challenge since I don't consider myself much of a creative writer.

I am possibly meeting up with some h.s. friends at some point this week. One of my "nerd-herd" pals will be in town from DC visiting her parents, so some other nerd-herders and I want to try and get together with her for lunch or dinner or something. We always have fun together even when we go a year or two between meet-ups. Hopefully our plans will pan out.

Report this!

For the past three days at work I have been fighting with a certain reporting tool (name starts with "C" and ends with "rystal" :P) that I have had a love-hate relationship with over the years. It can produce neat-looking reports, but it is not possible to do anything *easily* with this product beyond simple report layouts. [warning: some geekspeak just ahead] This week, I have been trying to update the SQL query behind a particular report to remove a database name reference (so that I can run the report off of a test server that has a differently-named copy of the production data). Apparently it is not possible to simply go in and delete the offending verbiage from the SQL command, but instead you have to go through 387 dialog boxes to update the data source location. And *then* when I try to run the report via the client application, it prompts me for database login information. Hello, I'm already logged in to the database, otherwise I wouldn't be logged into the client app to begin with. ::hate:: </rant>

In other news, today I spoke on the phone with my academic advisor at DePaul (actually, not my assigned advisor, but I can never get a hold of that guy, so I went straight to the director of admissions, per suggestion from a classmate - thanks Linh!) to discuss whether I should remain on my current curriculum track or switch over to the new "career-focused" curriculum that came into being this quarter. The advisor told me that on the new curriculum, I would have to take two fewer classes in total, but that I would have to take the new quantitative analysis course. While he was saying this, I was all "well OK, well all right" but then after I hung up it hit me that I took like four advanced math classes as an enginerd in undergrad, and shouldn't I be able to place out of or waive this class? Anyway, he is going to snail-mail me some information that I can use to compare the two tracks, so I'll bring up the math thing when I call him back to follow up.

Time to finish my assigned homework for tomorrow's class. Whoo!