Mom's heading home tomorrow, so she asked if she could take me out to dinner on her last night here. We've been cooking most meals, and managed to eat all the leftovers, so heading out was a good idea.

After dinner, we were readying to leave the restaurant, but, never missing the opportunity, we went to use the toliets. As luck would have it, the women's was occupied, but the men's wasn't.

Yes, I went into the men's restroom. Both of them are single rooms, not stalls, so closing and locking the door meant no one would be shocked at a woman in the men's room. Just as I was closing the door, I thought, hey, maybe Mom doesn't want to stand outside there, wondering, cripes, is my kid going to get in trouble for this, so I invited her in.

Women. We can do this and not be embarrassed.

As I was sitting on the toliet, Mom looked at the urinal on the opposite wall, complete with a bright red liner that screamed, "TARGET! AIM HERE!"

"Hmmmm, I guess they put that in there to prevent backsplash."

"The red thing? I guess so," I responded.

"Wouldn't that be a pisser? You're wearing tan pants and you splash on yourself when you pee? At knee height, no less," she continued, marvelling at the urinal.

"Uh, pun intended? A pisser pissing?"

"Pun intended!"

A minute later, I was washing my hands and Mom was using the toliet.

"You know what would be a worse pisser, Mom?"

"No. What?"

"If I left right now."

"Yeah. Not sure how'd I'd explain that to the guy trying the door right now."

"There's someone outside the door right now?"

"Yep."

"Oh. I'll just wait then."

"You do that."

Tomorrow's Master Gardener class is actually a tour of various Master Gardener projects. We're to head out some time this week to see the different projects and report back in small groups next week.

I'm heading out tomorrow with my mentor group, and Mom is going with me. I'm not sure we're going to spend the whole day touring projects, but we'll tour at least in the morning.

The group is doing a potluck lunch. I've been dying to make some of Shirley's peanut butter cookies, which she had made for me like six months ago after I helped her move a couch. Since I'd lost my sense of smell, most peanut butter cookies taste like cardboard. These, now these I could taste.

And I wanted some.

So, I told Mom we were going to make some tonight. We had dinner and watched the most recent episode of Heroes before starting on the cookies at 9:00 at night.

Only to realize the recipe calls for the dough to chill for 2 hours in the middle.

2 hours.

TWO hours.

Yeah, I'm not staying awake that long, I thought, we'll just chill them in the freezer for a few minutes, they'll still turn out.

Ten minutes of chilling, one minute of dropping balls of dough onto the baking sheets and twelve minutes of cooking later, I pulled the two dozen cookies out of the oven.

Now, for the record, they taste wonderful. Mom ate three lickety-split, and she doesn't eat cookies very often. I downed two before accidently dropping one on the floor and dodging out of the way of the doggie feeding frenzy.

So, they taste good.

They just look like little piles of doggie puke:

Maybe I won't take them to the potluck tomorrow.

They move away from me, and look what they get:

Weather!

Of course, having the car move from the top of the driveway to the bottom of the driveway overnight, while in park, probably wasn't what they were expecting.

When's the last time I read a book?

From start to finish, cover to cover?

I don't know.

I know I have Mark's copy of Catch 22 at the top of my stack. I've tried to read it three or four times. I've started, stopped, restarted, stopped again. I keep going through that cycle, never quite getting into it. Mark and Tyler and Kris all say it's worth the read. They all admit it's a boy's book, too. That might be part of the problem of my inability to read the book.

I have three or four technical books I've started and managed half way through or so. Haven't finished them.

My commute is four minutes long, seven on a bad day, so the books on CD that I've been "reading" have taken me months to finish, when they take Kris only a couple weeks. Though, with his shorter commute, he's managed to draw out the stories to all of maybe a month.

Maybe.

I can't believe my concentration has dwindled to mere moments on a web page or partial hours with a magazine. Is a thousand word article really my max? Can I really read a classic only in five minute increments?

I remember months, which have probably faded to years, ago thinking, I'm too busy, something has to give. Then it was my health. Now I think it's going to be the Intarweb™. There is so much interesting information out there that stopping is going to be hard.

But, geez, I haven't stopped to read a book since I threw the last Harry Potter across the room in a fit of anger at the death of one of the characters.

Today I had a client emergency. Their website response times had been deteriorating lately, and had hit a critical spot today, causing cascading failures in their systems. When I logged into the database server and started watching the processes, it became clear fairly quickly the server was either overloaded or spinning it gears, and causing the website to slow.

I looked at the usual culprits for system slowdown (disk space, runaway processes, excessive memory consumption, swap space issues), with no success in finding the problem. I started watching the database processes for bad (unoptimized) queries and found several locked, waiting for another query to complete.

A little digging later and I found a sessions query was locking the system. Puzzled, because this query is optimized and very simple, I went to clear old sessions from the sessions table.

To realize there were around 670k sessions in the table.

There should be a few thousand. That there would be this many was momentarily puzzling. They're cleared out on a regular basis. I started a delete query to remove all of the anonymous user sessions.

I have so many watches and checks and alerts on these systems, that I receive warnings (email, SMS, IM) when it hiccups, how could it have gotten this far?

As I watched, the system deteriorated so that I couldn't become root, nor could Mike or I log in remotely. I had to go to the colocation facility and the computer directly to log in. Off I went, and twenty minutes I was at the colo. In that twenty minutes, and it did take that long, the delete sessions query finished, and the system was humming along again.

I drove back to the office puzzled.

And then it hit me.

The website receives a frequently scheduled hit to a page that triggers the database clean up. That scheduled process was sending me email on a daily basis. I was ignoring them because, if everything is running properly, I shouldn't receive them.

This was the problem. The scheduled process wasn't cleaning out the database tables as needed, and I was ignoring the error, and the sessions table grew to an unsustainable size for the frequency it's accessed.

Lesson learned: listen to the small errors before they grow into big ones.