Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

So, today, long about 12:30, I ended my work week.  I am blessed - and by that, I mean that honestly. A little under a year ago, my employer told me I was losing my job.  This week I had several people reach out to me and thank me for sticking around.  Like it was my choice.  But truly, it was. So yes, I punched out with over 60 hours on my timecard this week.  Now, if one of my former supervisors at my previous employer were to see that, I'm pretty sure they'd...  well, plotz is probably a good enough description for what retail management do when they find out they've gone into overtime. Mind you, I'm not playing on my cell phone to accrue all of this time.  I'm working my hind end off, and spending most of my day sharing my ... well, now valuable experience with the people who spent the last two years working in our legacy systems while I and a team of others ... touched the future.   There's one last group of folks to come over into our w...

Happy Mother's Day, to all who celebrate.  In second grade, when I was 8 years old, just before Mother's day, I lost my grandmother.  She was my dad's mom, and had raised a fairly large family.  I was blessed to live within a mile of her, and some days my father would take me over to her house so I could spend the day out of my mother's way, as she worked to take care of my increasing number of younger sisters.   And with four of them, you can imagine the amount of time I spent over there.  Some of my clearest memories of her include the toy basket, literally a green woven basket, about 18 inches tall, filled with toys which these days would be on a shelf, labeled antiques.  For me, they were merely 50 year old things like little cars and trucks and other things my father probably played with.  There were also the wooden block toys which I could play with, but didn't interlock and stay together like my Lego Blocks did. And then there was that glor...

Yeah, I know, but look, back in the day when this blogging stuff was called Daynotes by some of us, I did do a bit of a tour not just around the Daynoters, but around the wider world of bloggers as well.  Some for entertainment, some to see what was up, and some because they were just darned good writers, just damned funny.  While excusing myself regularly for using that term (much like a current TV ad for a product called "rebelsus" - sounds like a body function someone ought to do in private, wash their hands afterwards, or apologize if it happens in a small interior space), I did find some people who were all of the above, plus spectacular writers. Moby was one of them.  I remember reading his site and then his birthday came up - September 11th, 2001.  And the roof of his building was being showered with dust, ash, and debris from some unknown disaster which wasn't localized to New York.   Earlier this week, as I pulled up my usual end-of-day visit to CN...

I noted earlier the depressing realization that I'm closing in on a deplorable amount of old e-mails I've kept over the years. The terrible news about this is that, while going through some of these messages, all the old emotions (or as the kids today say, "the feels") are returning from when I encountered the messages.   There are messages from, yes, ten years ago, when my son and I were still part of several different communities - and messages from my wife and daughter as well.  From my daughter's period where she attended college in Wisconsin, and came to realize that being away from home and responsible for her own budget is just about as difficult as adulting gets in that 18-year-old time.  And there are messages from my wife and I back and forth trying to get the kids ready for school, getting me a new-to-me job, and managing the family finances and scheduling.  And a few other teeth-gritters. I do understand some people have an incredibly difficult time ...