Health:
The back is still fused. Recovery has been very slow, I think it’s mostly because after I pushed myself so hard in 2021 I now have a new found fear of my frailty. I’ve been doing a lot of walking but the whole reason I got into cycling 20 years ago was my joints were already going bad and the decades have not improved matters. Glad I got my chance to hike the Appalachians when I did.
Work:
Work went sideways in an unexpected way because while I was missing time at work as a developer the engineer who had been running an internal-use-only-pre-production-hardware lab decided he was tired of it and my boss asked if I would take over part of what he had been doing. Turns out what he had been doing was an insane amount of work - even dividing it up between 3 of us it’s now a full time job dealing with users in all 24 timezones who all have frantic deadlines.
Still more fun that sitting around doing nothing though.
Speaking of work… When I was previously employed at $MEGACORP they had a mechanism for giving quick spot rewards to employees by basically throwing money on a debit card which you could spend. $MEGACORP had a deal with some random bank no one had ever heard of, and the bank was who issued the debit card.
When $MEGACORP laid me off, I spent all the money on the card then cut it up.
When they hired me back, I discovered that they had never really forgotten me. I mean, in some ways it was great - I kept my seniority, for example, for vacation time calculations. It was weird in others, when they issued me a new badge it said I was actually a visitor from a company I hadn’t worked at since $MEGACORP acquihired our team in 2012. The only thing that seemed different was they gave me a different email address. No idea why.
Anyway, today I discovered that someone had added money to my rewards account after I was gone - and that someone else had dropped more money on it as a reward for the long shifts I mentioned above.
Now I have to convince some random bank that the account belongs to me - when I have no idea what the CC number is and I don’t have the email address they have on file.
It’s not a lot of money, but it’s enough for a nice dinner for 2, so I’m trying to decide how much effort I want to put into prying the cash out of them. I’ve already gotten an email from the bank’s customer service department saying, “LoL. Pull the other one.”
Family:
SWHTL and I are otherwise doing well. I owe her a lot, and Lamb as well, for helping me through the recovery. I mean, complete loss of dignity stuff that is TMI even for me. At this point we’re doing well and back into something closer to our 2021 routine: SWHTL still enjoys her gig economy job and I still work from my basement (one of the alleged bennies of having a boss that lives 2+ hours from work is that he never wants to come back to the office. I say “alleged” because, damn I’m desperate for human contact some days…) Lamb has found herself a cushy job with the federal gubmint which makes my libertarian instincts twitch but, I have to admit, is as far from my experiences in the 1980’s DOD as is possible to get and still be in the civil service.
I even pleasantly text with the Little Lost Lamb in an uneven manner, sometimes there’s months between messages, sometimes there’s a flurry. This week she sent me a video of black sand on the Oregon coast, and I DoorDashed a box of cupcakes to her apartment for her birthday - which isn’t as uneven as it sounds because the cupcakes were an apology for an utter failure of the tchotchke xmas present I had drop-shipped from Etsy last year.
So, life is different than it was before, but things are looking better.
What else is new?
The back is still fused. Recovery has been very slow, I think it’s mostly because after I pushed myself so hard in 2021 I now have a new found fear of my frailty. I’ve been doing a lot of walking but the whole reason I got into cycling 20 years ago was my joints were already going bad and the decades have not improved matters. Glad I got my chance to hike the Appalachians when I did.
Work:
Work went sideways in an unexpected way because while I was missing time at work as a developer the engineer who had been running an internal-use-only-pre-production-hardware lab decided he was tired of it and my boss asked if I would take over part of what he had been doing. Turns out what he had been doing was an insane amount of work - even dividing it up between 3 of us it’s now a full time job dealing with users in all 24 timezones who all have frantic deadlines.
Still more fun that sitting around doing nothing though.
Speaking of work… When I was previously employed at $MEGACORP they had a mechanism for giving quick spot rewards to employees by basically throwing money on a debit card which you could spend. $MEGACORP had a deal with some random bank no one had ever heard of, and the bank was who issued the debit card.
When $MEGACORP laid me off, I spent all the money on the card then cut it up.
When they hired me back, I discovered that they had never really forgotten me. I mean, in some ways it was great - I kept my seniority, for example, for vacation time calculations. It was weird in others, when they issued me a new badge it said I was actually a visitor from a company I hadn’t worked at since $MEGACORP acquihired our team in 2012. The only thing that seemed different was they gave me a different email address. No idea why.
Anyway, today I discovered that someone had added money to my rewards account after I was gone - and that someone else had dropped more money on it as a reward for the long shifts I mentioned above.
Now I have to convince some random bank that the account belongs to me - when I have no idea what the CC number is and I don’t have the email address they have on file.
It’s not a lot of money, but it’s enough for a nice dinner for 2, so I’m trying to decide how much effort I want to put into prying the cash out of them. I’ve already gotten an email from the bank’s customer service department saying, “LoL. Pull the other one.”
Family:
SWHTL and I are otherwise doing well. I owe her a lot, and Lamb as well, for helping me through the recovery. I mean, complete loss of dignity stuff that is TMI even for me. At this point we’re doing well and back into something closer to our 2021 routine: SWHTL still enjoys her gig economy job and I still work from my basement (one of the alleged bennies of having a boss that lives 2+ hours from work is that he never wants to come back to the office. I say “alleged” because, damn I’m desperate for human contact some days…) Lamb has found herself a cushy job with the federal gubmint which makes my libertarian instincts twitch but, I have to admit, is as far from my experiences in the 1980’s DOD as is possible to get and still be in the civil service.
I even pleasantly text with the Little Lost Lamb in an uneven manner, sometimes there’s months between messages, sometimes there’s a flurry. This week she sent me a video of black sand on the Oregon coast, and I DoorDashed a box of cupcakes to her apartment for her birthday - which isn’t as uneven as it sounds because the cupcakes were an apology for an utter failure of the tchotchke xmas present I had drop-shipped from Etsy last year.
So, life is different than it was before, but things are looking better.
What else is new?
| < haven't written in a while |
