Category Archives: Life
Only four more days remain of my career at The Company! It’s hard to believe (and not a little weird). The only thing in my life that’s lasted longer than this career is my life itself. I’ve never lived in one place anywhere near that long (and my romantic relationships have all been famously short).
This week we sort of edged part of the data chain into production this past week. Supposedly the rest is being pushed there this weekend. I’ve got four days to test in production, wrap up a career, and then I walk out the door!
As you might imagine, my mind is really not in the blogsphere right now!
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10 Comments | tags: bosses, retirement, work | posted in Life
Thursday and Friday of this past week were days 10 and 9 in [big booming voice] The Countdown to Retirement. I’m taking Mondays off in June (no more Monday mornings!), so I have two four-day weeks remaining in my 33-year career at The Company.
And it’s a good thing I decided to stay through June. The project I’ve been working on since last September still hasn’t hit production (through, I stress, absolutely no fault of mine).
This week we finally got to the point of end-to-end testing in the QA environment, and I’m anticipating we’ll start testing in production next week. Talk about taking it down to the wire!
As you might imagine, rather than lazily basking in the last remaining weeks of my career, I’m instead working my ass off!
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18 Comments | tags: Bruce Willis, Looper, Mariano Rivera, Minnesota Twins, retirement, work | posted in Baseball, From My Collection, Life, Movies
This week begins the 25 final work days at The Company. Retirement is up there with the other major lifetime events: birth, marriage, career, parenthood, property, divorce, health, death. For many it’s the conclusion of the other main relationship in their lives.
I find I’m too distracted and tense to write blog articles right now. The anticipation making me… making me… I dunno,… making me w… wonder if the day will ever come. It’s like an adult Christmas that only comes once in a lifetime.
So, in the meantime — Spring Cleaning—I’m clearing out my files. These are things I’ve kept for years thinking I might use them someday…
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8 Comments | tags: humor, Walmart | posted in From My Collection, Life
It’s been an interesting few days. Not bad; there’s no tale of woe to tell. It’s more that things that have been churning in my mind are starting to bubble to the surface. And there have been some interesting events going on (the Minnesota Twins are fun to watch again, for instance).
Also, yesterday I (electronically) submitted the “paperwork” to officially kick off the retirement process. My last day of work will be June 28, (2π Day and my mom’s birthday!) There’s a hell of a pay cut coming up due to this early retirement, but that won’t be a real issue for a while. It’s not something I’ll need to consider until at least next year.
I warn you now: I have no idea what this post is going to be about!
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28 Comments | tags: Adria Richards, bullying, mental tar pit, Monty Python, people, Python, sexism, stupidity | posted in Life, Rant
Baseball is here! It has been for weeks. Due to the blog bogs, it’s been a while since my last baseball post. It’s high time to rectify that!
One problem is that the Twins don’t give one a whole lot to talk about. They rarely earn many headlines on the hardball pages. (This is at least partially due to not earning many runs on the baseball fields.) We’re not dead last in any key stat, and we’re even doing pretty good in some areas. That’s relatively good news for Twins fans!
Today I want to talk about baseball, old school versus new school. It’s a choice you make — or one that’s thrust upon you — and which you adopt often informs many of your other views on the sport.
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9 Comments | tags: Brian Kenny, designated hitter, For The Record, Harold Reynolds, instant replay, Jim Thome, MLB, MLB channel, MLB Network, MLB Now, new school, old school, umpires | posted in Baseball, Life
“Whose woods these are…”
I’m still working my way back to blogging. I likely won’t be fully back until my work life is behind me, but I am getting past the shock of finding out just how right I was about management’s view of me. It’s been a week-and-a-half since I announced my intention to divorce them, and there has been nothing since the initial, “Oh, okay.”
It’s not unexpected. It’s not really even a surprise. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. I’ve realized that I am going through my second divorce. And both times it’s been due to the perception that my cons swamp my pros (and my prose). What really stings is the sense of unfairness caused by so many others saying, “I don’t understand their thinking.”
Yeah, me either, but so it goes. Set it aside; I have some catching up to do.
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13 Comments | tags: bisy backson, honey, Minnesota Twins, Robert Frost, snow, Tao of Pooh, Winnie the Pooh | posted in Books, Life
The dung beetle, a far more noble form of life than a spammer!
Going to try something a little different. Rather than write a longish comment in response to someone’s blog article or comment, I’m going to write a shortish article on my own blog. (Well, short for me, anyway.)
Sometimes when writing a long comment, I find myself thinking that what I’d like to say would be better served as an article rather than a typically long-winded comment. There is also that comment sections can be a bit confined space-wise, plus it’s a bit harder to include pictures or do formatting.
Today’s “comment” is actually a long-standing observation about the interweb but was triggered by the sudden rise in spam Follows and then Michelle’s latest article over on The Green Study.
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42 Comments | tags: die die die spammers, die horribly spammers, die painfully spammers, die spammers, TWIOWASBE, vanish from the earth spammers | posted in Life, Rant, The Interweb
A bit over a month ago I wrote that, after six months of effort and three weeks of idly waiting for others to complete work, maybe things would finally start moving on my data integration project. And I haven’t posted since (other than the Rick O’Shay post later that same day).
As it turned out, things did finally take off, and the month got very busy. Things got even busier when they dumped an urgent “can you help with this” project in my lap. (I’ve also spent the month struggling with whether I wanted to continue blogging, and if so, whether to change my approach.)
Today I thought I’d post an article about all that (and the Minnesota Twins).
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11 Comments | tags: Minnesota Twins, retirement, work | posted in Life, Rant
Back in the day, there was a comic strip that I really loved. It took place in the American old west in the small town of Conniption. The town was so small, it had only a deputy sheriff, Rick O’Shay. His best friend was a (reformed) gunslinger, Hipshot Percussion. The dance hall owner was Gaye Abandon, and the town doctor was Dr. Basil Metabolism. (Ya gotta love those names!)
The strip was called Rick O’Shay, and it was drawn by Stan Lynde.
Of course, we all love cowboys and the old west, but what made the comic a key part of my past was the spirituality of my favorite character, the gunslinger Hipshot.
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36 Comments | tags: church, comic strips, comics, Hipshot Percussion, spirituality, Stan Lynde, Sunday comics, wilderness | posted in Books, Life, Religion
Go pound sand, TC!
This is just a running-at-the-fingers marker post, a diary page for the weblog. I have a special Sunday post almost written, but it involves some (great Americana) artwork by a living artist, and I’d like to use more than small “fair use” thumbnails.
I would probably be within fair use using the low-res versions I want to use, but these pieces are so meaningful to me that I want to be as respectful to the artist as possible.
So — hopefully — you’ll be seeing that article down the road one of these Sundays. I’ll just give you a one-word clue for now. It’ll be a giveaway for anyone familiar with the works in question and likely utterly useless for everyone else (at least those not motivated to Go Ogle for it). The word is: Hipshot.
Instead, I thought I’d ramble on a bit about work and what I do for a living.
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8 Comments | tags: anger, data integration, restless leg syndrome, retirement, work | posted in Life, Rant
Logos con carne 