Author: robertjames1971

I'm wicked tall.

Photo Fail

The web based Flickr photo uploader works in two steps. First you chose the files you want to upload. It preps them. You can tell the uploader which albums to add your new photos to, and what tags to give them, and what permissions, and what groups, and what people, and all sorts of fun stuff like that. When everything is ready you click upload and BOOM, the photos are uploaded to your account.

During this morning’s surprise guitar playing I took a picture for the photo a day thing using my mirrorless camera. I added them to the uploader, added some tags, picked an album to add them to, marked the permissions as being viewable by the public…

…and then promptly forgot to click the upload button. Oops.

On the off chance that something keeps me from getting home at a decent hour tonight (nothing will, I’m just doing what the boy scout motto said and being prepared) I took a picture in the kitchenette at work just to make sure my photo-a-day-butt is covered.

Enjoy… or something.

Frustrated

Dude, you need to calm down. I know you’re in a fragile state right now, what with the impending wake and funeral, but you have to relax. You have to stop stressing. You have to stop letting everything get under your skin.

So what if the person sitting behind you in the open concept office space doesn’t have their laptop muted and you can hear the alert every time they get a Google Meet chat message, and so what if that alert is happening 2-3 times a minute all day long.

So what if that other person sitting near you doesn’t have their phone muted and it keeps ringing at 100 decibels and it also has the same ring tone you use on your own phone and every time it rings you simultaneously jump through the ceiling and reach for your own phone to answer the call that isn’t coming to you.

So what if two hours ago you asked someone to move an escalated issue they are looking at to another application, where it clearly belongs, so that management doesn’t start hounding you with questions and requests for updates that you will not be able to give and they ignored you (why?) and now you are both getting hounded by management with questions and requests for updates that you cannot provide because the issue does not belong with you and yet still they haven’t moved the fucking issue to the other application.

So what if the only thing on this Earth that you want to do is leave this fucking office and go work from home but you cannot for at least another three hours.

So what?

Just calm down, you psycho. Calm the frick down.

Screwed Up Routine

I overslept a little. I had a bit of an issue first thing. Nothing major, but it threw off my morning routine enough that I dumped the whole deal down the crapper. Instead of doing my 50 minutes or so of morning exercise I did 30 minutes of guitar playing. Bad for the physical health, but good for the mental health… or something like that.

I still managed to mess up the timing a little so that I had to rush through some of the morning routine things that I didn’t skip. I’m in the office today so there’s a bunch of office-day-prep things that need to happen.

I got in on time though, and I wasn’t planning on having time for much on the musical front today and I ended up with a song’s worth of guitar parts recorded. I’ll take that as a win.

I’m off tomorrow for my dad’s wake, but I have the morning to myself. I might get a hair cut. I will definitely iron a couple of dress shirts. I might play a shit load of guitar. I will definitely do about 50 minutes worth of exercise.

Which Me is Real?

My sister in law started a shared Google Photo Album where we can all add pictures of my father. One of my brother’s friends is going to make a slide show out of them that we will have running at the wake on Thursday.

I was looking through the album and I had a weird moment where my memory and reality sort of broke apart from each other. There was a picture of me from a couple of years before I had my weight loss surgery. I wasn’t even close to the 450 pounds I weighed when I finally decided to go under the knife, but I was probably 380 pounds or so. I was huge, though not quite as huge as I would eventually get.

Seeing that picture didn’t phase me in the least. I kept scrolling through the album and I eventually got to a photo from earlier this year. Father’s Day, to be precise. There was a picture of my father with my brother, my sister, and some other guy. I did a double take. The other guy was me. I didn’t recognize myself. It was the same me that I see in the morning now. It was post-surgery, 215-220 pound me. The current me. The new normal, real me. I didn’t recognize me.

I did recognize the dangerously overweight me as if it were the “real” me.

That didn’t bother me quite as much as being asked about my mother while talking about my father’s funeral did (as mentioned in a post from earlier today), but it disturbed me a bit.

Like… who am I? Who is the “real” me? Do I even know? Will I ever know?

Well, That was Painful

I did a little funeral planning today. My step daughter, Bellana, is going to sing a song at the service and I had to call the parish musical director to get a copy of the arrangement. I mentioned whose funeral it was and she got all sad. She knew my parents and extended her condolences. She said she hoped my mother was doing okay.

Well, in her defense, my parents stopped going to this church when they moved out of town about three years ago. The music director hadn’t seen or heard from them at all over that time. While my mother’s funeral a year and a half ago was in this very same church, I did not expect her to remember that.

Still… I’m already feeling pretty low over losing my father but then to have to share that my mother’s been gone for over a year. Yeah, that was a bit of a gut punch. Ouch, babie. Ouch.

Dad’s wake is the day after tomorrow. The funeral is the day after that.

Turn Around

I left the driveway for work at 7:40 or so. I drove until about 8:10 and then something came up at home and I had to turn around and head back. It took less than 10 minutes to get home.

And now you understand how Boston traffic works once Labor Day is over.

At least I took today’s photo a day pic. 3/365.

3/365

2024 50/90 Challenge Day 61/90

I put vocals onto five songs first thing in the morning. That’s all I got to for the day.

Today (day 62, Tuesday) and tomorrow are work in the office days so there won’t be a ton of time available. The next couple of summary posts are going to be thin. Just saying.