3 day weekend and books

(originally posted on the book of face)

Well it's Friday, it's payday. Got up before my work alarm would have woke me up. Got ready, did my run to Recycled Books. Timed it well, got to the door a minute before they opened the door. Got some old "Whispers" issues (or collections, not 100% sure), and a couple of books on books. Didn't stay all that long, didn't even go down to the basement to look at history. I think my inner collector was happy with the "Whispers", and the books on books were the cherries on the book hunting cake. Went from there to a local Lowes to return the drill I bought earlier this week. It's a good took, but that money is better spent elsewhere, especially after I figured out my little drill/screwdriver is good enough as long as I change the batteries fairly quick.

Got home right around 11, so instead of bumming around for an hour, I switched my PTO to 2 hours and logged in. A dev wanted to ask how much of a pain setting up a local ClamAV mirror would be for the devnet boxes. I said "Probably reading a page of documentation, going "oh I remember doing this." then setting it up. Only problem is I don't want to run it off a dev's machine, so I'll do it as part of Tuesday's work which includes throwing up a test box for my own use, which will include the mirror now. Gotta keep myself busy.

No wild 3 day weekend plans, well besides the fortnightly supply run. If my back and shoulder are up to it, I may do some reorganizing, but I say that every weekend I think. Shudder has "Slaxx" the killer jeans movie, which sounds like what the mad scientist ordered for tonight. Ok, I'll catch you lot later.

Almost a Year

Next Friday marks 1 year being mostly isolated. Last time I was out with a bunch of my friends. Time flies when life goes whackadoodle. Not going to dwell much on the last year, lets talk now. Tomorrow, I get my first COVID-19 vaccine. (may be the only, I honestly have no clue which one I'm getting). So not the end, but maybe a big waypoint? What will change in Vulpine's life? Very little, Still going to mask the same, still going to avoid crowds and interior social situations, unless both parties are vaccinated, and even then probably not often. Basically until the mortality/"Long Haul" rates drop and someone smarter than me says "Ok, you can do this now." And no, politicians don't count. Sucks, but I rather not get people sick, or kill them.

And starting this next work week, we take apart the Carcosa Corp datacenter. Nearly everything is migrated to 'The Cloud' (a term I loathe). So Monday I start shutting down things to see if we missed anything vital, then we start unracking things to be hauled off. I'm a little sad, I've spent half a decade dealing with that tiny DC (compared to The Shoggoth Pit). Going to be weird saying goodbye. On the other tentacle, will be nice to not have to drive into another county to fix things.

I had plans on other things to write, but yeah... I lost whatever they were. So I guess I'll call this a post. Ciao cultists.

Migration is done

Spent the weekend working the migration. Not as bad as I thought it was going to be, but not as good as it could have been. Anxiety levels were stupid high the entire time. Worked with audiobooks, mostly HPL and MR James stories, with a few podcasts on the side. Clocked 26 hours over the last two days, on top of the work week. Technically I'm still on the clock, but when it clocks after 2000 I'm heading to bed and meds. Maybe a little book time. Very little.

So what's next? Monday and possibly Tuesday will be kind of crazy with support requests and reminding people to read their darn email. I'm hoping to take a day or two off as comp time. I put off a bunch of stuff because I knew the weekend was going to be hard. Computer stuff, work around the apartment. Convincing the neighborhood crows that I'm their friend. Maybe even making myself disconnect for a few hours and read.

So the stressor is done, for now. (Beyond the rest of the stressors). Dear Cthulhu and Tsathoggua, please grant me some restful sleep.

Viruses, Carcosa and stuff

Tomorrow will be my second calendar month here in Dunwich Abbey. It's also the middle of the Covid-19 virus outbreak. Not, as I've been typing, 'Corvid'. It's not a crow. So far I'm fine, I'm low risk, even with the diabetes and high blood pressure. I'm not being stupid though. And I have plenty of toilet paper, I bought a bulk pack when I moved in, and well... I live alone, so I have plenty.

Carcosa Corp is all kinds of busy, projects and migrations and everyone is twitchy. There's no official word about office closings and whatnot, but I've been mostly working from home anyway. So we'll see what happens.

Personal foo? Been slowly working on getting Dunwich Abbey setup. Not as fast as I'd like, but I've been pretty lacking in tentacles post work, and I spend most of the weekend trying to recover. I've managed to get the study to be pretty comfortable, and the bedroom is coming together. The living room is still a bunch of boxes and stuff. I need to get more bookshelves so I can start organizing books better, but that's going to wait life to settle down again, vs having random folks over here in case of plague. Plus the next weekend or two will be busy with work foo. I'll get around to it sooner or later.

Ok, I'm out of stuff to talk about, and I'm bloody exhausted. Night folks who read this.

Welsh, closets, and fixing workstations

Well it's been a few days on the new meds, I see a difference, but that's probably the placebo effect of having done something. This is so far from my first rodeo, I even have the non-physiological foo mapped out. Work week was...goofy. Office moving around was a pain. Got a ping today that one of the dev boxes we hid in a network closet wasn't responding. So I drove up to the office to fix it. (I'd just finished the movie I was watching, so it worked out well. Needed some arguing, and some labeling and cable mishmashing. Came back home after that.

As I said today would have been Dad's 95th spawning day. So when I wasn't working on cleaning out the closet in prep for moving, or driving to work, I've been watching movies I remember watching with Dad. 'In the Name of the Rose', 'Hunt for Red October' and now, 1 Million Years B.C. (aka Raquel Welch in a fur bikini). It's been fun, not many sad thoughts. Didn't get as much moving labor done as I wanted, but I found multiple boxes of Mom stuff and that took some of the wind out of my sails. I decided to just keep it boxed up, move it to the new place, then I'll work on sorting through it. Or not.

Not much else, I don't think I've mentioned it, but I've been using DuoLingo the last 3 months to actually study Latin. I know a lot of words, but I have little to know idea on grammar or structure. Sadly, I can't say I'm much better at it, but it's fun to try. Today, kind of on a whim I fired up Welsh, since I keep running into Celts in my reading. A lot more material, since Welsh is a living language, and I'm better than listening/saying the basic words than I am at Latin. (seriously, I rather just read it). So we'll see. I don't think I'll ever be more than a how to ask nicely for the restroom, and sorry I don't speak $language, do you speak English ? But who knows, maybe something will click. And I'm having fun.

31 days til I get the keys to the new place. I need to get services moved over, and I need to figure out some other new place stuff. As well as finish packing/organizing. Holiday BS is pretty much being treated as just BS, I really ain't feeling it this year. Oh well, a little over two weeks and it's done. Then moving, then Cthulhu knows. Right now it's still day by day. Which is about all I can count on. Night all.

Here comes the weekend

Been a couple of days since my sad post. The Fourth wasn't much better, I'm not the most patriotic person in the world, and I honestly felt very alone, but I didn't want to deal with the traditional crazies that come out to play. Plus it was bloody hot, and my apartment parking gets bad on the 4th, since the fireworks and festival in town are a few blocks away. So I stayed home, read a bit, watched a bunch of movies, and generally felt blah. Slept better than I had before, even with the fireworks, and got up for today's WFH day.

The plan was to take advantage of the quiet day and people taking long weekends and work on project stuff. That didn't happen, lots of virtual walk ups asking for help. I did manage to get a few things done, but nothing like I planned. Oh well. At least the day/work week is done. This weekend is Spider-Man flick, and I'm not sure what else. A few chores. Try to avoid bookstore runs, since next week is Half Price Books coupon a day thingie. So better to save on my book addiction and splurge next week (I also get paid next Friday).

So yeah, it's the weekend, thank Cthulhu. And I have no idea where to go with this post, so I'll wrap it up. Have a good night folks.

Carcosa Corp 2.0

Been at the new office a week. And I am of mixed opinions. It's a nice building, nice office space. My cube is fairly big, and while it doesn't have full height walls, it's still fairly private. Sadly, voices carry, so I hear the neighbors (a bunch of devs I don't know) more than I'd like. It's also overly warm IMHO, I guess the powers that be that control the thermostat are lizard people. My fellow IT folks are nearby, fellow admin is across the row, and the desktop guy is one row over and further back. I'm at the front of my row, so people walk by me all day, which is distracting as I see movement, and look up. Guess I need to slouch a bit more so I don't see them. There's a bunch of restaurants near by, and a good Half Price Books. I also got to meet one of the execs I've dealt with a lot the last few months, got some chitchat in. The people I know are on the other side of the big office area I'm in, but between walkups and IM clients we're still in constant contact. Which is mostly good. We'll see how it works over time.

Brought my craptop over, and my triple monitor setup on a dock. Network is a little slower, especially if I'm doing things on the datacenter network, a few more hops than there was when I was a few floors overhead. Today I setup a test 'developer machine' in my cube. Our devops guy wanted a system he could test from in the new office, vs his own box back in the datacenter. Dell Optiplex, running Fedora (was 28, but I upgraded to 30 today). In theory it's going to just sit in my cube if anyone needs to see what's up with the developer network, in practice if I end up working in the office a good deal, I'll move it so it's the primary box and just not 'tell anyone'. (32 gigs of RAM and not Windows would make up for a lot of the commute.) We'll see. I did manage to name it 'hyades', our test dev boxes are named after constellations, and well, a star cluster is just a constellation mushed together. The devops guy is a Lovecraft fan (one of my converts), and I think he got the joke. At some point this weekend I'll log in from home, and push some scripts and files over to it. (Via VPN, no we're not insane). Not much in the way of decorations in the new cube, since I'm probably going to work remote more often than not, it's probably for the best.

Now, the big problem of the moment. The commute sucks. Morning isn't so bad, if I leave at 8:30, I'll be there at 9:00, assuming traffic doesn't snarl. But coming home is pretty crappy from 4pm til after 6pm. And it's the drive home that I really appreciated the 10 minute commute. But in 6 months or so, in theory we'll be done with the datacenter. And I'll be ready to move, so the pseudo-plan is to move north, assuming working from home 4 days out of 5 works for me. Which it should, unless I end up feeling too hermited. I really don't know, as is often I can see both sides. Next week I'll be about half and half, and we'll see what works from there.

So, it's more or less alright. Some things are better, some things are not. I'm just going to keep on going, adjust things and see how it goes. On that note though, it's time for this fox to head to book and bed. Night all.

Health and Office Foo

Well yesterday (Thursday), I went back to the hematologist. The issue is I have an enlarged liver, which is enlarging my gallbladder, which reduces platelets in the blood. The basic fix is lose weight, liver gets more to normal, things are ok. My current platelet count is right at the low end of normal. Doc wants me back in 3 months to see how things go. So I'm going to try getting more firm on the diet, like I did after being diagnosed with diabetes, and trying to figure out more exercise. But since it's summer in the hell of Texas, it's hard to make myself exercise. So we'll see what happens.

Also, today was my last day in the local Carcosa Corp office. Finished my packing, did some other stuff. Went up to the new office, found my new cube (it's been changed a couple of times). Didn't stay, all I had was my laptop and I didn't want to argue with trying to find the work wifi. So I came home, hit traffic (at 2pm), worked from home for a bit, then kind of checked out. I have to do some work Sunday night before people go in the office Monday, and I have to be in the office way too early to help with people coming in. Hopefully going to get some rest this weekend. In fact, going to finish this post and head to bookville.

Wish I was Goin’ Down to Dunwich

Lots of stuff and things lately. Finally finished the Atlassian migration. It does still require work, upgrading things to a supported version that allows me to migrate the next set of Atlassian foo. But that's for another week. Speaking of Carcosa Corp, found out we're offically moving offices to the main set of offices in DFW. Not sure how much it will apply to me, since there's no current plan to move the DC we have. So that's something we need to work out. Move is in the next quarter or two. Looking forward to yet another wild fun of moving offices.

Speaking of moving, it's offical, I'm not moving this year. Too much other stuff going on. Work, timing, my own stress levels, and when the season of hot hits the area. So I signed a 9 month leason (starts May 1st), so I'll be trying to move right after the New year 2020. No idea where I'm going still. Will depend on work, on what I can find, and honestly, where is the best location for access to my favorite book haunts. So instead of moving I'm going to do a major declutter and moving of stuff into storage, and getting rid of things I'll never use or need again. (already have several bags of clothes to go to Goodwill). So hopefully when it comes time to move, I won't be in a huge scramble. We'll see.

Weekend was helping a friend out, managed to get myself majorly dusted, and tweaked my back. So I'm taking it easy tonight, watching movies and taking it easy. Tomorrow is probably chores, assuming I feel like moving around. Then it's another crazy week of work. And that's all I have, and have had for the last couple of hours. So I guess I'll call this a post.

State of the Fox

October hasn't been what I'd call a great month. Work is lots of stress, lots of change and not a lot of concrete stuff. I'm officially a Subject Matter Expert for something I really do not to be involved in, but I am the guy with the most knowledge ATM. At least the project is a complete new build out, so hopefully I can do it right from the start.

I turned 46. I still don't feel 46. What the hell happened? I'll buy my 30's, since I can at least keep my checkbook balanced. Oh well. On my spawning day I went and saw a screening of 'Prince of Darkness' at the Alamo Drafthouse. Good way to spend the end of my spawning day.

Last night I went to the wake of a friend of mine from college. Saw a lot of people I haven't seen in too many years. Lots of stories, laughs, tears. I have a lot of stuff in my head that I have to process. Don't worry, nothing bad, just stuff in my life and how I view my life I think I need to change. I'm also sorry it took a friend dying for me to reach out and see those friends from my past. *sad*

Health wise, things are mixed. When I'm mindful of my eating, and my stress isn't super high, my bloodsugars are hovering a smidge above normal. When the stress kicks in, or I do something stupid like eat too much pizza (aka today), they're all over the place. My dealings with CareNow have sunk to a new low, I need to find a GP so I don't have to deal with unprofessional medical staff. I have a couple of leads from people I trust, so that's good. Depression/anxiety and stress is making the brainmeats tricky to manage, along with constant focusing on my blood sugar and how my eyes are acting. *yawn* I also am having issues sleeping solid, stress is for the feckin birds.

So what's coming up ? A follow up eye-doctor visit on Wednesday, then after that I hope to have stable enough vision to get my normal bifocal glasses. Various work projects, next weekend is more social time, and going to see some classic horror flicks next Sunday. Mostly though, I'm just going to be trying to keep the anxiety/stress levels from hitting peak levels again. *crosses tentacles*