Tag Archives: Work

Been A While

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So, yeah.

It’s been three-and-a-half years since I updated this. I guess not much has happened?

Let’s see…

For starters, I moved in with Sandie a couple of years ago. She bought a log cabin in Lawrenceville on a few nicely-wooded acres and we decided that it was easier for me to just move here than it was for us to continue in separate domiciles. As it turned out, the move was pretty well timed, because a mutual friend found himself homeless shortly after I vacated my place, and he’s been renting from me ever since.

The boys, Joshua and Chamberlain, weren’t especially thrilled with the ride from my house to the cabin (particularly Josh, who managed to rip out a couple of claws in his panic during the ride), but they’re settled in nicely with their “cousin” Mojo (a Shih-Tzu dog) and have adjusted to the new things that come with a new place. Chamberlain loves nothing more than to sleep on the screened-in porch (at home, the closest he could get to being “outside” was to sit by an open window), and Joshua spends most of his time sleeping upstairs in my office. He’s had a rougher time of it – including falling from a catwalk that spans the main room of the house (scaring the hell out of me) – but he seems on the whole to be relatively content.

I quite my job at the X company in November of 2022. Mainly because my director moved to a different job, I couldn’t stand his replacement, and when a newly-created position opened up for an overall service manager, it went to a colleague of mine who I could never see myself respecting. The story I gave them was that I wanted to “get back into tech,” and move away from a supervisory role, but the simple fact was that I couldn’t stomach the thought of reporting to either of those guys. My new job is, to put it mildly, difficult. As far as the “tech” goes, it’s fine – I work almost entirely with SQL servers, which is no big deal – but the questions that I get from the accounting companies that I support might as well be in another language. 18 months into it, I’m still constantly asking my teammates, “What exactly are they saying the problem is?” There are plenty of days that I think I regret making the jump, but then I try to imagine doing my old job and taking direction from two morons, and I wind up feeling better about the decision again.

My woodworking hobby has taken off since moving here, also. The previous owner had setup a detached garage on the property as his workshop, and Sandie and I continued that. At first, we both had workbenches in the place, but she slowly moved most of her tools and projects to a corner of the in-house garage (she calls it “the SPA” – small projects area), and I’m slowly filling the bigger shop with some serious hardware. Planer, jointer, laser engraver, router table….all the fun stuff that I would have loved to put in my garage at home, but for which there just wasn’t space. Don’t know that my woodworking has gotten any better, but at least I’m willing to try things that I would not have considered previously. Sandie, as is her wont, is methodically remodeling the house, and she’s asked me to try building things for it – benches, closet space, cabinets and the like. I practice for things like that by making shop furniture, and I do see some improvement. Maybe if I can ever retire I can make a bit of money on the side as a carpenter.

Hanging out in the woodshop. Sitting on a bench that I reconstructed from cast-iron parts I found buried in the yard.

Speaking of retirement, Sandie took that plunge a year or so ago. She’s younger than me, but when her father passed away a few years ago, he did so as a pretty wealthy guy. Sandie’s mom set her and her sister up with pretty decent allowances and they’re both living the retired life. She’s told me to make the plunge a few times, but I’m not ready yet. I want that sweet government insurance. And I want to have some structure. I think when I actually do take the leap, I’ll be looking for a part-time gig within a year just to stay somewhat focused (and also have a bit of extra scratch coming in).

I continue to play with the Georgia Brass Band, and continue to act as the librarian for that group. During the Covid lockdown in 2020, I started scanning all of our music and estimated that it would take me 6-12 months to have everything digitized. 48 months later, I’m maybe a 10th of the way through it. Granted, I had a move during that time (there are currently 11 file cabinets full of music in the basement), but my original idea was vastly underestimated – and I don’t spend as much time scanning as I probably should. The group sounds good, though. We’ve gone back to NABBA a few times (competing in the Championship Section) and haven’t embarrassed ourselves yet. May do it again in 2025. The jury is still out on that, but our director – who founded the band – is retiring after 25 years at the helm (on Sunday), and he was not into competition at all. The new guy, who hasn’t been selected yet, may be more excited about it.

So that’s a (very) brief rundown of what’s been happening for the last 3 years. I’ve said this (many times) before, but I’ll try to be more diligent about keeping this thing updated going forward.

The Rise and Fall of the Turf

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Two more months have gone by, and we’re now officially well into the hottest part of the summer in Georgia. I’m quite settled into the work-from-home routine – though I’m actually at the office today because my internet crapped out at home and AT&T isn’t sending a technician until Friday. Yes, I do have a mobile hotspot, but it’s just barely sufficient for doing my job at home.

The routine for the last few months has been pretty much set in stone. I get up at 5:00, feed the cats, drink a cup of coffee while watching the news or some YouTube videos. Shortly before 6:00, I’ll head out for a 5-mile walk, which gets me home at just after 7:00. At that point, I’ll have another cup of coffee (decaf, by the way – always), will watch the tube a bit more, and might eat something for breakfast – egg white omelet, bowl of cereal, or some fruit. As often as not, I’ll skip the food altogether. At around 7:30, I’ll take a shower and start work. Somewhere between 4:00 and 5:00, I’ll turn off the computer, feed the cats again, take another walk, put something on the stove for dinner, and drink a couple of rocks glasses of bourbon while looking at Facebook or playing a game on my phone – generally sitting in the screen house on my deck, though it’s recently gotten so hot that it’s uncomfortable to sit outside for too long.

The “Bourbon Barn” on my deck – a screen-house with removable wind/rain panels – is where I’ve taken to spending most evenings. I took this picture the day the roof was being replaced, which explains the rope on the roof.

After an hour or so, I’ll wander back inside, eat whatever was cooking, watch part of a movie or something, and generally hit the sack before 9:00. Lather, rinse, repeat. It really shouldn’t be surprising that I quite often do not know what day it is. Seriously – it’s not unusual at all for me to start the day by saying, “Alexa, what day is it?”

There are some highlights and banner days, however. For example, I had my gutters replaced last Thursday. After getting quotes from three different roofers to do the job – and after all three of them gave me quotes, but never followed up to schedule the work even when I sent them emails, I called a fourth company who was recommended by my bartender on Sunday. They came out and took pictures on Monday, gave me a quote on Tuesday, and did the job Thursday. The gutters look great, the work was done in less than three hours, and I’m not sure why the first three companies didn’t think it was worth three hours of their time to make $1500.

Another example: yesterday was Tuesday the 11th – and on Tuesday the 11th, my new retaining wall was completed. While it was expensive, it came out looking great and I’m confident that the erosion that has claimed about a foot and a half of my backyard over the last 20 years will now stop. I ended up hiring a hardscraper who lives in my neighborhood, and he went to town: 85-pound blocks, a few tons of gravel, two large drainage tubes, another ton of fill dirt, another ton or two of large rocks….the upper yard is not going anywhere anytime soon.

The new retaining wall shortly after it was finished.

The biggest disappointment with the new wall, however, is that my lawns were absolutely destroyed by the equipment and materiel needed to build it. As you can see in the picture, both the lower and upper yards are now little more than dirt. I’m fairly certain that it’s too late in the year to try planting grass, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway. Wendell (the guy who built the wall) really wanted me to hire him to resod the yard, but I’m not doing that anytime soon. The plan all along has been “Roof then wall then floors,” and I’m sticking to it. My floors – at least downstairs – are getting replaced next.

And I think the upstairs will get replaced sooner rather than later, too. Since I’m going to be working out of the house for the long term, I really want to get my upstairs office into better shape, starting with a new floor. It’s okay right now, but I need to make it feel less like a spare bedroom and more like an office, so I might as well start at the bottom, rip out the floor, repaint it, replace the lights, then put in a new floor and start getting the furniture laid out like an office. I think it will help me put some distance between home and work, and make the days a little less monotonous.

I did drive up to the NC mountains last weekend – mainly to find out if they were open and people could camp there again. I went to the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest and drove along the forest road next to the Little Santeetlah River, where all of my favorite spots did indeed have people in them. So that’s a good thing. I stopped for 45 minutes or so just to sit by the river and soak up the sound of quiet. Now that I’ve established that the place is open, a couple of friends and I may hike up to Bob Bald in the next couple of weeks and spend a night up there. That should be really nice.

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.

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!