Friday and the weekend (long)

Friday I finished cleaning our outdoor furniture and moving it upstairs to the deck.  We now have 10 chairs and a "bench", so it's more work than it sounds.  Though it's mainly tedious -- lots of trips around the house.  I moved our table on Sunday.  It's big, glass, and heavy; that was actually work.  And when I thought I was done, Monica said "hey let's put one chair downstairs so I can sit with the dogs".  Score one point for well-written acceptance criteria.

Met my friend Jay for lunch on Friday and got to catch up.  Jay's sort of like Griffey, Jr. -- he was the face and the star of our softball team for a number of years but was often injured and those injuries have finally led him to retire.  What's that?  Griffey hasn't retired yet?

Spent a lot of time over the weekend working on taxes, mainly stock sales, interest, and dividends.  This is where having managed accounts -- like mutual funds but you own actual stocks -- becomes a pain. Lots and lots of stock transactions.  Import/download is a life saver, but verifying is still a fair amount of work. Yuck!

In more fun stuff, Saturday I helped man the both for Monica at the Redmond pet fair.  My role is basically to watch the booth when she needs a break and keep her company.  It isn't busy enough and I don't really know enough about Ttouch or pet adoption counseling to share the booth.  For the first time she's set up at one of these things, it was actually useful.  I don't know if she'll actually get anyone who calls, but she talked to a number of people who seemed very interested in her services, took her card, and should call her. On of our observations mid-way through the day was that 10-3 was too long for this event.  Everyone started packing up their booths at 2:30, so I guess we weren't alone in that view.  I walked outside at 2:25 to get some fresh air and when I came back 1/3 of the "vendors" were gone.  I think once the first person bailed, everyone else decided it was OK to follow suit.  By 3:00, there was no one left.
 Saturday night we went to a great dinner at Ruth's Chris, separate post coming.  Sunday was mainly running around.  We had softball in the morning and played one of the key games of the season.  Before the 2008 season I split our team in two.  We had developed a group of players who thought recreational co-ed softball was all about winning and not about having fun (OK they liked to have fun, but their idea of fun was winning).  Their attitudes sucked and it made it no fun to play on Sunday.  I kicked a couple people off the team a few of their friends from my team joined them and they decided to recruit a bunch of good players and form their own team.  I wouldn't say this team is our rival but they're one of the better teams in the division, they care a lot about the final score, and half the players used to be on our team, so the game is special.  We scored 3 runs in the top of the first and never trailed though the game was a toss up until we pulled away in the 6th and 7th innings.  We played terrific defense which was the key and got them out running the bases four or five times, though the umpire missed one of the outs.  Final was 13-6.

Sunday afternoon Hunny Bear had an acupuncture appointment.  And then Sunday evening I went to the Storm Opening Night.  The game was sloppy as I'd expect.  Training camp is about 3 weeks in the WNBA and the star players don't get back from overseas until the last week.  So you're watching a team that's practiced together for about 4 days.  It was pretty ugly at times and the Storm had long stretches where they didn't score, but in the end they beat LA, their #1 rival, by about 10 points.

Oh yeh, Sprint 3 planning Sunday night.