• Today is National Puppy Day according to my social media feeds. Where did all of these obscure celebrations come from? It’s almost like they are now the "participation trophy" for adults looking for something to celebrate. So, if you need a reason to celebrate, you can do puppy day or "Cuddly Kitten Day" or National Chip and Dip Day" or "Near Miss Day" or "National Melba Toast Day" or "OK Day" or "World Meteorological Day". Or you can celebrate that 16 years ago, the Russian Space Station Mir plunged into the sea after spending 15 years in space.
• I have a stack of five or six 5 1/4 inch floppies on my desk. I think I got pulled into someone’s prank on a cohort. I’m not sure. I’m just impressed someone still has one, let along five.
• This morning started with yelling at my youngest for breaking rules around her phone usage. G discovered last night that she and her friend would arrange to text each other when her friend got up in the morning – she’s on the east coast Hello, three hour time difference. For those of you playing at home, that means she was getting up at 3-4 am in the morning to text with her friend. Then the youngest would give us this bullshit story about insomnia and not being able to sleep…..blah blah blah. This was just the tip of the iceberg of things G discovered. So once again, the phone is ours. If I were to add up the time she has versus has-not had her phone, the has-not would win by a large margin. Ironically, someone in the kink community who is also a certified counselor gave me her card last night. She works with teens specifically. Yeah…..we are getting to that point given how much she is lying and all. Good start to a Thursday. Guess I celebrated the unofficial "Yell At Your Kid At 7AM Day". As I told her this morning, my job is to not send an overly-entitled brat into the world, so she’d better knock this shit off or I’ll be happy to create an environment worthy of rebelling against.
• Seems to be a week of "Give-an-Inch / Take-a-Mile". Maybe that’s the week long celebration. Hmm….because the kid isn’t the only example of this behavior. I’m responsible for six art shows a year at a club in town. My upcoming artist is trying to take advantage of some latitude I’ve given him on the show. Part of me is letting him take the rope knowing he will hang himself with it. The other part knows I am ultimately responsible for what happens at that event and the art shown in that space, so wants to give him a verbal smack across the head. Needless to say, he better enjoy this show because it’s the last one I’m letting him have because honoring agreements is apparently not his strong suit.
• Things I’ve learned about my new team……they like to redo shit about 100 times before JUST PUTTING THE FUCKING CODE IN PRODUCTION! Example: this week, code was supposed to go in for a change. Users were ready. We were ready. Last week, development tools were upgraded by the vendor introducing a few cool things. While I was gone, they started re-writing the code to use the new cool stuff. So are we delayed because we found an issue? Nope. We are delayed because they got a shiny thing they wanted to use on everything. I know I don’t have a poker face, so I’m sure my reaction was seen as "oh shit". Change is hard.
• My boss was asking me about the training I attended. I told him about one of the guys in the class, and he commented "oh that guy interviewed me at the other company that offered me the job". Then he asked what I thought of the guy because "he seemed to be a dick". I laughed and told him that yes, he did come off that way. "But you know – get a couple beers in him – and he’s actually a funny guy." What can I say, there were three of us taking the train back, and we bonded over beers before the train.
• I need to go find some rain boots for the game on Saturday. There is now a hope by the other teams that I’ll take photos. Last week that was hard to do given the field and all were a swamp. If I’m going to even try this week, I will need boots. Wonder if there is a farm supply store nearby. Yeah, I need better than usual boots for that muck.

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