Weekend!
My boss went on vacation. For a *WEEK*.
He’s the head fireman around here. When stuff blows up, there’s a team of us that are on the front line and can handle about 90% of anything. That 10%, though, is the stuff where we need to call him in.
Luckily, this week was probably the *PERFECT* week for him to go on vacation. In years past, he picked the worst weeks. Like, he’d leave for the airport and, immediately, everything would break. We’d fix what we could, handle testers and users as we could, dealt with the intermittent problems as best we could, and kicked cans down the road until he got back when we said “you’re never allowed to go on vacation again”.
Well, this time, all of the stuff that broke waited until Tuesday to break, and it was stuff that had broken before and our accumulated knowledge, documented procedures, and troubleshooting skills were more than enough for the fires that broke out and, get this, we even closed a handful of persistent action items.
We’re still going to tell him that he’s never allowed to go on vacation again, of course. We’re just going to be joking this time.
Which means that it’s probably my turn for everything to catch fire the second I get on a plane to go somewhere.
Somewhere on vacation, anyway. They’re already making noises about whose turn it is to go to Doha. Which probably includes me.
As such, this weekend will be dedicated to not doing anything. Maribou even asked: “Hey, on Saturday, can we not do anything?” I was 100% down with what she was thinking.
We’ll have chores and errands, of course. Those are part of a delightful cadence of the week, though. It’s downright pleasant to do laundry and go to the PetSmart and Costco and a half dozen other little places and doubly so when you know that as soon as you’re done doing them, you don’t have to do anything.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Image is “Play” by Clare Briggs. Used with permission of the Briggs estate.)
Oh, and the rock climbing update.
Went back to spend some time on the kiddie wall and jump off of it and the gym was changing routes all over. A couple of the routes that my climbing buddies climbed on the main part of the floor were gone, replaced by new and improved ones and I couldn’t help but notice that they removed the middle auto-belay from the kiddie wall. Probably in prep for making it more difficult, no doubt.
Well, after giving my harness back to the counter people, the guy behind the counter asked me how I did, how I was doing, and mentioned that he remembered the Greek stuff I talked about the time before. I told him about how my brain was trying to overcome things and explained the difference between beliefs and “aliefs“. I believed that the auto-belays would be safe but I knew, in my gut, that the missing auto-belay was gone because it broke.
He told me “well, technically, that one *DID* break.”
It was fine, no one was hurt, it broke when the person had his feet on the floor, and they’re specially made to fail in such a way that they just stop reeling altogether. So when you see them go slack, they’re broke. They’re not going to break because they snapped.
So now that’s another thing that I have to get over.Report
And how stiff/sore are the muscles?Report
Dunno how bad off he is today, but yesterday it was bad enough that the person with fibromyalgia carried the two giant bags of litter down the stairs because she felt so very very sorry for him and his stiff muscles….
(Sidenote, I was super-excited to realize that I am definitely in better health than I was the last time I attempted such a thing, when I dropped both bags about 3 seconds after picking them up…)Report
I found myself going down some stairs and then asking “WHAT THE HECK” halfway through.
This is my life now.Report
Stiff and sore, but some of that is due to an attempt to “boulder” that resulted in failure that involved hitting fixtures on the way down.
The guy behind the counter explained “traverse climbing” climbing to me. Maybe I’ll add that to the menu.Report
I was surprisingly not sore anywhere after climbing, which tells me that I clearly did not work hard enough. And I’ve also got that 5.9 on my mind and I’m looking forward to taking another crack at it next week.
Do the Greeks have anything to say about things you can control and things you can’t control and which one of these things one should spend more time worrying about?Report
The Stoics had a handful of twitter-appropriate maxims on that topic but they were decimated by one of the things that they didn’t worry about.Report
After which the population of Athens plummeted, since there was no one to bring the new babies.Report
All I can think about is napping.
This is having a predictable effect on my productivity.
But I imagine it will be quite nice to curl up in bed with a stack of movies this evening.
And quite possibly all of tomorrow as well.
Sunday is a kid-we-love’s birthday party.Report
About a month ago they did some blood test and found my father has cancer. (still not sure what kind) So dad did the mule headed thing rural folks tend to do. He went home. His local doc eventually prescribed some morphine pills and something that sounds like zantax or zanax? Whatever is going on internally he is dropping weight like crazy which is really strange, because he was a giant of a man, and now his arms are so skinny I can nearly wrap my hands around ’em.
Sis and I have been cycling through helping out when we can, but there isn’t much to do. This may sound remarkably sad, but he lived a eventful life, and his current age (78) is seven years older than when his father passed on.
Twice this month Rigs and I traveled Texas from south to north and back again. He is learning to drive in the desolate hill country between Santa Anna and Vernon. Pretty much hours of empty road. So we’ll be just hangin around the house coolin’ our heels for the weekend. Rigs scored a PS3 last month for $12 and has been playing some version of Fallout, not looking forward to school starting.
As luck would have it, our fridge went down early last week, and Aims bought ‘The Mother of All Fridges’ last weekend, which doesn’t fit where the last tiny one fit, which we knew someday the temporary wire framed booze bar would be sacrificed to TMoAF, but now we have a sizeable quantum of bottles to deal with. So if you hear a uno,dos,tres, tequila, coming from down south, pay no mind, we’re solving a spatial booze problem.
Hope yall are doing well.Report
Rural old people, man. There’s not a lot you can do. (I have had similar experiences…)
Thanks for this update, I could really picture the things you describe.Report
Sucks to hear about your dad. I certainly hope you make the best of whatever time you and he have left together.
My wife has gone through chemo twice, the first time when she was 36. Having seen that, and then again about 6 or 7 years later, I know that if I get a cancer diagnosis at 78, I’m going to say fish it all and go out balls to the wall.Report
Surrobabe is due tomorrow. I was really hoping he’d come early, but I’ll take on-time over late. Yesterday was my last day of work before maternity leave, which was great timing because the tension between all of the office gals and the new office manager is about to break wide open. It’s like a soap opera over there.Report
Best wishes from me and the rest of my (extended) family that things go smoothly. Granddaughter #2 arrived in a rush — as her dad says, if he hadn’t run the last stoplight on the way to the hospital, she would have arrived in the parking lot.Report
Oh, jeez. Fingers crossed for you from Colorado.Report
Thanks, MC and JB. Unfortunately, I made it through the weekend without having the baby. 🙁Report