Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

So I did a rather ill-advised thing, probably, but on the other hand, someone needed a buddy. Cheyanne was more and more mopey, and we'd been more and more missing our "floof".  That is one of the many nicknames of Leonidas, our dear Leo, who passed away 128 days ago.  103 days ago, our new friend Freyja, a Belgian Tervuren, was born.  Today, she came home with us.  It's been a big day.  Pictures, soon, I promise, as I'll have to figure out a camera.  I have several around here, just need to find one and put some batteries and a memory card in it.  Then I can inundate you with puppy pictures.   I promise, I won't stop for a while. 

I really don't know why they continue to try - not that it works with me, I guess there are some who still fall for this shit. Yeah, GOM mode engaged (Grumpy Old Man).   For my main email address, which is linked here and about a half million other places, I use Hotmail.  I get an average of 25 messages a day that make it through the 38 rules I have that automatically delete messages with certain words in them.  I don't get all, obviously, but certain key phrases tend to trigger the nuking, which is fine by me.  If you include the phrase business proposal, yep, right out the window.  Sure, I may have missed a quarter million or so promises from people who had no intention of following through on their commitments, not that they made any, but you know what I mean.A I cannot even begin to estimate the number of utterly inappropriate offers that some allegedly young women have made to me, but as I've got no intention of following through with any of them, what...

I have relocated, started to adapt, and am now waiting with great anticipation (and a little apprehension) for the approval of my finance manager to acquire eight 4 1/2" x 3/8" hex-head bolts, an equal number of T nuts, a half-dozen full-length 2x4s, and 3 six-foot 2x6s.  All of that will be combined with most of a full sheet of 3/16" MDF Fiberboard (that which we formerly called "Masonite" - which probably needs one of those TM marks following it, sorry if I abused your trademark, whomever) and my $1 door to become my desk-side table.   There will be re-arranging, as I want that table on my right side to give me more note-taking room.  I'll also have to improvise some armrest enhancements for my good chair, and do a little more re-arranging, because I'll finally have the kinda-sorta-almost what I wanted work-from-home setup. And don't get me started on Martha Stewart's blathering this week.  I noted where she said people should get their butts ...

Some years ago, 15 to be exact, I started working from home for a then-rather-unusual company.  I got a laptop after I verified I did have a high-speed internet connection - a cable modem, which wasn't very common back then - and went to work for my last - as of now - IT Employer. I'd managed to fall into a very lovely desk with typing return, I had built a table to sit behind me for my personal computer, and had a spot for a laptop or three on my desk.  It worked well.  Until that employer ceased to be, anyway, then it became my primary location to job hunt.  And I did that with a vengeance for a few years.   Then I got out of IT, returned to retail - where one does not often work from home - and did that for six years.  I'm sure I was such a malcontent that my employer then was happy to see me go.  Or perhaps I was one of those people who was just darned reliable and consistent that they really missed me, they just didn't notice.  But who a...

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...