Evelyn Day 12

It is Tuesday morning, 28 March 2023. I would love to be able to tell you that the news overnight was all rainbows and glitter, but that would not be the case. Some bad things happened in the world yesterday.

Where do I start?

Evelyn, honey, we’re all going to have choices to make in this life. Sometimes we want to make selfish choices, and we want to do what is right for ourselves in the moment. It happens, it’s our nature. There will be times, however, when choices can have a little more impact on others. If we have choices, and one of those choices helps more people than others, that’s probably the right way to go. In our lives, we’re also going to encounter powerful people that want more, and they will use their positions of power to convince people that they are the ones that deserve more.

I hope when I have those choices in front of me, I choose the path of most good. Sometimes I have chosen the wrong way to go, and I hope I now have the experience and awareness to make better choices as an adult than some of the choices I made when I was younger.

You were born good. I believe that. You have a purpose on this earth, and I hope you have every opportunity to improve your world. Your mom and dad are there to help, and gramma and I will be there for you as well.

Know that you are loved.

Grampa has to get ready for work now. You don’t have to worry about all of that stuff for a while, so you just keep sleeping and feeding, growing and stretching and making those neural connections.

I’m gonna go make a pot of coffee.

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

peace y’all.

Evelyn Day 11

Good morning! It is Monday, 27 March 2023.

Good morning to you, Evie. This weekend was kind of special, and you might need to look at some pictures to understand why.

My mother was born in August 1942. She is 80 years old. Yesterday she met her first great-grandchild. Your mom and dad got up early to drive the two-and-a-half hours to visit, and I am thankful they were able to do that. You also met my sister, your great-aunt.

It’s interesting to me, how a little part of us gets passed on to the next generation. I do a little genealogy research on a website, and I have added a new placeholder for you, your mom, and your dad. If my research is correct, we can trace our family back almost a thousand years. It likely has a mistake or two – the record of an 18th-century ancestor living to be 117 is likely a typographical error or a “Senior” passing landed to a “Junior” and people loving track of the generational y change.

Your roots go back to the beginning of time, as all of our roots do.

Someday I hope you can come sit with grampa, and I’ll be able to tell you a few stories about our family. There are a few tales worth telling, and many are about people you can see in pictures and you will never meet. Time is a constant that cannot be changed, and cannot be slowed down. You will grow up and grow older. You’ll learn to read and maybe some of the things I write down will make some sense, and much of it won’t until you get a little older.

This week I start off with a sort of “in-service day”. There are always things we can do to have a greater impact on our classroom environments and help our learners pick up a little more information.

I’m going to get going making some coffee and grabbing some breakfast.

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

Peace y’all.

Evelyn Day 8

Y’know, if I’m going to start tracking my granddaughter’s days, I should try a different method: math and all that.

I use a website to calculate my days quickly – Rod Martin’s site has a “my days” calculator that’s quick and easy to use.

OK, back to the regular opening…

Good morning! It is 24 March 2023, and I’ve got a couple of meetings to attend to today, then I get to enjoy the company of a fair young lady who is but eight days old. I am a happy grampa.

After I spend an hour or two with Evey, I’ll stop and grab dinner for Lisa and me on the way home, and at this point in the day, I’m thinking a shrimp baja taco might be a good choice.

As I shared, I finished a three-day class the other day. Yesterday I received some follow-up feedback from my manager, and it was pretty positive. I have a love-hate relationship with feedback – the really positive stuff can inflate an ego, and the negative stuff can drag me down for weeks, but it is necessary to take a look at it, and I have to take everything with a grain of salt. The feedback can be very constructive, so I try to approach it from a “assume positive intent” perspective.

Today is going to be a good day. I’ve got a cup of coffee and a sesame bagel. Hard-boiled eggs in the fridge are on stand-by if I need a mid-morning snack. Low-carb ramen might be the answer to the lunch question.

I’m not quite sure what the weekend holds. I generally don’t blog on the weekends, as I try to stay focused on family and the tasks I need to attend to here. I probably ought to check the weather report to see if it’s going to be conducive to getting some work done outside.

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

Peace y’all.

Evelyn Day 7

Good morning! I hope you are well on this Thursday, the 23rd day of March 2023. Today marks one week since Evelyn arrived, and today is looking like a pretty good day.

I wrapped up a three-day course yesterday. I know that I sat the course when it first came out, but over the course of the last couple of years, I don’t think I ever had the opportunity to teach it. Our team went through a period of time when we would pick our classes out, and the three-day classes were often picked up first. I think by the time I got off my backside to pick my classes, all of the three-day classes were already picked up by other team members – and that’s just fine. We have some folks on the team that do a really good job with this content, and they should be delivering the majority of these classes. My perspective is that we ought to have some overlap with courses and skill sets so we’ve got options when someone should fall ill or have some other type of family emergency. We do a pretty good job with that side of the equation.

While I was in class the last few days, there were some meetings I missed. Fortunately, they were all recorded, so today I’ll be hitting the play button and getting caught up on the meetings I was unable to attend.

Tomorrow will be a good day. I get to spend a little time with my granddaughter while her mom runs a couple of errands. Yeah, I know she’s only a week old, but every moment is precious. The little ones are only this small for a short period of time, and the first year is going to fly by. Each day is so meaningful… the eighth day for her is still 12.5% of her life.

The dogs are all upset about a cat on tv. Some commercial for kitty litter.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning! It is 22 March 2023, and it might be time for me to change my post greeting.

Good morning, Evelyn. Today is your Day 6. I’m your grampa.

You are the single brightest light in our lives today, and that is an undeniable fact.

I would love to tell you that you have arrived in a world where everything is good, and people are treating everyone the way they themselves want to be treated, but that’s not always the case. Someday you’ll start talking and you’ll learn new words, and I hope one day you can appreciate the word, “empathy”.

As you grow up, you’ll find out about dictionaries, where we have great big collections of words, their definitions, and how they are pronounced. Empathy is an important word to me, and it is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person or animal, or even a fictional character in a book. You will see it around you. When you are happy, you will notice others feeling happy, too. When you are sad, you can look into my eyes, the eyes of your mom and dad, the eyes of your grandparents, your aunts and uncles, and you will see that we all feel your pain and want you to feel better.

Someone once wrote that evil is the absence of empathy. People can only hurt other people when they stop trying to understand the feelings of others. If people tell you that your feelings don’t matter, that’s not a good thing. Your feelings matter. My feelings matter. Even our pets have feelings, and you can see it in their eyes when they are happy or sad… although with the dogs, you don’t have to look in their eyes, the tail gives it away.

We all love you, and we want you to know you are loved. You matter, your dreams matter, your feelings matter.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Tuesday morning, 21 March 2023, and spring hasn’t entirely sprung yet, but the wild onions in the yard are peaking up a little higher than anything else that’s green. Pretty soon here it will be time to get the mower, tractor, and gator ready to roll around the property and get some lawn maintenance done.

Yesterday was a good day, the first time I’ve delivered this course solo. I always like the networking side of things, I think primarily due to the math and the logic involved in configuring route tables and filtering rules. Today we’ll pick it back up talking about load balancers for HTTP/HTTPS traffic and other solutions that aren’t as tightly coupled to specific protocols.

It is Tuesday, so that means tacos.

The sting of March Madness got a little pain reliever yesterday. KU’s men’s team had an early exit from the tournament, and the KU women did not get into the field of 64 for the women’s tournament. The women did get to go to the other tournament, the NIT (“National Invitational Tournament” which predates the NCAA – although some people refer to it as the “Not Invited Tournament”). The Kansas women moved deeper into their tournament last night by knocking off Missouri in impressive fashion, 75-47. Looks like they play again on Thursday, so I’ll wish them luck in their next game versus Nebraska.

It’s about time to get the coffee beans ground and the water heated for the morning brew.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning! It is 20 March 2023, and the US is still not on the metric system.

Yeah, I’m in a goofy mood this morning. Day four of being a grandparent is off to the kind of start you’d expect. I stepped on the scale and didn’t receive bad news, grabbed a couple glasses of water, and coffee will be on the schedule as soon as I get this post completed.

I’ll be back in my virtual classroom for a networking class this week, and a cloud solutions architecture class next week. After that, I’ll be shadowing a class that I will be delivering in the next couple of months.

OK, so my daughter and Evelyn are at home. Lisa is going back to the university this week following spring break. Dane goes back to classes following spring break. My aunt had her account spoofed on Facebook and is now receiving all kinds of “helpful” posts from complete strangers (secondary hack attempts). Puppies are on my lap and sitting beside me (Freya isn’t a “puppy” per se, but she weighs in at five pounds and is our “perma-puppy”).

My basketball team lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament. Not having our coach on the bench probably affected the team a little bit, and the fact that there were twenty more fouls called in our second round game than the average game was a tough pill to swallow. It just wasn’t our weekend, and not out year – I’ll live, as it was our year last year, and these days, teams don’t repeat as champions – they’re more likely to fall in the first weekend, as has happened seven straight years now.

There’s some political stuff going on, but I’m not going to go there today.

Time to get ready for class.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning, and happy St. Patrck’s Day… it is 17 March 2023, it is my nephew Keegan’s birthday, and it is the day after.

Evelyn Kay was born yesterday at 7:40 PM. Mother and child are doing well. She weighed in at a healthy 9 lbs, 20 inches in length, and the right number of fingers and toes. Lisa and I arrived at the hospital, and the other grandmother was there to let us know that she had been born and was doing well. I had to reset my phone to reconnect to the carrier to get my missing text messages, so we weren’t as up to speed on current events.

We spent a little time with Gracie and Austin, held our first grandchild for a bit, and then let them all get some rest. On the way home, our thoughts turned to our new roles as grandparents, and the usual questions came up between us. Evelyn is our first grandchild, and it could be a while before there are any others. Our oldest daughter doesn’t plan on ever having kids, and our youngest is 21 years old and is focused on school, no girlfriend, and it could be another decade before the thought even crosses his mind. On the father’s side of the family, she has a bunch of cousins all ready to take her into their warm embrace… and I hope she has a lot of fun with them as she grows up.

Evelyn is going to grow up in a different world than her mother did. Lisa and I were in our early thirties when we met and married, Gracie isn’t even 25 years old yet. Our oldest daughter was born less than two weeks after the passing of Lisa’s mother, and her father passed away a few years later when Gracie was just a couple of years old. I remember getting that call – I was in Germany when I received the news. Evelyn has more than a couple sets of grandparents, and we’re all a short distance away. My parents have had a presence in our kids’ lives, but they’ve never been right around the corner. Lisa and I were either in Wichita or Lawrence, always a couple hours away from the nearest family members.

So many thoughts running through our minds this morning.

I also realized that I don’t have a great deal of green clothing in my wardrobe appropriate for St. Patrick’s Day.

Anyway, I have a talk to get ready for… wiped out, didn’t sleep well with so many things running through my mind.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning! It is Thursday, 16 March 2023. It is 6 months until I turn 60… and the day Lisa and I will most likely become grandparents. Gracie was admitted to the hospital yesterday – later in the day than I thought (AM v PM mix-up on my part). Poor thing has been in the hospital overnight, and we haven’t received any text messages about the arrival quite yet.

Today will have some distractions. New baby on the way, the senior dog getting an abscessed tooth pulled, and KU versus Howard in the first NCAA tournament round. With Lucy getting a tooth pulled, we had to move some stuff around here, as she wasn’t supposed to have food and water after ten last night, so all of the dogs are walking around looking at us with expressions of longing … for their water bowls. Not to fear, pooches… Dane is taking Lucy to the vet shortly, and then we can get the water back to the regular spots.

Anticipating the arrival of Evelyn yesterday got me a bit anxious. Not sure how well I slept… I’ll probably figure that out this afternoon when I feel the need to crash hard.

I’m going to get this in the can and figure out my morning. Coffee needs to be made, and a low-carb bagel tossed in the toaster.

More later…

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning to any and all that have discovered my blog. It is 15 March 2023… and today could be the day. In history, this day has been referred to as the Ides of March, the day that Julius Caesar was stabbed repeatedly on the Senate floor. After today, at least in my house, it will be remembered as the birthday of my first grandchild. My youngest daughter is going into the hospital this morning to be induced.

Man, oh man.

I’ve got meetings that run until later this afternoon, then it will be time to run up to the hospital. It will likely be late enough in the day that I should bring the new dad some dinner.

I’ll get to work on my work stuff in a bit to keep my mind occupied. Time to break down the topic of the day and throw together a few slides on the topic of training to neurodivergent audiences… and what neurodivergent means, and all of the different ways it can manifest itself in a learner.

Or an instructor.

Today is going to present some challenges for a guy that needs to stay focused.

Yeah… and the butterflies take flight.

I’m going to get this in the can and see if I can lock in.

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

Peace y’all.