People around me are catching Covid for the 2nd or 3rd time, and I still remain (apparently) untouched. I am thinking by now I have had it, and I was a lucky sod who remained asymptomatic. Not so lucky for anyone around me. My partner has had time for her ADHD medication to kick in, and holy shit what a difference. Normally I cook, clean, take care of the laundry and chores - and she will do her absolute best to help out around the house. 90% of the time though, it falls to me. However! This weekend just gone, she sorted out our entire linen closet, repotted all of our (her) succulent plants, took an entire carload of old clothes away to be donated, took our cat to the vet, vacuumed the house, hung up paintings she's had for two years but never done anything with, conditioned our leather couch and went to the farmers market to get some veggies for this weeks meals. She even found time to visit an op-shop, and came back with an untouched herringbone blazer that fits me perfectly, and would have sold for about $250. She got it for $10. Overall, she's beating me to chores around the house, which has never happened in our years together. I am careful not to focus on the medication doing it's thing, and trying instead to see it as a launch pad for her. She's quick to say "Wow these meds are awesome" but she's still doing the things. She wanted to do them all along, she just now has the executive function to back up her plans. I'm confident the diagnosis was a key part of her shift towards productivity - the validation she felt when a therapist said "Yes. This all makes sense. You have all the markers of ADHD. This isn't being faked and I have a plan to combat this". She has started the conversation that I was dreading though. The one that began, "You've put up with me like this for 6 years. Why? Why would you do that to yourself?" I love her. She's hilarious, compassionate and charismatic. She's fuckin' weird and has that delightful, British dry wit. She encourages me with my hobbies and calls me on my bullshit when I get a bit fiery and am absolutely not looking at a scenario objectively. I'd be a far worse person without her, so.. I can hardly call it "putting up" with her. Her birthday is next week, taking her out for dinner and a nighttime walk on the beach. Happy times. Update: I just got home from work and she has been busy. There is a small plastic guillotine (of the paper slicing variety) on the kitchen table. Me: What's that? Her: A tiny guillotine M: Ooo for crafts? H: For beheading tiny revolutionaries M:.... H: And crafts.
It's now almost been an year since my long-covid-ish inducing covid. My recovery was slow over the summer but steady, so I thought I was essentially over it by now. I can do my 4 mile bike commute without trouble and have fairly active days quite regularly. Last week however I went for a nice walk for the first time in a while, and it wrecked me with an all too familiar soreness and lethargy the two days after. Went for another shorter walk yesterday, similar issues today. Getting to terms with the fact that I might need help is such a hard thing to do.
I'm very sorry to hear you've been hit by this. It's affected a close friend of mine similarly severely, effectively turning him into a shut in for the better part of a year. Have you found anything that works?
My cousin, who grew up in civilization, didn't really take any of my "New Mexico stories" seriously until he went down to the Balloon Fiesta and, coincidentally, spent a week hanging out with one of the girls in my clique. I think hearing the same stories from a different perspective took him from "kleinbl00 is a serial liar just like grandpa" to "holy shit." She's happily married, works at Sandia National Labs, and Teh Brokenz are still plainly evident. New Mexico Stories So y'all had camps, prolly. We had "Hummingbird Music Camp." It was a shithole up in the "mountains" that looked a lot like the prison camp in "Bridge on the River Kwai" if Walter White and Jesse Pinkman were imprisoned there rather than Obi Wan Kenobi. I went there for a week in 4th grade, and then like 3 days in 7th, 8th and 9th grade. The boys' dorm was an uninsulated steel box that got insufferably hot in the summer, impossibly cold in the winter and at night, the perspiration of a hundred grade-school kids would condense on the steel rafters and rain down on you. The camp "counselors" (8th grade sociopaths) would arrange the bunks to maximize the drippage and then make fun of you for "wetting your bed." They would also make sure everyone took a mandatory nap by heating up bent coat hanger wires until they glowed cherry red and threatening to poke out any eye they saw. The place was great. If you were in band? You had to spend a few days there every fucking year. They were all about Jesus, would kick out any girl who wore short shorts (but only if they saw any of the family eyeballing them) and gave you half a glass of milk with every meal. I caught food poisoning from some wretched shit they made, had projectile vomiting and diarrhea and they still made me hike 4 miles past Sulfur Springs at night so I could have "eggs mixed together, thrown in an ammo can and tossed onto a raging campfire so they can be simultaneously raw, charred and smoked" for breakfast. Add an oboe for pure joy. My sister informed me this morning that "uncle Elliott" was the "wedding dress rapist." Higgins also followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming an expert French horn player, Kennedy said. Records show Higgins helped establish Hummingbird Music Camp in the late 1950s, played in or directed several orchestras and symphonies, and helped start what is now known as the International Horn Competition in the mid-1970s. Investigators believe the latter proved most beneficial for his criminal activities, as the competitions were held at various colleges and universities across the U.S., including at the University of Alabama. Kennedy said investigators confirmed Higgins had been in Tuscaloosa for the competition when the 1991 and 2001 assaults occurred. Yeah. So your kid gets arrested in Ohio several times for trying to diddle children so what do you do? Flee to New Mexico and OPEN A FUCKING KID'S CAMP. It's still open. Creepy mutherfucker. His wife looked just like the women he raped. They all fucking knew. New Mexico StoriesNew Mexico, he said, was where Higgins had been living for the last several years. Evidence showed Higgins was originally from Ohio and had even been arrested there in the 1970s for multiple sex crimes involving minors, including indecent exposure, assault, prowling and gross sexual imposition.
Obligatory reminder from me that our world continues to be impoverished by your failure to write a memoir. Get on it.
Climbing Today is a rest day from ice climbing, thank god. In the last three days I've climbed 15 pitches which is...a lot...for someone who doesn't do a lot of this. Unfortunately, while WA state is amazing for so many outdoor activities, ice climbing is particularly tricky to get good conditions due to lack of regular cold snaps and other factors that go into forming these flows. I can feel my technique and form get much, much better over the course of this week and the people I'm climbing with are becoming new friends! It is incredible to me to be in Canada this week climbing with some absolute legends of climbing in Steven Swenson and Jim Elzinga. Still having trouble believing I'm really here this week. Not Climbing Still talking to one girl in particular, "girl b" from last weeks pubski! Had an amazing 2nd date with her last Thursday and am hoping to talk to her on the phone tonight, with a 3rd date either on Monday or Tuesday. She wants to take things slow and so do I, I think that was my biggest takeaway from recent experiences. If I want something sustaining and nourishing, which I do, I need to take some different actions and repeat to myself "I am not in a hurry". Y'all have any 3rd date recommendations?
The OKR vs KPI showdown In a series of mandatory high burn rate meetings two leansixsigma blackbelts, keepers of secret knowledge from Japan and ancient wisdom from Illinois, fight to the bitter end* attacking and blocking with statistics beyond any comprehension which haven't been applied correctly since that one guy left. * in the end we're saddled with both
One of the awesome things about the CNC program I took is they relied heavily on this distance learning thing from the SME. Machinists tend to be not-well-educated and have a real cargo-cult understanding of engineers, so they think "manucturing engineers" are actual authorities rather than the dipshits whose grades weren't good enough to get into a real engineering program. Anyway, these SME dipshits and their distance learning program, which I was required to suck down 40 hours of, had things like "if you multiply the sides of a right angle by themselves and then divide that by itself you'll know how long the other side is" to avoid using the word "hypotenuse" or "square root" in the math section, shit like this in some goddamn section... Well... I want you to imagine how they dealt with Six Sigma, Kanban, ISO9001, lean manufacturing and all the rest. It was like this, but not funny and not self-aware.
That sounds painful. I've mostly had to deal with vocabulary-only versions of these from an engineering manager who never had enough buy in from other departments to make major changes.
Literally going into a meeting in 2 minutes to set my OKRs... despite the fact that I am an independent contributor, have no team, no direct reports, a manager in-name-only, and my schedule and workload is dictated by outside sources (customers issuing RFPs). Every factor of the O, the K, and the R, are unmappable and unmeasurable for someone in my role/position. But I've been doing it every quarter for seven years now. Joy.
Just hearing about it now, which means my boss will start her next team meeting waxing lyrical on it's effectiveness. Then we can touch base with HR and loop in finance, so moving forward everyone is aligned and able to leverage synergies and streamline processes, all to empower our core competencies.
Goodbye for now, Hubski? Kind of? So yeah ... just got back from two weeks of vacation - a week in Santorini, and a week in Rome with several day trips around to Florence and Pompeii - and am back on the job and shaking off some serious jet lag. Being unplugged from all my usual internet use for that time has made me realize how little of it I actually need in my day to day life. And, while I was gone, my company has gone through a complete security overhaul (after some hackers did some serious damage), and we have to install DarkTrace Sensor on our machines. DarkTrace is mostly a defensive tool for keeping out the baddies and nogoodniks, but it does also give the IT guys full access to your computer and visibility into your internet use. So I need to remove 1Password and all my personal stuff from my work machine, and stop visiting the sites I used to spend downtime on ... like Hubski. Outside of work I have plenty of other stuff going on, so don't spend much time at all on a computer. So yeah ... the sum of all that is I won't be dropping into Hubski during the workday anymore, which will pretty much eliminate my Hubksi browsing time. I'm not leaving in a huff, or in dissatisfaction, or anything like that, and I won't be deleting my account. I'll drop back in when time/interest is right. Stay chill. Keep up the conversation, and the community, y'all.