Another Month Gone!

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Welcome to May! April was, to be honest, a very strange month. It had a little bit of everything, both good and bad. I can’t say that I’ll miss it, but parts of it were pretty nice. I don’t remember exactly when we started working from home, but I’m pretty sure that it was before April – which means that I’ve spent all month at home (with a few trips to the grocery or liquor store).

And I’ve really enjoyed working from home. Being completely honest…I don’t want to go back to the office. It’s nice to be able to take long walks in the morning, get home, have a leisurely cup of coffee on the deck while catching up on the news (maybe even eat breakfast!), then take a shower….and still sit down to work a full thirty minutes earlier than I would have if I’d have gone to the office.

On the other side of the day, it’s nice to put in a full day, then shut down the computer, take another long walk, then have a leisurely drink on the deck, cook dinner, watch some television, and get to bed before 9:00.

I love that kind of a schedule!

To be sure, April also had some downsides. The most glaringly obvious one to me is that I’ve developed some serious anxiety about being around other people. It doesn’t take a trained psychologist to figure out why: I had some chest pains after going out a month ago, I associated them with COVID-19, I couldn’t really call anyone (other than an ambulance) for help, and it freaked me out. Since then, I’ve experienced some degree of chest pain every time I’ve gone out to a store or have had someone come to my house (delivering packages or coming to give me home improvement estimates).

The good part of that is that it’s been so consistent that I know beyond any doubt that it’s psychological – and knowing that has allowed me to block it out and rebound back to normal pretty quickly the last couple of times that I’ve gone out. This is a big plus, because I’m really NOT “that guy.” I don’t get wrapped up in my health. I don’t worry about it. So worrying about it as I have been – to the point of having anxiety attacks about it…well, THAT bothers me more than the actual worry does. When I start stressing over something I really can’t control, that’s when I start to just give up.

On to more pleasant things. I’ve decided to get serious about fixing up this old house (and landscape) over the next however long it takes. Big-ticket items that I’m looking at getting fixed now are the roof, the retaining wall in the back yard, the deck, all of the floors, the half-bath, and – maybe – the kitchen. Lots of work, lots of money, lots of time – but these are things that need to be addressed and I’ve put them off for too long.

The roof has been leaking for a while, and I’ve had the insurance company out again in the hopes of convincing them that it just needs to be replaced. I showed them damage inside the garage – the ceiling and walls – and in the foyer (front wall and floor). At least this time around, the guy they sent out admitted that he saw holes in the roof. The last one wouldn’t admit to any damage at all. What I’m hoping is that the new guy won’t give me $1000 and tell me to patch the holes. The roof is over 30 years old. It needs to be replaced. If I can’t get insurance to cover it, two things are going to happen. First, I’ll be getting a new insurance company. Second, I’ll be refinancing the house and pulling some money out of equity.

It’s obviously important to have a good roof over my head, and it’s made more important by the fact that I simply cannot replace my floors until I can control the leaking coming in to the front hall of the house. When I replaced the front door a couple of months ago, I pulled up most of the hall floor because it was so water damaged it was like walking on wet towels after a storm. Since doing so, I’ve had a literal towel next to my front wall to keep the water from pooling at the foot of the stairs after every rain storm. I’m not spending a penny on new flooring until I know that it will stay dry.

Heading to the back yard, my retaining walls need to be replaced (as pictured in the post entitled “Solutions”). This is somewhat vital because my upper lawn has been slowly washing away as the retaining walls fail. The level of the upper lawn has dropped about 8 inches over the last twenty years. One casualty of this slow slippage has been the deck.

The deck has pulled away from the house by a couple of inches, and has begun to list to one side as the earth underneath it erodes away at different rates. While it’s still standing – and fairly stable – it doesn’t take a genius to see that it’s not going to be either of those things for more than a year or so down the road. I had a contractor out this morning (the second in as many days) taking a look so that I can get estimates on repairing it vs. replacing it vs. a bit of both.

Both contractors are also giving me estimates on repairing/replacing the retaining walls, and I plan to get at least one – probably two – more estimates for both of those projects.

The half-bath project is something that I’ll be doing on my own. At first, I was just going to re-seat the toilet, as it has been leaking (I’ve turned off the water to it), but I’ve decided to go ahead and gut the room and use it as a learning experience. New floor (which will stretch out into the laundry room in front of the half bath) will let me get an idea of how I want to handle flooring for the rest of the house. A new sink will give me an idea of what sort of effort and expense will go into replacing the cabinets in the kitchen. Lighting, painting…it’s just a good project to let me get my hands dirty with home improvement – and if I completely screw it up, it’s in an enclosed area so nobody has to see it, and it’s small enough that it should be fairly inexpensive to get a pro to fix my mistakes should that become necessary.

Through thinking about all of these projects – and I’ve thought a lot about them – I’ve come to the inevitable conclusion that I’m not retiring next year as I’d hoped to do. For one thing, it’s going to be expensive and take time. For another, my 401(k) has been CRUSHED this year – I’ve already lost over $100,000, and I don’t have any reason to believe that that’s going to rebound anytime soon. So I’m just going to hunker down, do my job, try to enjoy it, and hope that I live another 10 years so that I can enjoy a funded retirement when I’m 65. By then, I should have the house paid off (or very close), even if I have to refi, it will be worth a lot more than it is now, and I can decide if I still want to move to the woods or if I’ll be happy just living where I am.

Lots of questions, yeah – but I’ve got sort of a plan, and that makes me happy.

It has been a beautiful day today, and this weekend should be more of the same. Looking forward to getting in some good walking to finish out the week (shooting for over 100 miles for the week), and to beginning to tackle that half-bath project. Should be fun!

Weight Lifted

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Went to a vascular surgeon on Monday morning to get the ol’ carotid arteries checked out. That’s something I never dreamed that I’d be saying as little as 4 months ago, but apparently 2020 is just going to be one of those years where weird shit comes at you from every direction. Lose control of your eyes in January. Find out you’ve got carotid stenosis in February. Get hit by a global pandemic in March. Develop chest tightness in April.

Can’t say that I’m really looking forward to May.

However, the visit to the vasculatorium© turned out okay for me. Got my temp taken (98.4, I think), BP (140/85, I think – heart rate was 76), weight (170). Got to talk to about 14 different people, none of whom was the doctor that I made the appointment with. Got to regale them all with stories of why I went to the ER in January, and two of them made me smile and pull their fingers and raise my eyebrows and stick out my tongue. Both approved of my performances and declared that I haven’t had a stroke.

Then I went in for an ultrasound of the arteries, and that was pleasant enough experience. Had a lovely technician basically massage my neck for 10 minutes and then leave.

At long last, the actual DOCTOR doctor came into the room…and made me smile and pull his fingers and raise my eyebrows and stick out my tongue, before approving of my performances and declaring that I haven’t had a stroke. I was beginning to wonder if anyone there had bothered to read the reports from the ER saying, “no stroke.”

The dude finally got around to my carotids and told me that, yeah, there was some blockage in both. He drew a very bad representation of a carotid artery on a piece of paper and showed me where said blockage was. Then he said that it was under 50% in both of them, no surgery, come back and check again in a year.

I said, “That’s it?” Yep. That’s it. I asked what the actual percentage of blockage is, and he said, “Under 50%. That’s about as specific as I can get.” I asked if either artery is more blocked than the other, and he said, “No. About the same.” I asked what would happen if it gets to be more than 50% and he said, “If it’s under 80%, you’ll need to check it every 6 months. If it’s over, then we’ll talk about surgery.”

So I made an appointment for April, 2021, and I left. And I felt much better than I have since the first week of February, when my GP made it seem as if my carotids were both about to explode. I’ve got another appointment with him in a few weeks and I might tell him he’s a jerk…or I might just get a prescription refill and be on my way. In either case, I won’t be as stressed as I was a week ago.

In other news, the family had a zoom conference call on Sunday afternoon, and it became apparent that I need to get remote access into Dad’s computer so that I can get him set up correctly should we do it again (and I hope we do, as it was enjoyable).

I’ve been trying to get some estimates from landscapers to see what can be done with my back yards. So far, I’m having a hard time getting any of them to call me back. Guess they don’t want money?

Insurance agent is supposed to be coming to look at my roof next Monday – I’d really love to get THAT fixed.

Oh yeah – Right Networks acquired another company yesterday – Rootworks. As I understand it, that acquisition puts us in a pretty good spot to become the go-to cloud company for any CPA firms with fewer than 300 users. I’ve decided to be positive for a change and to believe that I’ll be able to work at RN until I retire. Maybe not as lucratively as I’d once assumed, but comfortably enough, I guess. And if the house has a new roof and good-looking backyard, maybe I can even get a nice chunk of change for it if I want to move to a shack in the mountains.

Magnificent Saturday

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I felt pretty good this morning, which was nice – because the weather today has been fantastic. It rained very early (like between 0600 and 0800), and I sat on my deck in my bathrobe, drank coffee, and read my phone during that time. In addition to the rain, there was a pretty strong breeze and it felt amazingly like sitting under a tarp during a camping trip. Very relaxing and a nice prelude to the rest of the day.

I should mention that the featured photo for this entry is one that I took of sunrise over Lake Superior in October, 2016. It was at Au Sable Lighthouse at Pictured Rocks National Seashore, and a few hours after I took that shot, I was on a call with my (AT&T) boss and getting the first inkling that my job was in jeopardy. One of the most beautiful mornings juxtaposed with one of the worst. I need to get back to Pictured Rocks, though. I haven’t been since that autumn, and I don’t want to conflate that wonderful place with bad memories.

After the rain had stopped, I put on a shirt and some pants, along with a windbreaker, and headed out for a brisk walk. “Brisk” in the sense that it was still a little chilly – probably 60 degrees. I didn’t set any speed records, but after two days of not really walking (and about six of those days in the last two weeks), I really wanted to just have a nice long walk. I got 5.5 miles in and averaged about 15.5 minutes/mile. I’ll take that every time.

Back at the house, I jumped into yard work. Mowed both of the back yards, as well as the front-side one, cut down a lot of weeds and shrubs in the back of the house, cleared crap out from around the deck, and fixed the “blow it all out” hole on my lawnmower. The cover had come off – what a pain THAT was to get back on! It was a perfect day for this kind of work. Sunny, high sixties, breezy…one of the nine perfect Georgia days that I’ve written about previously.

In the afternoon, I played around with my router a bit and discovered that it will do an admirable job of cutting some miter-jig grooves for my table saw, so I’m going to try to do that tomorrow. I also did a few loads of laundry and took another 2.5-mile walk in the afternoon, during which I tried to take a picture of a squirrel standing straight up in the middle of the road. Said squirrel took off as soon as I brought my phone up, but I did managed to get him with all four little feet off of the ground…which was nice.

For dinner, I cooked the first of my Rastelli’s pork chops. Like the chicken and salmon before it, the pork chop was fantastic. I took a chance on Rastelli’s a couple of weeks ago and put in an order for $140 worth of chicken, salmon, and pork – mainly because I saw a good review for them and because I wanted to stock up on meat that I could eat without health concerns. I’m now a devotee. When this stuff runs out (a couple of months, probably), I’ll be making another order.

Throughout today, I’ve been running scripts to delete old profiles from all of my firms. This will result in them all having less data on our servers and they’ll save money because of it. They’ll probably never know I’ve done this for them, and that’s fine. I really just wanted to script something cool, and this fits the bill. I’ll continue running the scripts tomorrow and I should be able to have all of my firms cleaned up by Monday. Then I’ll have to come up with something else to interest me.

Looking forward to sleeping well tonight. This has been a really good day.

More on the Health Front

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My last entry, written last Sunday, indicated that maybe I’d caught the virus, and – if so – it wasn’t all that terrible. Man. I need to learn when to keep my mouth shut. Six days later, I’m not going to make that mistake again.

After resting through most of last Sunday and going to bed early, I felt pretty good on Monday morning. Told my team as much, indicated that I wasn’t at 100% and that I’d be in and out during the day, but that I’d be working. And, for the majority of the day, I did.

Then came late afternoon.

At around 4:00 or so, my chest once again tightened up, my neck started to hurt…and back to bed I went. I sat in bed and tried to decide whether I was having a heart attack or dealing with the virus. I looked up symptoms of both (they’re basically the same). I did my best to fall asleep, with very poor results. I worried myself basically to death and felt completely helpless.

When you don’t know what’s happening, but you do know that if you go to a hospital these days you’re probably either going to get sent home or get sent to ICU – and in either case, you’re going to be on the hook for a few thousand dollars – you feel helpless.

So, eventually, I just lay there. Pretty much all night. I got up at some point to pee and had major chills – which actually came as somewhat of a relief, because that let me lean more towards COVID and less towards “heart giving out.” I still didn’t have a thermometer, but having the chills helped; because (after peeing) I could just curl up in a fetal position under the covers and wait them out. My chest was still tight when I took deep breaths and my neck still hurt when I coughed, but those two things were no longer keeping me awake – which was a huge relief.

I only managed to get about two hours of decent sleep on Monday night, though. I told my team on Tuesday that I would not be working. I had Jenny bring a thermometer and some expectorant to the house (she left them in the garage), and I spent most of the day in bed. Unfortunately, the thermometer consistently showed that I had no fever (was, in fact, a degree LOW) and the expectorant did very little. So, as I lay in bed all day, I tended to magnify every little ache or twinge and wonder if I was about to die.

Felt better on Wednesday morning after getting a pretty decent night’s sleep, but again told my team that I’d be taking the day off to continue to rest. Which I did. Drank a lot of hot tea, took my temp regularly (never high) and my BP (fairly normal for me) and my heart rate (normal), and dozed all day. I felt a lot better after late afternoon came and went with no chest tightness, so I took a shower and went back to bed. Slept okay.

Thursday, I worked normally, though by then I was stressed beyond all recognition because I still didn’t know what the issue actually was. Every time I felt a twinge in my neck, I’d think, “My carotid artery is about to explode.” Every time I’d feel a tingle in my arm or neck or chest or leg (and guys, I’m getting up there – twinge happen!) , it felt like an indication that something was terribly wrong. And every time I got stressed, my heart rate went up, which stressed me more and…you get the idea. Not a happy camper at all.

So on Friday, I made the call and made an appointment with a vascular surgeon. I’ll go in a week from next Monday to find out exactly what type of blockage I’ve got in my carotids, what my heart is doing, etc. At that point, I’ll have to make a decision (maybe) on surgery. But at THIS point, I can at least tell myself that I’m taking steps to do something. I’m doing something, even if it’s just asking someone else to do something. And I’m can hopefully stop stressing myself out.

Not a fun post, this, but it’s getting the facts out there.

In NORMAL news, I did a lot of yard work today, particularly when it came to cutting down trees (well…SMALL trees – diameter of under 3 inches) by my fence at the back side of the house. Cleared out a lot of them, and discovered that I’ve got a fairly large tree on the right side of the house which is leaning towards the house and is going to have to go.

So I guess I’ll be looking for some tree removal people. Can’t do that one myself.

More yard work planned for tomorrow (need to mow the back lawn and I still want to trim SOME of the branches that are scraping the house), but for now it’s bedtime. I put in a lot of work today and I’m looking forward to sleeping like a log tonight.

Is it COVID-19?

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So everybody stay calm. It’s probably nothing. On my way home from the store yesterday, I noticed a tightness in my chest, which has waxed and waned a few times since then. I have no trouble breathing, no fever (as far as I know – the only thermometer in the house had enough juice in it for one measurement, which came out low), my heart rate is normal, and my blood pressure is (for me) fairly low. Not dead yet.

That being said, I’ve never had the flu in my life (as far as I know – I believe I did have pneumonia once when I was quite young), and the chest thing isn’t a cold. So either I’m get to experience my first flu or I’ve got the mystery virus that’s been going around. Nothing to do about it except sleep and drink water, which I’m doing (also making a salmon filet). Sure, I could probably find a place to get tested, but to what end? I have very mild symptoms and I’m not going to a hospital. I told Jenny that if it gets worse, I’ll let her know and maybe I’ll try a teledoctor or whatever.

I know what you really want to know: What store did I go to? That’d be the Home Depot. Picked up some lumber, glue, bolts, screws, and light bulbs. The bulbs are for a lamp. Everything else is what I need to extend the table on Dad’s old table saw (which, I learned today, is 11 years older than I am), which I began to do yesterday afternoon before getting to a good stopping point and deciding to pay attention to my chest and lie down. I need to do some surgery on the stand that Dad built for the saw in order to drop the motor about two inches – in order to be able to increase the length of the table and let longer pieces of wood slide onto my workbench.

Once I’ve got the table extended, I’ll start work on a cross-cut sled. That will be fun.

Salmon is nearly done, so I’ll wrap this up. Just thought I’d get it down for posterity that maybe I’ve caught the dreaded Coronavirus and – at least for now – I don’t feel too awfully terrible.

Solutions

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Another day home, another day getting better at working there. The boys are currently settled in happily on their kitty tree by the window. They don’t both have to be there, though. They were being little hellions yesterday. Fighting over the top spot on the tree, then flying around the house and yowling at each other, they made it very difficult for me to get any kind of a work groove going. With that in mind, I added another chair (Gramma Sprague’s old wing-back) to a spot in front of the window today. Joshua immediately curled up in it and went to sleep, and Chamberlain settled into his favorite spot on top of the tree. I had an uninterrupted morning.

I also had some issues with my internet yesterday, which was a bigger concern than the cats. I figured that the problem was probably my wireless signal and not the speed of the outside connection, but I really didn’t want to move everything downstairs in order to plug the laptop directly into the router. Truth be told, that’s exactly what I’d tell a client to do if they called in needing help for internet issues while working from home.Instead of doing that, though, I spent $130 on NetGear PowerLine Adapters,which I was able to buy online from Best Buy and pick up at the store at about 10 yesterday morning.

We used a version of these things at Digital Life when a customer didn’t have good wireless strength throughout the house, but I was never overly impressed with them. The newer generation, though…just damn. Call me impressed. The way the adapters work is pretty simple. You plug one into an outlet near the router and you attach it to the router with a Cat-5 (Ethernet) cable. Then, you plug the other adapter into an outlet near the system that needs a better connection (my upstairs laptop, in my case). The adapters use the electrical power lines in the house (basically) to connect the “far away” adapter directly to the router. Much easier than having to fish cable through the walls. The “far” adapter can serve as a wireless access point, a physical network port, or both. In my situation, I connected my laptop to the adapter with Cat-5, and my download speed when from about 8MB to about 29MB instantly. Problem solved.No problems for the rest of the day yesterday and today is a continuation of that. Decent speed, no jitters…just like working from the office.

I also connected my upstairs Roku to the wireless access point; and that seems to be running better, too.

Joshua looking regal in the wing-back chair

Chamberlain has now moved off of the tree and settled into the wing-back. Everybody’s still happy.

For the last week or so, I’ve been opening the front windows for the boys, but I don’t dare open them all the way, as I do downstairs. When they see anything – a bird, a dog, a bug, or an air molecule – they tend to try to get to it. I yell at them downstairs when they do this, but the paranoid side of me can see both of them leaping for a squirrel outside of the upstairs window, hitting the screen with a combined 35 pounds, and falling out. Because of this, I basically crack the windows open about 2 inches on either side (these are tall windows that open side-to-side, not bottom-to-top.

Since I do want to be able to open them a little more, I think I’m going to try to build some frames this afternoon, into which I can insert a couple of heavy-duty pieces of wire shelf. I can then attach the frames to the windows and let the boys have about 10 inches of fresh air. It’s hard to describe, but I’ll put a picture in here after I complete the frames.

The featured image for this post (also inserted here) is one that I took in my back yard a couple of days ago. I went out on Tuesday evening to mow the back yards – first time I’ve done so this year – and determined that I can no longer look the other way when it comes to fixing the landscape timbers that are keeping the upper part of the lawn from sliding into the lower part. As you can see, they need to be replaced. I don’t know exactly how to do this, but it’s something that has just risen to the top of my list. I talked with a friend who is a handyman by trade, and he told me that I can probably get the timbers – pretreated and stained – for about $10 each. If that’s the case, then I’m probably looking at $600-$700 for the material and God knows how much time learning how to replace everything. No way am I hiring somebody to do that, however. It can’t be that tough, right?

Famous last words, I’m sure.

Red Meat

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I ate a steak tonight! First red meat I’ve had since January – since “the incident,” to be more precise. It’s probably an abundance of caution bordering on paranoia, but I’ve limited myself to fish since then (with chicken once or twice). Made some peas, carrots, and mushrooms to go with the steak. Everything turned out pretty good! Back to fish now.

The temperature today plunged back down to the low 50s. It had been in the 80s for the last few days, so it really felt a bit chilly this morning – I had the windows in the office open for a while (until it started to rain), but I eventually turned on the heat for a while. Strange, because I’d just switched from heat to air conditioning on Saturday.

I did manage to get some decent work done today – mind still wandered a bit, but I generally stayed in control of it. I also put in an extra hour just to be sure. Also played around with my Webcam quite a bit, and figured out how to drop “exotic” backgrounds into my video meetings – so instead of just me in my office, people can now see me in front of Lake Ahmic or the NC mountains or in a snow storm on the shore of Lake Huron. That was kinda fun.

Planning to hit the sack early tonight. Might as well take advantage of the cooler weather and get 8-9 hours of (hopefully) deep sleep. Nothing else to do in this “shelter in place” bit anyway. I could go for a walk, I guess, but I got nearly 6 miles in this morning, and I don’t want to push my feet any harder than that.

Going Mobile Again

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I set up the Bluetooth keyboard on my phone again this morning. Haven’t used it since I was in Michigan 18 months ago, but since I’m doing most of my work in the office on my work laptop, which I really try to keep separate from my personal stuff, it’s easier to keep this site updated from my phone. Therefore, please be more understanding of typos and don’t expect a huge number of photos until I can remember how to get them into posts with this little WordPress app.  Just for grins, I’ll try to insert one here… Assuming that that picture made it, it’s of a new feral cat who’s been showing up on my deck for the last few days.  Very pretty black kitty and it seems wee-fed and happy.  Maybe it’s not feral, but I’ll treat it as such. You can also see how much pollen has been falling in the last few days.  It’s making walking a lot less enjoyable, but I guess it’s to be expected given the mild winter we had. It’s kind of scary that the WORST pollen  generally doesn’t happen until late April. Continuing to work from home and I’m now into the third week of it.  I’ve noticed that it’s becoming more difficult to stay focused on work. Need to figure out a way to stay more engaged with my team, since I’m not actively working tickets like they are. I’m trying to provide assistance for them, but it’s very easy to take a break from that and read some news pages (or Facebook), or run to the kitchen for a snack, or just stare out the window.  I might try to set up a written schedule and daily milestones for myself until I get fully comfortable with the idea of being part of a team while in isolation.  It’s tougher than I thought it would be. I think it would be much easier if I were still an L1 and just needed to answer the phone and work tickets.

A Day in the Life

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Since I’m being the responsible, “socially-distanced” individual (working from home), I figured I might as well try to update a post throughout the course of a day at work. I’m a few hours late – started work at about 7:30 this morning – but I’ll gloss over those three hours and keep things updated going forward.

I started the day by kicking Joshua out of my office chair. He’s decided that it’s his. I’ve decided that he can have it when I don’t want it; and, since I’m bigger than he is, I get the last word. He and Boo are currently sharing the cat tree by the front window.

Lazy Morning Kitty Tree

Spent some time BS’ing via Microsoft Teams (chat) with the other leads in Alpharetta – who’s feeling sick, who’s buying ammunition (not kidding!), how are teams are handling the enforced isolation, etc. While doing this, I went through my team’s ticket list trying to identify cases that could be resolved or needed updates. I also started working on the cases that were auto-assigned to me overnight.

At around 9:00, the “Open Office Hours – Coffee Chat” meeting started. This is something that my boss put together on Monday as daily meeting for anybody who wants to join it (webcams, microphones, and chat) just to combat the feeling of isolation that some folks might be having. It’s a good idea and people seem to enjoy it. Early on – from 9:00 to 9:15 or so – pretty much everyone who’s working will be in the meeting, just to shoot the shit about nothing or to ask questions about specific tickets. After that, people just start to drop out and get back to focusing on their work.

One of the tickets that I’ve been working on since 9:30 or so has to do with a user email account that’s having problems. I’ve been unable to attach to it with my own testing account, which is a red flag. Other users have said that they’ve gotten kickback messages when trying to send something to the problem address, but I’ve been unable to replicate that. So I’m waiting on a few more details from the users before opening a case with Microsoft.

Right now, I’m putting together call and ticket statistics from yesterday for my team.

Got the stats out. Now I’m trying to coach one of my people on what sounds like an incredibly simple ticket (a user can’t get connected to a Citrix session), and it’s like pulling teeth to get my person to follow simple troubleshooting steps. We’ve been dealing with a lot of clients having problems getting set up to work from home this week – everything from, “My monitors look funny,” to “How do I print to the office?”

The answer to that last question, should you be wondering, is, “You don’t. And why on earth would you want to?”

At any rate, if a user can’t get connected, there are only about 3 things it could be. I could jump into the call and do this work for my direct report, but I really want her to figure it out on her own. I get amazingly frustrated when my people don’t follow the simple troubleshooting steps that I preach to them every week.

20 minutes later and she still hasn’t figured it out. She also hasn’t answered any of the three troubleshooting questions that I put in front of her. I know that she’s expecting me to jump into her call, jump onto the remote machine, and fix it for her. It’s not going to happen. I have a meeting in 10 minutes – ironically enough, one concerning how to deal with “uncomfortable” discussions with our consultants – and she’s either going to have to figure it out by herself or get some help from the rest of the team.

She did end up getting help from one of my senior consultants. As expected, it was an incredibly simple fix (literally – click “Reset”).

The meeting was a rundown of new procedures for issuing warnings (verbal, documented, written), PIPs (performance improvement plans), and terminations if the warnings and the PIP don’t work. Happy stuff.

Speaking of happy stuff, I’ve learned that a large number of sporting/gun stores in the metro area are running out of guns and ammunition. This bothers me. A week ago, we were in a normal society. Now we’ve got people stockpiling firearms? Believe it or not, I registered at Adventure Outdoors – literally the largest gun store in the world. Perhaps I have to finally pull the trigger (no pun intended) and buy an actual gun, rather than counting on the BB pistol I’ve got to deter people.

We’re now in a possible SysInc (System Incident), although it looks like it might be restricted to a couple of cities in Texas where ISPs are having trouble. Not surprising, since the load on them from people suddenly deciding to work from home is probably pretty intense.

Chamberlain has replaced Joshua and Boo on the Kitty Tree. Joshua has – you guessed it – settled into my office chair. I’m standing. Good thing I brought home the Varidesk when I moved from the office!

Chamberlain loves to sleep near an open window

This afternoon has been fairly slow. We’re still having clients call in regarding disconnects, but it’s become widely known that multiple ISPs are having problems and there’s isn’t really much we can do about it.

My team has chugged away and we’ve gotten back down under 30 tickets, though how long that will last I don’t know. A couple of my guys will be working tomorrow, so that will help. Call volume will be low and I hope they can snipe some of the low-hanging fruit on our ticket board.

At 3:00, we had “Beer Cart Friday – Virtual Style,” which was interesting. Normally on Fridays, we push a literal beer cart around the office and everyone grabs a beer. Today, we all just took pictures of ourselves holding up beers (or a shot of bourbon in my case) and shared them in our internal bulletin board.

I’m just wrapping things up now – helping some younger consultants with tickets that they’re working for my clients, finding documents for them, etc. Most of my team has gone offline for the day, and I’m not far from joining them. So I’ll wrap this up here. Happy Friday!

Virtual Beer Cart Friday

Pandemic!

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Been quite a while since I did anything with this, and I’ve been keenly aware of that fact. Oddly enough, a bunch of stuff has happened since I left wrote an entry, and I wasn’t completely sure how I wanted to approach writing about it. So let’s just jump into everything.

While driving into work on Tuesday, January 27th, I slowly began to realize that I couldn’t see. Fortunately, I was almost at work by the time I figured out what was happening. It wasn’t that I was going blind – my eyes basically just stopped working together. My right pupil was larger than my left, it was basically impossible to focus on anything that wasn’t directly in front of me, and if I moved my head (hence having to focus on something ELSE right in front of me), it’d take probably 5 seconds to get that new focus.

As I said, I didn’t really figure out that this was happening until quite a bit later. I just knew that it was getting more and more difficult to really see anything. That may help explain how it is that I got myself to work, told my boss something was going on, looked up directions to the hospital, and drove myself there. I told the woman at the front desk that I thought I might be having a stroke, and she lost no time in getting me through the doors and sitting me in front of a doctor.

And another doctor. And some nurses. And some other people. They squeezed and shone lights on me and gave me a couple of CT scans and plugged about 500 wires into me and asked a bunch of inane questions (true story – I told them I was having double vision and they asked, “In which eye?”), and about three hours later told me that I had high blood pressure but no signs of a stroke. The also said that they wanted to admit me and give me an MRI, but I’d already promised Jenny (she was in the Galapagos at the time) that I’d take care of her cats – and I didn’t know what this was costing me – so I declined and somehow drove myself home.

It was during the drive home (white-knuckled) and while sitting there the rest of the afternoon that I actually figured out what my eyes were doing (as described above). Needless to say, I was kind of freaking out for most of the day, but I managed to let my boss and co-workers know that I wasn’t dead and went to bed pretty early.

Wednesday morning, my eyes were back to normal. I took the day off and picked up a couple of prescriptions that the hospital had given me for hypertension and made an appointment with a GP for a follow-up.

Do you remember when I said, near the end of my last post, that I really needed to cut down on my smoking? Yeah – I went ahead and quit that. Coming up on two months now. I’m also walking (rather quickly) a bit over 5 miles every morning and taking drugs for hypertension and cholesterol. I’m also not eating anything that tastes remotely good (no sugar, no salt, no cholesterol, no fat, no carbs, blah, blah, blah).

The GP wants me to go see a cardiologist about carotid stenosis (blockage in my carotids), but I’m not ready for that yet. The worst part of things now is that one of the BP meds occasionally gives me vertigo – and every time it happens, I start to wonder if the whole thing is starting up again.

That can’t be good for my blood pressure.

In other news…THE APOCALYPSE IS HERE! Yes. Coronavirus. COVID-19. The big one. Or not. Who knows? All I know is that everything in Atlanta (and much of the world) has been canceled, and we went from talking about maybe working from home a bit to EVERYBODY WORK AT HOME ALL THE TIME – over the course of 3 days. So that’s what we’re doing. I straightened out my office, brought home a standing desk and my laptop, and made sure that all of my people brought home whatever they needed to be efficient from home. Just like that, all of us are remote for the foreseeable future.

My work-from-home setup, featuring a stand-up desk

The remote working isn’t really a big deal – I’ve been doing it a couple of days per week anyway – but the fact that I’m at home all the time now is going to get really boring really fast. I’ve got a project, which I’m calling “Campmachine 3.0,” to keep me occupied for a while. Not sure how long it will last. I’m basically building a bed and some cabinets in the back of my car in anticipation of going car camping sometime after tax season. At this point, what I’ve built is perfectly functional (helps a great deal when I’m bringing home groceries!), but it doesn’t look “finished,” so I might just consider what I’ve got to be a prototype and built the whole thing again better. That’s assuming that the Home Depot stays open long enough for me to get the material that I need.

I bought a Dremel tool a few weeks ago. Now THAT’S a good time! I’m still very green with it. Not sure of all the cool things that it can do, but I know it can do more than cut the ends off of screws that go all the way through a piece of wood (which is all I’ve used it for). I have a feeling that I’ll be doing more with it as I get more bored.

I’ve also been watching a couple of woodworking channels on YouTube, and I’m definitely going to build a Joiner’s table to replace the aging worktable that I put in my garage 15 or so years ago. I’ve got the plans and everything. I’m really looking forward to building that. I probably should do that before I do any other projects, to be honest.

One last bit of news is that this blog may be moving yet again. Or it may not. I’m definitely doing something with it, but haven’t decided exactly what. I’ve started a new domain called TomsBrain.com, both because I don’t want my personal blog so closely associated with the football site and also because I wanted a non-gmail address that was more “me” than my hotmail address, but not all-the-way “professional” like my Outlook address is. For those of you who didn’t know I had multiple addresses, you haven’t been paying attention – and I have others that are basically “stealth” addresses that you’ll probably never know about.

Anyway, I liked the idea of “tom@tomsbrain.com,” so I got that setup. The new domain is indeed built on a WordPress structure; in theory, I could just move this whole thing there and call it good. I thought about that. And then I thought, “What if I use the TomsBrain.com address to apply for a job? Do I want complete strangers who might be looking to hire me to see a personal blog?”

And I’m not sure that I do. But I might want them to see a less personal blog. Not necessarily professional, but maybe more structured, with more formal writing. Maybe articles about brass banding or thoughts on various technical issues or even just day-to-day nonsense, but written for a larger, general, audience (as this is most certainly not). That’s a decent idea…but what do I do with the last 15 years’ worth of stuff that’s already here?

Don’t know. I might move it (truth be told, I already HAVE copied it) to the new site, but set it up in a more protected way, allowing access only to a select few. Or I might just archive it, allowing access to nobody other than me – no one wants to go back and read my old stuff anyway, right?

Anyway, it’s all still up in the air. I’m working on the design for TomsBrain.com now, and I’ll decide what it’s going to be – and where this blog will fit in – after I’ve got that taken care of. For now, this is still the only place to see all this literary nonsense.