Month: November 2021

I have a few minutes to hit this first-thing-in-the-morning today.

More recycling form 2015

---

It’s the final Tuesday of the month. Do you care?

Not really, no. All it means, really, is that next Tuesday will be the first day I haven’t written in a month.

Although there’s still a few days left, I think I’ve proven to myself that I can still keep a commitment to something sometimes tedious.

By the same token, though, the fourteen months I’ve spent in this horrible, very bad job indicate teh same thing.

I’ve endured a lot in my life. Some of it deserved. Some of it undeserved. But all of it flavors my values, who I am.

I can endure a lot; the question is why do I keep doing it? When will I get to do something that I really enjoy professionally again? I’ve considered a lot lately, mainly to get out of my current situation, but should I go do something else I really won’t enjoy, for very little money?

Hmmmm…..

But one day of work left. I’m ready for a break.

---

I miscalculated that when I was putting together my prompts. The last Tuesday in the month is actually tomorrow, the 30^th.

But, in keeping with the general tenor of the original entry, I think I’ll still feel like things are completed. Will I care that tomorrow is the last Tuesday? Not particularly. Will I care that it’s the last day in the pay period? A slight amount, I guess. I’m actually burning a little leave this pay period, so that’s a change from normal.

I was such a stick-in-the-mud when it came to a benefit I’d end up not being able to use very much. Thank you, The Science. (Why do I feel like Dave Smith’s pronouncements Saturday make him akin to the Dr. Fauci of the LP? Except Fauci’s been sucking at the public teet almost as long as Dave’s been breathing….)

But back to the prompt. Do I care that November is kind of over? A little. The weather is really outside my knowledge at this point given how rarely I go outside. I do sort of miss the days of when cold air would invade my lungs first thing as I step outside in the morning. (And, for several years, before warm tobacco smoke replaced it…)

though I’m physically closer to the point where I’d be able to enjoy that, it’s been taken from me for other reasons; thanks, The Science.

I could wax nostalgic about it, but I don’t really have that many good memories. I guess the closest would be some of the things in my youth in Europe. Or a couple of times freezing with my girlfriend (now wife) in DC.

Is there something that I can do? I don’t know.

One more day. Completion.

Thumbing through pars years to see if there was a prompt I can steal for this year.

Nope. Nothing. But there was one with a link to totes-didn’t-used-to-do-evil Co.’s clip of Mike Gundy’s exasperated rant of I’m A Man. I’m 40!

But I guess the biggest message of today is one of completion.

I am excited to continue through to the end of my charge

How long can I keep going one that’s finished?

I don’t know, and, to be honest, I really don’t think about it much.

I’m listening to this in the background, and wondering if the guest has ever spoken at Shmoocon.

I guess I’m somewhat-impressed with how well some of these tools work. I don’t know if it’s a chicken-or-the-egg situation, however. I suppose retrofitting some of the nifty features is easier than securing something that’s an open sore.

But I think the only reason that that’s having to happen is because the big players, who portrayed themselves as paragons of virtue, out only to make the world a better place.

Maybe this reaction from Fargo is a good description of how I feel about it.

They’ve buddied-up with the thugs with guns. Maybe I should be more worried about irking them, but, well, I am the one who’s seeing a psychologist.

But I’ve finished it. Completion.

And I don’t care, and I feel like there’s something wrong with that.

Whatever.

All that said, it’s now afternoon, I’m almost out of coffee, so I’m going to stop for the day.

Tomorrow I’ll go find a flu shot, since there isn’t really a lot of interesting football with the Saints having lost on Thanksgiving, and the For(mer)skins playing Monday night.

–snip–

I had a resigned aside there about finishing writing so I could go do some work.

Instead of saving and finishing, Completion, I decided to go do the work I’d planned on doing.

An hour an a half later, I can get back to this.

But I really don’t have anything more to add, actually.

So that’s it.

Three more, and completion.

Thanksgiving went pretty well. Good food. Enjoyed spending time with my wife just the two of us.

Football, on the other hand, wasn’t great, especially if you were rooting for one of the home teams.

The Saints were destroyed. On one of the other networks’ pregame shows, they said the Saints have fourteen players out of the game due to an injury.

Starting quarterback, Starting halfback, Reserve halfback, top wide receiver, etc. etc.

They’ll be partying some nights in the Quarter, certainly. It won’t be because of the Saints.

It happens

So, what did I want to write about today?

It’s “Black Friday,” so I guess Christmas shopping is top of mind.

My brother is pretty straightforward. My wife enjoys worrying about her family, etc.. Still not sure what to do for my mother — there’s lots that needs to happen with regards to her relocation.

I don’t know what to get my wife, but I will figure it out.

I would like to send a card to the nurses who took care of my at Georgetown over the past couple of years.

I wish there was a good way to do that doesn’t involve me worrying about the disaster that is the US Postal Service.

My grandfather is pretty straightforward, too.

I’ve been rethinking a bit my leaving-behind of the Space Cowboy, and his shipping Borg.

But I’m trying to enjoy the not working part.

How am I doing? Debatable.

I really don’t know that I have a chance to really go do something just for me. With B.1.1529, which is not Elon Musk’s illegitimate son, is sealing things up again.

So it goes.

Three more days.

Thanksgiving

That’s today, isn’t it?

It’s just me and my wife. She’s finishing up some cooking things, and watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I’ll go join her after I write. And get some coffee, maybe a bit to nibble on to try and extend until the late afternoon meal.

The Saints are playing tonight. I’m wondering how bad a game it can be. The Bills are in NOLA, but both teams are really collapsing toward the end of the season.

Other stuff….

I watched Bombshell yesterday. I guess it was okay. I worked in professional media for, what, early a decade, and I never saw anything even remotely resembling that sort of thing.

Occasionally you’d get a couple of employees hooking up, but I attribute that more to it being an environment where you’re surrounded by somewhat-attractive young people; they hook up. They drink. They take drugs. They get upset about seemingly-inconsequential things. This isn’t news.

I listened to an interview with Joanne Nosuchinsky where she touched on her departure from FOX News while all of this was breaking. She was pretty adamant that nothing had happened to her, and she was unaware that really anything was going on.

Speaking of Joanne, I’m curious about what she and Bill Schultz are doing with their streaming TV show.

At the same time, it’s really tough for me to justify paying money for yet another TV service that I won’t watch much of.

There’s only so many hours in the day, and my eyes only are useful for so long.

I’m going to go drink coffee, watch the parade, and enjoy Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving to anyone who’s reading my blather.

I don’t know where this one ran off to yesterday….

i was going to go through and finish something I’d started a couple of years ago, but never got around to finishing.

My brain is still swimming around with to do with this next project.

I think I might try to write an record an ep this weekend to see how it goes.

I’m listening to Adam Carolla talk about family Thanksgiving.

As a kid, we were overseas so often I only got a couple of those. The last one I really have memories of was riding down I-95 next to a very excited Golden Retriever puppy who would get carsick.

This.

Yeah, there’s not much I can identify with that.

We were so spread out across the world that it didn’t happen all that often.

There were a few times where we went to the mess hall so my dad could eat with the people he was commanding.

There was often one or more bachelor officers and soldiers who were invited guests to eat with us.

Nobody would have ever even considered bitching about the Mac & Cheese.

I just realized that maybe part of the reason I’m partial to the Lions’ game is because it was playing in the evening in Germany.

But I think the idea of traditional Thanksgiving might be part of what’s got me on the try-all-the-things-people-used-to-rave-about kick.

I realized a few months ago that I’d never actually had Maxwell House coffee.

Part of that could have been the period where I got out of drinking coffee for a while, but my parents were always Folger’s people….until there were other things coming in at the Commissary, and they got a Braun coffee grinder.

My mom, on one of her antique store trips, found a cookbook from the White House. The calculations take a lot of time to cut the recipes down to a consumable size, but these things were saved for a reason — by and large, they were really fucking good!

These things take time to prepare, but I think the payoff is worth it.

I would like to do some things, myself, but it’s not an issue I’m excited to debate.

I’ve written enough, now, I think. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.

Almost finished.

Out of curiosity, I decided to look at some of what I’d written the first year I did this, 2010.

---

What was the most precious thing you ever gave up willingly?

Wow; this is a toughie. For so long, I was probably more selfish over my personal things than I should have been….especially my computer equipment.

I let borrow, then gave my wife my old iBook after we’d only been dating for a few months. That little notebook is probably the best little computer I’ve ever owned.

Truth be told, and thinking more about it, I didn’t give it for entirely unselfish reasons. I wanted to be able to communicate with her online, and her parents’ computer was so strangled with fifteen different antivirus and antispyware programs that it was basically unusable. So, talking to her was more important to me than the cost of the computer, or its sentimental value.

Long story short……I think she loves Macs more than me, but that’s okay. She’d never used one before we started dating, and that’s now all she uses.

As for that specific little white iBook, it died. Unfortunately, it was one of the first ones that was totally ROHS-compliant; the solder traces are very brittle. A couple of the GPU’s solder joints broke, making it basically unusable. I gave her the Macbook I’d bought to replace it when I got the job offer to get out of the last company. I bought myself a second, almost identical machine, set my old one up with her old data, slipped a copy of my offer letter inside, and gave it to her.

I don’t think she quite knew what to think.

Still, by that point, I pretty much knew. I gave her the second one in late September. In early February, I gave her something more expensive, but more durable and meaningful. 🙂

Speaking of which, we still need to figure out wedding rings. We’re married, but we didn’t do rings. She still wears her engagement ring, but *I* don’t have anything. There’s that selfish thing again…..I feel kinda naked.

---

Re-doing that prompt seems more than a little, umm, odd. That little Macintosh was kinda neat, still. Unfortunately, it was one of the early ones that didn’t use lead in the solder to meet ROHS regs, so, eventually, the GPU came unsoldered from the motherboard.

I am tired, but I have work to do later tonight. I also have work that I probably should do tomorrow, but I’m scheduled for time off.

Decisions, decisions.

I’m still trying to find sites that’ll let me go back through, and find headlines from a specific date.

The only one I’ve been able to find, really, is Democracy Now!, which is more than a bit more partisan than I’d like. (They make CNN and MSNBC look right-wing)

Top headline from last year?

U.S. Holiday Travel Surges as U.S. COVID-19 Cases Soar Past 12 Million

And today….

So there’s that.

Productive day, I suppose. I don’t really know how to describe what I’m feeling, honestly.

I did get an enthusiastic thumbs-up on my idea. Maybe that’ll be something I can try as a test-run on Wednesday, since I’m not working that day.

I think the tack I’m going to take to start is to select three stories, and do re-examinations on each of them, see if it matches what was reported a year ago.

We’ll see how it goes.

Though the tagline on this blog is “everything gets deleted, eventually,” I do know that it’s possible to go back and see what was going on.

Oddly enough, I just saw something I wrote on this day in 2014. Holy fuck was that a horrible situation. Essentially what happened is that I took a job that was not really necessarily up-my-alley. I needed money. There was a contract change underway, and they hired me as the junior person on the contract. My job really was to warm a seat.

Then they couldn’t reach an agreement with the in-place capture of the senior person for the position. They promoted me to fill the senior position. Without a single additional cent in salary.

It was awesome. After something like eighteen months in that mess, I left for something that was differently awful.

Whatever. It’s all over now.

On to other things….

I need to figure out a few more prompts for the next week or so. Hmmm.

---

Somehow I got on a mailing list — WordGenius. (Let’s not start with how I consciously try to avoid using overly-complicated words in my writing, but there are some interesting tidbits, to be sure. Recently, they had a post that included writing prompts.

These are not easy. Who is my favorite author so I can write in his/her style? Good question.

Anyway, there’s at least one I can attack…

Write Your Senses

Smelling: Nothing in particular. Perhaps some vague spearmint. And Dr. Pepper Zero Sugar

Seeing: The display on my PC.

Hearing: A podcast that’s currently recapping the Rittenhouse acquittal.

Feeling: Numb

Tasting: Dr. Pepper Zero Sugar

I really am not trying to throw out an ad for Dr. Pepper. I don’t have a sponsorship. It’s just what I’m drinking at the moment.

Eight more days.

Taking things back five years for this prompt.

Nov. 21, 2016, 5:01 p.m.

Write about something you’ve had to re-learn.

The impetus for this was something too personal to write about publicly.

As my nerves stop working, I’ve had to re-learn lots of things.

Many of them are attributable to my limited eyesight, unsteady balance.

I learn to do things one-handed, so I can steady myself with the other.

Perhaps oddly, I find myself doing a lot more things from the sinister side.

The neurologist I saw at Georgetown said I was a lefty. I don’t even. Maybe it’s that I’m wearing my Fitbit on my right wrist, and carrying my cane in my right hand, leaving my left free to do other things.

shrug

The TV news is doing pre-fab stories about smartphone apps for cooking. Yeah, about that.

How about just printing the recipe?

Part of my fun the past few days has involved getting my 401K funds from the company that shall not be named. I didn’t even think about the pittance I’d contributed when I finally GTFO of that hellhole until I got a notice that they were paying me a penalty and interest for a mistake they’d made.

I’m trying to be surprised.

But they’re giving me the run-around on getting it rolled over into my IRA.

Again, trying to be surprised.

I seriously need my Tysabri infusion. It’s weird; I’m exhausted, but not terribly sleepy.

This is a Monday for me.

At least there should be an interesting game tonihgttonight.

Apologies, to quote Katy, to my non-existent reader, but I really don’t have a ton to say today.

---

And jumping back on for this year…

Write about something you’ve had to re-learn.

I’m trying to remember what sort of physical things I was enduring when I wrote about this.

It’s tough to discern, but I think I was still somewhat new in another professional situation where I’d been misled.

At the same time, it really doesn’t matter.

I came across an idea yesterday that I’ve gone whole-hot into pursuing.

One of the things my psychologist has long suggested is I start doing something again where I’m communicating orally.

I think part of the big thing that my periodic meetings with her provide is an opportunity to just speak.

I don’t get much of a chance to do that in my current situation.

Though I’m getting into more meetings, many of them are just me listening and taking notes, not participating.

I have things to say. What I don’t do well anymore is snappy conversation.

I couldn’t host a talk show anymore. I don’t speak quickly enough.

But I think I can put together things, still, in a logical way.

I’ve been bouncing a few ideas off of Justin Campbell, who does a lot of the stuff with several of the podcasts to which I listen.

I think I have it. I’ve registered a domain. I have the equipment I need. I’ve figured out what I’m going to do, when I’m going to record and release.

So that takes me back to what I want to the prompt.

I need to get back further into the IT side of things. Accompanying blog set up.

Twitter account will come at some point.

I don’t know if anyone would want to do Facebook and Instagram, but I’m not terribly concerned about those at this point.

Ideally, the first bit will drop during the event I really wish I could be attending, but can’t. So I’ll talk about it.

I will write and speak, and we’ll see where it goes.

The overall idea that’s guiding this is looking back at things one year later.

Let’s take a step back, and see what people were up-in-arms about. I can see what I was writing about a year ago. What was the rest of the world talking about? How much of the reporting on it ended up being correct?

So, let’s go.