Work

I mean, it pays the bills, I'm irritated by it but haven't found anything 100% remote that pays the bills equally yet.  That's what happens when you specialize in a niche and that niche begins to dry up I suppose.  Fortunately, I've positioned my team to be more focused on supporting business functions than being in the business of supporting a specific piece of software.  Either way, it's still kind of lame and since our upper management have a weird "everyone in the office" fetish, we keep losing people.  It did slow down some once they started letting people with cubicles work from home two days per week that the company picked, but lots of people are still finding 100% remote jobs.  I should probably look again in a few months.

Death of a Friend

So suffice to say, like most of you I'm fairly introverted and don't find a lot of friends that share my interests.  Fortunately, my family made friends with another family and we've been close for 10+ years.  He was older, like 20 years older than me, but he also basically a geek and also liked cars and such.  We went to Formula 1 together, lots of car shows, etc.  Anyway, when the pandemic started, he got cancer.  Unfortunately, he recently passed away from it.

We've had our share of deaths to deal with, but it's weird to have someone that we're close with that isn't a relative.  That being said, he was an amazing friend and my kids kind of viewed him as a grandfather (although we told them to say uncle to be nice). I'm trying to live up to his legacy with his family by helping them out as much as I can.  Between my wife and I we see them basically every day now, and I'm much more familiar with the inner workings of everything in their house than I ever cared to be.  Still, each time I need to fix something or teach his daughters how to do something that he would have done, I'm impressed by how organized he was (the opposite of me) and how much thought he put into everything.

Now for a twist of how much bullshit life can be, his brother also died from something unrelated.  Then his wife just told us that she needs a biopsy soon.  She's my wife's best friend, so it's bad news all around but we'll be there to do whatever we can for them.  I think she'll be fine, personally, but we're all a bit spooked after losing my friend.

It's not like Brain Surgery, is it?

So at the end of 2020, my wife's rare genetic problem came back to bite her, and last year she went through brain surgery.  We thought, "now that we're done, hopefully we'll have several years of respite from this."  Well, we thought wrong.

Fortunately, there have been no seizures, but we're in the middle of getting the various tests and scans done that are necessary and another surgery looks like it will happen, probably next month.  So that sucks, especially considering how aggressive the problem has grown from last year to this year.  Fortunately when they remove the things they don't come back there, but this may be a lifelong problem.  Lifelong could mean something bad happens tonight, or 40 years from now.  There's no real way to know, and nothing we can do that we aren't already doing.

Suffice to say, this really sucks and I'll be the first to admit that I have to fight off doom and gloom of imagining a worst case scenario where it's just me and my kids, and no other adults to count on as a part of a safety net, maybe even helping my friend's kids too because why not?  However, I know this is unrealistic, but my brain tends to think of worst case scenarios so I can try to plan for them to mitigate the problems should they actually happen.

COVID

It finally hit my household, at least a few of us.  It sucked, but was mostly like a medium strength cold.  The worst thing is that it did take away my smell and taste for about a week or so but it came back for the most part.  It's so weird to think that the thing that killed a few of my loved ones ended up being a non-event for me for the most part, and was actually kind of a relief because I got to work from home for a few days.

Wisdom Teeth

I started going to the dentist again last year, after not going for nearly 20 years.  I only had one small cavity that they needed to fill, and one that they couldn't get to on one of my wisdom teeth.  They're telling me to get them removed, and I've not done it despite having occasional pain whenever I have sinus problems.  I probably will do it for real once my wife's surgery is done, but we'll see.

Video Games

I don't want to end this on all depressing shit, so I'll just talk about games a bit.  I have a few 3/4 size arcade games, and have a nice game room going on.  I'm happy to play video games with my kids in a home "arcade" since real arcades are hard to come by anymore.  It's a lot of fun, and one of the things I splurge on.  I also play a good amount of Rocket League, but I'm not good at it.

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

I got a free year of Duolingo Plus, so I'm trying to learn German.  I tried Japanese at first but holy hell is that too tough for my brain to process.  So German is going well, but I'm only about two weeks into it.  I can tell you that my kids are tall, which is true.  Mein Sohn ist sehr groß.

Anyway, I hope you all are doing well.  That's it for now.