Fred Mallard lives

When I was a little kid of about 6 or 8, one day I wrote a letter to my mother (I think this was at a time when we didn't see each other every day). It's in one of her keepsake boxes for me. I wrote something like this: Dear Mom, How are you? I am fine. Today I had a 60/40 day. (I was a precocious squirt, and I was just getting glimmerings of the ideas [a] of relative proportions and [b] that daily life was not an unmixed joy.) 60 bad because I lost the room's kickball in the woods, (No fence around the playground.) And 40 good because I found it again.

Today was a 60/40 day. Except that, instead of the room's kickball, it was 83K rows from a key table in the central CMS database. A backup copy of the database, a magic Perl script, and the help of Jason, Stephen, Justin, Paul, and Jared, and the rows have been retrieved from the woods.