What did you do this week?

Tomorrow still counts as this week, right? :)

Context: A few weeks ago, I had the best first date of my life, with a pretty amazing woman I met on Tinder. I then thought she was ghosting me, but it turns out some bad personal things just happened to her right after we met… skipping the details here (and much <3 to @cfabbro for helping me, and her by proxy, deal with that). We met a couple more times since, but with all this behind and her feeling better, we're having our official second date tomorrow!! Like, in 13 hours!

We've been flirting over text/voice/video all week. I am super excited. Dating has been really hard during the pandemic; I had a couple of false starts with one guy and two girls I all really liked. Nothing short of frustrating. And with lots of unrelated bad events happening in a row, I just kinda gave up on dating for a while.

This is different. First time in years I feel this way about someone. And not just being giddy and missing her; it's the first time I see a serious relationship ahead. Much as I cared about all my exes, very few of them made me want a long term relationship of its own merit with them.

🥰

My puppy graduated her puppy class! We’re starting the next level on Monday. Can’t believe she’s been with us for two months now.

I had a bit of a scare about Covid earlier this week 👀

Tuesday was absolute hell on earth for me; I logged into work to find that I had an 8 hour long meeting scheduled for me to help support contractors deploying their services to a cloud environment. Unfortunately since I spoke up about our development practices when I first joined, that means I get to wear the Devops hat since I set up every single piece of our development architecture. Which is why I was the only person to be on the call with the contractors :|

Not only were there issues abound in the deploy scripts that I created (and had to fix on the fly), but I was then brought into a completely unrelated (to devops) call, to talk and discuss some fixes for an application that was written for a business line.

Needless to say, by the end of the day I started feeling sick. Wednesday I was running a 100 degree (f) fever for about half the day. I took a half day on Weds and a full day off on Thursday which I think was absolutely needed. Im back to feeling like my regular self again, and catching up on work I missed yesterday at this point.

I did get a nasal swab just to be safe which came back negative for "Big C", so that's a relief at least.

Quit my job (technically leaving next Friday). Started doing contracting work instead. I make more money and do more interesting work, so it's a win! My co-workers all seem oddly confused by this move, but I guess that's why they're still working there.

This week was honestly kind of a wash for me... the time change threw me off early in the week I had trouble sleeping/waking up on time for a couple days. On Thursday, my partner, whom I love and cherish, had an appointment at 7:00AM that I needed to drive her to and from and that is well outside my normal wake-up time. I think she was under the impression she could do the appointment and then go to work, but she was sedated for the appointment and there was follow-up care.

The appointment itself went fine, and we got good news. There was a 99% chance it'd be nothing serious, but also a small chance it could be very serious. Glad to know for sure now.

Anyway, got some deep sleep debt to the point I'm probably just going to take the afternoon off. My job lately has mostly been interacting with the support staff of a visualization software (think Birst/Looker/etc) that is truly inadequate for the scale and complexity of our actual data and I Just Cannot today. It's like I can feel my technical skills atrophying with every email I send.

I got to take a movie day/half day, courtesy of my work, to celebrate and mark that it had been 1 whole year since we started working from home and it's been a heck of a time but we managed to make it work.

Also, I had a BJD I pre-ordered back in September delivered today! I absolutely love her and I'm so excited to make her clothing and get her cute stuff.

I've also been crocheting elephants for my niblings. When I finish them up, I'll share here. The pattern is super duper easy and very cute (from the side, it's a little derpy from the front lmao).

Started as just a normal week. Continued to do my job, worked on my 3D printer, and nothing to really report. Took today off to take my father out to lunch, as a result I turned my alarm off to sleep in. Woke up to my wife kissing me goodbye as she headed off to work and I checked my phone.

On my phone were the usual middle of the night emails, a text from a night owl friend, a text from a friend that thought he might need a jumpstart on his car, but didn't, and a text from the CTO of the company I work for saying he knows I'm on PTO, but that he and I need to talk.

Anyone want to know why a C-level that you speak to maybe once a quarter would want to have a conversation with you on a Friday morning? Let's just say, it's not for good reasons.

I call my direct boss and ask him, since I'm less likely to get BS from him, why the CTO wants to talk to me. He stumbles a bit for the words, English isn't his first language, but eventually gets the point across. I tell him I'll call the CTO after I wake up some more.

About an hour passes and I get a call from the CTO. He tells me he also has the head of HR on the line. Gives me the spiel, different direction this, need resources that, blah, blah, blah. What it amounts to is the previous statements he made to us were bunk and the "offshore assets" that were doing the groundwork for v10 of our platform are going to remain on board while they eliminate nearly all of the "onshore assets," myself included. As of this morning 66% of my department has been axed and it wasn't all that large in the first place. Over the last year and a half the new "leadership" in the company has hired more and more managers and let go or didn't fill vacant slots of people that actually did things.

(Note: I'll talk about quite a few things that happened quite a bit longer ago than last week.)

I Actually had my first introduction to my new classmates!

The reason this is a month after I said classes would return (February 8th) is because my parents got a recommendation for a different school on a different school system that's largely untethered to the (state) government's deadlines (which are preferences anyway) and their 'selective process' basically lasted long after that, up until late February. (Which was actually quite annoying since it was basically like being 20 days in a limbo between passing that process or not.)

I personally found it a good idea mainly because that school has a course on programming, which I want to learn.

The application process was basically my parents getting a lot of documents they required and going to a LAN house to scan them and sign them and them put them in a pen-drive to plug in the documents because it's still government owned and they wanted it that way. This has the ironic effect of making online registering harder than rrgylar registering because before you would just go to the school, hand the documents they want and they would do the rest.

After a few documents weren't formatted the way they wanted to (they didn't specify) and a few other things, I was basically waiting for them to say when would things more meaningfully begin, which was a little annoying but a lot more like extra vacation.

So anyway, last week I got an email (that's where the institute sends it's stuff) for a Google meet reunion, so I installed the app and basically waited for the reunion. (Note that this was introductory, so far, no activities have been sent.)

When I entered, that was basically the first time I used Google Meet so it took me a little while to realize you can mute yourself and not show your face. The reunion showed a video of the school from the inside, which was pretty cool, albeit given this was shared from a screen on Google meet, the audio was terrible. There was a lot more but my memory didn't pick up on it. There were also Google meetings across the entire week to introduce ourselves to the teachers and other groups in the school. A large theme from the other students that joined the school earlier is that it's a lot more serious about it's activities load. They've said activities start in April so for now, I get to chat with my new classmates about whatever.

The round of Google meet introductions start at 8 AM so I had to get a sleep schedule and, to my own surprise, I did quite easily, albeit not needing to leave home is a lot of time I can spend sleeping.

Later I entered the class's whatsapp group and this is basically the first time I've talked to classmates in over a year. There was an introduction template which we used to basically put out some basic information about myself.

Fortunately since this a new school, a lot of baggage I have from my childhood was basically null and my new classmates generally feel far less distant from me, albeit I still need to get around to actually go and follow my interests instead of procrastinating about them and a lot of my vocabulary and internet lingo doesn't translate from English to Portuguese.