Thanks to everyone for the lovely birthday wishes.

I had a nice birthday. Aside from writing a new song, I had work to do at work. This included watching a project that I've been involved in and have been pushing since December get merged into the main codebase. This will fix up our JDeveloper build system to be a lot simpler and more maintainable. Different versions of this project have apparently been kicking around for years and this turned out to be the one that pulled all of the different threads together and got it done. Most of the changes were done by the build team -- I just got to keep testing it. :)

In and around that, I fixed a few bugs and managed to find time to duck out for a nice birthday lunch with Gretchen at City Barbeque. Gretchen made plans for dinner that involved pan pizza for us from Lou Malnati's while the kids ate macaroni and cheese, because they are not fond of pan pizza. This worked out nicely. Dinner was very silly and introduced me to at least one song that I am surprised that I haven't heard someone sing at a filk. (I suppose that I could pick it up, but it's not really my style.)

After dinner, K invited me to play one of the Mario games against her on her Switch. Since it was a game that wasn't likely to give me motion sickness, I said sure and we had a good time dodging piranha plants. After that, we all regrouped to the family room where we showed the kids "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". They had never seen the film, but now they know where all of the lines that we quote from it came from.

("Sharp pointy teeth.")

It was a good way to spend the day. :)

Today, I got some laundry and some cleaning done. I also updated the website to include the new song, which was useful, because it helped me find some more software that hadn't been installed yet on the new computer (Notepad++) as well as get my setup for Filezilla completed so that I could get to the website.

We've moved into the "shopping for series" mode on streaming. I suggested that we might try "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia", because we like the lead actress on "High Potential" and it's available on Hulu. Gretchen wasn't that impressed by the first episode, feeling that it was very predictable. It reminded me of "How I Met Your Mother" in some ways (I think it's a period thing) and I'd like to try a few more episodes to see how it settles in. We'll see what happens.

Tonight, we watched the finale for "Chicago Fire". This means that our broadcast TV schedule is now down to the "Alert" finale next week and some undetermined number of episodes of "Sherlock and Daughter".

Time to get back to streaming!

Having heard babies in the attic after Momma Raccoon was taken away, a different fellow came to set a trap for them in the attic. He was very thin though and realized that he could shimmy into the narrow space above our vaulted ceiling in the attic and then reach the baby raccoons with his grabber. He collected all of the baby raccoons that he could find and put them in the traps. The four of them were *extremely* cute when he brought them down.

He was still sitting in his truck outside when there was more noise from the attic above the living room, which was noticed because Gretchen and K hadn't gotten out of there yet. This meant that he could be asked to return to the attic and not long after that the fifth baby raccoon had been collected.

We now believe that there are no more baby raccoons.

We hope we are right.

And *someone* has gotten a very good review...