49

49

IL

50-1

7 squared

Today is pi day. 3.14. It is also my birthday.

According to my sister I'm older than dirt and close enough to 50 that she can round up and claim I'm half a century old. Her turns comes in just a couple years.

I didn't have the kind of day I wanted to today. I have never gone to work on my birthday. For 25 years I have always taken a vacation day on my birthday. My normal birthday routine is to sleep in, get some exercise with a walk, a bike ride or some golf. Then I like to catch an afternoon movie. I've been doing this for 25 years now. This year was different. I needed to have a meeting with a guy at work this week about a job. The only time he had available in his schedule was this morning. So I abandoned my own personal quarter century tradition and rolled my one year older butt out of bed, showered, shaved, dressed and went to work this morning.

When I got to my meeting I found his door locked and no one around. I waited for about half an hour and finally gave up and went over to my office to see if there were any messages on my phone or e-mail. I had one phone message on my machine from 1:30 yesterday afternoon telling me that the guy I needed to meet with had changed his plans and wanted to meet this afternoon at 2:30 instead. I was livid. I am also sick and tired of our phone answering system at work. The last thing I did last night before leaving the range where I was working was to check for phone messages. There were none. Then this morning there was a message dated yesterday afternoon. This is not an isolated occurance. I have checked for messages before leaving for lunch and had none, and when I get back I find two messages on the system from earlier that morning.

So I stood there in my office wondering if I should blow off the rest of my birthday plans and keep the afternoon meeting or salvage what I could of my plans and put the meeting off until next week. While trying to decide I noticed an email from my boss. When I opened it up I found out that he has arranged for me to be pulled off the testing I'm helping with and reassigned to excorting some visitors around the base next tuesday. This really pissed me off. Since my boss thinks that my time is better spent excorting uncleared visitors around instead of doing something useful I decided that I really didn't give a damned today. So I called the voicemail for the guy from my meeting and politiely explained that I was on leave today and I had already changed my morning plans for him and I was unable to change my afternoon plans. I explained that I would be happy to meet with him anytime next week, except on tuesday. If escorting visitors is more important than testing then it is also probably more important than a job interview.

Then I left work, came home and took a nap. I went to see 300 this afternoon. It was a pretty good movie. I'm no historical expert on Leonides and his Spartans but this movie had very little history in it. About the only historically accurate stuff was probably some of the main character's names. But that was no big deal. I didn't go to see a historical documentary I went to see an adventure movie. It was a pretty darned good one. My only complaint was that the ending was too much like giving up. The action was great. The stylized battle sequences were fantastically done.

After the movie there wasn't much time left in my day. I picked my daugher up and took her to volleyball practice. During her practice I has a coach's meeting for the city league. I got my roster and schedules. I have a very young team. It should be an interesting year.

When we got back home around 8 PM the twins were bursting with excitement. The fact that I had a small pile of wrapped presents sitting on the table to be opened was driving them nuts. So I opened my presents. We had some homemade carrot cake. Watched an episode of Mythbusters and then everyone headed for bed. Don't let it be said that this old man doesn't know how to party.