It is Wednesday, 8 March 2023. The first story that pops up on the news is a sad one… four people in Mexico for a cosmetic surgery procedure were kidnapped by a drug cartel, and two were killed when they realized they had the wrong folks… a case of mistaken identity.

I think I’ll be avoiding cosmetic surgery in Mexico for the foreseeable future.

Or just about anything in Mexico.

I’ve got a couple of modules to cover today in class, focusing on cloud storage and application services. After I get that wrapped up, it’s off to downtown Kansas City for a show. I haven’t been to a show in years at this point, so this will be an experience. One of my favorite guitar players, Eric Johnson, is playing at the Midland Theater tonight. In the past, I’ve often gone to these shows with another friend, but he can’t go tonight. I’ve left a text for my oldest daughter to see if she’s interested, but if she can’t go (that’s the likely reality), I might be fishing around for a friend interested in going.

The news has moved on to another story about a conservative news pundit that is trying to get away with a little gaslighting regarding the January 6 insurrection. There is an ongoing lawsuit by Dominion Voting against Fox News, and some of the released depositions are rather alarming. I’d guess at this point Rupert Murdock and Fox News will be scrambling for a settlement, because the facts lead to one conclusion: Fox messed up. This is a one-point-something billion-dollar lawsuit, and the news channel doesn’t want this to go before a jury… they would lose bigtime.

OK, time for me to start settling in for the day.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Tuesday morning, 7 march 2023. Right now Odin is pawing away at some box over by the dining room table. The little guy has a knack for finding the box from the pet supply company that has his treats. This box isn’t from Chewy, but Lisa thinks it might be an order from another vendor that contains beef jerky. Odin has a powerful nose.

The first day of class went pretty well, but my training partner and I had an interesting interaction with a student. She let us know that my delivery style didn’t give her the structure that she needed in a learning environment. I found that exceptionally interesting considering some of the topics that have captured my interest of late. My training partner was following the posted curriculum pretty closely, while I was introducing topics and then diving into demonstrations, and apparently, I wasn’t providing some needed context. We’ll get that nailed down today and do our best to accommodate her learning style.

I keep looking at the date thinking that today is someone’s birthday. I’ll slide over to Facebook in a few to get barraged with posts over there, and I’ll take a look. There’s just something about March 7 that sticks in my head.

Tomorrow night I’ll be heading out to see a show for the first time in years. We’ll see how that goes.

Time for me to get this in the can and get going on the tasks of the day. Tonight – tacos!

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

Peace y’all.

It is Monday, 6 March 2023. Lisa and I are up and after it, and I’m wondering when daylight savings time ends this year… checking…we’ve got another week or so before the “spring forward” event.

I need to exercise a little discipline. I have some weaknesses… and apparently, I have been indulging them this past weekend. It is amazing how quickly I can add five pounds when I slip off my meal plan. Time to get back to eight glasses of water per day and no carbs, or a lot fewer carbs.

I’m back in the virtual classroom today, another week of cloud administration, the same as the course I delivered last week. I’ll be covering a few different modules than I did last week, as I am co-delivering with a different trainer. This course is one that I’m pretty comfortable with, so I can float between modules pretty easily.

Politics is happening, and the farms are spinning their comments on social media. There are forces in the US and abroad that want certain people in the halls of power in order to push their agenda. That agenda is pretty dark in the eyes of people that support diversity, equality, and inclusion. This past weekend, the CPAC conference went on (conservative/reactionary), and some of the stuff that came out of that group is quite alarming. One clown proposed the eradication of all transgender people… not therapies, not treatments, not discussions, the complete elimination of an entire sector of our population. It wasn’t shortly after that someone posted a link to a story about how the Nazi German government under Adolf Hitler went after and wiped out a transgender/transvestite clinic in keeping with their pursuit of some mythical “purity”.

These days the same thing is going on. Some ideologies don’t do inclusion. They don’t do equality. They require a target for their hatred, and they generally go after populations that are incapable of defending themselves. The transgender population is a target for right-wing hatred. The transvestite population is a target for right-wing hatred.

It’s already started. Tennessee has passed a law banning drag shows, with a punishment of up to 6 months in jail. Multiple states are implementing a ban on gender-affirming care.

If you want to confuse a right-winger, ask them the definition of “woke”. Then ask them about their medical credentials to diagnose gender dysphoria.

Time to get some things going on the day.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning! It is a rainy Friday morning on this 3rd day of March 2023.

I get to wade out into the raid to get the trash cans out to the corner on trash pickup day. That’s always fun.

My class is over for the week. I have a couple of meetings later today, but other than that, I’ll have a little bit slower day. I worked on a day off last week, so I’ll be “flexing” a bit today, taking about half the day to focus on stuff that I would’ve dealt with on President’s Day.

Dane is getting together with friends this evening, and Lisa has a working dinner with another professor, so tonight I get the rare opportunity to hunt and gather for one on a Friday night during Lent… which means there will be sushi on the menu. I’ll have to take a closer look at the sushi landscape here in Lawrence and make appropriate plans. Lisa has never been a big fan of sushi like Dane and I have been, but she has on occasion given it a try, so long as there was no raw fish. If there’s a roll in front of my wife, it’s most likely loaded with tempura shrimp. The only absolute for me is the absence of sea urchin… that is a texture I can’t deal with.

Plenty of stuff going on in the news, but I’m not going to dwell on that. Anybody can look up “this day in the news” on the internet to see what’s happening in Ukraine, South Carolina, and the Capitol.

I’m going to get this in the can and get on with my day. There is a coffee maker that requires my attention. I think a low-carb bagel and onion & chive cream cheese will align with the current direction of my taste buds.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning! It is 2 March 2023.

Right now I’ve got the news on, and the topic is the poisoning of schoolgirls in Iran. These girls are being attacked for the dire sin of seeking an education in a backward country that doesn’t see the value of women beyond their ability to reproduce.

People sometimes wonder why I view certain religious institutions negatively – here you go. Religion does a great job of putting men at the center of the universe. Religion even strips women of their most sacred power – here’s an example. In the Book of Genesis, God creates Adam in his own image – personally, I think man created God in his own image – but the creation of woman – the “birth” of woman, if you will – was from Adam’s rib. Despite the observed truth that women are responsible for bringing new life into the world, the jokers that wrote Genesis decided somewhere along the way that women didn’t deserve that credit, and that woman was created from man with no uterus involved.

People wonder why I question religious tenets – well, there you go.

Today I wrap up my four-day class with my training partner. I’m in Kansas, she’s in New York City, and the class has been running on eastern time, so I’ll start a little early, but be wrapped up by 4 PM my time. Three days to decompress, then right back at it again next week with the same material, but a central time shift.

I’ll have a prep week the week of March 13 with no classroom responsibilities. A good time to focus on some peripheral projects.

Now reading that some clown named Muffley tried to sneak a bomb onto a plane. I’m kind of laughing at the name… if I recall correctly, the name of the US President in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” was named Merkin Muffley. Ironic, I suppose.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Wednesday morning, and the first day of March. 1 March 2023.

Last night the University of Kansas guaranteed themselves at least a portion of the Big 12 Basketball Championship – there will be a tournament next week for the post-season championship – and could win it outright when they play Texas at Texas next Saturday. If Texas wins, it’s a split – and I have a feeling the Texas Longhorns will be coming at the Jayhawks with a full head of steam. Texas plays at TCU tonight… if Texas loses, then it’s a done deal anyway.

As I have shared, I spend a little time in the comments sections of some stories that appear in my feed. One of the things that I have often been curious about is whether or not troll farms spin up fake accounts to foment chaos by making irresponsible, uneducated, and inflammatory comments. Sometimes I read the comments and I have to ask myself, “Are people really this ignorant? Are people really this racist?”, and I do ponder the idea that there are chaos agents in the world that really want to see America fall – they want to see infighting to the point of civil war in this country – they want to see us at each other’s throats.

When I see a profile picture, I will sometimes do a “right-mouse click” on the photo to pull up the shortcut menu and select “Find On Web”. This is a little something I do just to see if their profile pic is a stock photo, or some other shut publicly accessible. Earlier this week I did just that and the profile pic was linked to a story about a man from eastern Europe that had died.

Sometimes the devil is in the details. I’m not going to stand here and state as a fact that just because somebody used a picture of an eastern European man it has to be a troll farm, but when there is no other obvious reason why that photo was used, it does give rise to more questions.

Keep asking questions.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Tuesday, 28 February 2023.

I’m watching the news, and folks are talking about the weather. It’s been a little (more than a little!) goofy. Last weekend, tornados ripped through the southern Midwest, bringing cyclones to Oklahoma City & Norman, as well as other communities in Kansas and Texas. California has communities that are isolated following huge snowfalls.

People are wondering what could be the cause of such wide-ranging weather differences in such a small amount of time – even here, at our house, we had a coat of ice on everything Saturday morning, while yesterday it hit almost 70 degrees.

Daily CO2 posts that the CO2 levels the other day were at 421.23 parts per million. Compare that to 372.23 on April 10 of 1999. I’m sure some weather expert from my hometown will flex their GED to let me know that CO2 levels were much higher during the Ordovician era or some other ridiculousness (humans weren’t around during the Ordovician era… and not much else from the Ordovician era is around today either – it was 500 million years ago).

I need to start thinking about my work day. We’re going to cover all of the course lecture in the morning, then switch to labs in the afternoon. I have learners this week from all over, including folks from India, Serbia, Poland, and the UK this week. When that happens, we try to tailor the course timings a little bit to make their lives a little easier. If we get all of the class lecture in early, they can either do labs or defer to the morning, doing labs when it best suits their schedule.

I’m going to make a cup of coffee.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Monday, 27 February 2023, and it’s kind of crazy to think that March is a scant two days away. With March comes birthdays, spring break, the first day of spring, and the birth of my first grandchild.

Stuff is going to get very real.

I have a class, cloud administration, that starts in a couple of hours, as we’re teaching on east coast time. I’ll be working with a trainer I’ve worked with before, so that part is a “known”. You never know what kind of learner audience you’re going to have until you get into it, but we’ll adapt.

I have to confess, I didn’t sleep well last night. I’m used to having a nightcap before I go to bed, but I’m taking a break from booze during Lent for religious as well as personal reasons. My mind just could not shut off last night, and it feels like I was up half the night thinking about things that I didn’t need to think about. I’ll be ok – I’ll throw back a protein shake at our first break, then find a way to shut down a bit during lunch break. It also helps that we’re done at four o’clock my time, so I’ll be able to sneak in a late afternoon nap before Lisa gets home from the university.

I probably ought to dedicate part of that non-delivery time to some meditation and make a concerted effort to calm my mind down.

There have been some other things going on in the world, and I’ll think about adding them in tomorrow. Lots of things going in relative to racism and cartoonists, and the ever-changing world of sports.

I’m going to get this wrapped up and shift my focus to the tasks at hand.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning, and happy Friday to you all! It if 24 February 2023.

And this morning I am going to be political.

The Kansas Senate and the GOP super-majority have proposed some changes to the tax code.

From the Kansas Reflector:

“An individual who earns $15,000 would see just $1 in tax savings under the plan, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that provides research on state and federal tax policies. Meanwhile, the top 20% of wage earners would receive about 70% of the total $764 million tax cut.”

So, effectively, let’s give the money to those that need it the least instead of those that need it the most.

People wonder why I don’t support the Kansas Republican Party, this is why. They will do whatever they can to divert funds intended to help Kansans to the wealthy Kansans that really don’t need it, but donate to their re-election campaigns.

It sickens me.

Oh, and you can bet they’ll give you a hearty handshake at church on Sunday and boast of all of the great work they are doing.

For people that don’t need help.

I’m done.

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

Peace y’all.

I tell you what, something has my four-legged furballs agitated this morning. I think it’s a new pet medication commercial. Wow…

Good morning! It is Thursday, 23 February 2023. I’m about two days away from my 4th anniversary with my employer. I’m about 3 or 4 weeks away from becoming a grandfather for the first time.

It’s a little nuts.

I resume my class in a couple of hours, and I’ll use that time to review some of the course material. Even with as many years and times I delivered the course material, I still want to spend a few minutes prior to making sure there aren’t any surprise updates.

I have been quite fortunate to have a solid delivery partner this week. It’s my first time delivering with this teammate, and it has been a wonderful experience. Good teammates can make all the difference in the world.

What else does the day hold for me? There are a couple of things on tv later today that I have an interest in. Star Trek: Picard has started their final season, and the first episode was an event last week. After that, the US Women’s National Team takes on Brazil in the championship round of the SheBelieves cup in women’s soccer. I try to support women’s sports.

Two more days of class, and then I’ll get to sleep in Saturday morning.

BTW, when trying to say “I’m empathetic”, make sure you don’t stumble over a syllable. It’s a short trip to “I’m pathetic”.

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

Peace y’all.