Tag: anniversary

Big Red Haired Ball of Stress

Woah, boy… today… am I right, or am I right?

The stress level today has been through the roof. The contractor experience went off without a hitch, but the first half of the work day was… woah.

We caught a customer issue before the customer did and went into a mad scramble to get it straightened out for them. It took a little while to get a band aid in place but now we’re dealing with figuring out how to stop it from ever happening again while also talking the customer down from their panicked state. The code/app that my team is responsible for is downstream from the actual cause of the problem. It didn’t happen in our piece of the system, but it did present itself to people using our piece of the system. Yikes is the word of the day. Everyone involved, both on my company’s side and on the customer’s side, did a bang up job getting everything straightened out, and I bet that when the dust settles we’ll all agree it wasn’t that big of a deal… but for the moment. Yikes.

Back to the home owner situation, two more contractors are coming tomorrow. One is a plumber who will put everything that was taken apart today back together again. The other is just a routine maintenance thing. I will be in the office for both of them though. I am thinking about trying to find a way to be able to stay home for all of it. I don’t want my wife to have to deal with either thing. If I work from home tomorrow it means I will have to be in the office three days next week…….. yeah, I think I am going to work from home tomorrow. Command decision made. Three days next week.

On an unrelated note, today is the anniversary of my Uncle Johnny’s death. It’s been 17 years. He was godfather to both me and my sister. He was my father’s only sibling. He had a tough life but he overcame a lot of awful shit. He was good people and I love him and I miss him. I wish he could have known all of our kids. He would have been proud, I know it.

Okay. Back to the stress. Look out below!

Five Years

Today is an important anniversary for me. It was five years ago today that my company’s Covid-19 pandemic response went into effect. March 13, 2020 was the last day we worked in the office. We were told to clear out anything we needed for our work day (I had a desktop machine at that point so I packed it up and took it home) and to clean off our work areas as much as possible. The operations staff was going to disinfect the hell out of all of our buildings during our two weeks of working at home.

Two weeks. That was the plan. Sure, it was a tentative plan as no one had any idea what they were doing. We thought we’d lock down for a few weeks in order to give medical staff a chance to get out in front of things and then we’d be okay. Two weeks turned into years (plural). Things are more or less back to normal now, though we’re still working from home more often than working in the office. I’m on a laptop now instead of my desktop, and the building I cleared out of on 3/13/20 has been sold. I’m sitting at my desk in a different building, but still with the same company. The higher ups have made it pretty clear that they’d like us to be in the office more often, but the rank and file are pretty adamant about working from home more often. It’s a confusing situation and we’re all doing our best to accommodate everyone else.

I still wear a mask sometimes. Not often. Mostly when I am feeling a little under the weather and need to leave the house. I’ll put on a mask to keep everyone else safe. That’s what the maga cult never understood. It was never about keeping yourself safe, it was about keeping others safe. The maga cult is too selfish to do that particular piece of math. They don’t care about other people at all, only themselves. Whatever. Fuck them.

Just for fun, I went back and read everything I posted on that day. It included a photo of an empty parking lot at work. That was cute. I also wrote this:

So Harry has high school classes at home, Bellana has college classes at home, Jen has work from home, and ol’ Robbie has work from home.  All for at least the next two weeks.

It’s going to be tough having all of us trying to work at the same time.  We’re going to get in each other’s way and we’re going to get on each other’s nerves, and if everything works out the way we want we will look back on this and see it as a successful waste of time.  A little sacrifice today will lead to an easier time for our health care professionals in the coming weeks.  That’s the goal at least.

We’re all in this shit show together, and we are up to the challenge.

Who would have thought that “a little sacrifice” was more than half of america was willing to give. Okay, instead of reminiscing here I find myself absolutely pissed off. I should have seen that coming, just like I should have seen everything coming.

Happy fifth covid-aversary everyone.

Blogiversary: Missed

Four days ago, November 18th, was the 16th anniversary of the start of this blog. Sort of. It was the 16th anniversary of the start of the blog I had on blogger.com that was moved to wordpress.com in 2012 and then moved to medium.com for a while and then moved to a new wordpress.com at some point in time that I don’t remember. 11/18/08 was the day that I started a blog that was public facing, so that’s the anniversary date that I celebrate here. Before that I had private posts on myspace. Before that (briefly) I had private posts on yahoo360 (remember that one? No? Neither does anyone else).

Allow me to celebrate the 16th blogiversary with a picture of a cat because what the hell else would I post to honor an anniversary?

83/365

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad

Today would have been my parents’ 57th wedding anniversary. Instead it is the second wedding anniversary since my mother passed away. It’s a sad day, but it’s also a happy day. I need to call my father and just tell him I love him.

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Credit where credit is due, my cousin Erin took these two photos at my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary party back in 2017. Thanks, Erin!

Two Year Anniversary Weigh In

I can’t believe it has been two years. It simultaneously feels like yesterday and a thousand years ago.

Saturday (two days ago) was the two year anniversary of my weight loss surgery. The full gastric bypass procedure that my guts and I went through on May 4, 2022 has changed my life, health wise.

When I list off the best decisions I have made in my life, Marrying Jen is first by a landslide. It is first by a tidal wave. Not just marrying her, but going on that first date, moving in together, meeting the kids, all of it. That’s number one and nothing else even comes close.

It’s a close call for the second most important decision in my life. It might be going back to school in 1997 and everything that came with it over the following seven years or so that lead to my Bachelors degree. If it’s not that, then it’s getting the gastric bypass surgery. From a health care stand point, the surgery is definitely number one. Even after all of this time I still cannot believe how different I feel. It’s starting to become less impactful as I am more and more removed from my former self, but I’m still close enough to the changes that when I stop and think of it I still can’t believe it.

I weighed 452 pounds when I started the process. I weighed about 431 pounds when I actually went under the knife. On Saturday I celebrated the second anniversary by stepping on the scale. I weighed 211.2 pounds. One decimal point placement away from a Rush reference. Ah, hells. I am down 220.2 pounds since surgery and 240.8 pounds since deciding to have the surgery. My brain can’t wrap itself around the idea that I have lost more weight than I currently weigh. I lost the equivalent of a mildly overweight adult male.

It hasn’t been easy. It will never be easy. I am always at the mercy of my newly redesigned stomach. Every now and then it’s going to rebel and show me who’s boss. It happened last Friday and it destroyed me for about 18 hours. Here we are three days later and I am still not quite right. I had a plan for lunch today and I scrapped it because my stomach was feeling weird. It was a little pain, a little gassy discomfort, and a little bit just a sense of being wrong. I’m on edge right now for all things stomach so I errored on the side of caution and went with something very light and simple and small for lunch. We’ll see how I feel in a few hours when it comes to dinner time.

Would I recommend this surgery to everyone? I don’t know. I don’t think so. The variables involved are a combination of how bad is your situation and how difficult is the post-processing. I almost went through with this thing a few years before I did, but the idea of all of the restrictions post-op scared me away. Never eating sugar again? Never drinking soda again? No, I wasn’t up for that at the time. Then in 2022 I was in such a terrible state with my weight that suddenly those brutal restrictions (not to mention the changes to how you eat and when you eat and how you chew and how you swallow your food and all of that) seemed like a small price to pay.

It worked out for me. I don’t want to be the kind of guy who encourages people to go through this sort of thing. You need to come to that conclusion on your own. For me though… I would do it all again in a heartbeat. No question. No hesitation. It is the best decision I’ve ever made for my health. Apart from being with my wife and my family, it’s probably the best decision I’ve ever made, period.

Wish me and my new digestive system a happy 2nd anniversary. Many happy returns, you wild and crazy, temperamental stomach.

Flickr Turning 20?

Flickr, the photography site that I have been an avid user of since 2009, even though it’s been sort of overlooked and forgotten by most of the social media and photography universe, is going to celebrate it’s 20th birthday next month. The big day is a few days after my wife’s birthday, and a week-ish after my step son’s birthday, which is also my nephew’s birthday.

https://www.threads.net/@flickr/post/C2f3EUUyu8R

I guess Threads embeds still don’t work with wordpress.com. Hmmm…

This might work better… friggin’ zuckerberg…

Anyway, they have a bunch of things planned including some photowalks. I don’t see anything scheduled for Boston and even if they do schedule something it’s 99.9999% guaranteed that I would not join in, even from a social distance. Still… it would be nice, right? Granted, not nice enough for me to try to get something started. No way in hell would Mr Introvert do something crazy like that. No thank you.

Anyway, Flickr’s birthday is February 10th. Take some pictures to celebrate.

Sad Day

Today should be a good day. It’s Geddy Lee’s 70th birthday.

It’s also the anniversary of the day that Neil Peart joined Rush, so for Rush fans it’s a two-for-one deal.

Unfortunately it is a sad day for my family. Today should have been my parents’ 56th wedding anniversary. Instead, it’s the first wedding anniversary without my mother. The first one since she passed away. My father is having a tough time today, but he’ll make it through all right. I hope he’s all right at least. He’s sad and he misses her and he just wants to be alone.

I miss my mother. We all do. We always will. Happy anniversary, mom and dad.

Oh, and to make matters worse as I was finishing up the last sentence I started having a migraine. Oh good.

Work Anniversary

I almost forgot about this one. Fortunately I am a nerd and added it as a recurring date on my Google calendar many years ago. Today is a noteworthy day, but this date next year will be a much more important occasion.

On this date, July 12, in the year 2004 I started a new job. 19 years later, I’m still here. 19 years, one promotion, countless reorganizations, one wedding, one house purchase, two high school graduations, one college graduation (and counting), one ridiculously invasive stomach surgery, and one continuing global pandemic later, and I am still here.

My 19th workaversary is a big deal, but my 20th next year… that will be a big deal. We’ll see what happens in the meantime. For now at least, go have a piece of cake or something to celebrate for me. You know, have the kind of sugary thing that I can’t eat anymore in honor of me not getting sacked at all over the last 19 years.