I can’t believe we’ve reached out halfway point already! I really thought the Ascend Project flew by but this one is going by even faster. I had submitted my PR the day before so I went on the hunt for +1s. Jhenna was on vacation so Brett came and sat at her desk. That was a mistake on his part because I took the opportunity to ask him for a code review. He was super nice though and agreed to look it over. He and Mele reviewed it and had about 15 comments and corrections. They were all related to wording and formatting which I had anticipated. I was very happy that my code was all fine but wow, I made some really silly documentation errors. I guess I’m just not looking at it as critically because it doesn’t cause my tests to fail. I’ll have to work on that though and I am SO thankful that they both have great eyes and easily saw things that needed to be fixed. Some of them were as simple and inconspicuous as a missing full stop.

I fixed as many things as I could until it was time for our team lunch. Mele picked Los Gorditos and I promise I had nothing to do with it! Yeah, I may have mentioned how much I like it once or twice but that’s it! 🙂 We were supposed to be having some horrible rain storm but fool me sixteen times Portland. Not this time though! It was beautiful out! The sun was shining and the sky was blue. Wow, this place is the best. Anyway, I decided to try something a bit different this time so I ordered some soy curl tacos and added potatoes to them. They were delicious! I asked Mele some questions about the next ticket I would be working on and we all talked about programming languages.

When we got back to the office I only had about an hour left before I would be at my 40 hour maximum for the week so I bugged Brett again and asked if he would mind looking over my PR once I pushed up the changes they requested. He was happy to comply and so was Mele. I got my two +1s and was able to merge! My merge made Amanda’s PR conflict though and she was kind of unsure about what to do so I helped her fix a really simple merge conflict and she was good to go as well.

Next week is a short week so Amanda and I asked if we could work extra hours or days to make up the time and we can as long as we don’t work on Christmas day or the days the office is required to be closed. That works out well for me because I can work nights and weekends.

I wished everyone a great weekend and headed off to the bank and then to meet Andrew so we could go home. As I was walking I saw the Snow Peak store and thought I might be able to get a gift for Andrew’s brother Abraham. Andrew’s siblings decided to do a Sibling Santa something or other and Andrew drew Abe. This meant I would have to figure out what to get, buy it, and get it mailed because Andrew would never get around to it. I told the salesperson that I had to buy for someone who had no wish list or suggestions. He immediately said, “Blow torch!” Hmm…that sounded intriguing. He asked if I would like him to demonstrate it. Uh, yeah! He lit it up and it was awesome! It was loud and had a huge flame. Abe would most certainly injure himself or someone else with it. Sold! I also grabbed some of their carry-on chopsticks.

I stopped by the bank and then grabbed Andrew. We had a nice trek home talking about I don’t even know what. When we got home I quickly logged on to my work laptop and pulled in the latest changes to my repo just so I would be totally up to date and then moved to my laptop and checked out the new Treehouse series on regular expressions in Python. I really want to improve my regex skills of which I currently have none.

Wayne and I offered to drive Alice and Jason to the airport for their trip to Arizona. They would be picking up Alice’s mother who has recently been diagnosed with dementia. She will be living with them until they have a spot for her at a very nice assisted living place nearby. After they were dropped off I asked Wayne if we could have mac n’ cheese and mixed vegetables for dinner. It’s one of my favorite comfort food meals and Earth Balance makes a great boxed mac n’ cheese now. We have only been able to find it at Food Fight so we headed over there. We also got some really good sourdough rye bread that is made here in Portland. Dinner was excellent!

Jayde and Estelle were actually going to have a sleepover at our house. This was kind of a big deal because Estelle has anxiety and doesn’t really stay at other people’s houses. She finally felt comfortable enough here to give it a try. The girls decided to have a movie night with popcorn and pie. We were out of popcorn though so Wayne and I ran to New Seasons and grabbed some for them. They made a huge bowl of popcorn and shared with us. We watched the newer Freaky Friday and the girls both went to bed before it was even over.

Today I learned a lot about sugar.