Evie Day 109

Good morning! It is Monday, 3 July 2023. It is the first (work) day of my vacation. Technically, I guess my vacation started on Friday, right after I closed out my work week, but that first weekend always feels more like a weekend than a vacation anyway.

I’ll get some meat trimmed up and dressed to go on the smoker a little later today. I’ve picked up a brisket and a pork shoulder to throw on the smoker tomorrow. I might take a chance on a couple of sides in the smoker as well – barbecue beans with bacon, and something weird with corn and cheese – I have some frozen sweet corn and a brick of spicy Velveeta that I’ll throw into a small foil pan. I figure get some smoke rolling by 9:00 AM and 6:00 pull for the proteins. The veggies don’t need as long in the heat. The only thing I need to do is get a little more chuck hardwood for the smoker – pecan is my favorite, and hickory is the alternative.

Later today we’re going to have a little role-playing one-shot with the kids, and I think my son and eldest daughter have manipulated my wife into joining the fray. I’ll have ’em run a couple of errands for a neurotic gnome that requires very special components for a scroll he is creating for a customer, but, my oh my, there is a deadline and he is quite worried, quite worried indeed.

One thing that I have learned to enjoy a bit and have repeatedly used for inspiration – artificial intelligence. I have been going out to ChatGPT and have used their engines to generate lists of random stuff, just the sort of stuff I want to pull from when I need a description of some random item sitting on a table or a book on a shelf. Yeah, it’s not the most creative approach, but it’s quick, and I don’t have to devote a lot of time to the creation of minutiae.

I hope those of you in the US are getting a break, and I hope my Canadian friends had a good Canada Day this past Saturday. For my American friends, pause and read the Flag Code – our flag is to be revered, and not meant to be worn as a jingoistic tank top.

For the rest of y’all…

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 106

Good morning and happy Friday! It is 30 June 2023, and the last day of my fiscal year at work.

I’m mad today, and I started writing, and I just started going down a hole. Today may not be the best day for me to ponder the issues of the day.

I’ve got a couple of meetings later today, but I should have a pretty low-key day to recuperate. My class this week wasn’t a strain, just the opposite. One of my learners this week was a student that I had worked with while I was at my former employer in Kansas City.

Lisa is making breakfast pastries to take into work, and I’ve got a glass of water and three dogs on my lap. Freya is nestled under my lap desk. She was a delight this morning when I work up, giving me that look while she did her “pet me” dance on the bed. 9 years old and she still can be our little puppy.

I’m going to get this in the can. Sorry, just not focused on getting words on the page today. When I first started writing this, my focus was on writing 200 words per day. I normally do ok with my word count, but the little extension I use to count my words isn’t as convenient as it used to be, so I no longer count my words – I just keep writing.

There’s more to get down on the page, but maybe just not now. I’ll put some more thought into the events of the last day and maybe write a little more later.

In the meantime…

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 105

Good morning! It is 29 June 2023.

This morning I flipped on the news to see some stuff happening in the world. The 24th perfect baseball game in MLB history happened last night, thrown by NY Yankee pitcher Domingo German. Congrats! Recovery teams have recovered human remains and wreckage from the Titan submersible craft, which is kind of amazing. Air traffic is miserable, as weather and other issues have led to numerous cancellations – United Airlines is at the center of the problem. A Delta airline was forced to land without its front landing gear.

I head back into my virtual classroom later today. I’ll handle a little review, hand off to my training partner for business continuity, then back to me for monitoring and log analytics and the close of class. We’ll have labs until about 4 o’clock in the afternoon my time (class is scheduled for east coast time zone).

The US Men’s National Team had a match in the CONCACAF Gold Cup, taking care of business against an overmatched squad from St. Kitts and Nevis, 6-0.

Tonight, a new episode of Star Trek.

Other than that, I’ll get the day squared away, take care of business tomorrow… then a week of vacation.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 104

Good morning! It is hump day, Wednesday, 28 June 2023.

Just a couple more days in my work week, month, year.

Lisa arrived home safely last evening after a short trip out of town. I can’t really get into what she was doing, but based on her mood when she arrived home, it appears to have been a successful trip.

Normally, my Wednesday is filled with anticipation of the evening’s festivities, and a chance to “hang out with the guys” online and play some games online. Tonight, however, we’re switching things up. A few of the gang will not be available due to vacation trips and whatnot, so I’m going to switch gears and get into futbol mode as the United States Mens National Team plays St.Kitts & Nevis in the CONCACAF Gold Cup tournament.

The news this morning is full of news about the Russians and whether there was an actual coup attempt, and there is lots of chatter about Trump and his ongoing legal woes. I’ll take a swing by the comments section after a bit to read the garbage “Trump 2024” posts. I suspect that those posts are coming from some troll farm, paid to use fake accounts, and post pro-Trump nonsense online – especially on stories about Trump or Biden. I can’t imagine that real people are that naive, but then again, maybe some folks are just so dense that they still think Trump is a viable candidate for the Presidency. He wasn’t a qualified candidate in 2016, and he’s even worse now, as everybody knows that if he were to get back in the White House, he would immediately start abusing the power of the office, then head off to the golf course – right after pardoning himself and members of his family.

I get back to my virtual classroom in a bit. Today I get to talk about data storage and security, as well as application programming content. It’s a decent day.

In the meantime, there is coffee to be made and toast to be toasted.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 103

Good morning, and a happy Taco Tuesday to you. It is 27 June 2023.

I got up a little earlier this morning, as Lisa had to head out early for a meeting out of town. I’ve yet to make a pot of coffee, but I did grab a couple of glasses of water to start my day.

I’m watching the news right now, and they are discussing audio tapes that have been turned over as evidence in the espionage trial of Donald J. Trump. Yesterday there were ads on TV talking, flashbacks to Trump running for president in 2016, where he is railing against people (I’m guessing Hillary Clinton) that didn’t handle confidential and classified documents with the appropriate care. Then in the audiotape, he’s boasting and sharing classified content with a staffer that doesn’t have clearance. Criminally irresponsible.

My class went well yesterday, and while we are covering three modules today, I only have to worry about the middle unit, as my training partner is picking up the lion’s share of the content today, and I’ll switch that up with her tomorrow when I will cover two of the three scheduled units.

Other than that, it’s a pretty casual day. I don’t expect a lot of excitement. The only thing I really anticipate on the day is the tacos on Tuesday night. How will we mix it up today? Fish tacos, perhaps?

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 102

Good morning, and happy Monday to you all! It is 26 June 2023.

I should have kept my eyes out for a 100-Day report from my daughter about my granddaughter over the weekend. I might need to review my texts.

I started off the day by telling somebody in the comments about the inclusion social contract. He was telling me that all progressives are evil and discussing. I disagreed, but then I realized that the person I am having this little verbal spat with is defending neo-Nazis. I think I’m sitting in the right corner from a historical perspective.

I’m back in my virtual classroom shortly, teaching an east coast time zone class this week – the last class for the fiscal year. Next week I’ll take some vacation. I’m currently scheduled to work on Monday, but I’m starting to change my lean on that commitment. I’ve planned out my vacation time for the rest of the calendar year, and although we don’t keep tight track of vacation time due to policy changes, my manager wants to make sure I am taking at least as many days of vacation as I would have had if we were still tracking vacation days. So, I’ve got 5 days left. Maybe I should take off Monday, too, and get that sorted.

Not much else going on right at the moment. I need to make some coffee and grab a bit of breakfast.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 99

Good morning. It is Friday, 23 June 2023. A pair of 23s in the date… might be timely to watch on old movie about that number, the 2007 Jim Carey mess, “The Number 23”.

Or not.

Bad news from the Titanic tourists. They found a debris field on the bottom of the ocean, including the nosecone of the submersible. It was also reported that the US Navy deep microphones in the Atlantic detected the implosion on Sunday morning. It is sad that those folks died, but if it was an implosion at depth, the passengers would have died immediately. It’s odd sometimes how we can focus on four or five wealthy people that require rescuing at the same time virtually ignoring refugees capsizing in the Aegean Sea, killing 31, or another ship with 700 passengers suffering a similar fate last summer. It seems we only pay attention to some, but not those that might need the most help.

I finished my class yesterday. Seemed to have gone over OK. I had a couple of attendees ask me for the links, so I’m going to go through all four meetings from Monday through Thursday and harvest all of the URLs for the course. That’ll keep me busy for a bit this morning. No meetings until later in the morning, so I ought to be OK.

I noticed that it is my granddaughter’s 99th day on this side of reality. I start thinking about working “Evie’s Day 99” into lyrics to replace the words in a Prince song.

I’m back in my virtual classroom on Monday for a four-day administration course. I should get together with my training partner sometime today to work out the distribution of work.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 98

Hi folks! It is Thursday, 22 June 2023.

Yesterday was a good day. We took some time to celebrate my son’s 22nd birthday, got to see all of my kids, my granddaughter, and one of the pooches in our extended dog family.

I’m entering day four of my security class this morning. I have four lessons, a case study, and a closing today. A lot of the content I go through today is merely checklists of security steps to take under certain situations. It will be a lot of talking, a lot of pointing to reference documents.

No news on the missing submersible. It doesn’t look good.

There’s stuff going on in politics, but I’m not going to dwell on that this morning. Sometimes I am convinced that a bunch of the people on Capitol Hill are vindictive idiots.

I’m going to get to work looking over my notes for my talks today. Yeah, I’ve got a couple of hours, but still… whatever I can do to mitigate the anxiety I get when delivering a course for the first time.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 97

Good morning! It is Wednesday, 21 June 2023.

Well, let’s unpack what I’ve seen so far this morning… and the clock is reading 5:54 AM.

I saw that Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill banning “sexually-oriented performances”. Now people cannot perform nude or have a performance that appeals to the “prurient interest in sex” when minors are present. Now, I remember when I was a teenager in high school, I was one of many young men that paid very close attention to the performances of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. I am of the opinion that someone didn’t think this all the way through.

There’s a new ProPublica story about another Supreme Court Justice not reporting gifts. Apparently, a billionaire entertained Justice Alito at a private fishing resort and served all the good stuff at dinner, Alaskan king crab, Kobe filet mignon. Keep in mind that both Alito and Thomas missed a deadline to revise their declarations of gifts last week. This is not a good look when the two most prominent conservative justices are accepting gifts from billionaires and later ruling on cases that directly affect those billionaires. Apparently, Alito made a ruling that benefitted his patron to the tune of 2 billion dollars. Meanwhile, my wife couldn’t buy lunch for a college classmate that worked for the FDA because of the way the rules get applied to government employees.

Everybody is still on edge about the Titanic submersible. Reports are that people are hearing banging in the water at 30-minute intervals. At the time I am writing this, there are estimates that they have 24 hours of oxygen remaining. All positive intentions to all involved in the rescue.

Yesterday was my son’s 22nd birthday, and he went out with a group of his friends. We’ll have a little celebration this evening for dinner, with a special meal coming from Little Saigon here in Lawrence.

My day of lecture went pretty well yesterday. I think my lips were getting a bit fatigued by the end of the day. Lots of lecture in this course.

That’s enough for now.

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

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 96

Good morning! It is Tuesday, 20 June 2023.

Today is my son’s 22nd birthday. I celebrate the day with him, and I am quite proud of the man he has become. He has a good heart, and genuinely cares about the welfare of others. I guess my wife and I did something right.

There are things happening in the world. Right now there is a race against time to rescue some tourists that had taken a submersible to tour the wreckage of the Titanic. The vehicle had 96 hours of air on board, but time is running out. All positive intentions for the best possible outcome.

Also, my home state of Kansas is in the news because some idiot decided to send envelopes with white powder to some 100 Kansas Republicans. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation and their federal counterparts are investigating. Personally, I think this is a loathful act. If you have a problem with a politician, support their opponent in the next election, speak up and state your case, or start a grassroots movement to address the issue you are concerned about. Terrorism (and that’s what this is) is not a solution. Somebody is going to get caught, and they will be spending some quality time with the Kansas penal system.

I’m trying to get my head in the right space this morning. I have my first delivery of a security theory course. Yesterday my training partner got the class off to a great start. I hope to maintain that pace as we continue through the day.

Other than that, it is that wonderful day of the week that we celebrate the most perfect food… the TACO! Tonight, there will be tacos for dinner.

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

Peace y’all.