What did you do this week (and weekend)?

I've been pining for a leadership position at my company for a year or so, and yesterday and today I've been asked to train new employees training for my position! It might not sound like much, but as someone without a degree, getting into middle management has been a goal of mine and it feels like I'm making progress!

I've also been consistently adding to my Roth and child's college fund. I swear something about turning 30 makes something change in your brain.

This week's biggest event was certainly that I received a court decision by the Federal Court of Justice which confirmed unanimously the lower court's life sentence against my mother's murderer. It wasn't even a verdict, the Federal Court just decided not to open a trial and dismissed the appeal directly, which means an unanimous vote of all five judges took place. The entire decision is just three sentences long. And there's no further appeal possible.

So, the legal battle of the criminal trial is over for good, and justice won. I still have a lot of things to do, but now the most important puzzle piece is rock solid in place. My lawyer told me he'll take care of the pain and suffering money for free as part of the service as that's just two more letters for him. My pain and suffering money as such was already decided by the lower court during the criminal trial by an oddity of our law. I think nobody who didn't go through this hell on earth can understand the relief to full extent.

The rest of the week went by quickly, I had to replace my coworker a fourth - and last - week, and I expect a hug from her Monday when she realizes how little I left her. After four weeks her backlog is roughly equivalent to one day of work.

This week feels as though it's been a whirlwind. Saturday night we had had some family over who stayed for awhile, Sunday, my wife and I went to see The Dollop live, which was a good time. Monday and Tuesday were relatively quiet, though my kids had friends over, which usually results in chaos and loudness, which I find kind of draining, though I'm glad my kids have fun.

Wednesday I had a dental appointment, Thursday I had a reprieve when my mother in law came to watch my kids for a few hours, so I was able to go to my Mecca (Microcenter) and buy a part I needed for a friend, then hang out at a coffee shop afterwards. But even after that, we had Back to School "Night" for my oldest, we then drove across town to visit a brewery with toys and things for the kids to do, which was really nice (if expensive.) and then we went to a Members only event at the local Museum and stayed for 2-hours with the kids.

This evening, my wife will be going out and I have a friend coming over to drink beer and play tabletop wargames (SPQR), then tomorrow I'll go to another friends house to continue working on an engine rebuild project for my Jeep, Sunday I need to go help out a neighbor with their car.

Basically just life. But it feels like I haven't had a minute to sit by myself and breathe; I would like to just sit and watch some Youtube videos, paint my miniatures or play some video games uninterrupted, but just haven't had the chance for awhile. But, both kids will be in school at the end of the month and I feel like things will finally slow down a little bit and I can kind of do some of my own stuff.

Watched some movies, read some books.

I hit the theater last Saturday and saw Meg 2, Barbie, and the new TMNT. Meg 2 was aggressively mediocre, but the rest were fun.

Not much aside from work after that, I feel like. Been in a bit of a funk and haven't been sleeping well.

My aunt told me that she thought I'd enjoy cross stitching. So I ordered a kit. Hoping that maybe comes sometime this weekend for me to fool around with.

Read the Ballad of Black Tom last night. Good little Novella, interesting read!

Works been work, but I've disconnected a lot from it now and really just going through the motions. I'm not interested in the business anymore and I've got another offer on the table. I'm out at the end of the month post bonus payout.

Then it's on to my last office job (I hope) I'll be training in my spare time to be a therapist... So it'll be a few years, but I'll be looking down the barrel of being my own boss and contributing something healthy back to society.

The new job means relocation as well. So, there's an oppo to move to a new city filled with goodness. It's all very exciting.

I roasted a massive amount of coffee this week at work. Our head roaster was in Colombia this week, so I got to sub in. I've roasted in the past at a previous job, but this is a much bigger setup. The other challenge is that I'm running two roasters simultaneously: one 35-kilo and one 70-kilo capacity machine. The volume we go through is pretty crazy and I'm glad for the experience.

Getting ready to integrate a company/office from another country onto our IT services. Sounds simple but there are a lot of moving parts, everything from getting their office connected to our network, to licensing, to new computer hardware and accounts are needed. Luckily our team is pretty sound and know what we are doing, but you never know what's going to happen when you finally flip the switch, hopefully it goes smoothly.

I'm still getting up to speed at work so I was assigned some simple bug fix tickets to work on. However, these tickets have been some of the most annoying tickets I've ever had the displeasure of working on. One bug turned out to not be a backend bug (I'm a backend SWE), but rather a front end bug so I've reached out to the front end team and am just waiting for them to respond so I can close out the ticket. The other bug is a similar bug that seems to only exist in the staging and production environments but not locally. I've recreated those environments as best I can using the same commit and feature flags and I just cannot recreate the bug locally. I reached out to my senior engineers and just got told to "make the staging/prod environments like your local one". My team is currently slammed with work so I understand that my seniors can't help me one on one but I feel like I'm drowning already. On top of that, all week we had this engineering specific onboarding event that consisted of mandatory 3 hour long meetings every morning at 8:30am so I'm just beyond stressed.

Looking forward to relaxing this weekend, maybe go on a little drive and just play some games at home.

This week I revised a novel I wrote almost two years ago. Though I didn't make many structural changes, I put a lot of effort into improving the flow, and getting rid of extraneous bits. A lot of the dialog needed to be tighter, and I have a bad habit of including the character's name in verbal exchanges, which is unusual in real life. I mean, we don't say "Pass the salt, would you Bob? Thanks Bob. Do you want the ketchup Bob?"
My other focus in the revision was improving the punctuation, which was still sloppy even after a couple of previous re-writes. Now I have to find another test reader, since I've exhausted the patience of my usual suspects.

Built a little 'wood processing center' with a table top and an electric mitre saw. Using solar power through an inverter, am in the process of turning a few tons of free 4x4" hardwood dunnage into a substantial stack of firewood for this winter. We probably have enough for three winters donated from an waste company - they'd rather give it away than pay to dump it at the landfill.

With another few days of work, we should have enough to get us through the coming winter without having to turn on our furnace, which saves us about $1000 in propane. The wood was free, from an oil field pipe storage facility, but the labor sure isn't and I'm pacing myself so I don't overdo it (a hazard of being an old fart).

The wood is mostly in 12' lengths and since its all hardwood some of it is ridiculously heavy so just getting it on the table is an exercise in weightlifting. But its satisfying to see the cut stack grow and know that we're going to be warm and cozy all winter as this stuff puts out considerably more heat than the typical split pine logs that we used last year. It's hard to light but once its going, we can easily heat the house to 24c when its -30c outside.

I also fixed our Keurig. We were desperate when it just wouldn't turn on but youtube saved the day and I got it working again. I love youtube fix it videos!

Went and saw Last Voyage of the Demeter on a whim. My thoughts with spoilers are in a comment just before this one, but the short version is that it has the kind of flaws I expected it probably would going in but still managed to keep me excited and scared through about 98% of the movie so I'm glad I have it a try despite the low ratings I was seeing.

I bought a couple books on Banjo playing, Clawhammer Banjo for the Complete Ignoramus, and from the same author "Bluegrass Banjo for the Complete Ignoramus." I actually just bought two more for mandolin and guitar, as I like the approach, and it's a good way to help me reinforce some technique and practice I need.

I started the Clawhammer volume and, while I'm alright at guitar, I want to do better learning banjo, and decided I liked the style and teaching method enough that I wanted to go back to basics on guitar and mandolin, two other instruments I enjoy playing. The design is to get you doing a basic version of the song, and filling in/adding flourish with advanced techniques later, and it gives you a great foundation.

I've been thinking about how I can improve my computer setup and tried a keyboard I bought a while back that is basically my perfect keyboard. I can set it up to be like a OLKB Planck or Preonic using all sorts of cool layer configurations for various things, or just have it work as a straightforward 60% keyboard with the rest of the functionality (nav cluster, numberpad) available by layers, so that's just what I did. I find I'm not wanting for much with this setup. I just needed to swap out some silent switches, and it's 100% perfect.

Work, work, work. Covering for coworkers who are taking time off, as they did for me last weekend and earlier in the summer. Walked a total of 103K+ steps this week, probably do it again next week.

I got back from visiting my folks a bit earlier in the week, and at least until Wednesday didn't really have anything planned, so I started recording a playthrough of a game I like and uploading it in ~30 minute chunks. I'm not really trying to promote or advertise, the whole thing is set up pretending I'm just at home with my friend, playing a game.

Events happened over the past two weeks which might mean I've lost the longest friend I've had, so I wanted to do something to at least get back a piece of what made my time with them so enjoyable. My plan is to do little (if any) editing, it's basically a recorded livestream. I don't want to livestream but something like that is about as close to "playing a game with your friend" you can do, so I'm compromising a little.