"The bright lights of Broadway are still shining, but the question remains, for how long?

There doesn't appear to be any movement in the deadlock between the stagehands' union and the League of American Theaters and Producers, despite a meeting yesterday aimed at clearing the air.

However, right now there is no indication of a when or if a lockout will take place. Both sides say they have already given their final offers."

[defiant chuckling] All I have to do now is move this script to a server that likes curl_setopt(), set up cron a day or two before we leave, and cackle at the results. It worked! There shall be once-daily reposts of tweets while we're gone -- and I actually learned some nifty stuff, too...

Here we are. The clock on my computer says we have exactly a week to go, and the scary thing is, I think we're more ready than we've been in years past. Jeff brought the Ops server up last night, and I started testing it to make sure the basic functions were ready to go.

I've found a few oddities, and it's not fully functional yet, but I've got a list of fixes and tweaks, and everything looks manageable.

"So how did it go," you ask?

I type this, looking down at the clock on the right-hand side of my computer's display. 6:38. I have a little bit of time, but not much. Today I really need to get out of here as early as possible, because I'm taking a long (paid) break in the middle of the day. My houseguest flies home today, and I'm not going to pass up the chance to have one last, lazy, caffeinated lunch with him before taking him to the airport and getting that quiet little lump in my throat I get every time I put someone I care about on a plane.

At lunchtime, the raindrops were starting to find each other and think about congregating on windshields, and I thought about Chris, out west, half a world and a blizzard away.

We've relaxed since getting here, having put down our daily lives on the floor next to our bags and picking up something simpler. We've flitted from restaurant to restaurant, snagging wings here, Chinese there.This afternoon, we went gifting, bringing Patrick along for the plan of getting him a birthday shirt. A simple plan, a dress shirt; help Patrick finally find a dress shirt he liked that actually fit, buy it for him and wish him a happy birthday.