January has historically been the toughest month of the year, at least the years where we’ve lived somewhere cold. The thrill of Christmas has gone the way of the carbonation in a flat, half-finished can of coke and the road to spring looks arduous and cold. Emily might seem nice and all, but as long as I’ve known her she has had a deep, abiding hatred in her heart for snow. Indeed, our ideal location is somewhere in the beautiful desolation of a warm desert with NO SNOW. We’re not totally sure where that is, but wherever it is we’d prefer to know we’re living in the desert, not just a city with hot sidewalks (like the center of Phoenix). We would love to live somewhere with big starry nights, open desert land, and ABSOLUTELY NO SNOW. But that’s just a dream at the moment.
Kev has watched me cook long enough that he now seems to be very interested in “cooking” himself. He likes to stir whatever he can find in a bowl and move it to another bowl, etc. Sometimes we let him “cook” on the stove. He’ll pretty much stir anything that is stirrable.
Kev’s other favorite activity is walking. Although he seems capable of taking a couple of rickety steps on his own, he’s discovered that he’s much faster and steadier if he can hold on to something, an adult’s hand in this case. Our lives now consist of walking around with Kev as he walks to a room, then walks back to home base, which is the ice machine, to put some ice in his mouth, explore some more, walk back to the ice machine, rinse and repeat.
I think we’re all getting cabin fever. We don’t particularly enjoy going out in the freezing cold, so we’re holed up in the apartment while we wait for winter to blow over. Every now and then we go outside. We like to take him to the gym with us and give him free rein to explore, as long as there are no people there.
In the middle of the wonderful month of January, Kev threw up in the middle of the night, and the next day Emily started puking her guts out, about every 15-20 minutes for half the day. I took part of the day off to take care of Kev. The next morning I woke up to stomach pain, proceeded by a day of puking my guts out and generally feeling awful, followed by another day of feeling awful. Kev probably felt as good as we did but he was a lot more vocal about it. Somehow, we survived.
My job has been a fantastic growing experience, which is exactly what I was looking for. The downside of having a growing experience is that by the very nature of growing experiences, it’s rather challenging as well as stressful and demanding. I’ve been trying to work up the courage to go see a doctor about ADHD for a year or two and my new job has been the catalyst to finally do it. I’m feeling the need to be able to pay attention in meetings. It’s not uncommon for me to slip into a state where I can’t get my mind to pay attention to words that are being spoken, even when I know perfectly well that I should be paying attention. I finally went to see someone and I got me some Adderall. At first, it amped me up and I barely slept for the next 48 hours. I went off for a few days and then went back on again, this time only taking half the dosage, and have since worked up to full. I hate the fact that I have to take medication in order for the fog in my brain to lift, but that seems to be the reality.
I’ve been at my job for 5 months now, and for 4 of those months I’ve been working on redoing the loyalty system (which allows people to earn points and redeem rewards). Just a couple weeks ago, we finally deployed it after months of hard work. That week elevated my blood pressure a bit, as bug reports came in and various issues were discovered. One issue that quickly came to our attention was that iOS apps crashed as a result of one of my changes. It turns out that I had made a change that would remove a value from a message when that value is empty. That’s a perfectly reasonable change to make in most circumstances, however it turns out that the iOS apps are depending on that field being there, even if it’s empty, otherwise they crash. I was on my way to a doctors appointment for a 30 day medication check when I was alerted to the fact that I broke something, so I hightailed it back home, coordinated with the necessary people to push out an emergency fix so that people could continue to use the app, then called the doctor’s office to apologize and reschedule. When I go to the doctor they like to tell me that my blood pressure is a bit on the higher end. How interesting.
The thing about working in the software industry is that you will screw up, and you will screw up publically, over and over again. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want to show your faults for the world to see, this ain’t the job for you. At my first real programming job I met a guy named Jose who’d been around the block - he’d been programming since the 70’s. I consider Jose to be my “mentor”, and one of these days I’d like to write a blog post about him. One thing he was fond of saying is that there is nothing more humbling than software. He was the most competent programmer I’ve met, and also the most humble. I’ve generally found the more seasoned a programmer is, the more humility they possess.
And that’s all I’ve got for this post. I don’t even really have a good ending.
Yeah ok bye.
But I have captured a very rare specimen on camera. The bearded infant:
