Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

I've been "caving" recently. As in, hiding in my cave. Oh, there are outward signs of life. I show up to work, I'm cheery at work, I've gone out for lunch most days this past week. But inside I've felt dead. I haven't wanted to do anything. For example, I haven't even been able to get myself out to the hot tub to enjoy a soak. Oh, I still still make forward plans for it. "I'd like to use the hot tub after dinner tonight," I tell myself. Then when 8pm or 9pm comes around I decide I'm just as relaxed lying on the floor in the house and would rather not change into swim trunks and go outside.

Things have looked up a bit this past week. I got back on the cadence of blogging. I had 7 "skip days" earlier this month, days when I didn't write to my journal. I think the last time I had that many skip days in a month was 10 years ago. But now I've been writing daily for a week-plus, including some days where I've posted twice. Small steps forward.

And this weekend I finally mustered the will to go out to the hot tub! I was going to do it Saturday morning but then the I-don't-wannas hit... but then I did it Sunday morning.

And Sunday afternoon I did a legit, major chore by dealing with the clothes washer. And good news after my check-it-out and clean-it-up efforts: it's not broken!

This week, since returning to work on Wednesday morning after a relaxing long weekend in Phoenix, I've been developing a customer workshop. The deadline was short... It was decided early last week ago that I'd have to deliver it today. And not only that but I was on the road for 3 days last week with a business trip and then had 2 days of PTO planned this week. Thus the work in earnest on the creating the workshop began Wednesday morning. To run it for an audience of 6-8 devops engineers today at 9am. 😳

TBH I could have started before Wednesday. Although at the same time, not really. Mon-Tue were out because I was on vacation. Last week Thursday afternoon I'd just gotten back from a business trip and was tired out. And Friday I was both still tired out and had at least half a day of regular work to do. So I started this week Wednesday.

At first I was kicking myself for not starting until Wednesday. Despite the reasons above I kept scolding myself, "This would be so much easier if I'd done even 1 hour per day of it last Thu-Fri." That made me feel down. But at least I got going Wednesday. And I made steady progress at it, ultimately working until after 6pm because I was in the zone on it. That made me feel good.

Thursday was another "in the zone" day— at least up through lunch. After lunch I paused working on the workshop because I had a few important meetings to attend. When I got back to the workshop development work around 3pm I found that my infrastructure had gotten borked. 😰

My systems were wedged. About 95% of what I'd built was unusable. It wasn't anything I'd done; I hadn't touched it for 3 hours. And it seemed like it wasn't somebody else's fault, either; nobody else was using my infrastructure. Something had just failed on its own. And while I know enough about the infrastructure underpinnings to figure out, in broad strokes, what was wrong, I'm not expert enough in the details to have fixed it. Fortunately I still have one colleague— I used to have three, until the layoffs of a few weeks ago— who is familiar with the infra. Unfortunately it was already after 6pm for him and he was offline.

I messaged my boss to let him know. He was understanding of the predicament. He encouraged me to do as much as I could the rest of the day, and he'd help get my east-coast colleague involved at 9am EDT (6am my time) today. I finished the day Thursday pleased with how much I'd built in 2 days but crestfallen that a system snafu at the 11th hour might force us to push the seminar off to next week.

Well, I woke up at 5:40am today. It's not that frustration made me unable to sleep; just the heat. But the frustration was definitely there so I decided I might as well put on a shirt and log in to see if my colleagues were active. They'd just logged in a few minutes earlier. Logan, the guy who setup the infra originally, had just messaged that he was starting to take a look. Within 10 minutes he'd diagnosed the problem. It was basically what I'd figured out, but at a more granular level. He knew the specifics I didn't, so he knew which part had failed and how to reset it. He reset it, and within another 10 minutes everything was back up and running. The path was clear for me to deliver the workshop seminar today at 9am!

The seminar went well. We had a good number of attendees at the start, though half were called away less than 15 minutes later when part of their infrastructure went down. Oh, the irony! I even joked with them about my infra outage. But their infrastructure runs the e-commerce site for a small retail brand you might have heard of, so "down" for them means it's all-hands-on-deck for their infra team.

Their infra team was about half the attendees. The other half were apps people whose app was behaving just fine, so they could stay. I ran the workshop with them. It went really well. We ran until just after 12pm. The customer appreciated it, my sales counterpart said I did a fantastic job, and my boss really liked it, too. Good times!

The past two weekends I mostly sat around home like a bump on a log. I sat around and I was pissed at myself for letting opportunities slip through my fingers. Opportunities for what? Opportunities to do... anything. Anything fun. Anything more fulfilling that sitting around home like a bump on a log! I was such a bump on a log I didn't even blog. 🤣 So I promised myself (and my blog) I'd starting doing more.

Since then I've not only blogged more, I've done more. Monday night I went out to meet friends for dinner and games. I was feeling tired all Monday afternoon and thought long and hard about just staying in. Come 5:30pm I felt like I just wanted to go to bed early. But I pressed through my grogginess optimistic that by getting out I'd get a second wind. And I did! Monday evening dinner and games with friends was fun.

Tuesday evening we had a dinner date with friends again. Again I was tired in the afternoon. Again I gave serious consideration to text my friends my regrets I'd be unable to join them. And again I put faith in doing-something-brings-a-second-wind... and again my faith was confirmed. We had another nice evening out.

This week we've also been making plans for the weekend. Lack of plans is something that I felt frustrated about last weekend. As I sat like a bump on a log Saturday morning, mildly fuming at myself for being such a bump on a log, I realized that I could've been heading out for adventure... if only I planned it even a day in advance. So for this weekend we thought about where to go on an adventure. We came up with two ideas. And like we tend to do when we come up with two great ideas for travel... we chose them both! We've booked one trip this weekend and the other for two weekends after that. (The weekend in the middle we've already got plans.)

So, tomorrow afternoon instead of slouching into a weekend of torpor at home, we'll be packing the car and hitting the highway. Where to? On the road to adventure!

My plan this weekend was #PoolLife. After a busy-busy week of work Friday would be a half-day, I'd enjoy the pool mid-afternoon in the heat, then having little else on my calendar this weekend, do more of the same Saturday and Sunday afternoons while the warm weather lasts. Alas by the time I finished work Friday sometime after 3pm I was too tired to bother going to the pool. I just wanted to lie down and take a nap. 😧

I'm-too-tired continued to be a challenge over the weekend. Saturday I ended up not using the pool at all. Sunday I went for an hour because I forced myself to, frustrated that I didn't want to let my grand plan for the weekend go completely unacted upon.



Yes, going out to the pool for a while was nice. It was also tiring. I wound up microwaving some Hot Pockets for dinner Sunday night because I was too tired to go out for dinner and also too tired to actually cook anything. Sunday night I went to bed right before 9pm, once again lying down to sleep while there was still light in the sky.

Now it's Monday morning and it's almost time for work. Where did my weekend go? I feel like I slept/sleep-walked through too much of it. 😞

Today was the start of a four-day weekend. We'd had plans to travel but canceled those plans a few days ago due to lingering sickness. Instead I stayed home and basically wasted the day. 😞

I had trouble sleeping last night. I got down to sleep okay, going to bed a bit early (before 10pm) as I'd been up since 5:30am. But then I awoke at 3am and could not get back to sleep. I tossed and turned in bed for a bit, willing myself to get back to sleep, but gave up after 30 minutes or so when I could tell that wasn't going to work. I got up and fooled around on my computer for 3 hours. I felt tired after the sun had risen and went back to bed at 6:30. Then I slept until almost 11. I'd fret about wasting half the day in bed but it's not like I had much else to do today.

Hawk and I got out late for lunch today. It was her first dining out in several days, since she was diagnosed with bronchitis. She still has a cough— we both do— but it's typically for a cough to linger without being contagious for a few weeks after this kind of sickness. I'm very familiar with the lingers-for-a-few-weeks cough, unfortunately. Anyway, since it was her first time out of the house in a few days we went to one of her local favorites, Speedy's Tacos. We got donuts after at Daily Donuts.

In the afternoon I continued my tempo of not doing much at home. Late in the day I got really bored and finally pulled out my sewing kit to fix seams and buttons on some pants and shirts that have been waiting for attention for, in some cases, 6 months. I had been debating the over-under of sewing them myself versus taking them to a tailor shop to be fixed for, I dunno, $10 or whatever each. Probably it would've made economic sense simply to pay for someone else to do the work, but I chose to do it myself because there's a certain Zen aspect to doing it. Even with the frustration of how it just gets harder to thread a needle as I get older.

I've fallen back into caving. Caving, as in hiding in my cave. I've become entirely too much of a home-body the past few weeks. Since we got back from Panama on the 31st I haven't been more than 10-15 miles from home. A few days I haven't even left these four walls.

My excuse for the first week or so after returning Panama was being sick. It's understandable not to want to go out and do things when you're feeling ill. Then, while I got better, Hawk's illness(es) has/have continued. I've been reluctant to go out and enjoy the kind of outdoors-y things we enjoy doing together, by myself. And yes, the weather's been nice enough to have gone outdoors. Often "but the weather's crummy" is an excuse for staying inside in January. This year January has been unusually clear and sunny, if often a smidge cooler than normal.

Another excuse has been that I'm tired. Many evenings I'm feeling kaput by 7:30 or 8pm and ready for bed as early as 9. And on the weekends I've been content to idle most of the day.

I know that avoiding things because I lack the energy is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy; when I do things they often energize me. For example, on Saturday we had dinner with friends and then came back to our place to play cards. Instead of pooping out early like most nights I stayed up until after 1am. Tonight we're meeting friends in San Francisco for dinner. I hope I get the same second wind of energy from it. If nothing else I'll need it for the drive home.

Update: Yes, seeing friends for dinner this evening was fun! The drive up to SF in traffic was drudgery but dinner for 5 was reinvigorating. Too bad the restaurant closed at 9 and asked us to leave at 9:15. Dratted post-pandemic new normal.