How are you today?

I’ve always taken the exclamation point as a sign of trouble.

But then, I’ve played a LOT of Metal Gear Solid games…

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Snake! Snake!!!

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On top of the ongoing jobchange related soap-operatic shenanigans my partner is dealing with and the house renovation related issues, we caught us some bitey insects in the bedroom. Pretty sure not moskitos.

I once brought home bedbugs and fleas from a vacation 20 years ago. Now again my legs look like a flea buffet. I really hope it’s “just” fleas. They are also only biting me. Haven’t seen a single one. I have no idea where we caught the pests. We have no pets. My dad’s cat is apparently “vaccinated” against fleas? I feel… terrible. 20 years ago, we only got rid of the pests by spraying the whole apartment with poison.

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So I haven’t been around much for, two months maybe? Lot’s of goings ons. In brief:

  • In April my parents came to visit and the Mrs and I got away for two nights. Yay! @COMaestro will relate, but just 24 hours with no responsibility really means something when you’re carrying special needs 24/7.
  • Came home and the older one had a new breed of separation anxiety, couldn’t go to sleep or sleep through the night. Boo.
  • Got away with the family to a beach in Delaware for a few days. Yay!
  • Beach was called Broadkill beach. We assumed it was historically derived. We found dead animals all over the beach all week. And a shark egg. Most fish had a single bite taken out. Lazy sharks. Maybe lazy dolphins too. We saw a lot of dolphins. Boo and yay.
  • Older one now became afraid of the dark. Boo.
  • Came home. Au pair totaled our Volvo with my wife and two daughters inside. Boo.
  • No one was seriously hurt. Just several weeks of extra physical therapy and acupuncture for the kinks and cramps. Yay?
  • Got a bigger volvo. Yay!
  • It was expensive. Boo.
  • Life started to return to normalcy. Au pair decided to stay (which we wanted) even though she no longer has access to our cars. Yay!
  • We all caught COVID. Boo.
  • Seriously, my daughter caught COVID after 2.5 years of hardcore lockdown six days before the lazy-ass FDA met to approve her vaccine. After something like 6 months of delay for more information and to time the two mRNA vaccines together. I know, I know, they’ve got their reasons and priorities but their reasons and priorities put my high-risk-of-hospitalization daughter at risk every single day and those are not my priorities. You can decide whether or not she needs a third shot AFTER you give her the first two.

Anyway, said high-risk daughter got through it with one rough day that peaked at a 105 fever. Near-zero-risk sister barely knew she was sick. I qualified for Paxlovid and also had one rough day before the anti-virals kicked in, then had roughly a week of sleep. The wife had it worst and was laid out for about three days. The awful part is over for her but she’s still in bed for about double the usual amount. It’s no picnic but it wasn’t a disaster either.

Said au pair was a hero last week.

That just about brings us to present. I need a sit down and a drink.

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Sounds like you had the “living in interesting times” event happen multiple times. I am sure the rest of the deck now only has pleasant events. Unless of course you draw re-shuffle

Game references aside, I hope you and yours fully recover and get to relax a bit over the rest of the summer.

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FTFY! :slightly_smiling_face:

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TIL I learned Delaware has coast. I had it inland USA in my head for some reason.

Still that was an eventful couple of months

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Nothing compared to Acacia’s update, but a funny story.

My company is opening a new datacenter in St. Louis. This is a Big Deal™ because, well, we’re a datacenter company – 99.9% of our product offerings relate to people paying for things we put in our datacenter. The executive team wanted various groups to do a datacenter tour before it opened because:

  1. it’s easier to get groups of people in and out of datacenters before they go live, since once they are live, physical security is a huge concern.
  2. it’s nice to see something in person for a chance, for a company where more than half of the employees are remote or on-the-road.

It was originally supposed to happen in May, but got delayed (I’m guessing due to the “construction” phase going long and up until recently it was a hard-hat area until inspection was complete). Once it was scheduled for 17th June, my partner and I tried to come up with a way of making it a long-weekend family vacation to St. Louis. Unfortunately, StL hotels have lost their minds (or maybe it’s just “summer” hotel rates). So, instead, we are planning a vacation in September to visit the Omaha Zoo, and I would make a day-trip out to St Louis for the datacenter tour.

That’s approximately 8 hours of driving for a 30 minute tour. Worth it? Not for the tour, but for the chance to meet people face-to-face that I’ve been working with for a couple of years but never met. It was literally the first time I met someone in-person that works for the same company as me, unless you count the guy with whom I worked a previous position at a different company.

I drive all morning to get there just in time to spend about 30 minutes walking through a cold, loud, mostly-empty building. But it is nice to put faces to some names and voices; including someone who lives about 5 miles away from me, but we both drove 4 hours east in order to meet (and then we both drove 4 hours west… maybe we should have carpooled!? If only I knew he was going).

After the tour, we, a group of 9, head to a restaurant for lunch and then we all head over to our corporate headquarters about 3 miles away, to meet our Senior Vice President, many of us for the first time.

And then, we, a group of 9, get stuck in a stalled elevator. For about an hour and 15 minutes. After which, the SVP is not available to meet us, so we all just head home for the weekend.

Being stuck in an elevator is less dramatic than on TV or in the movies. Fortunately, everyone had a good attitude and we spent most of the time joking and laughing.

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Just realized I never gave an update about my wife’s physio appointment on Monday. So… Here goes:

We got there and the physio saw her immediately. After a bit over an hour, I get called in and she says that she can’t do anything yet because she suspects a herniated disk and she fears making things worse. My wife, at this point, is in TREMENDOUS pain and cannot walk back to the car, so we call an ambulance to get her to the hospital and get a scan of her back (well, let’s be real, an APPOINTMENT to get a scan).

Since this is in no way an emergency, the ambulance takes roughly 90 minutes to get there (fair enough). Wife is comfortable at this point and gets put on a gurney. Mother-in-law and I go to the house to get my wife some stuff for the long wait ahead (book, water, snacks…).

We get to the hospital and find her in a wheelchair in the emergency waiting room. At this point it’s around 6 PM. Ambulance had been called at around 3:15. I eventually leave with my father-in-law to go back home and sleep. Mother-in-law stays with my wife. No point in all of us being there.

At around 4 AM, I get a message that they saw a doctor and are coming home. Getting my wife in the house was quite the struggle, let me tell ya. But she’s got a prescription drugs cocktail (mother-in-law went to get the pills the following day) and a request for a scan in hand.

Scan people called today, it’s tomorrow at 5:30 PM. Might need to get an ambulance to get my wife out of the house on a gurney, but I’m ASTOUNDED at the speed.

Until then, she’s on ALL the drugs. Pain is generally manageable, but this morning was very hard.

Once that scan gets done, we can plan for treatment.

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This sounds like the perfect environment for Spaceteam

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I am so sorry your wife is having to go through all that. Mine has been having back pain for some time, and due to an auto accident last year, it got worse along with adding other problem areas, but finally she has been able to see a physical therapist to help with it, and it has been improving overall.

I hope they can figure out what is going on with your wife and resolve it quickly.

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Thanks, I appreciate it. The doc she saw yesterday (technically, she saw him at 2 AM) seemed pretty sure that surgery wouldn’t be necessary, so hey, that’s SOMETHING!

We’re pretty sure this goes back to her leg break in January 2020, which caused her to be immobile for around 4 months (was supposed to be less, but COVID put THAT on ice) and caused her hip muscles to atrophy and her posture to go to hell, creating a weakness that got exacerbated by all the coughing that she did because of bronchitis a couple of weeks ago.

I’m super happy for your wife finally getting better!

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As we’re talking about significant others…

My wife quit her job after 2.5 weeks, the job was not as advertised. She did this before getting another job offer.

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I walked out of one job (mostly because of the toxic office environment) with no immediate offer in hand (but enough savings that I wouldn’t starve for a few months). I was expecting to have some free time (minus job hunting) but that turned out to be a full-time thing. Still, one of the best decisions I made, and not only because it led me to the job I’ve now been in for ~19 years.

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Yes, we’re fortunate that we can manage on one income so her choices are more about job satisfaction first then money.

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One of my colleagues has just let me know he’s got COVID.

I’m still not back in the office much but I did spend most of yesterday sitting next to him and having the occasional chat. He seemed well enough yesterday so fingers crossed.

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Three of our team of fifteen researchers have got COVID in the past week and a half.

Thankfully our company is very sympathetic and keen to not have it spread to anyone else, so everyone is permitted to work at home until they test negative even if their job would usually be mostly hands on in the lab.

So far I’ve avoided it, but I’m increasingly feeling like it is only a matter of time…

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It depends on how much you have to pee.

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I’m going to put up spoiler tags on this next bit and I’m going to politely ask that anyone who does read it pretend that you didn’t. It’s insane, I know, but… it’s not serious? I’m just having a weird day.

Do you all… ever really want to talk about how you’re doing, but then you really don’t want to talk about how you’re doing because if you talk about how you’re doing, then people will be nice and tell you that things will be alright or maybe just be like, super nice and sympathetic and that’s not what you want but you also don’t want to feel like, totally alone but you also really don’t want people to tell you stuff but you don’t want to be a jerk and like tell them what to do but you don’t know how to express that?
I’m feeling like that. Like I want to go into a room somewhere that’s very dark, and very, very quiet, and scream at the top of my lungs just to get the sound… like… out there? But then not have anything come of it because this is just part of the process and I know that.

Right. Please carry on. /rant

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