I wonder if somehow it’s the cats moving around that keep waking me up. They don’t cause much trouble, short of taking about fifteen minutes to take a dump and seemingly scratching the side of the litter box the entire time. Early morning though, unless something cataclysmic happens I’m going to finally go put some time into working on the truck today. It’s a little dreary out but I’ll find some tunes and put my head into it.
My grandparents emailed me recently asking what the address to my blog was. I warned them it’s probably not their style, and when I talked to my dad he told me they had discussed it with him and he warned them to stay away as well. Best the fam not know about the dead hookers anyways.
So for know, we will stay away from the journal as we are getting too old for that heavy stuff!
They are a pretty amazing pair. They should both be about ~76 these days and still seem intent on doing more in a day than most people half their age do all week, as they say. They’ll be out here for a couple nights in March as they visit family in the Northwest and according to their itinerary, take a train all over the place, apparently for the entertainment value.
On that note, I did get most the decent photos from 2005 off CD and on to flickr. It’s mostly a road trip Maria and I took around the US back then and a bunch of animals we saw along the way. I’ve got a physical server I’ve got to host at some point here, as soon as my boss gets back to me about if they feel legally okay with me keeping it at work. When I do I’ll dig out the old gallery from my old webserver before I went virtual and disk space became a concern. The vhost I’m using right now is about 24GB. The server is about 2.4TB in a RAID5 configuration. Note the T instead of the G. So that’ll be nice, there’ll be some funny memories there. A lot of that trip had slipped my mind. While it’ll be three years ago in March or April, it’s also about two lifetimes ago and so much has changed since then.
It’s been 2.5 years since I moved out here. That’s one restart of life right there. 1.5 years ago was the other. Moving out here seems like an easier one to mark, that was 8/2005 but extended most of 2005 really. It took that trip, a lot of conversations with Maria and starting to feel like people in Maine were baggage to initiate a re-roll. Whereas 2006 there’s less of a defining moment. Probably the most turmoil was in quitting Strategy, but more in making the decision to do it and stick with it, even if I had to convince people I was nuts to get them to leave me alone. Breaking up with Maria that year and moving into the Awful Shark were both huge changes in my life as well though. So while lots happened in 2007, I’m glad I can look back at it and feel like it was relatively calm. Except for the accident I suppose, that was life changing, but not in the ways people always want to have been from stereotype or whatnot. I didn’t meet God. If I did, I probably jabbed him in the kidney and he took my memory of it away so I couldn’t finish off life with that level of satisfaction. All those stories about being a pain in the ass and the medically induced coma and shit are all god’s lies.
When I left the office last night just me and the CEO were left. As I said goodnight he thanked me. I looked a little quizzical, wondering what for. I particularly felt unsuccessful, having just spent a good number of hours fucking around with MSSQL to no success. He told me for taking care of a new employee earlier that day. We joked for a minute about how I mostly get thanks at work for the little things that people see. We have pretty pictures around the walls of the websites that the web teams and creative teams make, news articles about our software, etc, but of course there’s never anything posted up talking about how awesome the new debian repository is or anything like that. I had this conversation with someone else in the last six months and I remember expressing that if you work in IT long enough you get used to it and don’t have any expectation of getting your work on the fridge anymore. Maybe that’s not true, maybe it just hasn’t ever been a big deal to me. But I do find it pretty funny all the same. Five minutes of helping someone figure out how to use Office gets me much more praise than five days of mashing a pile of open sources packages together to provide slick back-end solutions. Mostly the funny part I think is that getting the latter done is always what makes me feel good about my job, whereas while I happily help users, it’s not why I go to work.
Kennifer, David, Anthony, Ken, Anna and I played poker last night. Playing poker may have been a first for me, definitely close. Good times seemed to be have had by all, although it looks like we got David and Anthony trashed, even without moonbags or anything.
Gotta get going and get outside though. No use procrastinating.