Hubs is out in Missouri now. He left Saturday morning (uh... the fifteenth, to be precise) in the truck with dog and rented trailer in tow. We keep reminding ourselves that the separation is only temporary and that we'll soon be working on OUR dreams together.
While he's out there, I've got changes going on back here on the flat track. I got back on skates for practice this past Tuesday. It was the first league practice that I've been on skates for since... uh... late February or so. The big change is that I was skating as ref-in-training. *shudder* Oh how I'd rather play.
With the big move actually (for REALZ) happening now, I got on the wait list for Philly's WFTDA officiating clinic in hopes of getting a couple days of referee training in without the additional expense of plane tickets. I'll still need lots of practice at scrimmages before I can officiate a bout, but it's a chance to practice without skaters depending on my making the correct call (or really hoping that I goof and they can get away with stuff!) Last year's clinic ended with volunteer skaters "scrimmaging" and the head ref directing skaters to play out completely illegal scenarios in order to see who was paying attention amongst the ref crew. I volunteered to skate that and it was fantastically fun.
The house is scheduled to be listed on July 1st, so going to the officiating clinic leaves me with even less time to prepare the house before showings. A few people are coming out on Sunday to help clean/pack/sort. The realtor needs to come in before the listing goes up and get pictures taken for the listing. The chicken fencing *should* be taken down, chickens moved to their new home and the chicken yard re-seeded. That's looking less and less likely to happen. I still need to work (can't that robot just program itself?!) and bigger projects need to be taken care of.
On the robotics side of things, I've finally gotten back into the groove of hammering out nitty gritty details in my protocols so that SNP genotyping can be restored to its previous mostly-automated status at the core. (I should probably actually try to remember what the core's latest name is. It changed while I was out for Baby Brother's wedding.) I have to trouble-shoot some of the programming that has been running for a few months on the new instrument as well as dance around the unforeseen drawbacks of the older instrument's upgrade. At this point it is a lot of repetitive, line-by-line alterations as I attempt to emulate a human's motions. It's funny how our "automatic" movements are so simple to us yet so difficult to define and execute via mechanical means.
Hopefully this weekend I'll get some sleep and a decent cup of coffee. I'm one of those needs-coffee-before-making-coffee people and am usually lucky I don't pour the hot water into the toaster. Or try to put it in the cupboard with the coffee beans. Yesterday's walking into a veritable sea of maggots all over the kitchen took coffee-making to a whole new level of Not Happening. (I still have no idea where exactly they came from but a general purging seems to have cleared them. I'm suspecting the frozen (and I thought fully sealed) items that had to be pulled out when the freezers were sold are the origin of that adventure.)
Aaand once again it's WAY past bedtime!
