nosrednayduj

We have been having many guests over the past two weeks. We started with a couple of friends of Jocelyn's from Portland Oregon who were in the East for two separate family reunion vacations, with a few days between them. So they killed some time here, where I taught them to waterski. They are both fun people.

Then Valerie's grandson, who stayed with us several weeks last summer, returned for a week. Last year he had been very disappointed that he had to go home before the annual Sharon triathlon, and this year he arranged that his stay would include that, and he competed. He came in 45th out of about 500 participants. Not bad for not really training, and just running on raw strength and youth. Our house is on the route for both biking and running, and my neighbors like to stand by the road and play uplifting music (the Olympics theme song was rotated frequently into the playlist) and cheer as people go by. I joined them for a while, but it turned out that he'd already gone by.

I did my usual unithlon of riding the bicycle part, and then seeing how I did after the results were posted. Worse than usual; I came in last in my age group by about five minutes. Took me 57 minutes to ride 12.4 miles. Which is faster than I usually go; I was trying hard to never coast but power down the hills and trying to go up them at a faster pace than usual etc. But, there's a reason I don't enter such things. I'm at 1400 miles for the year, though, so I'm not doing too badly.

Now we have three others of Valerie's grandkids: the first one's younger brother and two cousins. The cousins are 13-year-old twins, and so we had to do the whole pickup unaccompanied minor from the airport thing; it was a big deal for them to get to go by themselves without parental units or older brother. They aren't here for very long, but we are making the most of it. There has been a lot of boardgame play in the evenings (Perry has been here on and off to participate in that). One of Jocelyn's friends came back for a couple of days on her way to some other thing, and she and the twins went to Salem to do witch things yesterday.

Then today it was outdoor activity day: we visited Jocelyn's aerial rig, which we lent to somebody in town a couple of years ago after it was clear Jocelyn wasn't using it, and Jocelyn and the friend (of course also a circus performer) did a lot of stuff, and the younger set tried a few beginner things. Then we came back, had lunch, and hit the lake for skiing (by the older grandson) and tubing (by the twins). I got a ski ride with Jocelyn driving, before she had to deliver her friend to the train to go off on her next adventure. (It looks like we will see her again in a week or two, because she left a large duffel bag which she needs to retrieve.)

Dinner, more boardgames, and playing with my cats, which is also a hit. Tomorrow the people who live here will be away in the afternoon watching Perry graduate, so the visiting small fry (medium fry?) will have to amuse themselves for a few hours. But, there's the whole boardgame wall, and they have permission to swim as long as more than one of them is down there at the lake, and there are any number of places they could go by bicycle or foot. I think there will be shopping at the thrift store in the morning. I think this is a random activity, but the twins were both excited about it. Then, off they go at oh-dark-thirty Sunday morning. The other one will still be around for another couple of days. His activity on the Salem day was to go into town and take the self-guided tour of MIT and then a Perry-guided tour of Wentworth. He's applying to college this fall. His impression of MIT: "it's big."

During all of this I have been managing to work a moderate amount, but I have been taking time for lake activities (I got a lot of ski rides with the older grandson driving when he was here), bicycling, and stuff, so I have been working less than usual, which is good, because I've been unhappy about the amount of working I've had in the past few months.

So my work is kind of sucking recently. We have a lot of customer issues, and our customer support organization is inadequate, so questions that I think ought not to go to development do go to development. We need to spend some time training customer support better, and we never have time, so instead we are answering customer questions ourselves.

So there isn't as much time for actual development as a result. In fact, the current deadlines do not affect me personally, because I don't have pieces that are going into the next release; I only have pieces that are going into the following release, which means that I should work on those some time, but it's not heavy pressure about that yet. But the customer questions do get heavy pressure, because the customers expect answers in a certain timeframe (dictated by severity and how important that customer is etc.) So there's still too much work. And then my team is too small and when people go on vacation, they aren't available to help with the customer support issues, and I've been really feeling it the last two weeks. My boss was out at a conference for three of those days, and it was stressful because it kind of falls to me to do the organizational stuff when he's out.

Anyway, I woke up crying on Thursday about how inadequate I was being even though I really can't try any harder. I don't work full time, but after six hours there's nothing left inside me and there's really no point in doing anything except reading or making cookies. (There's been a certain amount of stress eating, and 5 extra pounds over the last few months, which is not great either.)

So my boss came back and we had a chat and he was very supportive (my boss is awesome), and I confessed to a bunch of procrastiworking (I am forever grateful to Chris Hallbeck on mastodon for publicizing that phrase), and he was complementary that at least I was getting something useful done! Although, not for the customer case that I was having trouble with.

So then on Friday I got a slack message from somebody I'd vaguely heard of asking if he could talk to me about our product, and I thought he was going to ask a technical question, so I said sure, and he did a voice huddle thing with slack, and proceeded to ask me how some internal project was going where I'm helping his team, and trying to find out when it was going to be done. Now, I had ignored them for a couple of weeks a couple of weeks ago, but I had started to pay attention to them over the last two weeks, so I kind of felt like I'd been doing my part of that, and this harassment wasn't called for. And I hadn't read my email that morning yet, and so I guess I shouldn't have said sure talk to me, so I quick poked at my email and found that his employee had sent me an email about "there is a bug" and of course I hadn't looked at it yet, and so I was like "okay I see there's a bug, and I can't tell you when it's going to be done because I don't know if it's a hard bug or something trivial and I just don't know" and I got more and more frazzled in the conversation. Eventually I extracted myself from the conversation and burst into tears. Unfortunately, I had a meeting five minutes later.

So I called my boss (who was in the car having just dropped his kids off at school), and told him I was really struggling and this conversation I'd had and I didn't think I could go to this meeting because I wouldn't be able to stop crying soon enough. So we agreed that I would be 5-10 minutes late, and I would go outdoors and walk around for 10 minutes, and then come into the meeting in case I was needed. This plan worked, and I was able to put in my 2 cents in the meeting. Afterwards, I was still fragile, so I went on a bike ride (fortunately the weather was great), and came back at noon, and then I got work done for the rest of the afternoon successfully. Including dealing with the guy who made me cry's bug. I think that if I hadn't already been fragile from the day before, I wouldn't have been so upset about this random pressure from some random manager who's not in my chain of command. But, why am I so fragile? I don't feel like we have a toxic work place. But maybe secretly we do. Like, my manager is awesome, and his manager is okay, and the director seems to be very supportive of people needing time off or whatever. So some of this is internal "Protestant work ethic" or "I have to be able to do everything and can't fail" feelings, which are themselves kind of toxic.

Then I kind of took my feelings out on my housemates, so they are less than pleased with me, but I think we're making up and it will be okay.

Things started to suck right around the time my cat died. Is it because they were sucking earlier, and when things sucked I pet my cat and felt better as a result then was able to carry on? Or is this just burnout and the timing is coincidence?

Anyway, I'm going to yoga tomorrow, and that might help.

And we put in the first one third of the dock today.

Today, my work said we could all come in and get our stuff which has been sequestered for three months, and also we could borrow equipment from our desks. I borrowed my chair, my docking station, and my monitor (although I recently purchased a new monitor, so I'm not sure if I'm going to use the one I borrowed.) I also brought home all my personal stuff, because who knows what's going to happen, and if I have completely cleaned out my desk, then if they want to reorganize the office space, they can just do it. If they lay me off, or if I quit, you would think that would also make it easier, but presumably I would have to return the borrowed equipment in that case, so I'd have to go there anyway. Hopefully neither of these things will happen; I'm unlikely to quit, because getting another job would be quite the pain, in addition to the fact that I really hate working full time. I've been working nearly fulltime -- 6-7 hours a day, and that's really all I ever had in me. Maybe normal humans also are like that, and it would be considered full time anyway. I really don't know.

Anyway, it required a trip up to Waltham, 45 minutes each way, and I got to listen to the radio. I kind of miss listening to the radio while commuting; I never really wanted to do it for as many hours as I always did each week, but once a week is good. Once a month is too little.

On the way home, I stopped at a friend's house, and sold her a Black Lives Matter sign (prearranged). We still have four left, and I think we're going to just keep them, although it's probably better to get them out there, than to keep one for theft remediation.

While I was away, we had a lightning strike near home, and it fried two things: the Comcast modem, and our home server. So for a couple of hours we camped on the neighbors xfinity, and then Comcast got us a new modem. Meanwhile, Ken was researching the options for replacing the server. We had hoped we would be able to just plug in the disk and reboot, but the guy at microcenter said that would not work. So now our hope is to get linux on it, and get it to read the other disk. This is not trivial, because windows machines really don't want you to run anything besides windows… Anyway, I had another nice drive up to Cambridge, listening to the radio. There was some concern about getting there before they closed, but I had 15 minutes, and was not the last customer checking out.

1: my boss took her local direct reports plus her 2 remote workers who were in town for the hackathon out for a "team building" exercise. She took us to Escape Room Boston! There were 7 of us, and we escaped with 7 minutes to spare. 7 people was too many, because a few times we sat around while one person listened to a phone message or whatever to get a puzzle to then solve, which took 2 or 3 people, and there wasn't a lot of parallelism---you had to get clues from one puzzle in order to make progress. I think there was more than one "track" through, so there was a little parallelism, and inspecting the entire area for out-of-place items which were clearly a puzzle was faster with more people. It was fun anyway, but I'd guess 4 or 5 would have been better.

2: The entire hackathon was invited to participate in two team building exercises -- though neither of these had anything to do with a specific team, unlike the above, where my boss was trying to get us to know each other better, which can foster communication. In the first case, they sorted the entire participant list by first name, and split us into teams of 9. In the second case they sorted us by last name. I was waiting for the middle name sort...

2a: the first exercise was to make a poster that embodied our new slogan (which I think is kinna dumb, "Legacy Powers Legendary" -- "Legendary" isn't even a noun!) and our values of loving the customer. There were a couple of good posters that came out of it, and it was vaguely fun, and amusing to meet a bunch of people whose names started with J and K. Maybe the marketing department will use some inspiration from someone's poster.

2b: the second exercise was completely useless from a work standpoint, but it was fun (and by the end of Tuesday we were all pretty punchy and needed the break). We did an egg drop. The materials they gave us were inadequate to protect our eggs from the drop from the second floor of the parking structure, and most teams died on their first attempt, but a couple of teams survived to go again, this time from the THIRD floor of the parking structure. One actually succeeded! A good time was had by all and it was a really good thing it rained shortly after that to clean up the driveway!

I've been sick for a few days. Finally went to the doctor to see if it was strep (symptoms include sore throat among various chest and nasal symptoms). Rapid came back negative; I've had this for long enough he says the rapid would be positive if I had bacterial infection. They'll send out the slow test anyway, but likeliest outcome is, antibiotics will not be helpful.

I blame it all on the CTO of the company. He's been having me do extra stuff for him again (and, since I like him despite a certain amount of Male Answer Syndrome and other objectively annoying traits, and it's always helpful when the CTO likes you, mostly I step up to the plate.) Unfortunately, there was a foo-foo-rah involving some employees in Asia and miscommunication, so he decided he needed to call a meeting at 6:30am last Thursday. Well, obviously I'm attending from home, but it wasn't called early enough for me to get an adequate night's sleep. Plus, like, it's all very stressful. Seems, when I have stress + lack of sleep, I get sick. Almost every time. I tried to catch up on sleep Thursday night, but it wasn't enough.

Maybe I shouldn't have tried windsurfing on Friday morning. (First time this year. Way lots of wind; I was kind of blown away and there wasn't all that much success.) But, more likely, it didn't actually have anything to do with it. The water's 55, and I was wearing all manner of wetsuit bits. I was not at all cold except for the first little bit when the water runs into the wetsuit. I wasn't yet feeling bad, just had a tickle in the throat. By Friday night, it was a roar.

Bah.

We don't seem to have winter yet, and I had an opportunity to ride my bike (most of the way) to work in the 44 degree temps. It was a little cloudier and thus colder than I expected and my feet got kinna cold, but the warm shower at the end helped a lot.

23.34 in 2:13 for an average of 10.5, which isn't great but doesn't really suck either.

I've also decided to have a kind of new years resolution to do more stuff that makes me happy, and blow off more meetings at work, so I went to yoga on Wednesday and wore a tshirt instead of a striped sweater on Thursday. Striped sweater again today, but maybe I'll just make a habit of dressing back down. Hardly anyone wears tshirts at this place, and so a few years ago I bought some clothes at the thrift store to blend in, but it doesn't make me happy that it takes over a year to cycle through my tshirts. The eclipse shirts I wore in August 2017 are just surfacing. I mean, I have over 200 shirts, so it should take more than half a year, but not 1.5 years.