We’ve got another beautiful day out there this morning – always nice to have it coincide with a long weeekend.
So, after I got past my initial “oh shit, too much to do” paralysis yesterday with regards to the house, I did actually get a few things done! Of course, it started with discovering that the vac was at 25% because I’d forgotten to plug it back in after going to town on the car on Saturday, and I was out of cleaning rags. Charged the vacuum and did FOUR loads of laundry. So I have a vacuum at 100%, clean towels, clean rags, and clean clothes!
So while I still have a lot to get done, yesterday was a not terrible start, and I just have to get past my fucking freeze up that I do when confronted with too much to do around here. I’ve had it all my life and it’s the dumbest thing EVER. My brain really sucks sometimes.
Thing is – most of the time, once I get going, I’m OK. It’s the getting going that seems to be like climbing Mount Everest.
It just hit me that we are going on vacation in 17 days. I mean, I’ve had the dates memorized since we made the reservation, but oh shit that is right around the corner.
And OMG, I have a ton to do. All the laundry. Replacement pair of shorts & pants. Make the house feel less like a disaster area so I’m not hugely depressed when we return.
It’s not insurmountable, but it is a lot. And I’m kinda salty about it all, because I’d given myself permission to go slow this weekend cause I’m still trying to bounce (or slog) back from work trying its best to grind me into dust the past 3 months. Before all that went to shit, I had actually been keeping up on things.
I did hit yesterdays little goal of getting the car all shiny – got the car washed, cleared out all the trashy bits and vacuumed it. The trashy bits were A LOT and that is because a few weeks ago, l had to temporarily move the little trash can I keep on the passenger side floor to the back seat and kept forgetting to put it back.
There is definitely an object lesson here, but I’m not sure if it’s more complicated than “have a lot more trash bins within arms reach everywhere in the house.”
Now, given all this, am I studying my list to decide what to hit first? Or even picking something at random? Oh god no, I’m researching vegetable choppers for potato salad I’ll never make.
And at least here in the mid-Atlantic, it looks like it’s going to be a gorgeous day for everyone.
I didn’t learn about Juneteenth until grad school*, and I thought it was nice that the Black community in the US had a day that was just their own to celebrate and reflect. I’m glad it’s a Federal holiday now, because it really brings it to the consciousness of the whole country. That being said, white people, this isn’t about you – just be quiet, enjoy a day off, and order something from a Black owned business or donate to a Black run mutual aid group.
And for all the Dad’s out there – Happy Father’s Day – especially the first time Dads – you’re doing great. May you love the fashion-questionable ties, misshapen ceramics, painted rocks, and other gifts from your wee ones, and have fun cooking with fire.
My Dad isn’t here anymore, and while I miss him every day, today isn’t too bad, and if your Dad isn’t here anymore, I hope you do OK today, too.
Love all y’all.
* Glad kids will learn about it now, cause we sure as hell didn’t learn about it in school.
After 95º yesterday, it’s breezy and sunny and it’s gonna only hit 75º today. Woke up before my alarm, hit the farmers market early while the empanada lady still had ALL her goodies and I had my usual lack of impulse control – but I have empanadas, green beans, green onions, salad mix, pumpkin bread, granola, a crunchy oat bar, cheddar garlic buns, and CHERRY TOMATOES!
Mmmmm, tomatoes
I mean, if you’re going to totally lack impulse control, the farmers market is the place to do it, right? Fresh produce and food, and supporting local businesses – all good! Though I suddenly realized I intended to circle back around to the pie & quiche stand and got distracted. Next week! I’ve already had a handful of tomatoes with some hickory smoked salts I got at the fair weekend before last – yummy!
My own cherry tomato plant is producing quite well – and the chipmunks are LOVING IT. Inadvertently caught one red-handed yesterday. It wasn’t until I zoomed in after the snap that I saw that little fucker had a cherry tomato in his mouth and had obviously taken it while I was sitting not 10 feet away.
Stripey thief!!
I’m not mad that he took it – I left snacks in his living room. BUT I WAS RIGHT THERE. The. Audacity.
And I’ve got a three day weekend on top of all the rest of this loveliness, and lordy do I need it. While this last week has been delightfully calm at work, it’s going to take more than just a week to really recover from the insanity of the previous three months.
And I am keeping my expectations extremely low for productivity this weekend. So far, I’ve hit the market and the farmers market, and the market again for the stuff I didn’t know I needed when I popped in the first time, and gotten the car washed.
Still need to get the car cleared out and vacuumed. Repot the catnip, rabbits foot fern, marigolds, and geraniums, tackle the damn vine in the front garden, and get the impatiens in the ground.
It’s not much for a whole three day weekend, but it’s about all I can reasonably contemplate right now. Anything more will just be a big ol’ bonus. If I put more on the list, I know I’ll just get overwhelmed and then get all paralyzed and get nothing at all done. So, small steps and all that.
You have a good weekend and look after yourself – you deserve it.
Half-following the Jan 6th hearings and I could do without the lionizing of Pence. He did the right thing once, but lay down with dogs and all that. My empathy is definitely lacking there.
Work has been gloriously calm this week and I am really, really hoping it stays that way. We’ve got a half day today, and my ass is not showing up early, because I’m out at 1PM no matter what. I’m getting my four hours off, dammit.
What can I say, the last three months has made me a bit twitchy about my work hours. I really don’t mind the occasional long day or emergency, but I can’t do it constantly. It’s gonna take me multiple weeks to recover from the last three months – right now I still feel like I could sleep for a week.
Gotta work on that retirement plan this weekend.
Time to go do the thing to make the 401K deposits… You have a great day!
Last night it was a full on rout against the Cubs – 19-5. There is a fine line between, “Damn, we’re really winning!” and “Should we be considering a mercy rule?” But…it was a fun game to watch. Manny Machado got his 1500th hit!
On the work front – whew, after roughly three months of unadulterated chaos and overwork, things appear to be back to normal. And let me tell you – regular 8 hour days where I can take a break between tasks to clear my head and refocus before the next task and I’m not dealing with constant “Special Client found X” all day? It feels damn near like part time work and it is glorious.
Don’t tell my team lead I said that, cause he’ll just find more work for me, LOL. I’m hoping now that things have calmed down he’ll be a little less…extra. I mean, there have always been issues with time estimates and how much capacity we actually have, but this past three months was BAD.
I get not wanting to tell management “we don’t have the capacity to do this in a reasonable amount of time” – but not at the expense of your team, and he did that over and over again.
Hopefully we won’t find ourselves in this spot again, but if we do, I’ll again be the boss ass bitch saying FUCK NO. (Pretty sure he’s still very pissed at me – don’t care.)
The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the Padres have another win in the books! Rough start, down 5 runs through the 5th inning and then the bats caught fire and they scored 12 runs!!
And it’s another FML early meeting Wednesday and at least I can go in not being insanely behind on my work. Granted, the two things I’m working on – both have defects I found yesterday and my dev is on vacation this week. Like I literally sat down yesterday and went, “Yes! I can work on the new version today!” and bang, one right after the other and it’s back on hold, LOL.
But on one of them, I definitely know the trigger for it, and the other one, I had no idea yesterday, but it hit me this morning that I think I know what the issue is and I should be able to confirm that this morning without too much hassle – and then I can at least tell my dev what is driving it.
While I can’t point to a line of code and say “this is it” – I take a lot of pride in being able to tell my devs “When I do X, it works, but when I do Y, it blows up” or being able to read a system error when it pukes up a SQL error and know what it is telling me.
That’s the work I love – figuring shit out, and it’s nice to be able to once again do it in a somewhat calm manner.
You have a great day and I hope you figure shit out too. :-D
At work no less! Our Special Client has declared their issues with the app from hell…resolved. And not because they’re moving to another software product. I feel like I should find an old computer peripheral and sacrifice it to the goddesses of tech to keep this going.
Hopefully lessons were learned here. First being: don’t make big changes within the context of a monthly release where there is only a week or so to test said changes. Second: over-catering to one client can be disastrous for everyone, and if you must over-cater to one client, do things incrementally. Third: I really need to create some of my own automated tests – I should have caught a lot of this before the client did, and automated comparisons of version X to Y would have caught a ton of things I just didn’t see. But…time. But, I will absolutely be implementing some kind of automated comparison for our newest version. Just gotta find the time…
In the end, I’m just happy we didn’t all get fired. Though I will say, I think this has been the most exhausting 6 months of my career – and I burned out of support not once, but twice, so that’s saying something. But the difference here – even despite my clashes with the team lead, management was actually clued in to how hard we were working, and made it known.
So, hopefully the worst is behind us. Time to go do the thing and make sure this doesn’t happen with the next version.
It’s another Monday, wheeeee. But, we get paid this week, have a half-day Friday and then a long weekend for Juneteenth on Monday, so that’s something.
Will it be a calm week? Now, that is a question for the ages. I have one bug that has to be tested today, everything is setup and ready to go for it – it’s been tested already on other versions with no issues, so I think it will be fine. And that bug we were struggling with…management has said to let it go – there is a not at all cumbersome workaround should it be encountered, just “hit X not Y” – and it doesn’t appear to be a widespread problem, so… Not what I would have done, but it is what it is.
On the housework front, I had the revelation that I am in charge of my to-do list. And when you’re so far behind on everything that you just freak out when you look at it – sometimes you just have to mark everything as done and start fresh. Which is exactly what I did. So, the list is looking far more manageable today, which is a relief.
Welp, time to go take on the day – you have a great day!
Amazon and the like are great for things I can’t find locally or don’t have the time to go searching for locally. And boy did today demonstrate that.
Three and a half hours of running around to not find what I was looking for. My preferred old lady vitamins that were supposedly in stock at alllllll the local drugstores were nowhere to be found. Grocery store, Walmart, CVS x3, Whole Foods, and Walgreens x2 – nope. Also apparently just missed an armed robbery at the Walgreens. Walmart.com did in fact have them, despite the manufacturers website saying no one was selling them online. Of course, this was the same website that said every drug store had them in store.
And Amazon had to do for a grill ash disposal container – at least this one is sold and shipped by Amazon vs the fly by night folks I ordered the last one from that had a carrier listed of “Truck”…
Musings of a marginally sane feline-appreciating female. 