Work Friends, Colleagues and Acquaintances

Last week two former work colleagues reconnected with me.  I sent a text to Sasha* asking a simple yes/no/the color purple question.  A tad bit later she responded, ignored the question, and just said she was traveling back from Tampa Bay.  Date with Tom Brady?  I said no worries, we can chat/text tomorrow after you get some sleep.

* I don't remember what alias I use for her here.

So of course, she does the one thing that fucking annoys the hell out of me. She calls without first brokering a call, as if we are living in 1987.  It turns out her dad is going to have quadruple bypass surgery the next day.  

We talked for about an hour until the call started getting staticky.  i guess she was driving and got ot a place where the reception wasn't great.   I was also picking up my kids at this point, so I said let's talk tomorrow.

Meanwhile, a person I worked with at Big Audit 2.0 reached out to me on LinkedIn.  I like her, but I trust her as much as I trust gas station sushi.  She really straddled the line of being my work friend and also enabling my Office Nemisis.  Let's call her Veronica.

Veronca reached out, acknowledged that it has been 4 years since last chated. In fact, it was actually 4 years almost to the day.   I'm not sure if she was genuinely interested in what I was up to vs a fishing expedition but I took the bait.  We exchanged some messages and left it with maybe we will have another phone call soon.  

"no special reason to reach out, I was scrolling through LinkedIn and remembered out chats: I miss those! there is nobody left to chat with at work, I so do not fit the group I am in right now - it's really sad; there are no lunches, or after work drinks, everyone is sitting alone at home...and majority of people I came up with are gone and the group I am in right now is a lot younger than me so they are at a different stage of their lives; I am not on social media other than Facebook which I try hard to stay away from as it has become toxic; I will stay in touch here on LinkedIn for now, maybe we can chat on the phone one day? like dinosaurs we are :)

stay well and in touch!"

I'll probably send a volley to her, seeing if this is a Genuine Offer versus Conversational Device.  I'm 0 for 3 with recent phone calls and that doesn't include Sasha.  She actually did ask me how things were going when we talked the second time.  

Hello March - a bit late

 It goes without saying that I have done a terrible job of keeping up with this blog.  It's probably a combination of laziness, not having an audience, and having a boring, mostly uneventful last remaining years of life.

Trespassers

As a Stay-At-Home-Dad (SAHD), I don't get out much.  I take the kids to school, maybe run some errands, try to get some stuff done around the house, and then pick the kids up.  It's hard to tell what day it is, unless there is something that I can anchor to.  Certain Substacks I follow come out on specific days.  Same with some TV shows that we watch.

Pepper Sandwiches for the Lent I no longer observe

I'm very isolated down here with no local friends.  My attempts at having standing phone calls with people have not worked out.  People like to talk, talk, talk but not ask me anything.  

March definitely came in like a Lion.   We had: 

• Daylight Saving Time, 
• Spring Break, 
• Friday the 13th, 
• Pi Day, 
• Ides of March, 
• International Women's Day (I think)
• St Patrick's Day.  

And also March Madness and the Oscars for those who are into that sort of thing...and I'm not.  Oh and America (at least the MAGA part) declared war on Iran on the first day of Ramadan.  

We also had me puking my guts out all day and night last Saturday.  I couldn't even hold down water, which sucked because I was getting dehydrated.  I barely got 4 hours of sleep.  We thought it might be a virus, but since no one else in the household got it, we are attributing it to food poisoning.  

The good news is that the next morning, I felt better and could drink water again, though I craved soda pop like no one's business.

The next few weeks are not gonna be any less easier.  There are field trips and science fairs.  And who knows what else from the unhinged, unrestrained, lying, petulant, insecure, thrice married, serial wife-cheating, porn star-banging, blue collar-worker-stiffing con artist in the White House.

More Catching Up

 I did something to my shoulder and cannot bring it full circle without the ibuprofen.  Even with the meds it still hurts a tad when I try perform some basic function that involves my left arm, like typing.  I have a lot of things I want and need to do around the house now that the weather is warming up, but I also know that if I overdo it, I will injure myself further.  So with great frustration, the great garage cleanout reorg is delayed again.

The Saturday after Martin Luther King's Birthday, a good part of the country, including our neck of the woods, was hit with a big ice storm.  We knew it was coming in the sense that it's not gonna pass us by, be mild, or be short-term.  We knew the kids would be home for at least a week.  

It turned out to be two weeks.  The first week was declared an emergency and doesn't need to be made up, but apparently, they are still figuring out the second week. The kids had to give up President's Day as the first make-up day, hopefully the only one

Sidenote: our county does this thing where if there is a holiday during the week (typically a Monday Holiday) garbage pickup is shifted one day.  This usually isn't a problem but remember that It's Definitely Coming Storm!  Everyone whose pickup is on Friday had to wait two weeks until theirs got picked up, as well as the rest of the county for the following week.

I get the Holiday Day Shift, but they ended up doing it again in the second week, so it would have been better to somehow get all the pre-storm garbage collected.  

Meanwhile, the storm allowed Nightingale to "help" the kids get their science fair projects completed.  They would have been due Jan 27 but were extended to February 11th and we used each weekend we were home to move the project forward instead of wait until the last minute.  Yay Nightingale.

Chicago Bears wrap up

I'm way overdue for writing this post.  So now that the SuperBowl is over, I will wrap up the Chicago Bears posts until next season.  Anyone who pays attention to football knows that the Bears not only went to the playoffs but won the Wild Card round against their archrival, the Green Bay Packers in overtime.  

Katness and I often text each other during Bears games, and for 3 quarters the messages can be summed up as "WTF?" followed by "how did they pull that off" when they win the 4th quarter.  Same with that crazy wild card game.

In the divisional round, they also forced overtime.  It really came down to one bad play that turned the momentum to the LA Rams, and our season ended.  

Had they won against LA, how would they do against the Seattle Seahawks?  No way of knowing.  We were playing with House Money on Borrowed Time.  This season seems to have been the Sam Darnold Renaissance story, so they might have held in but not won.  

And that also might be evidence that the NFL isn't fixed or rigged, or whatever. I'm not saying they aren't in bed with online gambling (the muffed extra point in the Houston - Steelers game), but I've said it before: if the NFL were rigged, NY, LA, Dallas, Chicago, and DC would be in the playoffs every year.

So what's next?  First, I have to get through 162 games of Cubs Baseball, of which I will only watch a fraction.  Then I have to see if this season was a fluke or if the Bears build on what they have.  Caleb Williams is a franchise QB.  I'm not skilled enough to know if our offensive line is fine or could use one more better player.  However, our defense, while showing flashes of brilliance, still needs some help.  

So we wait until the Draft and Free Agency 1.0 and 2.0 are over.  

Catching Up

 We had a warm Christmas week.  It was so nice that the kids could be outside and we could have fires.  After the Michigan in-laws left, the weather cooled.  That Sunday (December 28th), we had a storm.  Sometime in the night, the winds blew down this tree.

I thought about renting a chainsaw from Home Depot and cutting at least the fallen part down myself.  But my lawn crew, ever eager to make a buck, offered to do it for me for $1500.  They actually offered to do it for $2600 back in Sept when the tree was still standing, but being unemployed, I opted not to, so I guess my cheapness saved me $1100.

As I get older, I've learned to outsource as much as I can possibly afford.  This same lawn crew offered to plow my driveway for $200.  My driveway is at least one football field long, maybe two, and it would have taken Nightingale and me hours to do it by shovel.

Because of the once a year bad weather, the kids have been home all week, and likely into next week.  Nightingale had Monday and Tuesday off, but had to use PTO for it.  She is also home on Friday for an unrelated to the storm reason. 

2025 Bears: We both went 11 and 6

The regular season is over and we Bears fans have one playoff game to look forward to.  With the way they played the Lions on Sunday, we fans aren't exactly holding our breath for a playoff win.  

They ended the season the way they started, by losing two games.  But in between, they won 11 games and that was good enough to win a division where every team had a winning record.

I had them going 9 and 8 but my prediction of how they would do for each game came out to 11 and 6.  

Of the 17 games they played, I was able to watch 12 of them.  It would have been 10 but I was in Chicago for the game against Pittsburg and I also have the streaming service the SNF game against the 49ers was on.

The Bears were mostly fun to watch this season and I said at one point, this team reminds me of the lucky 2001 team that also won the 2nd Seed (when it had a bye week same as the number 1 seed) and then went on to lose it's first game to the Eagles.  

This year the Bears play Green Bay in the Wild Card round at Soldier Field.  The Packers are banged up and lost 4 in a role, which makes them dangerous.  IF, if the Bears can get past them again, they could face the 49ers again, the Rams, the Panthers or the Eagles.  

Welcome 2025

I didn't even get a chance to start my annual first post of the year before things went bad for us in the United States of America.  We attacked Venezuela over the weekend and are about to annex it, at least temporarily.  

Every year, I revisit what to do with this blog.  It takes more effort than it use to for me to write posts that even I'm interested in, but I also like the archiving feature of looking back on things I have pretty much forgotten about.

So on to it. Last year there was a noticeable decline in recruiters reaching out to me.  I still got some interviews and even had a job that lasted not quite a month (I  need to finish the writeup on that one).  But I think it is safe to say my Document Management SME career is over.

 The holidays turned out better than expected.  My BILs and I didn't have any clashes or agenda arguments.  It's not just that we were on our best behavior, but I think it's also because we are older geezers now and it's just easier to find a way to get along.  

That's not to say it was perfect, there were still some remnants of the old: talking over one another/struggling to be heard.  Trying to find the best way to achieve a desired outcome.  But it was a lot easier than in the past.  Confederate Jethro even tried to bond with me but his misogyny made it hard for me to go along with it.  

After the Adamas got back to Michigan, my wife and her sister talked.  Apparently I annoyed my BIL by putting too much cardboard on the Solo Fire Pit we "borrowed" from the Father-in-Law.  Now keep in mind I'm hearing what was told to my wife by her sister.  I'm sure BIL was annoyed if I put too much cardboard in and created too much ash.  But I wasn't the only one doing it.  And he likely said it more in a making conversation with his wife -- who still tries to pick fights with him whenever she can  -- way, than a pissed off way.  

Also, as he didn't talk to me about it, I really cannot be bothered to be upset about this information.  I have bigger things to worry about.