Evie Day 694

Good morning, and a happy last day of the Western work week to you all. Today is 7 February 2025.

I think it’s somebody’s birthday that I know, but I’m not sure. Of course, that’ll be the kind of thing that will linger around the back of my head for the rest of the day.

So, Friday. One week out from a really bad day. Things are looking up, and I have a couple of meetings on the calendar for next week, so that’s a positive. Gracie has to have a morning to get some things done, so I get to spend some time with my granddaughter.

A couple of weeks ago, before the career change, I ordered a piece of equipment to help me in my deliveries – an Elgato Teleprompter. I assembled it yesterday, but I need to complete the process and check it out. One of my old German teammates did a couple of nice demos on the Elgato Stream Deck and the Teleprompter, so when the time comes, I’ll get right back into it.

I have a certification exam booked for later this morning. I hope to nail down the last cert for the security suite I’ve been working with for the last couple of years.

Superbowl this weekend. Go Chiefs!

I’ve got garbage to get to the corner, coffee to brew, and an English muffin to get toasted.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 693

Good morning, and a happy Thursday to you all. Today is 6 February 2025.

Yep, mistyped the year again.

Yesterday was a good day. I reached out to some other folks I used to work with, and I sent my resume to a couple of training companies that saw my status change. Lisa and I worked on switching over our insurance to a plan offered to State of Kansas employees which will get us by. I won’t be planning any elective procedures for a while, right?

Gracie called me yesterday while she was working from home. Evelyn wanted to see Grampa, and she was wearing the cutest little pink cardigan – her “grampa sweater”. She’s too cute for words.

We had a good gathering of the guys last evening. My character went down in the first round of combat – “Wade in!” they said, “They’re just a couple of flesh golems” they said. There were six, and I should’ve just used the fireball wand.

Today is a study day. I have a certification exam tomorrow morning, so today is my day to revisit the curriculum. I’m kind of excited about passing this one, as this will complete the security suite.

There is not much else going on, really. The weather was warm the first couple of days, but it’s cooled back off since.

Time to get the coffee going and get myself something to eat.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 692

Good morning, and a happy Wednesday to you all. Today is 5 February 2025.

I am not really feeling it this morning.

I got up, did my morning stuff, and plopped my butt into my chair. I read a few terrifying headlines and close the page, head over to LinkedIn to see if there are any changes overnight, and head over to my email for any new missives.

And that’s the start of my day.

I’ll be focusing on communications today, as well as my certification exam. It is within the realm of possibility that I’ll see me granddaughter today.

Doldrums.

I think I’ll just make a pot of coffee and try to focus. My enthusiasm, level is not rock bottom, but I think I can see it from here.

“Keep on swimming, keep on swimming”.

I’m going to just get this in the can and call it. I hope to be a little more interesting tomorrow.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 691

Good morning, and a happy Taco Tuesday to you all. Today is 4 February 2025.

Yesterday was an interesting day. I had some teammates reach out to me who heard about my dismissal, and it’s nice to know they have my best interests in mind. It’s always nice to hear positive comments from folks you respect when things take a turn. I had several folks request my resume, and had another ask overnight, so that’s a net positive.

The weird part about a job search today is dealing with the scammers. “We’ll help you rewrite your resume…” , “we can coach you up…”, “For the amazingly low price of four thousand dollars we can get your name and profile in front of these executives”.

If I had an extra four grand lying around, I’d buy a laptop to replace the company asset I have to send back to the mothership. I’ll stick with the older laptop I have right here for now. It gets the job done… but eventually, yeah, new laptop.

Basketball was good last night as the Kansas Jayhawks hosted the Iowa State Cyclones. Kansas did a good job holding down the home court and winning by 17.

There’s not a lot else to add right now. Time to look over at LinkedIn to see who else with a poor command of the English language wants to provide me with legendary guidance on how to best frame my experience for the prospective employer.

In the meantime, I do want to express my gratitude to you all. I’ve had some really nice comments from friends and professional acquaintances about this involuntary change, and y’all are great.

Coffee is up.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 690

Good morning, and a happy first day of the Western work week to you all. Today is 3 February 2024.

Friday was not a great day for me after all.

My first meeting of the day turned out to be my last meeting of the day. My team manager was on vacation, and I knew he was leaving our team to go to another project, my team was getting a new manager starting Saturday, and I wish the new manager well. He and I delivered two courses over the course of 10 weeks last summer, one admin course and one architecture course. We had absolutely dismal survey numbers returned after class for those two classes.

That was the beginning of the end, I guess.

Friday I was let go from my employer. That made for a pretty bad day.

There are things that I could say, but I’ll just focus on what comes next. I have a contract coming today for freelance work that will help until I can find something a little more permanent. A couple of larger training providers have reached out to me as well.

I have to send my hardware back to the company. That might put me in a bit of a pinch for a new system to use in class. This one is ok, but it’s already five years old. I guess one of the smarter decisions I made was buying my own equipment in some cases – lighting, chromakey, teleprompter, side display for writing notes.

Ugh.

There’s a lot of housekeeping that needs to be done right now, and I have some other plans for later in the week – I had booked a certification exam so I’ll keep that appointment for this Friday. That will round out the security suite of certifications for me.

I did get to smile a bit this weekend. My granddaughter has that effect on me.

OK, time to get this in the can and get going on my day. My resume isn’t going to update itself.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 687

Good morning, and a happy last day of the Western work week to you all. It is also the last day of the first month of 2025, 31 January.

Friday, Friday, Friday!

I closed out my class yesterday on a high note, with some comradery and pleasant banter at the end of the course. I showed my attendees one of my favorite cute videos of Evelyn noticing the tiger at the zoo – “No, no, no!”. All in all, it was a successful class. The admin courses are generally a notch down on the difficulty scale, but there were definitely some questions that were beyond the scope of the material, queries right out of the solutions architecture and cybersecurity architecture classes I also teach. Good group… I told them they were my best private class this year. They then noticed it was still January, and the joke took on a life of its own.

Today is a day filled with meetings. A one-on-one with a skip-level manager in lieu of a normal one-on-one. There are some things to think about. After that other team meetings and discussions fill up the day.

The last couple of days have been warmer, Wednesday unseasonably warm with temps reaching into the high 50s. Yesterday it wasn’t quite as warm, and it was raining in the afternoon. Today’s forecast includes rain as well. It’s going to be a soggy day, one of those days that highway drivers should check the windshield wiper fluid levels.

I’m looking forward to this weekend. I know Lisa and I will be able to spend some time with our kids and our grandaughter. I always look forward to that.

In the meantime…

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 686

Good morning, and a happy Thursday to you all. Today is 30 January 2025.

I got to see Evelyn yesterday. It was a good day. Gracie and Evie showed up yesterday afternoon. Gracie was getting a little bit of cabin fever, and I guess Evelyn told her that she wanted to see Grampa. I am a lucky old man.

Last night there was an accident in Washington, DC as an inbound American Airlines flight from Wichita collided with a military helicopter at Reagan National. From what I have heard, there are 67 deaths, 64 from the flight and 3 from the helicopter. My thoughts are with the victims’ families. Both Lisa and I are keeping an eye out for a passenger manifest, as we lived in Wichita for quite some time.

I got together with some of the guys last night for a little tabletop. We were short a couple of players, each having to deal with their own real-life situations. They were missed. It was an enjoyable evening, nonetheless.

Today I’ll wrap up my four-day private class, then segue into a walk-through of a presentation we’re recording in a couple of weeks. I still need to look into my hardware situation… I’m looking forward to using a teleprompter.

Oh, I did a brisket on my smoker yesterday. Turned out pretty good. Lisa said it was one of my best briskets ever… and I think she tells me that every time I smoke a brisket. She loves me.

That’s what I’ve got for now. Be good, be the safe space someone needs. Heaven knows there are folks out there being persecuted for just trying to be the best version of themselves, and the folks doing the persecuting will claim to be Christians. To paraphrase Matthew 25:45, “I tell you the truth, anything you refused to do for even the least of my people here, you refused to do for me.”

I’ll take passages Christians should familiarize themselves with for $500, Alex.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 685

Good morning, and welcome to Wednesday. Today is 29 January 2025.

Today would be my dad’s 84th birthday. He was born in 1941. I remember my grandmother telling me about window shopping for Christmas in downtown Sioux City on December 7, 1941, and she was pushing my dad around in a stroller, and as they walked by one of the radio stations, she heard the news about Pearl Harbor. Many of the radio stations then had speakers on the outside of their buildings so people could hear the radio broadcasts.

Radio days.

When we transitioned to teaching from home in 2020, a number of my peers weren’t too excited about it. I completely understood. Trainers like to be in the same room as their learners, so we can better grasp their sentiments in the moment. When we pivoted to remote learning, we moved from a room full of people to a room in the house where one person could sit and present all day. It was easier for me than it was for some others, as having a radio background helped during this move. I’m still fine with it, and I don’t see that changing. I think I’ve adapted fairly well.

Lisa and I had tacos last night, but she was concerned I didn’t buy enough. We have a taco left over in the fridge.

After dinner, we settled in to watch Kansas host Central Florida in basketball. Once again, the Jayhawks took it to the edge, but pulled out a win – this after they had demolished CFU earlier this season at their home court by 51.

Today will be a pretty basic day. Lisa has a class that runs until 7, so Dane and I will put something together for dinner.

Alright. That’s enough for now.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 684 

Good morning, and once again, a very happy Taco Tuesday to you all. Today is 28 January 2025.

Hey… I got the year right on the first try! Woot! Minor victory time!

Lucy, the senior dog, is over by Lisa at the dining room table trying her best to bark her way into a little bit of Lisa’s breakfast. It’s the dog’s least charming trait. Bark, bark, bark… that dog is old and grumpy… and you know what they say about dogs and their owners, right?

Yesterday was a pretty good day. I started my class on cloud administration, a private class with all attendees from a single customer. They come from different teams, so we can talk candidly, but at the same time, there aren’t any big projects they are collaborating on at the moment, so in that regard it’s a pretty typical class.

Last night we watched some reruns of Forged in Fire, followed by the second season of “The Night Agent” on Netflix. Tonight we’ll watch a little college basketball as Kansas hosts Central Florida at 7:00.

We still keep the news turned off, but with some of the executive orders coming out of DC, the news is going to get a little more sparse. Reporting outbreaks is not going to be reported any longer, and that means that the largest tuberculosis outbreak in US history won’t get a lot of discussion in the news. Last I heard, there were over 70 cases in Wyandotte and Johnson counties in the greater Kansas City metropolitan area. It’s not good news, but no one is going to talk about it because someone has decided that sort of news doesn’t matter. Amazing.

OK, I’m going to get a pot of coffee going and grab a little breakfast.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 683

Good morning, happy Monday, and welcome to another week. Today is 27 January 2025.

I’m in a pretty good mood, although I must admit to a bit of “champion’s guilt”. I’m a Chiefs fan, and they are going back to the Superbowl for a possible three-peat, which would be the first in NFL history. A lot of people are sick of the Chiefs… and that’s where the guilt comes in. Given a choice between being likable and being reviled, I would prefer to be liked, but I will admit that when I am around some of my professional peers, I don’t bring up football and I don’t bring up the Chiefs. It’s reached a point where even the Patriots’ fans are sick of hearing about the Chiefs.

I had a good weekend. I worked on some projects, and Dane spent some time really focused on out 3D printer (Bambu Lab A1). He’s doing a combination of things, some work-related prints for himself, then some fun fidget things to keep my mind occupied. He gave me something called a gearcube, which it an interesting fidget toy.

Today I embark on a four-day exploration of cloud administration for a private customer. I’ll start off the day by asking if there are any special projects they are working on that we need to spend a little extra time and focus on this week. I expect there will be some suggestions for deeper dives, and I’ll do my best to accommodate.

We’re expecting a warmer spell here, with temperatures rising into the 50s (Fahrenheit). That will likely melt most of the snow that fell a few weeks ago. It might be a good time to get another gallon of wiper fluid – when there’s mud on the highway, there will be mud on the windshield.

Oh, and Kansas fell to Houston in double-overtime on Saturday. I don’t want to talk about that.

Work stuff, record some work stuff, follow up on some hardware I need for recording… I’ve got a little to-do list for a Monday.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.