Today’s featured image is one that was obviously taken quite a while ago. The boys were still babies – I’d guess in the 4-months-old range – and Boo was still the biggest kitty in the house. She is now dwarfed by them.
I was going to feature a panoramic shot that I took at Lake Huron last year, but it was just too large to be considered, so I’ll embed a smaller version of it here:
Now that that’s out of the way….what have I been doing with myself lately? The answer to that is, basically, not a lot. Settling into my life as an L1 lead at the X-Company is a bit challenging, having not had direct reports in over 10 years. Last week, I completed three annual review with members of my team; somewhat awkward, considering that two of the three have been at the company longer than I have. The toughest ones are still ahead. I get to sit in judgement of two guys who basically trained me. One of them can be confrontational at times. Not looking forward to that, but it’s part of the gig. I’ve also been doing a number of interviews every week – the L1 teams are going to be growing pretty dramatically, and we’ll probably end up hiring 20-30 new folks over the course of the year. At least I’ve got a say in who the new people are, which is nice.
I’ve also been doing quite a bit more coding (which is what I really want to do anyway), putting together some scripts for my team. I have to keep all of them on the down-low, as we’ve got a petty tyrant in an L3 role who doesn’t like for anybody to automate anything if they don’t report directly to him. That being the case, I’m just very quietly writing, tweaking, and perfecting a few bullet-proof scripts for everyday tasks and letting a few of my folks use them until they become so engrained in the daily grind that it’ll be hell for the person who tries to take them away. The new idea going around the L1 community is that the tyrant will say that my scripts are not allowed in our environment before magically releasing his OWN scripts a week later that do exactly the same thing. Apparently, he’s done that in the past. Should it happen, I will call him out on it. Publically.
Tax season ends on the 17th, and everyone at the X-Company is looking forward to that. With our growth and the merger and our infrastructure and development teams’ bad habit of rolling out changes without fully testing them, the last several months have been a long nightmare. My main problem client (the one who sent at least two letters from their lawyer to complain) have formally announced that they will be leaving after the season (and the people praised the Lord), so I’m really looking forward to the 18th. In the immediate aftermath of the season, the vast majority of CPA firms go on vacation for at least a few weeks, which means we’ll have the chance to clear out all of our old tickets, regroup, and get ready for the next season, which starts around August.
We’ll also be entering “project season,” which is when people like me go on the road and set up new clients. The only project that I’ve volunteered for so far is one in Chattanooga (not THAT firm in Chattanooga…a different one) on the week of May 28th. I didn’t realize when I signed up for it that that week includes Memorial Day, so I’m honestly not sure how that’s going to work. I don’t know if I’ll have a day less to set things up or if I’ll get a comp day for working on the holiday or what. In any case, I’ll be in Chatty for 4-5 days, away from the office and hopefully enjoying myself.
The GBB competed at the North American championships last weekend – and got thrashed. It definitely didn’t help that we were scheduled as the second band to play in our section – the early bands generally get screwed by the judges, who are hyper-sensitive first thing in the morning and have to leave room for higher scores for later bands. It also didn’t help that, frankly, we’re just not as good as we have been in the past. We ended up coming in 12th out of 13 bands. It was the first time since we started competing in around 2007 that we didn’t win or place 2nd – and we’re planning to move up to the highest section next year, so it was a bit of a wakeup call for the folks who were really pushing for that move. Scores, should you be interested, are posted here.
Interestingly, the San Antonio Band, which won the section with a phenomenal score, was founded by two former members of the GBB who moved to SA several years ago. They benefitted, I am told, from their late-in-the-day performance. Since we played so early on Saturday, I hit the road almost immediately after our performance and didn’t hear any of the other bands.
So that was last weekend. The week before that was devoted to rehearsals every night – preparation for the competition – and the weekend prior to that was Easter. I had an Easter gig; that’s nice, but it pretty much spoiled any weekend plans I may have wanted to have.
So this weekend is really the first time in quite a while that I can relax a little bit. Not much, mind you. I need to mow the lawns and do some housekeeping, and I’m also in the middle of a long-term project of cleaning and organizing my garage. So I’m going to do all of that stuff and get some sleep. Next weekend, however, I’m headed to the woods. Have already taken off next Friday in anticipation of this. It will probably rain, of course, but just being able to kick back and sleep in the woods next to a stream will be fantastic. And I might finally get to test out the car camping setup that I came up with late last year.
The Amazon Echo Dots that I mentioned in my last post have continued to be a source of fun for me. I updated a number of the rooms in the house – and the garage – with Phillips Hue lights, and the Hue and the Amazon systems work really well together. One cool thing about Hue is that it is aware of my phone location – so it will automatically turn off all of the lights in the house when I leave, and will turn on the garage and kitchen lights when I come home. Since my garage door light gave up the ghost a couple of years ago, I’ve been coming home to a completely dark house. It’s so much nicer to drive into a lit garage – and having the house light up for me is also pretty excellent.
That’s just the Hue system. With Amazon/Alexa, I’ve also setup a number of routines – for example, the system turns on various lights in the morning and begins broadcasting NPR and the weather for me, then tells me what’s on my calendar for the day – and I’ve have had some fun playing “Jeopardy!” every night after work. Also put in a couple of bluetooth speakers, and – thanks to my Amazon Prime account – I can tell the system to, for example, “Play Yorkshire Building Society Band,” and it’ll just kick off a random selection of that band playing throughout the house.
Being able to say, “Alexa, add toilet paper to my shopping list,” is pretty nice, since I have a terrible habit of forgetting what I need three seconds after I think of it. Same with to-do items (“Alexa, put clean the garage on my to-do list”). Definitely helpful for an old fart with a spastic memory.
The best things, however, are the various sleep sounds that I can have it play. Not surprisingly, “Wind in the Trees” and “Icy Snowstorm” are my favorites, though I have over 50 white noises that I can tell it to play while I’m lying in bed (or, to be completely honest, when I’m not lying in bed); and I know – by checking my sleep patterns – that running those sounds at night is helping me sleep better, if not for longer. My typical night used to consist of 2-3 hours of “restful” sleep and 4-5 of “light” sleep. Those numbers have reversed since I started playing sleep sounds. Also, if I concentrate, I can come close to believing that I’m in the woods when I play the “Wind in the Trees” sounds.
At any rate, I plan to add at least two more Phillips Hue lights (outside the front door) and am considering replacing the fluorescent tubes in my kitchen with some sort of recessed Phillips lights, and I’ll continue to experiment with gadgets and IFTT scenarios for the Dots.
So I guess I’ve kind of caught up with things, and I must now go tackle the lawn. After that, I might do some shopping, then start in on housekeeping tasks – or maybe I’ll just go to a bar and play video golf. It’s the weekend, dammit.
Finally.