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we are almost there! end of the day tomorrow, i am 90% sure of it, barring any sort of catastrophic failures, we ship the alpha code. if i drank, i'd have champagne being prepared, it's definitely an occasion for celebration. buoyed by this shipment date on the very near horizon, i found myself full of energy tonight and able to go home at 10pm but then come back to the office and work another 3 hours to 2am before going back home for some sleep.

mandy was staying late to work as well, and for dinner she suggested getting some sushi from the mall. we left the office with john (he went to the burrito shack), but at the last minute decided to try our luck at the afghanistan restaurant next to boca grande. it was dark inside, full of expensively dressed people dining and wining. we definitely didn't fit in, mandy with her blue denim jacket, me in my shorts. the maitre d' told us there'd be a 20 minute wait. so we decided to go with our original plan, which was sushi at the mall. in the mall, in the food court, from sakkio the japanese restaurant runned by chinese people, we each got a box of sushi and some beverage. mandy told me a secret (and it wasn't about her love for wasabi!), and shed some more details about her oh-so-sordid past.

at 10pm i went home but came back to the office an hour later to find (surprise!) james playing games on my pc. he told us his car broke down on route 93 and he managed to borrow sarah's car and come back to the office, where he'd be staying over tonight. at midnight, i drove mandy back home to brighton, then came back to the office again to see james still busy on the computer. i worked some more until 2am. by then i was the only person left in the office, james having gone upstairs to sleep on the air mattress in his office. with nobody there, i put on some billy ocean songs (get out of my dream get into my car, when the going gets tough the tough gets going), brushed my teeth, and then left the office to go home.

including the time when i left to go eat dinner at the mall, and the time i went home for an hour, and the 30 minutes it took me to drive mandy home and come back again, i've been working today from 9am to 2am, 17 hours of work. if i'd been slacking off in the past, these past few weeks i have certainly made up for it.

like i said, when my project is over, i will be so happy that if you hear sobbing from my work area, those are tears are happiness. i can't wait.

note: i know i swore off eating fish for a while ever since yesterday's fishing expedition, and here i am going off to the mall to eat raw fish! but i don't consider raw sushi salmon to be in the same league as something like the cods we caught. in my mind i'm picturing these salmons raised in clear water tanks, completely domesticated, completely clean. compare that to the mental image i have of the cod, wild, dirty, crawling with parasites. i will still eat fish, but only those raised in captivity, not wild ones!