Wow, it took me a long time to post this entry that I wrote a week ago! And the new Blogger is weird! Anyway, here's from 6/25:

Apparently my blog is being converted "to a new-and-improved version of Blogger," so I can’t actually post right now. Humph. It seems that, since I post so infrequently and sporadically, the least that Blogger could do for me would be to make itself available for those rare occasions on which I do want to post. Sigh.

I saw DeMara today! Hooray! She picked me up after work to do dinner and catch-up. We tried to go to the Portland City Grill on the 30th floor of "The Big Pink" (the second-tallest building in Portland, with an amazing view of the city) for cheap happy hour appetizers and good scenery, but it was really crowded and noisy and unconducive to chatting. So we went back down the 30 floors (no, we didn’t take the stairs) and went across the street to a wonderfully colorful, funky cute restaurant called Ca?ita, where a bunch of my co-workers had gone for cheap happy hour appetizers. I had wanted to go with them, but had scheduled dinner with DeMara before I knew about the outing, but this way I got to do both at once! It was fun to hang out with these guys somewhere other than work; I really do work with a pretty neat group of people. And all of these particular people were under or very close to 30, so everybody’s pretty close to the same age. I’m still the youngest of the bunch, but fortunately I don’t usually feel it. So that was fun.

Random hilarious computer story of the day (well, yesterday). I was having a terrible morning yesterday with the printer – the server was freezing and nothing was printing, and when I restarted it it kept giving me weird error messages that I didn’t understand. If I left the message too long without clicking one of the buttons it offered, a verbal alert would begin, basically a woman’s voice reading the error message to me. It was scary enough the first time, but the second time she prefaced her recitation by saying: "It’s not my fault." I’m not kidding. I couldn’t believe somebody had actually programmed that into a computer! It almost made up for the hassle I was going through. (But not quite –- my printing rate hit an all-time low of about one job an hour). Fortunately, I managed to sort out the problem with the help of tech support, and actually hit an all-time high printing rate of 21 jobs an hour this morning. So that was satisfying. But enough of work. I’ve decided to make the conscious decision (do I sound decisive or what?) to leave work at work, and not to bring it home with me. Makes for much more relaxed, less stressful evenings. J

Practice tomorrow for theWhirled Beet Festival, as our Squire likes to call it. Renegade Rose is listed in the Sunday entertainment at the European Village, but unfortunately it doesn’t have any description, so nobody will know what we do! Humph. Oh, well.

We "stole" some fresh mint from Beverly’s garden last time we were over, so I think I’m going to make myself some mint tea and take a bath. I’ll post this whenever Blogger decides to let me get to my blog again.