Tag Archives: health

Dog Days

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Mojo (Sandie’s little dog) went to the vet yesterday. He (the dog) wasn’t particularly thrilled about this, but he had (probably still has) an ear infection that looked nasty, smelled disgusting, and was obviously bothering him. Sandie spent some time Monday night torturing him by pulling hair out of his ear, and I couldn’t stand listening to him yelp, so I insisted that he go to the vet.

Ear looks better and doesn’t smell anymore. And I didn’t have to hear him scream.

In other news, it has been hot and rainy since we returned from Canada last week. The yard is slowly growing into a jungle because it’s always raining – or when it’s not it’s like walking into a steam room whenever you go outside, so nobody has felt much like mowing. I’ve been spending some time in my shop redecorating. Pulling cabinets off of walls, reconfiguring them, planning in my mind how I want things to look. It’s a slow process, but should give me a lot more bench space when all is said and done.

Work is beginning to really bore me. I feel more sorry for the folks that I used to supervise every day, because doing tech support is just so uninspiring. You fix one thing and there are 10 more lined up to look at. Half of the questions seem to be variations of “Why doesn’t report A match report B?” My knee jerk response has always been, “Because they’re different reports,” but that wouldn’t fly, so I end up going into the database and comparing the reports on a line-by-line level until I can pinpoint exactly which record is missing from one report or the other, and it’s always because, for whatever reason, that record shouldn’t BE on report A or B and the user has done something stupid. I can’t explain this to them in technical terms, and I don’t understand it in accounting terms, so I usually end up finding the issue and then asking a teammate to translate for me. It’s just…boring. I like having projects that have endings. This type of support just doesn’t have those. Don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to do it.

Got a call from a group of doctors who stick cameras up your butt a few days ago. Seems that my doc REALLY wants them to do this to me. I’ve avoided it for nearly 60 years, but I guess I’ll bite the bullet and get it done, if only to get Sandie off of my back about it. Not something that I’m looking forward to, although I am a bit curious about how much weight I’ll lose during the purge process before I do it. That could be interesting.

Football season is only a month or so away. So that’s nice.

Not much else to say today. Maybe something amazing will happen tonight.

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.

One of the Seven

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Today’s featured picture, should you be wondering, is of a trail to the beach at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.  I was just perusing some random files in my OneDrive folders and I liked it.  I think I’ll just start doing that – using random shots – from now on.

Anyway, this morning is what I’d call one of the perfect 7 days that Georgia has each year.  I used to say that we had 6 perfect days, but I decided recently to increase that to a full week.  Not for any particular reason, but it’s probably close.  There are usually 4 or 5 such perfect days in the autumn and 1 or 2 in the early spring.  The rest of the year is either ungodly hot, ungodly wet, or both.  This morning, though….it’s in the high 50s, there’s a luscious breeze blowing out of the south, the humidity is very low, and the leaves in my back yard have finally turned gold.  I have the weirdest tree back there.  I think it’s a Beech, and it stays green forever.  And then, overnight, it seems, it goes gold.  It will stay that color until January or so, and then – again, overnight – all of the leaves will fall off and it’ll be dead until summer, when it instantly becomes covered in thick green leaves.  Just a strange tree.

So I’ve got the living room window open and the boys are loving life, sitting as close to the screen as they can without actually pushing it out of its frame, and smelling all that neat stuff that only cats can smell.

The job search continues for me.  I’ve been rejected so far by AT&T (two or three times), Macy’s (once), GE (twice), NCR (once), and I think by somebody else that I can’t remember.  I have resumes out to AT&T (several), OFS (a job that, if the dorks would just read my resume, they’d break their legs running to get me), RaceTrac (HQ – two possible jobs), and nice lady recruiter in Columbia, SC, has been hounding me for the last two days.  I told her to leave me alone until I’ve exhausted my Atlanta options.  Oh, and I’ve got a resume in Huntsville, AL, too.  Private K-12 needs a support dude.  I think that’d be fun.

My boss called me the other day and said that a friend of his is thinking about back-filling at job at AT&T, and he’s going to pass my name along.  That’d be cool because I’d keep my years in service and current salary (which I’m not going to get if I leave the company), but it would also kinda suck because the job is for an outage call coordinator….which means that my job would be to sit on outage calls and yell at people in order to make them fix the outage.  On the plus side, I’d get to work from home.  Also on the plus side, it’d give me more management experience.  On the minus side….come on…if you know me at all, you know that I don’t get in people’s faces.  I fix the problems for them.  In fact, that personality quirk bit me on the ass last week during my second interview for a sysadmin job at GE.  The interviewer asked me why I haven’t advanced further up the ladder, considering my experience.  I told him the truth: I don’t want direct reports.  I don’t want to be a team lead.  I like being given a problem and told to solve it.

He was looking for a team lead.  Even told me that in the follow-up rejection call.  “We really like your experience, but we want somebody to run the show.”  I thanked him and told him to keep me in mind when they need tuba players and not trumpet soloists.  He laughed and said that he would.  All in all, a pretty pleasant rejection.

I’m also considering applying for a job as the assistant manager at an AT&T retail store – a job that is two salary grades below my own and would just barely pay the bills.  Why would I do this?  A number of reasons, actually.  One, I’d keep my years in services.  This is actually important to me, if for no other reason than the fact that I’m only three years away from being able to take an early retirement.  Two, there’s nowhere for me to go in my current career path except into people management, and I have no experience with that.  If I’m going to have to make that plunge eventually, I think it’d be good for me to actually get some experience as a manager – and what less stressful learning could I get than as an entry-level assistant manager?  Three, I think I’d be damned good at it, given that I’m still a geek who likes to play with all the new toys, that (this is actually true) I’m extremely organized, that I like crunching numbers and making charts, and that (this is also true) I have phenomenal people skills in a work environment….said skills do not apply to social environments, where I can be kind of a dick, truth be told.  I’m also free to apply for that job and to turn it down if it’s offered to me without losing my severance package (because it’s a step down, I’m not obligated to accept an offer).  So I’m working on a cover letter for that gig, meant to convince the hiring manager that I’m not overqualified and that I’m not just flailing away trying to stay at AT&T, but that I’m truly interested in learning in order to maybe start a second career in my doddering years.

In a nutshell, no job yet, but I’m not defeated.  I will admit that my smoke intake has increased markedly in the last couple of weeks, and I really need to chill out as far as that goes.  Stress level is indeed high, but I’m trying to keep it under control.

What else what else….?

Oh!  In between applying for jobs and avoiding all actual work in the office, I’ve been trying to learn more about Bootstrap, which is a CSS framework for mobile-first websites.  Why?  Because it’s cool.  So there.

As a beginner project, I’ve decided to make a mileage/gasoline tracker for myself, rather than going back to one of the myriad apps that do the same thing.  If you want to watch my progress, you can do so by looking at migration.theuffp.com/mileage.  It’ll open in a regular browser.  More importantly, if you open it on your phone, it should fit on the screen perfectly, thanks to Bootstrap.   As of today, it does absolutely nothing.  You can enter numbers and click buttons to your hearts’ content, and nothing will happen.  Next week, however, I hope to start filling in the fun stuff that actually writes and reads data and displays graphs.  Then I’ll have to add some security to it.  Then I’ll be happy to set up accounts for anybody who wants to use it – and I’ll charge you.

Career #3 maybe?

In the “spending money I shouldn’t spend right now” category, I bought Battlefield 1 the other day.  It’s a video game.  First-person shooter of World War I.  Having already beaten up the Japanese and Germans in two separate WWII games, and the Russians in a Cold War game, I’ve decided to go old-school and kick some WWI butt.  Unfortunately, I need to get a video driver update before the game will work for me on my Surface Book.  Hoping to do that later today, but I’m being very careful.  All I need at this point is to break the graphics on my main computer….

And that, friends and family, is all the news that I can think to print.  Maybe next week I’ll have something better.  If not, I’ll try to just ramble on again anyway.  After nearly 50 years of doing it, the act of writing (or typing) is still a very calming experience for me.  I spend more on pens and notebooks than anyone I know.  And then I leave them at my desk and type everything that I thought I was going to write.  Weird.

Almost as weird as that stupid Beech tree.

 

Snuffles

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Had a fairly boring weekend.  Mowed the lawn and did some shopping on Saturday before going to a watering hole to play some trivia (came within 18 points of a perfect score – good for #2 in North America); and did absolutely nothing on Sunday other than taking a long walk in the morning.  Spent most of the day watching the new implementation of Roots and doing laundry.

Also took a walk on Saturday morning.  Both walks featured tiny bits of rain which did not mitigate the ungodly heat and humidity.  You’d think that it’d be comfortable at 5:30 in the morning.  Not at all.  This is going to be a long, hot, summer.

I’ve been sneezing my head off for the past several weeks and it’s really getting annoying.  Picked up some Claritin and Flonase last week to see if either of those will help.  Just started a regimen of the latter yesterday.  I’m not sure exactly what I’m allergic to at this point.  Thought it was the cats, but I’m ruling that out for now.  Also thought it might be a new detergent that I started using about a month ago, but switching back to the old one hasn’t yielded any improvements.

The Puff’s company is pleased, anyway.  Can’t buy enough of the stuff.  Here’s hoping that a couple of weeks in Canada will clear things up at least temporarily.

In my spare time, I’ve been amusing myself for a couple of months by playing two computer games in a series called Medal of Honor.  Both are first-person shooters (in that the action involves a scene as it would be seen if you were in it, and you’re shooting at things) set in WWII.  The first one, Medal of Honor, Pacific Assault, puts the gamer in the marines at Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and a few other Pacific islands.   The second, MoH, Allied Assault, has the player landing at Normandy and fighting through the French and Belgian countryside.

Both are graphically excellent, and seem to be fairly historically accurate, too.  Both have inspired me to look up details of several of the battles that “I” have been involved in (Tarawa is fascinating.  I wouldn’t mind visiting).

I found it somewhat amusing that, when I watched Saving Private Ryan last Monday (Memorial Day), it became apparent that a number of the scenes depicted in MoH, Allied Assault were taken directly from the movie.  Not just close or similar, mind you.  Exactly.  From the scenery and “battle plan” for D-Day to the towns, weather, and sniper towers throughout the movie.

Anyway, they’re fun games that kill time and make me curious enough to look up WWII history, something that previously hasn’t interested me in the least.  I’m currently watching an HBO series, Pacific – you can probably figure out what it’s about.  Quite well done.