Friday wasn’t such a great time.

We went to the holiday party for David’s company, and it seemed to start off well – lots of people, nice wine to drink, and they didn’t have the creepy, smarmy DJ that they’ve had in years past. They started things off with a fun trivia contest that got everyone at our table laughing and chatting more than in previous years (the employees yak just fine, but the spice tend to sit there trying to make conversation).

And then they served dinner, and then I got sick. Sort of. It was really weird – I was the only one that had fish, which tasted all right, but looked like it was overdone or held too long under a heat lamp.

When I was almost finished with the fish, I started to get a funny aftertaste, and excused myself. Then whilst taking care of a few personal matters, I suddenly felt dizzy and slightly queasy. I went out to the hallway, sat down, felt worse, and thought “Oh, crap.” So I went in to find David and say that we’d have to leave.

Rats. I wonder how the trivia thing turned out? Since we were the Research and Development table, I wonder if they ended up calling our team “Arrested Development” or not? The other likelihood was “Winners” as a team name, but who knows.

Then after getting home, I went straight to bed. I was feeling better almost as soon as I got outside in the clear cold air, but I was tired. So I read and relaxed and drank tea that David brought to me (my schmoopikins!).

And then my husband David came up, very late, and reported that Things Went Very, Very Badly when he tried to do a Linux install. So badly that the whole network was down (a total of 5 computers, with two more not connected). And there was a chance that all the backups had been lost, and all the blog content, and various forms of horror, shock and despair were expressed. So we went to bed hoping it wasn’t as bad as David thought.

Things were grim yesterday morning, so I stayed out of the basement and did (gasp!) housework, because week before last the housecleaning people couldn’t come, and so I did what needed to be done and even cleaned out my closet and vacuumed under the bed, dusted, and so on. More to do tomorrow night, but the house looked fairly good.

Then later Steve came over to help with the problem and lend technical-moral support, and as it happens his friend Fred was in town (we’ve had him over before, and also met him again over dinner and a lot of bagna calda in San Francisco). Another friend, Ruth, came along and met us at (eventually) Babaluci, where the five of us had a very, very pleasant dinner with lots of good belly laughs and good conversation from the heart (there were two Mac gurus at the table, so there was much Mac love expressed).

Afterwards, Fred was freezing cold so we started a fire in the fireplace at home, the guys offered more tech services in the basement, we sat and chatted comfortably, and then the long day was over. It was a very, very nice evening and helped to make up for the interruption in our socializing on Friday.

Today was also very nice, except that I missed my friend Katie’s choral performance – lost track of time completely. However, this morning’s service went pretty well, and we in the church choir got through our party piece. In fact, we sounded pretty good, because we had 2 tenors and 2 basses, yay!

Meanwhile, David got everything working again, very carefully. Eventually, he was able to restore everything from backups except for Friday’s posts, which were still available so long as I didn’t rebuild my blog… so it was simple enough for me to restore by copying the source code of each post and paste it into a “new” draft. I even remembered to roll the date back, and because I copied the source, I got all the links and image tags, too.

So we’re back online. All 2 of you may rejoice with the appropriate level of enthusiasm.

Dinner was an experiment – had a taste for stuffed green peppers, but the recipe I adapted needs more work before it’s ready for prime time. However, I’ll have to remember to buy the Tex-Mex mild chopped tomatoes-and-green-chilies product again, as it had good flavor for the Spanish rice recipe I adapted from Elise’s recipe site.

And now, time for bed. I hope I can get a decent night’s sleep, I haven’t been sleeping well for quite a while.