Apparently not even the church was entirely spared from “Snowmageddon”.
That was a nice tree, I’ll miss it. It was a bit weird, though, to see snow just piled up and hanging around after weeks of nice weather. Guess that’s what happens when you don’t have salt on hand to deal with it.
That evening a friend came by and we watched another Bollywood movie. It’s the one Mom saw the beginning of and didn’t much care for. It’s not for everyone, but it does have two of my favorite numbers.
Anyways. Was fun.
I always keep an eye on our “forsale” mailing list; gotten some good deals in the past. A few weeks ago someone was selling a pair of tickets to this “National Geographic Live” thing, down in Seattle. They weren’t discounted or anything but I figured what the heck, let’s do something else. So on Tuesday I went out with a friend to go see it. They were great pictures and stories, but I was a little put off by the photographer’s enthusiasm after a while. His presentation was very energetic, and very rehearsed, down to the word. Hard to take jokes at face value when you know they’ve been told dozens of times. Whatevs.
On Thursday I went in to get a permanent retainer installed. I’d lost mine while eating a pear almost two years ago and always told myself I’d have to get a new one before long. Finally… wait for it… bit the bullet.
Friday was an Ensign Symphony concert I went to on a whim. So, second time in a week hitting up Benaroya Hall (the Nat Geo thing was there too). It was nice. Afterwards a friend of mine who performed pointed out a parking garage with a fantastic view. So I went on a mini-adventure.
Got questioned by a security guard on my way out; apparently taking photos for commercial purposes on that parking garage requires a permit. He let me off with a pinky swear not to sell these pics.
Saturday was Mary’s birthday at her place. I noticed people were playing the Mario Chase game on the Wii U, and I got to introduce everyone to the ghost game. Much fun.
Sunday I figured I’d check out the Bellevue ward for a change, and it was nice. Great lesson on happiness – I think the teacher decided to skip back a week in the manual.
That evening I went to a couple of friends’ going-away party; they’re moving off to Utah in a month or so.
Now that’s a dictionary.
After months of paranoia that cycling would damage my back, I decided to get back on the stationary cycle at work. The endorphins sure are nice. And I’ve actually been feeling much less back pain ever since I started.
It’s “Perf Season” at work, short for Performance Review. We each get to fill out a self-assessment of all the amazing things we’ve done this cycle, and then ask peers to comment on our summary. Managers will comment on our assessment, and in turn we’ll comment on our manager’s effectiveness.
There was an overhaul of the system some time back that aimed to reduce much of the burden placed on individual engineers, shifting more of the work to the manager. Couple that with the fact that I’m not going for promotion this cycle (and don’t know if I will again), and filling out my self-assessment was a breeze. It did become evident to me just how many different things I’m responsible for these days, validating the feeling I’ve had lately of being spread too thin. And actually, under “what do you want to work on going forward,” I said that I want to get myself out of the critical path for some of our testing and release operations.
Self-assessment done, I turned to my peer reviews – those who’d asked me to comment on their own self-assessments. And to my dismay, I found I had twelve other people had requested review. I think that’s twice as many as I’ve ever had in prior cycles. Guess it’s another sign of having my finger in too many pies.
Tuesday night was the deadline. All through Monday I’d tried motivating myself to make progress on the reviews, but other things kept cropping up. The product I work on was causing some issues for a few machines, and I was helping the technician do some manual debugging. The technician was up oddly late, 11pm, but we were making good progress. Eventually called it a night at 12:30am.
The next morning I heard from someone who had an idea of what could be causing us issues. I wrote up a set of commands to try out to recover the machine, and pinged my technician friend to see if he could give them a go (couldn’t run them myself as I didn’t own the machine in question). Made token progress throughout the day on the reviews. After dinner I hunkered down and made better progress, telling myself I wouldn’t leave the office until they were done. But then at 11pm my technician friend came online and was ready to get cracking again. I checked out where he was and it turns out the machine I’d been helping to debug was in Finland! That explained why the technician had seemed like such a night owl.
By 1am we’d gotten some good results. I had only a handful of reviews left. I tried my hardest to re-focus, but had to tell myself, “Chris, I’m sorry, but your review is just going to have to be late.” Headed home and conked out.
I’d been in a bit of a funk about random stuff over the weekend, so it was an interesting feeling, being able to dwell on things on the way in to work and not having it affect you at all. Hard to feel down when you have no neurotransmitters to speak of.
I somehow made it through the day, finishing up the reviews and even working an interview in. The review deadline is more of a guideline anyways, so I shouldn’t’ve killed myself over it.
Wednesday night I was invited over to dinner at Michael Shomler’s place. He’s in a pretty sweet situation right now. He and his wife act as the primary caregivers at a newly established group home for four developmentally disabled teens. The house was just recently refurbished and is very nice. They pay no rent or utilities. And it’s great practice for a family of your own I suppose.
Thursday night I went out to see Captain Marvel with a friend. Not the most amazing film ever but it was still a lot of fun.
Today I’ve been doing laundry and house work. Figured it was now warm enough for the water fountain out back to come back online. I’ll be keeping an eye out for any leakage; it’d be a royal pain if there were some frozen pipes under all that landscaping.
I loaded up half of the branches from the felled tree in my green waste bin, so, only one more week till they’re all gone. But then I figured I’d take some pruning shears to the bamboo shoots that had toppled from my neighbor’s yard over the fence. Snowmageddon had done a number on his foliage as well.
Unfortunately I didn’t grab a “before” pic, but you basically couldn’t see the fence. So, now I’m a few more weeks away from having this all out of here.
My dryer has gotten into a habit of emitting ear-splitting shrieks for the first few minutes of operation whenever I put in a load. From cursory research it sounds like it may be the drum rollers. Will have to do some investigation. I feel like there should be a “CarTalk” for dryers.
Been really enjoying the latest Star Trek Discovery episodes. And I’ve also been hooked on a Netflix show called Galavant. I won’t say a thing about it but I highly recommend y’all catch it next time you’re together in Alpine.