Fluffbuff

Ah, yes, I've been remiss in my blogging duties. Between the fires, a business deadline, and the raccoons and coyotes acting up in the middle of the night, I haven't had a good night's sleep in almost ten days and sleep deprivation turns me into this. You don't believe me? Ask Ben.

Fortunately, our experience of the fires was indirect, other than for the unhealthy air, and Ben's youngest brother — who had to evacuate twice in three days with his wife and small child — didn't lose his house. Thank you for all your comments and emails; it may sound corny, but the expressions of concerns and the messages from friends near and far really are comforting. The first few days, when fires were starting up all over the place, I was worried in spite of knowing that we were far from any large fire. When air humidity values are in the single digits and winds blow at 100 miles an hour, things can change quickly and now that we are down to one car and I was stuck at home all of last Tuesday, well… I didn't like that.

In spite of everything, I managed to relax and have fun on Sunday with a handful of friends. This time I kept the gathering very small on purpose; I find it more enjoyable and relaxing when it's not a crowd.

Our equal-opportunity lap-cat got plenty of hugs from Elena and an extended petting session with Carol's plastic nails. He and Pipie got inside all sorts of bags and boxes and Pipie even stole Carol's scarf for some private fondling.

Including Ben, there were just six of us, which worked perfectly at the table. I didn't get much knitting done, but boy, did I have fun. What with Anne's and Theresa's stories, we spent more time laughing than knitting. Laughing notwistanding, our mouths successfully negotiated bread, cheese, grilled eggplants and zucchini, red wine, a whole frikkin' fruit tart that could have fed twelve people, small hazelnut dessert thingies and some coffee. Life is good.

I don't know if it comes from dealing with children (Anne is a teacher and Theresa a children's librarian) but those girls know how to tell a story. The thing that cracks me up the most about Anne is not so much how she tells stories as how she drops comments in regular conversation and half the time I have to do a double take, as when she was talking about a former renter, "a little ol' lady, so old she didn't even like sex anymore". And we all loved Theresa's account of the baby possums that started showing up in her toilet.

But all good things come to an end, and a little after 4PM, when all the girls were gone, it was work until almost midnight. Ben and I were working on a business proposal for a startup challenge held by Amazon.com. The deadline was midnight on Sunday and we spent the last two hours that day trying to submit the various parts of the proposal in the form fields provided, but couldn't. And no error message to help us figure out why the system wasn't working, so by the time we finally went to bed we were both rather discouraged and convinced that all the work of the previous few days had been in vain.

Yesterday, Amazon extended the deadline and we found out that each form field had a limit of 4,000 characters, which was news to us since their submission instructions expressely said that we could be "as brief or as detailed" as we wished. So we had to edit several sections of our proposal to fit the new requirements. Who was it, Pascal, who once said "I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time"? Exactly. That took all of yesterday with both of us working on it and bouncing things back and forth each other to shave off a few more characters.

So we edited and chopped and edited again and tried to submit the proposal and still no luck. Obviously we weren't the only ones having trouble with that submission since Amazon extended the deadline again to noon today and we finally succeeded. Just.in.time.

Now, let's hope we do well in the competition.