So, about two years ago, I purchased a perfectly valid, legal copy of Microsoft Office for the Mac. I don't recall where I purchased the suite, it could have been directly from Microsoft, for all I recall, but I have the official hologram sticker and, when I installed it on my computer, a license key.

Every so often, the Microsoft Updater would run, and tell me that it had an upgrade to install. The first time I selected "Update!" the program scanned my entire harddrive. Having no love for Microsoft, I was completely suspicious of an update program that needs to scan my entire harddrive in order to update one program, and cancelled the update.

Well, a few months ago, I decided I was tired of the constant requests to update the Office suite, so I said sure, update.

The updater scanned my harddrive, then deleted my copy of Word.

I cancelled the update program before it could delete the other LEGALLY PURCHASED programs, but not before I was completely pissed off at Microsoft for deleting the programs in the first place.

So, I've gone these several months without Word, and seemed to be doing okay, until I needed to draw up a contract for a new client. And then I ran into problems.

Apple to the rescue, of sorts. Pages, Apple's semi-answer to Word, will import Word document file, so I've switched to Pages. It's a bit annoying to load, but I'll be damned if I'm going to buy another copy of Word after this last fiasco.

Okay, so, do you go to Starbucks? Have you been there recently?

The local stores have this marketing push for the new Vivanno drinks, which are cold, blended drinks that, eh, could be competing with Jamba Juice.

Except that the Starbucks drinks flat out suck. I wasn't able to finish the drink, it sucked so bad.

Now, I'm a fan of the ice blended chocolate drinks. Kris is a fan of the coffee, sure, but I don't like coffee. Sure, I prefer the Coffee Bean's chocolate drink, but the Coffee Bean's seem to stick with Southern California, so I don't manage to have them very often. Eh, and Starbucks suffices.

These Vivanno drinks? Really? No.

I took Bella to the vet today. She stopped eating a few days ago, including the stinky, mushy dog food I went out to buy for her yesterday. I think the problem is her teeth, as one of her top fangs looks particulary nasty, turning black around the gum.

I was surprisingly entertained at the visit, first with a little girl coming into the office, calling "Doggie! Doggie!" at Bella. That, and noticing in the folders on the counter that someone had named her cat "New Kitty."

I went up to the City tonight for the San Francisco Drupal meetup. Hannah and I took the train up together, with my taking a taxi to the meetup location.

There were about 15 people at the meetup, ranging in experience from previous release co-maintainer (Neil Drumm, who, honestly, is fabulous, we lurves him) to just installed it and tried it once. Also known as the range of Drupal user ID from 5088 to over 200000+. Most of the people at the meetup were developers instead of just users, which made me happy.

The presentation was for the patterns module, made by Chris Bryant. The module and surrounding infrastructure address the site setup problem where profiles fal short (in particular, with module add-ons and configurations). One of the surprising features of the module is that, even though it automates a lot of site setup, it does so through form submissions instead of accessing the database directly.

I wish I could say that I was the dynamic, outgoing person I want to be in these situations, but I wasn't. I wasn't uncomfortable, per se, but I was definitely with a group of people I didn't know. I ended up leaving soon after the presentation, and walked back to the train station. It wasn't nearly as far as I thought it was.

So, yeah, each summer, I hire a Smith brother to work for me around the house. I wasn't able to find a Smith brother this summer. Somehow, I think Matty is on to me. Mark must have said something about a shower in a dingy hotel room or something.

Anyway.

I did luck out, however, for this month, as Hannah, a teammate of mine, has a month before she starts working or starting school again in September. She was able to come over last week and just crush my stack of to-do items, blowing through my box of gee-I-really-should-deal-with-this items and generally lowering my stress level by a HUGE lot. I'm very excited for her visit.

Even more so when she brings me treats like home-made pumpkin spice muffins. I mean, hello? the Smith brothers have nothing on Hannah.

Well, except when they wear the leopard-print thong. It's a hard choice when they do that.