Daily Archives: December 15, 2018

End-of-the-year Crunch

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Yes, indeed.  The year is coming to a close and I’m in the middle of my “must get everything done before January” month.  There are many reasons that I like the fact that I was born when I was, but the December crunch is not one of them.

I got my driver’s license renewed last weekend.  Also received the letter to renew my tags, which I put off dealing with until today.  Other fun things included paying my auto insurance, renewing a couple of domains, doing year-end reviews for all of my direct reports (save one, who’ll get to go through that on Monday), and I don’t know what else.

As I said, I pulled out the registration letter today and logged on to pay for my 2019 registration, only to realize that I’ve forgotten to get my emissions checked (must do that before registering).  So I guess that’s on the docket for later this morning.

The X-company Christmas party was last Monday.  I did not attend.  Not a fan of 1}hanging out with the people from work, 2}hanging out with the people from work when there’s an open bar.  Not to worry, though.  The X-company gives out really nice Christmas presents to everyone – even those of us who don’t go to parties – and I scored a drone yesterday.  This is cool, because I’d been thinking about buying one anyway to take camping.  From what I can tell, the company saved me about $700.  I’ve been there for nearly two years and I’m not a huge fan of the job, but there are perks.

The GBB has a Christmas concert next Tuesday night, which should be fun.  After that, we’ll take a couple of weeks off and then start getting serious about NABBA rehearsals (we’re going in the Championship Section this year) and about the inaugural Southeastern Brass Band Festival, which was the idea of our board last summer and which – surprisingly – is shaping up to be a pretty good event.  I believe we’ve got 6 bands signed up for it and a great hall in which they can all perform.  That takes place in, I think, May.

It has been rainy and quite cool for the last month, and I must sing praises to my Nest Learning Thermostat.  Picked it up in late summer and have nothing but good things to say about it.  Since switching over from cooling to heating, it’s done a really good job of keeping the house comfortable and – from what I can see – saving me quite a bit of the green stuff.

Forgot to mention that I had my own annual review at work last week.  The first one I’ve had since I’ve been there, and I got “exceptional” marks all the way down the board.  First time that’s happened in about 30 years.  Granted, I think it’s the first time the X-Company has even done reviews, I’m in the first class of Team Leads they’ve ever had, my boss is the first-ever Director of Service in the company’s history, and I don’t think anyone really knows what they’re doing…but still – I got perfect scores and a raise and I’ll take it.  Also had a talk with my boss about restructuring going forward and there’s a decent possibility that I’ll get a bump up to some sort of capo di tuti capi role (floor lead/lead of leads) in the next year.  It will take my one level further away from technology and one step closer to full-time people administration, which is not an idea that I relish; but it is sort of what I had in mind when I took the job and told the hiring manager that I guess I’d start a completely new career with the X-Company.  

I’m getting more comfortable with my current role as lead – kind of shocks me at times to realize that I’m basically doing the job that my bosses used to do, but I also have the ability to take a step back if I need to clear my head and just work on technical problems.  I have two seniors on my team, one of whom I’m grooming to be a lead himself, so when I want to work on computer problems, I just tell my team to go to Matt with their questions for a while.  It’s working pretty well.

And I guess that’s about all I’ve got to say for right now.  The featured image for this post is of my kitchen in the Cheboygan Cabin last month.  I’d meant to use it for one of the posts that I wrote while in the cabin, but my phone apparently never uploaded the shot.  See how rustic I am!

a terrible horrible very bad day

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Note: I found this in my “drafts” folder today.  I’m assuming that it’s from somewhere in 2015, when I was dating Amy from Waukegan.

Monday was driving day.  The return to Atlanta from Waukegan.  It began at about 4:30 AM – and I should’ve just stayed in bed.

Remember when truck drivers were among the best drivers on the road?  Yeah, well, they’re not anymore.  I started to notice this probably 10 years ago, and it just seems to be getting worse with time. With that in mind, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that I came to a less-than-screeching halt 90 minutes after I set out on my trip Monday morning.  Feeling good about things after making it through downtown Chicago without any significant slowdowns, I found myself basically sitting still on I-94, in the rain, for the better part of two hours – caught in the backup created by three trucks that had somehow managed to tangle with each other on I-80, some 5 miles down the road from me.

After finally getting past the scene of the accident, I spent the next 13 hours in basically non-stop rain, fog,  and the mist kicked up by trucks whose drivers insisted upon driving next to other trucks, blocking both lanes and throwing up walls of water behind them.  I got a bit of a break just south of Nashville, when the rain stopped and, briefly, the sun came out.  By the time I approached the mountains north of Chattanooga, however, Mother Nature had thrown down the gauntlet.  The rain increased steadily for the remainder of the trip, which ended at around 8:00 Monday night.  By then, my neck and shoulders were in agony from the hunched-forward attitude that I’d been holding in the car for the majority of the day.  It’s now two days later, and I could still use a massage.

I did make it home, however – managed to take just over 5600 pictures during the trip (the GoPro was set to snap one every 10 seconds) – and yesterday was back to the grind.  It’s amazing how I can miss two days of work (three if you count the few people who go in to waste time on Saturdays) and end up with over 400 emails to go through upon my return.  I spent a couple of hours trying to pay attention to them yesterday before figuratively throwing up my hands and deleting the whole lot of them.  Probably not the most prudent thing to do, but I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with it anymore.  If there was anything in there that was actually worth reading, I’m sure it will be resent about 40 more times before I need to actually pay attention.

Spent the rest of the day dealing with obstinate workstations and working on some new code ideas.

After work, I went to a brass band rehearsal – which was nice.

There were no truck drivers there.

TWD