What an odd week this has become. It all started on Wednesday afternoon. I'd invited three of our experts to travel to San Francisco to take part with me in a design seminar, the goal being to arrive at a high-level architectural design for the complicated project I've been working on for a couple of months now, for a customer of ours in San Mateo.

This project has been unpredictable from the beginning. It's a "dot.com" company, and it's an extremely strategic customer for my company. But the guy who I've been working with there, who is basically running the company, is a bit of a nutcase. He's brilliant, mercurial, always changing his mind, refusing to be pinned-down by details - in short, the worst possible customer for a software development project.

But we've been able to hold the faith until now - we've transformed the project several times, each time to accomodate what he says he's looking for, and, by Wednesday at noon, after a half-day of the design seminar, I was feeling great. We'd brainstormed through the morning and arrived at some ideas that got us past the biggest roadblocks.

I took a lunch break in my own office, to catch up with email, and peruse the New York Times. There was one tiny little email from my contact at our customer's: "You'd better talk to the sales rep - I've changed my mind again." Jeez, I thought, here we go again.

But this was worse than I expected. He'd just come back from our national conference, where he'd been presenting the prototype of the application we're developing for him. He'd been wined and dined by everyone, including our President. And he'd had his vision filled with tantalizing technology. Naturally, he came back from this conference burning with the desire, as might any technology-geek, to use all those cute new widgets.

He'd also apparently come to the conclusion that because I hadn't myself suggested him using this new technology on the project, it meant that I must be inexperienced if not incompetent. What this guy didn't remember is that we'd discussed this very technology with him early on, and pointed out to him that it was "beta" - that is unreleased, and unfinished, and therefore too risky to use in a project that had to be delivered in a short time frame.

The first thing I thought of was that, Lord, I have three guys sitting in that conference room right now, enthusiastically using their time to hash out a solution. They'd flown in, two of them at least, from the East Coast, and now I had to go in and tell them that I didn't know if the darned project was going to continue! I took the easy way out - I procastinated. I'd find out more by talking to the various parties involved, and meanwhile continue with the design work - after all, it may still come in handy, I thought.

Well it took another twenty-four hours to get through all the talking, but by noon on Thursday, it had been decided that we might as well stop work on the project entirely. Some of our senior technology experts were going to fly in and meet with this guy, who had now decided that the project didn't need to meet his tight deadlines any longer.

So I did what anybody else would have done when finally released suddenly from a fairly long period of pressure and hard work - I went home and took the afternoon off. As I walked home, I felt extremely crotchety. I was angry with this guy, who I thought I'd build a good relationship with. He'd decided against me but hadn't even the nerve to call me and explain it, but had instead talked to our sales person. To add to my annoyance, I began to feel that twinge in my knee that I get from a long-running problem that had, in the past, prevented me from taking up running. It looked like it was beginning to reoccur, which was all I needed to add to my discontent.

Back in my apartment, I flicked through the channels on the TV. I was too tired and demoralized to do anything else. My new cable provider has channels I'm not used to, including the Nashville Channel. Well, I never expected to find anything on that channel I could watch, but I came across "The Waltons". I guess not everyone reading this will remember the Waltons, but it was a seventies TV series which idealized the rough, hard-scrabble life of a depression era, rural family called the Waltons, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It was a program I always loved. As I settled down to it, I didn't know if my affection for the show would have lasted all this time. But it was still there. I ordinarily can't abide overly schmaltzy movies and television, but there was an unaffected naturalness to the acting, and, jeez, it was just nice to pretend for a while that a family could live together with such love, and care.

After my sojourn on Walton's Mountain, I lay down on my bed temporarily, and next thing I knew, I'd been asleep for two and a half hours! But the sleep had restored my spirits somewhat, and I no longer felt so overpoweringly tired. And I had an interesting email! Earlier this week, while I'd been on a long wait on the phone at work, I'd idly browsed the classified ads online - just those with photos, you understand :) And my eyes had stopped at a pic of a very sexy, cute guy, who sounded charming and affectionate. So I'd sent him an email, not expecting anything. But by Thursday, we'd exchanged a couple of emails already, and after I woke up from my nap, I had an email from him suggesting we meet for a drink that evening.

When we met, he turned out to be as charming, intelligent and sexy as his ad had made him seem, and we had a lovely (and ultimately censored :) evening together.

Friday dawned overcast and damp. I wasn't feeling too good. Still very tired, and almost as if I was coming down with a cold. Since my project was at an end, I decided it was okay to call in sick, so I had a restful, and productive day at home. By the late afternoon, I was feeling fine again, and even had the energy for a very intense workout with Cecilia. As I picked up my chicken-caesar salad from Pasta Pomodoro, and a video of an old black-and-white cold-war movie named "Mackintosh Man", I felt on top of the world, and was looking forward to a quiet, relaxing evening at home.

But as I pulled away from the curb outside the gym, I heard that fateful flapping noise from my near front wheel which meant that I had a flat! Jeez. It was cold and dark, and I had to wait an hour and a quarter for road-service, and by that time, I was chilled through and through. I sped homeward down Market Street, and half ran through an amber traffic light, pulling up beyond the light right in front of a pedestrian cop with a flashlight. My heart sank right out of the bottom of my car. But he just flashed his light in my face, and passed by. By the time I got home, it was too late to watch the darned video, so I took myself to bed. The perfect end to a week that was so off kilter.