Chapter 6: Georgia

I spent the next couple of days at home with Mom and Elaine. I knew Mom missed Dad a lot, and spending a couple of nights with Cindy and Nell helped me understand that. I missed them a lot, too, and we hadn’t even gotten to the ‘main event’ yet.

I looked online for a folio for Dad, but that was going to have to be a real trip to one of the larger malls. Maybe in Birmingham, maybe in Atlanta when I picked up my whatever-it-was magic tooth. Other than that, I was done with my shopping two days early. Maybe some of the adulting was wearing off on me.

I did a lot of practicing, both with my mace and shield and with the practice staff. I used one of Dad’s saws to cut mine down to seven feet even. I was still about 5’9” tall, and that might be about it for me. Seven feet was supposed to be a little long for my height, but I could always trim it down a little more if I wanted. Certainly, it was a lot easier to use than it had been at eight feet.

I got a lot of my ALPRA ‘work’ done, too. Georgina had sent me a CSV file with an ‘anonymized’ copy of ALPRA’s Weapon database for me to play with. It had PRA ID number, first name, date ‘selected’ by the system, Portal System profession, weapon, and [known] number of Dives. She said she’d yanked last name, phone number, and all the address fields, but that was it. I should be able to import the table to any spreadsheet or database program and add whatever fields I wanted.

Of course I sorted by weapon first, and I was only listed once. I had to go find those two letters I’d gotten inviting me to that seminar in Gadsden back in October and get the ID numbers to verify that I was two of the Alabama ‘Weapons’. One record said I had a ‘Mace’, and the other said I had an ‘unknown’. I had to wonder how many other double records they had, as well as how many Weapons were flying under the radar. That table was going to need a lot of cleanup. Maybe starting with matching names and/or matching addresses would be best, when I had access to those fields.

I started a list of errors and recommended corrections, as well as a desired list of added fields. However, that was a philosophy question. Was it better to do the crunching in a quiet time and spend the storage space to save calculated values so that the results were immediately available, or was storage space more expensive so it was better to save that space and use the processor cycles live when you needed that calculated data? That was a ‘Georgina’ question.

I sent her an email, pointing out that it would be nice to have a gender field with one byte, allowed options ‘M’ or ‘F’, and ‘-’ or ‘U’ for unknown. In many cases, a human could make a good guess from first name, but some names were ambiguous. Still, I could have known how many attendees at the last BTF training seminar would need the ladies’ room, if I had access to that data.

I also wanted to classify all the weapons as ‘edged’, ‘blunt’, ‘reach’, and ‘ranged’. A sword and an axe were ‘edged’, my mace was ‘blunt’, all the staffs and spears were ‘reach’, and bows and arrows were ‘ranged’. There may be other categories like ‘spellcaster’. All the staffs were ‘blunt’, too. These could be bits toggled in a data word along with gender, but that took cycles to convert to a human-useful display.

Some people got two weapons. Me, I’d gotten a mace and a shield. There should be a field for ‘second weapon’ with a flag saying whether it was used or not. There should also be a flag for whether or not the weapon was useful for defense. My shield was. Any staff was. Some people got no weapons at all, like the ‘brawlers’. Where was the divider between ‘use processor cycles and save storage by figuring this out at every query’ and ‘use storage and save cycles by pre-filling this field’?

Hey, I’d been OFFERED A JOB as a DBA. I understood this stuff!

Nell came and got me on Thursday and we went to lunch at a nice place. I gave her her card, and we went out to the field and ‘snuggled’ some before she took me home. I had a great time and I know she enjoyed it, but I’ve got to find a way to do more for her.

Friday was Christmas Eve. I drove Dad’s car and took Cindy out for dinner and gave her her card and the charm bracelet. She squealed, so I was pretty sure she liked it. I told her the next time I had to save her from some monster, we’d add another charm.

I also gave her a wrapped package for her dad, from “The McGowan family, with love”. He was to open it with the family on Christmas morning. When I was far, far away. I wanted to see his face when he opened his box of green ‘CRE’s, but I didn’t want to be in the same room with him if he got mad.

After dinner we went to the mall and just sat on a bench, watching all the people frantically trying to finish their Christmas shopping. I had to admit that I hadn’t gotten Dad his present yet, but I had until the next time he came home to get it done, so I wasn’t really behind. It was good to just sit and hold her hand and do nothing for a while.

We walked down to the river and walked along it some, but it was too cold to do that for long, so we got back in the car and I took her home. Someday, we’d have a house and we’d be going home together. That would be wonderful, but I suspected that before long we’d have a few screaming children of our own and we’d be back to trying to get away for some peaceful moments together.

Christmas was always fun, but it would have been a lot nicer if Dad had been there. He called on Christmas Day, and we’d done the vidcon the evening before. We showed him his easy chair with presents in it. They’d go in the closet in their room until he got home.

I also had a bag of presents for my team-mates. After that Violet with the Spiders we’d all decided to take a couple of weeks off to concentrate on family and other stuff. Everybody bought something for the team, cheap and maybe silly but helpful for anyone. We’d agreed to trade presents in Georgia. I had wanted to give one of the water-bottle belt pouches to each one but I wanted two for myself so I’d bought eight in case someone else wanted two.

The next few days were pretty quiet. I went to the Jeffreys house for lunch on Christmas Day. Sally was allowed to sit on the other side of the table between Nell and her mom.

Nell brought Cindy over to our house for dinner Christmas night. Elaine thought it was neat that Nell was driving us around, and asked if Nell could take her places, too. Nell thought that maybe it would be better if her mother took her places, or maybe her brother, nodding at Mom and me, but as long as her mother gave permission she could do that some times, when she wasn’t getting run ragged driving Cindy and Sam around.

I took Cindy to dinner the next night, and I went out and met Nell at a restaurant the night after that. Both meals included dessert!

On Tuesday Nell came to our house about ten to pick me up for the trip to Georgia, with Cindy already in the car. We were going to spend the night at a hotel in Milledgeville, with two rooms paid for by GEOPRA. Supposedly it was a four-hour drive with us losing an hour when we crossed into the Eastern Time Zone, but we were going through Atlanta so there was no telling what delays we’d get.