Good morning! It is Labor Day, the first Monday of September, 5 September 2022. Odin is whimpering about not getting a slice of bacon off the table, Bonnie is over on the loveseat with her dog, Ruthie, and I’ve got Freya and the sisters Von Floof sitting on the couch between Lisa and me.

Yesterday we left in pretty good time to go to Clay Center, Kansas to celebrate my mom’s 80th birthday. It was a good family get-together with more food than we could eat. My brother smoked a turkey breast on the grill, and my brother-in-law smoked two briskets on his pellet smoker. There was plenty of veggies, and chips, dips, beans, and cereal malt beverages to satisfy a growing crowd.

Growing it is…

One of the highlights was the arrival of my youngest daughter and her beau, Austin, and the announcement became formal, kind of a two-fold thing. They plan on getting married, and the question is whether they tie the know before or after our first grandchild is born, expected in March. According to the tests, they are expecting a girl.

I’m going to be a grampa.

I recall somebody making the comment, “If you raise your kids, you get to spoil your grandchildren. If you spoil your kids, you get to raise your grandchildren”. I’m thinking Lisa and I will be able to spoil grandkids more than raise them.

We still have some things to get done around here today. We need to patch a hole in the pool cover before we shut it down for the winter later this month.

I’m going to try and decompress a bit, get my head in a good place and lower my blood pressure, right after I have this other cup of coffee.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Saturday morning, 3 September 2022, and I am floof wrestling. Rosy and Lily are being particularly needy this morning, demanding attention, climbing up on my laptop, and being general nuisances.

Cute, needy, lovable, fluffy nuisances.

I’ll throw the little orange ball in a few moments, Lily, just give me a moment to crank out a couple hundred words.

Last night, Lisa and I went to the KU-Tennessee Tech football game. These season openers are meant to be confidence builders for struggling programs, and Kansas has been one of those struggling programs for more than ten years now. Last night should, however, instill a little confidence in the team and for the fan base that this team is really doing the work. Kansas scored on their first few possessions, sometimes in rather dramatic fashion, with effective runs, and solid passing downfield – the Kansas quarterback completed 14 of 15 passes in the first half, and that’s a solid half of football in anybody’s book.

Kansas won 56-10.

We were invited to watch the game from the “Friends of Mechanical Engineering” suite at Memorial Stadium, and that was the first time I had ever seen one of the suites. Lisa spent the entirety of the game talking with alums and administrators, and I watched the game with other interested parties, several alums, including a father and his son. I enjoyed the evening immensely, and the dean of the engineering school asked if we would ever be interested in attending more games and watching from that suite, to which I replied with an “enthusiastic “Yes1′.

I’m going to have to spend some time on the mower here after bit. I love country life, but at the same time, there’s a lot of mowing to get done. Fortunately, I have the right tools for the job, and a decent audiobook to listen to as well.

If all goes well, I’ll be back in my recliner shortly after lunch ready to watch some sports.

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

Peace y’all

It is Thursday morning, 1 September 2022, and it is a good day. Lisa gets back home tonight, it’s the first day of a new month, and it is also my last classroom day for a couple of weeks.

Alright. I can do this!

Dogs had a pretty good evening last night. There was some up and down and tossing and turning in the night as the three bedroom dogs planned their sleeping strategy around my prone visage. Granted, Lucy was not very happy when I woke this morning and accidentally gave her a little prod from my right foot as I sprang to attention with the morning alarm.

Coffee is done brewing. House needs a good once-over before my beloved returns. I probably ought to take care of some other cleaning options around here as well.

Oooh. I also need to check my schedule for tomorrow. Might be an opportunity to take half a day off.

Tomorrow night Lisa and I are going to go to the KU-Tennessee State football game. KU is favored, so it could be fun. KU is supposedly favored by several touchdowns, but I think we ought to temper our expectations.

Dogs are requiring my attention, so I should wrap this up and be a dog dad.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Wednesday morning, 31 August 2022. Today will be a good day… Odin slept through the night (for the most part), I swing into Day 3 of my security course, and it’s payday… I’ll take it.

Odin sleeping through the night and not baying at the moon or barking incessantly made for a more satisfying sleep. There was one moment in the night when I had to tell him to stop barking, but it was brief, and I was able to drop back off to sleep.

I’m watching the news, and it’s the usual mix of good and bad. Former Soviet Union leader Gorbachev passed at the age of 91 – he’ll probably be remembered more fondly in the international media than he will be in his home country of Russia. Parts of Asia are suffering extremes in the weather, with flooding happening in one area, while there is a devastating heat wave and drought in other areas.

I am also glad I haven’t been caught with classified documents in my home. Looks like taking hope docs labeled “Top Secret” and stashing them in a desk drawer is a really bad idea.

Dogs are barking at Ryan Reynolds on TV. Might be time to watch “Deadpool” again.

Today I get to talk about key vaults and policies, then move on to more traditional topics like storage and shared-access signatures.

Coffee is done brewing, time for a cup.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Tuesday morning, 30 August 2022. I am not in a great mood right now… thank you, Odin, Lily, and Rosy.

Lisa has a meeting out of town, so she went to the airport very early this morning, leaving the house by 3:30 AM. I normally get up about 5:30… but Odin doesn’t care. He was barking ad howling for two hours, and the sisters Von Floof were more than happy to add their voices to the choir.

Now, right now, they are perfectly fine. Odin is on the back of the loveseat, staring out the picture window in the front of the house, and the little girls are lying beside me… yeah… now they chill out and nap.

I might have to sneak in a nap before I head to the virtual classroom today. Coffee is brewing, but I might just drink a glass of water for now.

Day 2 of my security course, teaching with an old friend this week. Today will be a little easier, as the first day of the security course is always a bear… lots of setup, lots of content, lots of labs.

Yeah, I’m thinking a quick little nap between 7 and 8 AM might not be such a bad idea.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning! It is 29 August 2022, a Monday morning. This is the unofficial last week of summer, as Labor Day weekend comes at the end of this week, and the sights and sounds of fall begin in earnest.

I’ve missed a couple of days of posting, as I focused on other tasks and responsibilities around here. Lisa and I had an enjoyable weekend as we recognized her 29th birthday again, and I pinged my brother Tom to wish him a good birthday as well.

There has been news, and as I look forward to the launch of the Artemis rocket, I am concerned about some of the news coming out about the security of the US. At this point the stories are little more than rumor, but if the rumors get confirmed, it really looks bad. Damage assessments, national security breaches, exposure of human assets.

This could really be bad. I wouldn’t want to be a foreign asset of the US government right now.

I get back into my virtual classroom here in a bit. It’s a security course, so a lot of folks take this sort of stuff very seriously.

Four days, and then my “official” September begins. Due to schedule movements, I have a non-delivery week next week so I can focus on some recertification I need to get wrapped up. The following week is built around some team meetings, and then I return back to teach an admin course. I had a non-delivery week scheduled for the first full week of October, but that was moved up a week so I can jump into another 4 week blended learning class in October.

Time to make the donuts…

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning! It is 26 August 2022, a Friday morning, and the sun has yet to break across my eastern horizon.

I was thinking about some song lyrics this morning…

“Sometimes in our lives
We all have pain
We all have sorrow

But if we are wise
We know that there’s
Always tomorrow”

We all have times when we need to lean on friends, lean on family. We get by with a little help from our friends. He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. Trouble me.

The other day, a bill was signed into law that gives some of my fellow Americans with student loan debt some relief. Some other countries on earth don’t have to worry about this because they provide free education for those pursuing college degrees. Others start training people for trades while they are still very young.

Right now a number of folks aren’t really happy about debt others have accumulated being transferred to others. It’s been surprising how many of those same people applied for and accepted loans from the federal government to keep their businesses afloat during the pandemic – loans that have now been forgiven.

The part that a lot of these folks are overlooking is their own profession of faith. A lot of folks who claim to be Christian seem to be overlooking the fact that the entire basis of the faith is the transfer of debt. He died for our sins. People recite the Lord’s Prayer every day- and one variation states, based on Matthew 6:9-13 “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

I’m not going to be sad or complain that some folks got some debt relief. Heck, big fossil fuel companies received funding in 2020 that costs twice what this student loan relief costs.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning! It is 25 August 2022, and I’m going to take a few moments to tell y’all about someone I love very much.

Today my mother turns 80 years old.

Hi mom! I know you don’t get out to the internet much, it’s not really your thing.

My mom was born in Minnesota, the second child born to Seg & Lyla Severson. Her older brother was born a year earlier on the exact same day. She would later become the “big sister”, as the family added two more younger brothers for her, then two younger sisters. From an age perspective, she was kind of on an island, with only boys for a long time, my aunts not being born until several years later.

She went to school and loved Iowa girl’s 3-on-3 basketball. She played guard. She also was a cheerleader.

Her cousin was engaged to a guy from Sioux City, and she went with her to see the city one day in the late fifties. As fate would have it, her cousin would break up with the man she was seeing, but that man had a younger brother. That younger brother would become her husband and my father.

My mom is a good person. She loves her kids, her grandkids, and all the many pets we’ve had around the house. I know there are a couple of names I could bring up around her that would likely bring a tear to her eye.

I’m going to give her a call later, as I doubt she’s up quite yet.

I love you, Mom.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning. It is 6:10 AM on 24 August 2022. Time for me to organize my thoughts and get focused on the task at hand. This morning I have a case study review of a networking problem, and later today we’ll get back in to office hours to further discuss cloud networking solutions.

More news this morning on how bad the classified document breach was at Mar-a-Lago. The Russians have been claiming ever since the docs were discovered that all of the classified information was in their hands as well. I hope that the FBI dusts all of those documents for prints.

I’ve had friends that served in the military and the US intelligence apparatus. I know they are trained on the proper treatment of classified documents.

I wonder if we’re going to get any rain this week?

Freya, our #2 oldest dog and the mother of the sisters Von Floof, has been having some kind of weird hiccough/cough thing the last couple of nights as well as during the day yesterday. I hope she gets over it soon.

Just a couple more days, then I get to turn my head to some different tasks. A full month of cloud solutions architecture can be whelming. Not underwhelming, not overwhelming, just whelming.

I think it’s funny that the spell check integrated into WordPress doesn’t recognize the word “whelming”.

Time to make the donuts…

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning! It is 23 August 2022, and I am wide awake. Coffee is dripping, my second large glass of water sitting to my right, and three pooches in my immediate vicinity.

Looks like the news has no shortage of stories this morning revolving around the Department of Justice and the seizure of government documents from the Eagles’ Nest. More docs are being requested from the National Archives by the select committee investigating the January 6th insurrection, and Cheeto Benito has filed a suit demanding a “Special Master” to determine the scope of the search warrant on his secret hideout and golf course to see if the documents seized were within scope.

I look forward to hearing the gavel fall on Trump’s legal troubles for the very last time, but that may be years down the road.

This morning I’ll be back in my virtual classroom, reviewing last week, previewing this week, as we discuss networking, business continuity, and migration. My training partner and I have quite a bit going on with this last four-day stint with this group.

Tuesday… and I am wondering about dinner tonight. Might have to make a run into town for taco ingredients.

Oooh. New story… Mudge is back. Didn’t know he had been in charge of security for Twitter. Looks like he’s turning whistleblower about security risks and poor compartmentalization at the micro-blogging service.

OK, time for me to focus on the day ahead.

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

Peace y’all.