Birthdays and addictions

I left work early yesterday so we could make it to Springfield to have dinner with my mom on her 70th birthday. She was in the mood for pizza so we met on N. Limestone and then went back to her house for cake and ice cream. I picked up the check despite grumblings from Jerry and gave mom a gift certificate to a local beauty/health store where she can have petticures done, something she really enjoys. The big party is on the 20th this month and we're now at roughly 100 people on the invitation list between the two sides of mom's extended family. Hopefully everything goes off without a hitch and she has a great time. On a more somber note today would've been my father's 72nd birthday. I always thought it quite thoughtful of my parents to have their birthdays back-to-back like they did. . .made it much easier for me to remember the dates as a child.

My LOTRO addiction rages on, keeping me up until almost 1am last night on a work night, something I haven't done since years before Megan was born. I hit level 19 and just had to finish a particular quest that gave a bow as its reward, a weapon that was a significant improvement over my hunter's current bow. And I've now got a former co-worker and two current co-workers playing on Nimrodel with me. The game's performance is still somewhat erratic, so I'm hoping a beafier graphics card with more on board memory will help smooth its frame rate out; I could of course come off using the game's ultra high texture setting but that would be too easy.

It's my week to sit the help desk and as luck would have it one of the ladies has been calling in and the phones have been ringing off the hook. On the plus side of work, I won a major battle in a meeting yesterday to have default profiles implemented. The desktop support lead was adamant against going this route because of his unfamiliarity with roaming profiles, but fortunately I was able to present a far stronger case for configuration control advantages by using a default roaming profile.