Month: August 2021

Another Year

First of all, my wife today referred to our basement as Lake Asshole without me prompting her. It is true, this stupid blog is corrupting people left and right. Insert maniacal laugh here.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled post:

One year ago today I posted a picture that I took with my iPhone. It marked the completion of the Flickr Photo a Day Challenge thing. 366 days (2020 was a leap year) with at least one photo. Success. I had tried that challenge a bunch of times and crashed and burned each time.

The next day (one year ago tomorrow) I still took another picture. The day after that I did it again. I wasn’t planning on doing another photo a day thing, it was just Covid-19 pandemic-land and I had to keep my locked down self entertained somehow, right? A few days into September there was a day where I did not take a still photo, but I did take a video of the cat doing something. Eventually I created an album on Flickr called “Not Doing a 365, but…”

Well… assuming that one video counts for a 365 project (notice I didn’t call it a photo a day this time, that’s a technicality, but it’s my project so I make the damn rules so blah), I just completed the 365 I wasn’t actually doing. That picture of the two wheel dolly I posted earlier? Yeah, that was the pic for day 365. So not only have I completed a photo a day thing after trying and failing over and over again so many times… I’ve now done it twice without a break in between. It’s not a 366 or a 365, it is a 731….

….and counting.

September 1, 2019 through August 31, 2021.

Good heavens, what a nerd!

Stay at Home Day

Today is a simple pandemic shelter in place day. I am staying home and not going anywhere. The work day is 33 minutes away and I have a truck load of stuff to do today. After work I don’t go to my parents so I’ll make a big dinner for me and the love of my life and take the opportunity to get some stuff done at home.

One big focus will be evaluating the current lake asshole situation in the cellar. We are still getting enough rain that I can’t rule out the ground water level as the source of the mini floods, but at this point I am really leaning toward something inside leaking. Hopefully within the next week or so we can get someone out to take a look and see if they can find the root cause. Until then, wet vac plus dehumidifier equals a false sense of security.

I might try to get some musical therapy in tonight. Not sure. I actually had a 45-60 minute window last night where I could have done something/anything and I chose to watch an episode of Toast of London (I still have seven to go and it looks like today is the last day it’s on Netflix. I thought it was being removed today but I just refreshed my Netflix tab and it’s still there. Unless I’m just seeing the cache?) and play a video game. Star Wars: The Old Republic. On a scale of 1-10 I give it a four. Maybe a 3.5. I am playing a Jedi character and he doesn’t have a light saber yet. Maybe once I get that far in the story I’ll give it a higher rating. At my current point, still super early in the story, I do get to slaughter bad guys in an awfully un-Jedi like manner so… it’s okay. For music, I do know that I am currently slightly behind the pace I kept in the two years that I finished 50/90 as far as completed mixes goes, but I think I might be a smidge ahead overall. Who cares. I’m hoping to make a big push this weekend. We’ll see. Still lots of shite going on.

Want a blog stats update? Sure you do! Always remembering that if you have one of a thing and add another of that thing you can rightfully state that you have a huge, dramatic increase… know what I mean? When I talk of growing numbers, they are still very small numbers. Right? Right. I’ve mentioned in the past that my total page views per month stat took a huge jump at the start of the year. January blew away my previous monthly high, then May beat the record by a very tiny bit, then June shattered the record again. July didn’t beat it but it was so close that we can call it a virtual tie. How’d August do? Well, with 15+ hours to go… it shattered June’s record. I don’t know what I am doing to get people to visit, and I am pretty sure most of the page views are spam-related, but thanks for coming folks. I hope I am not boring you to death… I’m pretty sure I am boring everyone to death.

Okay, I am going to punch into work and get my day started. Happy Tuesday, everyone. Wear a mask, wash your hands, practice social distance, get the vaccine if you haven’t already. Be a decent human being and not a selfish, nazi shit.

Half Over

The work day is half over. I’ve made some good progress on a couple of tasks and all in all things are going well today, but the bad sleep last night is starting to get to me. The SleepWatch data was actually really good, super high heart rate dip, super high restful sleep percentage, there just wasn’t much of it. I’m starting to find it hard to concentrate and I still have three hours and 40 minutes to go.

Yippee.

I just had a customer’s request for a tweak to standard functionality forwarded to me and I really don’t think it’s something we are capable of doing and it’s making me stress out to a huge degree. It’s a big customer. An important customer. A customer who has asked us for things that, in granting their requests, has lead to some huge wins for my team over the last few months. I want to get this for them… I just don’t know if it’s possible without a huge redesign. I’m playing this out in my head and it’s making me sad.

Sad on top of tired. Crap.

On the upside, the kids started school today. Bellana’s junior year is underway. Harry’s freshman year is underway. We have two honest to goodness university students. How awesome is that?

Roll Reversal

Big time childhood roll reversal going on this morning. Morning pill distribution is at 8:00am. At the stroke of 8:00, thanks to the iOS Reminders app, I brought them both their morning meds and accompanying stuff (water, food, ect). They were both sound asleep. Neither of them wanted to wake up. It was 8:15 before I got any real response out of them.

Flash back to me at age 6-18. 12 years of schooling with approximately 180 days per year worth of me not wanting to get out of bed each morning and my parents constantly yelling at me to get my ass in gear.

Life is weird, you know?

Sleepy

There was a stretch of time there overnight when I was pretty convinced I wasn’t going to get to four hours of sleep. I didn’t get to bed until a smidge before 1:00am and it was a little before 5:00am and both of my parents were up and about. Mom was making breakfast and dad was using the bathroom. I would guess I was at about three hours and 45-50 minutes. Almost made it. Then my father went back to bed and a few minutes later my mother was back in bed too and shortly after I was asleep again. The total sleep time ended up being four hours and 35 minutes. I was up before 6:00 and I tried to get my morning bathroom routine done before they got up again. I almost made it. My mother’s bladder interrupted me. That was okay though.

Now at 7:12am I have a load of their laundry running and I am setup for work. I am going to cleanup my sleep station a little and then try to sneak in a little of last night’s The Walking Dead episode (season 11, episode 2). I think I can get it all in before work starts, but I will have to stop a few times for parent duties.

I was out of the office on Friday so I will have some hectic catch up to do once I sign in. That’s normal on the first day back after being out. I know I have some stuff that needs to be done for tomorrow, but I am hoping things are quiet today. I got enough sleep to be able to handle whatever the universe throws at me. It’s just a question of when I run out of gas. I am going to try to conserve enough energy to make it to 9:00-10:00pm tonight.

Fingers crossed, my dear readers*.

*In my silly attempt to paraphrase Stephen King’s regular greeting to his readers (what does he write? Loyal readers? Something like that) I misspelled “readers” as “reasers” and left it that way through a full proof read even though the Chrome spell check flagged it as an error. Oh yeah, we gone have a fun wun tuhday.

Resolved

There was stuff going on outside of my parents house tonight and it’s all resolved happily. Kick ass, dude!

While trying to disctract myself from, well… everything, I mixed a second song. That’s it. Nothing else is ready for mixing so this is all you get tonight.

I don’t hate this one. I almost like it. The one I posted an hour or so ago is tons better, but this little 5/4 thingie is better than most of the shit I write.

On the parent sitting front, the floor fan in the living room is starting to squeak. If that sucker dies it will be like losing my closest friend. I love that little spinning bastard. It’s been so good to me over the last five months. I don’t know what I will do without it. HANG IN THERE MY FAN FRIEND!