Almost

Today was the first day in weeks I came home and did not become a heap of exhausted flesh curled up on the sofa. While I am worn out, I’m not bone tired. As the work project has moved into it’s final phase, deployment, things have been busy. Being someone who can’t just say, ‘Oh look, time to go home’ I’ve put in some long days lately. But my part is almost done. I volunteered for this project out of a desire to make our work environment better. I also didn’t want the users to get the shaft by having people who don’t use the system on a daily basis making decisions about what we got. A year and 2 months of my life has flown by and I’m proud of my work. It may not be everything I wanted but it is 5 times better than what we would have ended up with otherwise.

From a technical stand point, the rollout went off without too many major hiccups. The biggest unexpected glitches dealt with interface connections. Overall, once the new system went up, it stayed up. The glitches are still being worked on but the list is down to less than a handful.

From a user stand point, many of my coworkers hate it (so far). While we stayed with the same vendor, we switched to a new product. It looks similar in many ways but the underlying architecture is completely different. This translates into many of our day to day tasks being different or even an extra step at times. And for people who rely heavily on cognitive muscle-memory and reflex, this can be a royal pain. You, in essence, have to relearn your basic job functions over again. Throw in a healthy dose of random unexpected configuration issues [1]Even something as simple as new screen resolution has been an issue , functions that are similar but different, and  you have a recipe for some consternation. Two weeks in and we are still whittling down the list of issues. And while mostly minor, together they collectively make for some very frustrating attempts to get thru what used to be 2nd nature.

Once we work out the kinks and the settings that work best for everyone, I think many will come to enjoy it, or at least not mind it. Right now everyone is in full ‘I hate this crap’ mode. Having the luxury of 13 years on the job, I remember when we upgraded from a very limited custom map software to a newer one. Everyone moaned and groaned about it and now those same people would cut you if you tried to take their map away. Change is hard when you develop a skill set based on not having to think about menial tasks. Ironically, coworkers who’ve been thru previous upgrades aren’t as irate. Anyway, I know after things settle in people we feel better about it. [2]I do admit that every issue I knew would cause heads to explode has done just that. If they only knew my head exploded too. hehehe

For myself, I’m looking forward to going back to my normal job. I miss it. Hell, I even miss talking to the public. More than anything I’m looking forward to regular schedules, hours, and days. Naturally, I have a trainee starting with me next week. He’ll be with me for at least 4 weeks, maybe 5. He scored with a trainer who knows the new system inside and out. And I don’t mind having a trainee as I enjoy teaching.

On a side note, my blog should pick up again. You know you missed me.

References

References
↑1 Even something as simple as new screen resolution has been an issue
↑2 I do admit that every issue I knew would cause heads to explode has done just that. If they only knew my head exploded too. hehehe

Weird

I had a very bizarre nightmare the other day. It left me restless and agitated for the rest of the day. I’m not prone to nightmares but when I do get them, they are often very vivid and intense. It must have been a weird star alignment because Cooper had woken us up at one point with his barking. [1]He only barks when he sleeps and clearly his barks weren’t happy barks. Turns out, The Pup had also had bad dreams that night. I’m not overly superstitious but I’ll admit all three of us having bad dreams on the same night left me shaken the whole day. I kept waiting for something awful to happen as if it had been an omen.

I like to think I don’t have many hidden fears so I’m less prone to act them out in my sleep. I can’t say with any fact if that’s true but considering this particular dream, I am inclined to believe it. It involved The Pup leaving me. And while things are rock solid between us, and have been since we met, I guess I still have some lingering fear over it. I woke up and my face was wet so I’d obviously been crying in my sleep. It was weird because I could feel him next to me, even in sleep. We both tend to toss and turn so my body knew he was there. When I woke up, I guess we’d rolled away from each other at just the most inopportune moment as I no longer felt him touching me and since he left me in the dream, I had to physically make sure he was still in bed with me. It was a very surreal and scary feeling.

It was even more bizarre in that I was running for President. Yeah, you read it right. lolol I didn’t really want to run as I felt I had too many skeletons in my closet. But the more I tried not to run, the more popular I became and the more The Pup was unhappy with me. He didn’t want to have to share me with the world and the day I got elected president, he left me.

He and I laughed over it later when we had time to discuss it.

References

References
↑1 He only barks when he sleeps and clearly his barks weren’t happy barks.

End

The end is nigh. No, not my blog, the work project I have given a year of my life. We started the teaching phase a few weeks ago.Teaching 9-10 hours 6 days a week tends to wear on you. I’ve been struggling not to lose my voice from all the talking. [1]The irony in that statement is not lost on me. hehehe That being said, the software upgrade is being received better than I originally thought. It has it frustrations but overall it is an impressive upgrade. It makes some of our more tedious tasks easier.

This is the last week of training so I’ll be getting a break soon. I still have work to do but it revolves around tying up all the loose details. By the end of May, everything will be over. The software will be fully rolled out and I’ll go back to my main job functions. Part of me is glad but part of me will miss it. It gave me a chance to use skills I haven’t used in quite some time. It started out extremely fun and exciting and then the politics and interdepartmental squabbles soured it a bit.

Overall, it has been an exciting experience. I’ll always be grateful as it gave me some flexibility in my schedule I wouldn’t have otherwise had. Said flexibility gave me the space to devote more energies toward time with The Pup and our new (at the time) relationship. I expect my blogging will pickup again as well. Yay!

References

References
↑1 The irony in that statement is not lost on me. hehehe

Rest

After three weeks of long drawn out teaching 5 – 6 days, sometimes 10 hour sessions, here I sit on the first day of my vacation. I spent the whole day sitting on the sofa watching TV, playing video games,and napping with the man of my dreams. I can’t think of a better way to start my vacation. My voice is a bit hoarse and I’m just flat out tired but I couldn’t be happier. Total contentment.

Sometimes when you aren’t looking, life sneaks up and gives you that one thing you thought you’d never have.

Chip

The beloved Cooper is microchipped. He has been since I rescued him. It gave me peace of mind knowing this. But, it never dawned on me to check to see

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if the chip had ever been updated. I assumed the shelter would have done that. Turns out the assumed I did it. The ensuing drama fest is a lesson learned.

It all started with me trying to download an app for my phone to track Cooper‘s health and med history. Most of the apps I tried out had an option to include a pet’s microchip number. This got me to thinking about Cooper‘s chip and I decided to call the original rescue shelter to see if they had updated his chip after I rescued him. Turns out they had not. So I had him all this time and his chip was never updated. Yeah, I know right?! lol  It turns out that the shelter didn’t actually chip him, the original breeder did. This was why they didn’t update the chip. They could have mentioned that little tip at the time but whatevs.

Anyway, I then discover that chips aren’t issued by just one company but several and none of them use the same format. I’m bouncing around the web trying to figure out which of the 9 companies owned his chip. I finally track it down and then discover they want the act of Congress to update the chip. lol  Which I guess is good because no one could just randomly change the chip info without me knowing. I had to go thru a lot of hoops to get it though. They wanted not only a copy of the original adoption paperwork, which I still have, they also wanted records from the vet showing he’d been treated with me listed as the owner. Since the adoption paperwork didn’t have the shelter’s logo or letterhead, they had to send me a letter showing that I had in fact gotten Cooper [1]Norm was his original name from them. Funny side story, when I reached out to the shelter, I happen to reach the lady I originally dealt with. She remembered little Cooper almost immediately. She was very happy to help and that Cooper was doing so well.

I also learned that Cooper is actually a year older than we thought. So instead of being 4 this June, he’ll be 5 on May 16th. The original breeder had at least listed his birth date when they chipped him. During the discovery process, they revealed the original chip date and the listed birth date. This isn’t necessarily bad news. It gives me a little hope as I’ve been worried he would start developing hereditary issues. [2]White bullies are often very prone to health issues, primary amongst those are blindness and/or deafness  Knowing he is a year older now gives me a bit of relief as 3-5yrs is about the range when problems start to develop. So far Cooper is doing well. He does have a little tone-deafness but it isn’t bad at all.

So now my monster is all up to date. I’ve made sure his chip data is accurate. And he’ll be celebrating his 5th birthday this May.

References

References
↑1 Norm was his original name
↑2 White bullies are often very prone to health issues, primary amongst those are blindness and/or deafness

Engage

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Moby and The Pup's Engagement rings

I’ve been MIA here as of late due to my work schedule. If you’re here via the web, you’ll notice the new template. This is the one I will most likely keep for awhile. But in other news and if you haven’t heard by now, I got engaged!

For the first time in my life I’m engaged to marry. The historical importance is not lost on me but that is a rant for another day. Today is about how happy I am to be eagerly awaiting such a big event. This is truly a life event for me and I couldn’t be more excited. Being with The Pup has taught me what it is like to be so in love and completely compatible with someone. He is my best friend and my lover and I have no hesitation tying the not with him.

Everyone keeps asking how I did it? The Pup and I are both gamers. I rent games thru GameFly, which is like Netflix for video games. The envelopes come pretty much the same as they do for regular dvds. On a tangent, we’d already decided a while back that we wanted to do two sets of rings. One set for the engagement and then a complimenting set for the actual event. Anyway, knowing he would kill me if I did anything big or hugely public, I settled on a more subtle surprise. If you’ve ever rented thru Netflix you know how the game sleeves work. I managed to get the cardboard cover and game out of the envelope without actually tearing it open. The disc comes inside with it’s own protective fiber sleeve that also has the game name and info. Well, I decided to apply my own sticker and made it look like the game sticker as a close as possible. Except where the name and description were I had my proposal instead. And instead of a game disc, there was the ring. With some effort I got it back into the envelope and put it back in the post box.

I contrived a small chain of events that led to The Pup opening the game and examining it. Of course, he saw the proposal and to my delight said yes. It was a very personal and shared moment for us. I don’t think anyone around knew what had just happened. I honestly thought it was perfect. I wanted to surprise him and still not embarrass him. And he really liked the way I went about it. He had no idea it was coming either. hehehe 

We don’t have a date for the big event yet. It will most likely be another 3-4 months before we set a date. Both of us are content with where we are and don’t feel the need to rush it. And while I will invite friends to be present, it will not be an overly dramatic event. lol Neither of us are into the whole big-wedding sort of thing. Something simple and local will be more than sufficient to officialize what we already know and feel.

It’s an exhilarating feeling to be honest. Knowing that this will be my last LTR makes it seem even more right that this is the first time I wanted to and could legally marry my partner. If you’d told me a year ago I’d be proposing to someone, I’d have probably laughed or shrugged it off. It’s funny how you can meet someone and they totally change your world.

As I always say, ‘hope springs eternal..’

Here

I’m still here. It’s just been a busy few weeks.

The work project I’ve been working on for the last year is in its final stage and things are more than a little crazy. Beyond the deliberate delays introduced by a certain outside agency, things are moving right along. The build phase has ended and the training phase has begun.

Last week was the ‘train the trainer’ sessions and this coming Sunday night starts the mad push to get everyone trained on the new system. I’ll be a primary instructor along with several of my coworkers. Since the old and new systems cannot run side by side, it’s an all or nothing cut over. That means everyone has to be trained before we can go live. That translates into a mad dash to cram 24 hours of training into 3 sessions across 3 watches.

This next week I’m working 6 days. I’ll most likely end up doing a few 12-14 hour days as not only do we have an entire workforce to train but also a brand new cadet class. We didn’t plan it that way but due to schedules and delays it worked out that way.

So yeah, I’ll be a busy bee this next few weeks. lol Afterwards, I should be back on my regular shift doing my regular job. Well I say regular, I went to days so I’ll still be in early every day.  Ugh

Feedback

Interestingly enough, I got a ton of feedback from my PrEP post. Mostly in private though. .People reached out to me by email, pvt messages, and even texts to share their thoughts. Most were supportive and a few who disagreed in varying degrees.

I was just struck how so few people were willing to go on the record, so to speak, about the decision. The general consensus I got was that it was a very personal decision and many didn’t feel it should be up for debate by others. This in itself was a bit encouraging. It means people are ignoring the stupidity over ‘shaming’ and making informed decisions about what is best for them. The flip side, in an age where a complete stranger will show you vividly detailed pictures of his anatomy before even meeting, it isn’t so easy to discuss HIV prevention. We have some work to do. If we are ever truly going to get a handle on this we have to let go of the blame and guilt so common associated with STDs in general.

One dissenter was particularly focused on the drug companies making a huge sum of money off of PrEP. I’m not one for conspiracy theories but I also understand greed. But ‘knowing’ something w/o facts or proof isn’t really knowing at all. And frankly the drug companies don’t have to push their drugs on the negative folks. They can just as easily depend on the ignorance and fear to keep the transmission rate high and sell it to you when you convert. And since they aren’t the ones behind the idea to use Truvada as PrEP, it is really hard to sell that theory.

Anyway, I was happy to hear from so many who reached out to me. Some thanked me for my insight and discussion. Some lamented an age of ‘whores’, whatever that means. Overall, the general feeling was of acceptance, not as a solution but as a possible solution. The idea is that you consider it if it would be right for you. And many of my readers seemed to approach it from that perspective as well.

Freeze

My workspace at work is always an ice box. [1]That’s slang for refrigerator for you young’ens We have this awesome temp control system that allows to control the temperature in virtually every room but mine. lol  The space I work in and the space next to me used to be one big room. After a reconfiguration project a few years ago, it was split in two. That’s great but now the temp controls for the other side no longer effects my side. So I work in this nether space of frozen Tundra temperatures. Someone made a conscious decision to not include this little space because all the temp sensors have been removed. Seriously?! lol

My workstation has a little Johnson control heater which is usually enough to off-set the worst of it. But on days like today, it’s just a polar zone up in here. brrrrrr. I keep an extra warm up on the back of my chair so I can bundle up. If you see updates on Google, twitter, or FB that ramble off into one or two letters, call 911, I’ve frozen to death.

References

References
↑1 That’s slang for refrigerator for you young’ens

Gym

The Pup and I are back in the gym after an extended reprieve. I say reprieve because only part of it was laziness. hehehe  There was a 2-3 week window there where one of us wasn’t feeling so well. Either I felt fine and he didn’t or vice-versa. While neither of us got the full-blown flu, I think we may have extended the issue a bit by sharing it back and forth. [1]Sick or not, I can’t seem to resist kissing him  Anyway, after that we’d just gotten too comfortable coming home, making dinner, and then curling up on the sofa.

And yes, some of it was pure laziness. We like spending quality time curled up on the sofa together. Be it Tivo, video-games, or movies, the sofa is quite comfy for the three of us. The desire to be in the gym hasn’t left me. I still enjoy it when I’m there but I do find the desire to stay home and cuddle is often stronger. I’m sure we are still in the bonding phase so that is to be expected. However, if I don’t want to turn into a pumpkin, a routine needs to be re-established. I wonder if this is what a lot of couples go thru when they move in together? I’m sure as hell not letting myself turn into a heifer, but I can see the allure. The Pup tends to like sweets a tiny bit more than I. This means I’ve succumbed to keeping more sweets in the apt. And of course, once the temptation is there I’m all for it. 

It’s our first week back and even sitting still today my effin’ chest is sore as hell. I am by no means fat but I feel flabby. hehe My muscles have lost a bit of that tightness that comes from a daily gym regimen. He looks hot as ever (I may be biased) but I’m sure he feels the same way.

Regardless, I ache today. OY! I can only imagine what I’m going to feel like by Saturday after all my muscles have been put the ringer.

References

References
↑1 Sick or not, I can’t seem to resist kissing him