Evie Day 265

Good morning, and a happy hump day to you all! It is Wednesday, 6 December 2023.

Wow… writer’s block.

OK, a recap. Yesterday was a pretty good day. Gracie (my youngest daughter) came over for a bit with Evie. Gracie was taking care of some things around here, preparing for the holidays while I was in class back in the sunroom. When I popped out to grab a bite of lunch, Evie was sitting in her little playpen watching “Bear in the Bog Blue House”. She is such a little cutie. She is a hundred days away from her first birthday.

My class went pretty well yesterday. I try to close the day with a case study to work on overnight. I’ve been doing that a while to accommodate my learners on the other side of the Atlantic. I’ve got at least one, and he’s over in Germany, so he’s in class until 10:30 PM there, and he can go over the additional course content the next day and try to get a decent night’s sleep.

Kansas looked pretty good in a win over a local team last night. UMKC came into Allen Fieldhouse last night, and it went about the way one would expect, although I have to admit, I thought Kansas could win by a bigger margin… I predicted a 22-point win, Lisa predicted 24, and Kansas won by 19. I know, I’m nit-picking.

That expression… nit-picking. I should stop using that. I believe the origins have to do with the removal of lice.

OK, that’s a pleasant though.

I’m going to look over my content for the day and get focused.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 264

Good morning, and a happy Tuesday to you all. Today is 5 December 2023.

Yesterday was a special day in our family. My niece gave birth to a baby boy, my brother became a grandfather, and my mom became a great-grandmother for the second time. All are well.

My class is off to a good start. I’ve got about 20 learners in my virtual classroom, once again spanning the globe, but for the first time in a long time, I don’t think I have anybody further east on the planet beyond Germany. My German student was rather pleased when I passed along a “take-home assignment” at a decent hour so he could go get some sleep.

Yes, I know… they were already home in a lot of cases.

Tonight, we’ll have our regular dinner, celebrating the day of the week in the traditional fashion. The only question is how many tacos I’ll pick up for dinner.

There’s a basketball game on tonight. Kansas knocked off UConn last Friday night, and with that win, as well as some other losses among some of the top-ranked teams, Kansas moved to number 2 in the country. Kansas will host the University of Missouri/Kansas City Kangaroos at Allen Fieldhouse for a tune-up game before getting into the last stretch of holiday non-conference games. Two of the games I am looking forward to – the matchup against the University of Missouri this weekend, and the game on December 30th against Wichita State. I harbor no ill will against the the WSU basketball team – I used to hang out with a couple of players when I was a student at WSU, but these days I’m not a big fan of the school itself. There are reasons, but that’s a story for another day.

The time has come to get the coffee going and think about breakfast.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 263

Good morning, and a happy Monday to you. Today is 4 December 2023.

I’ll be back in my virtual classroom in a couple of hours to teach cloud solutions architecture. 4 days on Central Time this week, back on Eastern Time next week for another security course, then rounding out the calendar year with another security course that has a little more hands-on than theory.

Sports rant…

I know a lot of folks thought that Andy Reid was the offensive genius behind the Chiefs’ success during his rein as the head coach, and some thought Eric Bienieny was the beneficiary of Reid’s offensive prowess. Any casual Chiefs fan would cringe at that today, as the Chiefs’ offense continues to sputter after the move from Bieniemy to Naggy. All I can do is hope that if the Commanders fire their head coach and don’t make Bieniemy the head coach, the Chiefs make the move to bring him back as co-head coach and offensive coordinator.

Kind of weird this morning. I was having a dream of entering traffic on a highway while driving a white minivan, and a motorcycle wiped out right in front of me. I pulled off to the shoulder to go provide aid, and then the alarm went off… and left me hanging. I want to know that the motorcycle rider was OK.

I don’t often remember my dreams, but I sure remember that one.

Time to shift my focus to coffee, breakfast, and work.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 260

Hi. It’s me again. Today is Friday, 1 December 2023.

Yeah, December. It’s kind of crazy how fast the days, weeks, and months seem to be passing at this point in my life. It’s a math thing, right? Every day we live is a less significant fraction of our lives. Today will be 1 day in 21991 that I’ll have lived… while today will be 1 in 260 for my granddaughter. Those days for the little ones are so much more significant as those neural connections in her little brain grow and get reinforced.

I head over to the doctor’s office early this morning, an 8 am appointment to talk about my long-standing arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat (atrial fibrillation/atrial flutter) that was first diagnosed after I collapsed on a basketball court while I was in my 20s.

This week has been one of ups and downs, but I think I’m ending on a high note. I’ll get into some meetings a little later today, talking about cloud security and the current state of security operations with a coworker, and we’ll plan some next steps to advance the subject with our teams at work.

Tonight, back to the sports fan grind – KU Women’s Volleyball will host Penn State in the second round of the NCAA volleyball tournament, and KU Men’s Basketball host UConn. Tonight will be a good night… might need to pop a little popcorn for this one.

Until next time…

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

Peace y’all.

Evie 259

Good morning, and a happy and prosperous Thursday to you all. Today is the last day of the month, 30 November 2023.

I’ve been pondering my health a little more lately, probably triggered by the traumatic experience of turning 60 this last September. I think about age-related issues, such as cognitive decline, hypertension, that odd occasional tremble in my hand, and just general mental health stuff relating to anxiety, etc.

I had some stuff keep me up last night. As I told my wife, it was like my head was playing a radio and constantly switching channels, going from talk radio to music to white noise and back again. It was complicated by one of those “ear worms” – a song you get in your head and just can’t get escape. I love music. I have a preference for different styles. Before I work, I listen to a lot of smooth rock from the 80s, a lot of Christopher Cross, Bruce Hornsby, James Taylor, and Dire Straits. That said, why did the song stuck in my head have to be “Bad Blood” by Neil Sedaka?

It seemed like that song was stuck on “loop” from 3:00 AM until my normal wake-up at 5:30. Not a pleasant experience. I’ll get through the morning, but when I take my lunch break today, I’ll likely be slapping on some noise-cancelling headphones and listening to my meditation music for an hour before I go back and wrap up my class.

I better make a pot of coffee.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 258

Hi everybody! Today is Wednesday, 29 November 2023.

November is slipping by pretty quickly. Time seems to go by much faster when one stays busy, and this month I have been rather busy, and that doesn’t appear to be changing as we move into December.

My class is going well this week, and my attendees are being a little more engaged. It can be hard at times to draw people out, and if you’ve been around folks who work in IT, there is a sizeable portion of the community that doesn’t want to be drawn out – they just want to kick it in the back of the room and listen. I’m not going to compel folks to participate if they aren’t up for it, because I know that getting called out in a learning environment can cause some folks stress.

We had out typical Tuesday night dinner last night. Tacos are the perfect food.

After we dined on our taco feast last night, we settled in and watched the Kansas Jayhawks host the Eastern Illinois men’s basketball team. The spread on the game was ridiculous, something like 38.5 points, and Kansas played to the level of their competition, eventually winning by 8 – a far cry from the projected point spread. Kansas hosts the University of Connecticut Huskies on Friday night, the number 4 ranked team in the country. Kansas will need to bring a little more game to win at home, I think.

OK, time to think about breakfast… coffee, and scrambled eggs with a little leftover chili ought to get my digestive system moving.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 257

Hi everybody! It is another glorious Taco Tuesday, 28 November 2023.

I started my class yesterday, with a pretty good turnout. One of the challenges this time of year is getting folks to show up on the first day of class. It’s fairly regular to have a couple of folks not show up – our classes are free to our customers, and that might affect the perceived value of the course. Add in the challenges folks face during this time of year, and it is not unusual for there to be a pretty significant drop-off in attendance. We had a good day, and at the end of the day, there was pretty good feedback from my attendees, especially those in distant lands who were very late into the evening (2:30 AM in India!) and needed to get some sleep. One of my learners made the joking comment that sleep was for the weak.

I’ll get my day going here in a couple of hours. I’ve always been an early riser, something I think I picked up from my dad. He always got up at 6:30 AM, and with the years that I faced an hour-long commute to drive into Kansas City, I became accustomed to getting up at 5:30 AM. I sleep in a bit on Saturday and Sunday, but on workdays, 5:30 is the wake-up call.

I think I’ll have some of my wife’s leftover chili with eggs for breakfast this morning… avail myself of the opportunity to surprise my taste buds and stomach on a Tuesday. I won’t have much lunch – probably just a protein shake, and, as anyone who has read my blog before can expect, there will be tacos for dinner.

I’ve got dogs on my lap as well as my notebook. I suppose one could make the joke that I have a notebook and two furry laptops.

There is not much else to get into this morning. Kansas hosts Eastern Illinois tonight in a warm-up game prior to taking on the defending national champion UConn on Friday. I might need to get an extra bag of tortilla chips to enjoy with salsa during the game tonight.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 256

Good morning, and a happy Monday to you. Today is 27 November 2023.

I’ve got the news on, and the primary topic is the release of some of the October 7 hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza. There have been a number of hostages released, a number of them women in children. I’m not sure as to the numbers nor composition of those that were released on the Israel side. My understanding is that there is about a 3-to-1 ratio, with Israel releasing three for everyone released by Hamas.

I’m back in my virtual classroom for the next four weeks, with three classes focused on case studies and no real “labs”, and then another security class prior to the holiday break.

Sportsfan Bob had a good weekend. My Jayhawks finished out the regular season of football with a road win to finish 8-3, the first time they’ve won that many games in 15 years. The Kansas City Chiefs started off Sunday by spotting the Las Vegas Raiders 14 points before dropping the hammer and outscoring the Raiders 31-3 starting in the 2nd quarter to secure a road win.

Not much else happening in my corner of the world. Time to start looking over the content for my class that starts at 9:00 AM Central Time.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 253

Good morning, and a happy Black Friday to you all. My wife and eldest are heading out to see what Black Friday deals are out there to be had…today is 24 November 2023.

I’ve done the Black Friday thing in the past, but these days I’d rather plan a more organic Christmas shopping experience. Combine that with the fact that I’ve already taken care of a great deal of my shopping for the holiday and there’s not that much left to pick up, and I’m on pretty good footing for the holiday.

I’m going to get a little work done this morning, then get back to the relaxing activities of the day, this last paid-time-off day for November. Next month, there will be more time off.

My daughter is having a conversation wth my wife right now, and the subject matter is one that I would much rather be in a different room right now.

OK…

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

peace y’all.

Evie Day 252

Good morning, and a happy Thanksgiving Day to you. Today is 23 November 2023.

I have much to be thankful for.

I have my health, and my family is healthy as well. My wife and I have good jobs, and good careers. That is a blessing. My daughters have their careers, and my son is doing well in his last year of undergraduate college. We have a home over our heads, and vehicles that get us from point a to point b. I have a happy, healthy grandchild.

I am thankful for the people who care about me.

Later this morning we’re going to head out of town to see family for the holiday meal. For the first time in some time, I will not be doing the driving… my oldest daughter is going to get us there in the car she bought late last year. I’ll get my tablet charged up and read on the trip. I look forward to someone else doing the driving… might help me out with my energy level at the get-together.

It is a holiday, and there are things that need to be done. The coffee isn’t going to make itself quite yet.

I wish you all peace and happiness today, and I hope you live a life of gratitude. I know I have plenty to be thankful for.

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

Peace y’all.