No Post Today

Posted on 09/29/2013 by Andrew Reynolds

It’s one of those days where my brain is largely not functioning.  I sat down at the computer an hour ago to write my weekly post and so far I’ve got nothing.

Heather just gave me permission not to write so that’s what I am going to do.

Just wanted to let you all know that I am not writing today.  In the past I’ve said that if I don’t write, I’d post a picture.  Sorry, don’t have any pictures to post.  Well, I could go out a take one but that would involve effort and Heather’s using the camera cable right now to download some pictures.

Yes, we only own one download cable but have two cameras.  I could take a picture on my iPhone and email it but that would take about 10 mouse clicks and all my fingers are on the keyboard typing so that seems like it won’t work out for me today.

I did try to figure out something to write.  I’ve been thinking about a new business I’d like to start and was going to write all about it.  Seemed like a great idea until I started to think about how I’d explain it – then it started to sound like a bad idea and completely put me off the whole idea so I am not going to tell you about it.

Some times when I can’t think of what to write, I’ll reread my last post, read someone else’s blog, check out the news, maybe watch a short woodworking video or two.  Or in today’s case, three.  Normally I find my writing rhythm in about 10-15 minutes.

Today I was 52 minutes into that when I got an email which distracted me. Then Heather asked a question and looking at the clock I should be putting the pizza in the oven soon.

Maybe it’s some weird late side effect from my radiation treatment. Or possibly some late onset ADHD.  Not really sure what that is but a co-worker of my blames a lot his problems on it.  Oh look, I got another email.

I’ve been rereading the whole Harry Potter series and re-watching watching all the movies.  Which has nothing to do with why I can’t write today but I thought I’d mention it as it could be significant.  There must be some deep physiological need that has driven me to do this.

Now that I am writing about it, it is really starting to bother me.  On most Sundays I can sit down and knock out a thousand words, edit it down to 750 all while getting the pizza in the oven and finding the camera download cable.

Sorry, Heather is still using it.  Not that it would help since I don’t have any pictures to download.

Just had a great idea – opened up iPhoto and found some pictures in there that I’ve never posted.  Yes, I had to move my hand to the mouse to do that but it only took four clicks to find this picture of a bridge over a creak.  This is from one of our favorite hikes along Fall Creek.  This little bridge crosses the creek and I’ve always thought it would make a great marquetry picture.

Fall Creek Bridge

The bridge over Fall Creek

Well, sorry I didn’t write a post this week but sometimes it goes like that.

Till next week,
Andrew

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Whiny Post

Posted on 09/22/2013 by Andrew Reynolds

The last two weeks of work have been horrible.

Mind numbing the phase that pops into my mind.  Well, when anything pops into my mind – you see it’s a bit numb at the moment.  Have you ever gotten to the point where words just bounce off your brain?  It’s been happening to me all week.  People will come up to me and start talking.  I know they are talking because their mouths move and sound comes out.  Just about the time my brain connects the fact that sound is words and that they’re trying to tell me something, they stop making the sounds.  It’s at this moment that I know they’ve asked a question.

And I have no clue what they’ve just said because the words have been hitting that part of my brain that has been numbed by over use. They are just bouncing harmlessly into space having made no impact at all.

Some people might try a tactic at this point to save face by saying something like, “I’m not sure I understand the problem – could you go over that again?”

When I was younger and cared about what people thought about me, that’s what I would do.  These days I either just admit my defects by saying, “Sorry my brain is numb and I have no idea what you just asked me.” Or I just head for insanity and reply with, “I wish I could answer your question, but I am afraid that aliens will eat my brains if I do.”

Either answer works, as the person trying to talk to me generally gives up and goes away.

I have been complaining about my work load to my co-workers and my boss.  My co-workers are sympathetic and usually say something comforting like, “well if you think that is bad wait till you hear this …”  My boss generally tries something like, “You know the plan is to hire someone to help you, next year.”

This is the point in weekly my weekly blog post where I’d write some clever transition or flourish some witticism at you.

But this week my brain is numb and I don’t have anything clever or witty.

So instead I’ll just end this post by showing you one of my coping methods – building things in my workshop.  There is nothing quite like the sound of a saw slicing through wood to comfort the soul.  Beating a nail to death with a hammer has the ability to reduce stress and calm the nerves.  When I’ve had time lately I’ve been working on cleaning up my workshop.  Here is a picture of my new lumber rack:

Lumber Rack

My new place to store junk

Here is the space I got back in my shop by moving all that lumber scrap out:

Shop Space

Where the lumber used to be stacked

And finally here is the nearly completed deck.  It just needs the trellis at the top finished:

deck with top

Almost done. Just a few more sticks to nail on.

Till next week,
Andrew

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A Working Post

Posted on 09/15/2013 by Andrew Reynolds

I just did something evil.  Well, maybe not wholly evil but possibly immoral and against the laws of tea brewing.

I confess – I couldn’t wait for the tea kettle to come to a boil and then wait five minutes for the tea to brew.  Yes, dear friends, I did – I put a tea bag in a mug of water and put the whole thing in the microwave and zapped it on high for two minutes.  After fishing out the tea bag I poured in some milk and am actually drinking it now.

Well, not right at this very minute, but in between paragraphs, I take a sip or two.  I completely understand if you’re so disgusted with the thought of consuming improperly brewed tea that you stop reading this post.

In my defense, I plead stress, and promise you I am not fully enjoying this cup tea.

My current stress is work – as in “too much and too difficult.”  I don’t really want to talk about it, but it is really beating me up at the moment.  You know that I don’t discuss work in the blog very much for a number of reasons.  The short version of what I do is that I maintain computers – the big complex back-end servers that would take me a month to explain to you.  The darn things keep breaking and I was the nut case that took the job to keep them running.

That’s where the stress comes in.  Imagine sitting around on a quiet Friday afternoon while looking forward to spending a nice pleasant weekend playing with power tools.  Then just as the pleasing thoughts start to relax your brain and that silly smile starts to grow on your face, your boss flies into your cube followed by half the senior executive staff, all crying, “The server is down.  You have to fix it NOW.”

Stress defined: The mind overcoming the body’s desire to throttle someone who richly deserves it.

So to prevent these little bits of Friday afternoon fun, I lead my team on a little project to upgrade all our servers and move them to a data center that could better handle the demands of my customers.  It sounded like such a good idea – more servers, better servers, built-in redundancy, automatic monitoring, warm standbys, hot standbys, active fail over – a veritable nirvana of data processing.

Stress in action:  “What do you mean we ran out of power cords?”

It is times like this I am reminded of John Steinbeck’s story, “Of mice and Men” and the line, “The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray.”

That’s where I’ve been this weekend – astray.

For the last month, me and my team have been in deep planning and testing the changes.  We’ve made charts, written documents, had them reviewed by experts and constantly asked, “What have we forgotten?”

Then when we were convinced that we had it all together and everyone agreed, we scheduled the final dramatic cut-over to the new data center.  That was yesterday.  Planned to start at 9:00 am and end no later than 2:00 pm.

Stress starts with the statement: “Flip the switch.”

We finally finished the last test at 1:00 pm today and collapsed into victory.  Now I did get to come home and sleep in my own bed but it turns out there were about four things that we’d forgotten and that all the plan reviewers missed.  I am just gratefully I don’t work on nuclear power or launch rockets for a living – everyone down wind would still be in their shelters if I did.

So when it came to tea time this afternoon, I had very little emotional energy and just wanted a cup of tea NOW.  Hence my plunge into the abyss of microwave tea.

This is the kind of evil that working in high-tech can lead you into.

When the tea police finally show up, I’ll plea microwave tea by reason of stress and throw myself on the mercy of the court.

Maybe I’ll be sentenced to Starbuck’s.

Till next week,
Andrew

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The Contractor Post

Posted on 09/08/2013 by Andrew Reynolds

The real question I have today is: How many times do I have to rewrite the opening sentence before I can just get on with this post?  So far the count is up to four.  It’s not a day I feel strongly about writing and lately have been a bit overwhelmed with work and our little dance with the contractor community.

It’s also been very hot the last few days and likely not going to get cooler until later in the week.  I’ve always found it a bit strange that here in Northern California, September can often be hotter than August.  It’s been very odd talking to roofers and trying to predict when the rains will start – when will it be too cold to take the roof off while standing there sweating, in shorts and t-shirt.

I remember cold days and having to wear those things – jackets, coats? – forget the exact name but they keep you warm and I know I have a few around here somewhere.  Right now my brain can’t even comprehend the thought that I might need one again.  Well, until lunch today – the restaurant was freezing inside – they didn’t have the air-conditioner on, I think they just sat us in the walk-in freezer.  I was close to hypothermia by the time we finished lunch. Never thought I’d be happy to get outside to a nice California heat wave.

Back at our hot-house I started looking at my sweat stained notes from all those tours of the house I’ve been giving.  I have to say that talking to contractors about fixing the house has been more than a bit disturbing to my brain and general mental health.  You talk to one and they say, “Sure we can do that,” while another says, “don’t think city building codes will allow that.” Then there is the contractor who just looks at you blankly and says something like, “I’ll have to check on what I can do with that.”  Which generally means they have no clue and are looking for way to get away from you and your job.

So far I’ve found one really good contractor, one acceptable and another I’m thinking of getting a restraining order against (while I don’t think he’s actually dangerous, he was scary and now he knows where I live).  It’s interesting the mix I’ve found so far – from one man shops to family owned to big corporate operations.

The real problem has been two-fold: ideas and money.  That is too many great ideas and not enough money.  The electrician called with a preliminary quote that turned the notion of ‘sticker shock’ into ‘sticker atomic explosion.’  My personal estimate of the cost didn’t even have the same number of digits.  Still, talk about tempting – LED lights in the closets, exhaust fans that work, and enough circuits in the kitchen to have a cup of coffee while making tea and toast with the dishwasher running.  I think I actually fell in love with the electrician when he looked into my workshop and said, “You should have a circuit for each of your power tools – you’ll need about six in here.”

By the time the last of my list of contractors came through on Friday the project had expanded to include: re-roofing the house; completely rewiring; taking all the siding off and insulating the walls; building a carport; a new concrete walkway; remodeling both bathrooms; a complete kitchen redo; and while we’ve got everything torn up – why not replace the heater, add a air-conditioner and install solar to power it all?

There goes my retirement fund.

And all in the name of, “well, while we’ve got that wall open you might as well …”

By Friday, Heather was ready to sell the house and move, and I was calculating how many dumpsters it would fill if we just bulldozed the place and started from the ground up.

All this started by just wanting to make tea and toast at the same time with a roof that doesn’t leak.  How hard could that be?

Apparently very hard.

Heather and I had to sit down and go back to the beginning and re-ask the question – what is the pain point?  That is, what really needs to be fixed and what can stay the way it is.  Turns out the real trick isn’t figuring out what you want to do but rather learning to say, “no, we’re not going to fix that – it’s not important to us.”  After some reevaluation of our real needs and desires we’re looking at scaling the project way back.  I am again looking forward to a comfortable retirement.

But at least I’ve found a couple of very good contractors that I can work with and have a more manageable plan that doesn’t involve moving or bulldozers.

It does involve telling a few enthusiastic contractors, “no.”

With any luck psycho contractor won’t call back with a quote and I’ll get to avoid that bit of drama.

Still, it would be nice to have air-conditioner on these rare very hot days.

Till next week,
Andrew

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