It is Sunday morning, June 5, and I’m relaxing a little bit on this drizzly morning. Lisa is getting ready to head into town to do a little shopping. I’ve got some work stuff to focus on, and maybe some gaming this afternoon with friends.

Dealing with an irritating situation at the moment – my Alienware M15 R6 doesn’t appear to be taking a charge. I’ve got the thing plugged in, the icon in the lower right shows it’s plugged in, but the battery charge just slowly dwindles. I left it sitting on the charger last night, expecting to see it at 100% this morning, and I am a bit disappointed to see the charge sitting at 62%. I’ll get it back on power a little later. Some mystery needs to be solved, and I’m wondering if a power reset might be called for.

Tomorrow I start a four-day class for a private customer. It will be a small class, so I’ll be going solo for four days. The following week I will be able to enjoy a week of internal sessions focused on making me a better instructor. After that, it’s closing out the year with two straight weeks of cloud solutions architecture and a couple of down days to make sure all of my ducks are in a row.

Settling in now to watch Wales v Ukraine in a European qualifiers UEFA playoff. It would kind of suck to be anybody playing against Ukraine now in a sporting event, because of the sentiments of support directed towards the Ukraine team. I’ve got nothing against Wales, but certainly, the Ukraine team has earned a soft spot in the heart of many sports fans.

Wow… that yellow card came out quick.

OK, time for my to focus on the tasks at hand, and get this unit back on the charger. I’m wondering if I get it down to 3% or so if that will help in tracking down the source of my charging problem.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Saturday morning, June 6th, and I’m just sitting in the living room pondering the day, wondering how much I can get done before my body says, “Nope”.

Dane has been up already, as he had to run over to his sister’s place to tend to her dogs. Lisa has breakfast just about ready to go, with sausage, pancakes, and eggs. I made a pot of coffee, medium-roast Tanzanian peaberry. Two of the dogs, Rosy and Lily, are trying to get my attention because that tummy is not going to scratch itself.

Last weekend I spent time on the little mower trimming the front of the house and getting a little closer to the fence line. Today might be a diesel day, breaking out the tractor from the barn and dropping the big cutter to take care of the main parts of the property. The new tractor does a great job cutting the heavier stuff. I just try to keep from getting too close to the edge of the pond, keeping a good six feet from the edge.

My nephew has a baseball game in Baldwin today. We should get over for a game sometime.

Other than that, there’s some work stuff kind of hanging out there that I need to attend to. Just some preparatory stuff prior to the start of my class on Monday – a solo shot with a private customer.

Time to get over to the breakfast table.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Friday, June 3, and the last day of my workweek. I start off the day with a meeting with teammates in Atlanta and Stockholm. We’re getting things taken care of earlier rather than later.

Looks like there was some drama in Washington, DC, yesterday, as legislators argued for and against a piece of legislation that is supposed to make our kids safer from gun violence, this after the murders in Uvalde, TX. You can bet that most of the Texas legislators will vote against it, and they’ll stand at the ready with thoughts and prayers.

Nothing is going to change.

This will happen again… hell, it already has. We had attacks at two different hospitals, one in Tulsa, and the other in Ohio. I think there was another shooting in Florida as well.

Apparently, for many legislators, enough of the right people haven’t died.

It makes me sick, but nothing is going to change.

Meeting in about another hour…

The weather is a bit cool for June here. The daily temperatures are staying in the high 70s, low 80s. The pool could stand a little more heat.

OK, time to make the donuts.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Thursday morning, June 2, and I’m about to pour my first cup of coffee. I’ve got plenty to keep me occupied with work responsibilities today, as I prep for some additional Klaxoon materials and read up on a couple of other courses I should be tackling starting next month.

I’ve got a fellow trainer I’ve been working with for the last year, a bit of a mentorship role for me, and he and I talked a bit yesterday. He was a little down after taking on a new certification exam and not passing it. I had to let him know – failing a certification exam isn’t the worst thing in the world. One of my standing jokes is that I’ve taken over 80 certification exams and I know I passed at least 4. Fact is, I’ve passed over 60… and that in itself kind of blows my mind – but I’ve been a certified trainer since ’95, and when you figure two or three new certifications a year, you can get to 60 pretty quick.

I also need to keep myself available for some other conversations as well. There is just so much going on right now, it can be a be… whelming.

In the meantime, I should get to work on my day.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Wednesday, June 1. What will this new month bring? Time will tell, I guess.

I’ve got plenty to keep me busy today. I have a class next week, but that won’t require a great deal of prep work… I’m pretty family with the admin course at this point. The week after that, I get to sit some internal training to help me become a more active, engaged presenter.

I’ll close out the month and the fiscal year with two weeks of cloud solutions architecture.

It’s been rainy here again this week. We’re hoping that the sun comes out and dries out the ground a little bit so I can get back out and mow. I’ve also got some other responsibilities (note: I just wrote “otter responsibilities”… not sure if that was a simple typographical error or a Freudian slip… I love otters!) such as getting some bills taken care of – I forgot to take care of the tags and taxes on a couple of cars, so that gets addressed first thing after I’m done writing.

I might have a chance to get together with my friends online tonight. I do enjoy a midweek escape when the opportunity presents itself.

Time to make the donuts…

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning, and hello, Tuesday! It is the last day of May, 2022, and I’m just getting my day going. Looks like it’s going to be another gray rainy day here in rural Douglas County, but at least I won’t have to worry about watering the trees out in the orchard.

Or anything else for that matter.

Spent some time working on my virtual classroom rig yesterday, and I had a pretty good experience. I added a secondary writing monitor to my main system and hooked in my other monitor, so two displays mirrored, and a third for displaying my Teams meeting.

I’ve got some paperwork to get caught up on this morning, but I intentionally left some flexibility in my schedule. I have a teammate in Sweden that wants to get together this week to focus on some presentation software.

It’s just going to be one of those “slow-roller” kind of days, I think, where there’s this semi-structured pile of tasks that need to be addressed, but nothing very “time-dependent”. I’ll get stuff done in time, but there’s no sequence defined. Just dive into the pile and see where it leads me.

I’m going to grab a cup of coffee and get going on the tasks of the day.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Monday, May 30, Memorial Day… the day we pause and reflect, a time for us to recognize those who have given so much for the freedom and the country we live in today. Normally, we think about soldiers, and front-line folks that fought in wars… people like a 3x great grandfather of mine that died in Murfreesboro, Tennessee during the civil war. His name was George Yenne, and died at the age of 43, leaving a wife and nine children.

These days, I know we’re supposed to mourn our war dead, but it seems that there are other violent deaths that need to be in the forefront of today’s dialogue. We keep losing children to gun violence.

Right now, in the United States, the leading cause of death for children and teens is gun violence.

A lot of people in industry and in the government don’t want to talk about it.

I saw a post from the NRA national convention, a gentleman stepping to the microphone, and his talk was on the misinformation being spread about NRA grand poobah Wayne LaPierre. The thing is, it was sarcasm, addressing Mr. LaPierre’s tough stand on gun control, and stating that no one is thinking harder or praying harder than Wayne LaPieere, a side-eye sneer at the NRA’s perpetual post massacre mantra of “thoughts and prayers” for the dead.

The NRA loves massacres. America’s gun manufacturers make a lot of money following an event like this because they get to capitalize on the fear of the unknown, and the fear that our politicians will finally take some sort of action to prevent this from happening again.

Then they take a portion of those profits and drop them right into campaign finances for the politicians that will vote their way every time.

Nothing is going to change. Maybe someday, we’ll hit some magic number of dead kids. But until the politicians that are owned by the NRA feel this in a deep, personal way, they won’t do anything. Expect the status quo. Nothing changed after all of the other shootings, don’t expect anything now.

So, all of you politicians under control of the gun lobby – what’s the magic number? Is is 100? Is it a 1000? I’m guessing that the real number is 1… an unspeakable number 1. Someday that might happen, but until that day, our kids are nothing more than silhouettes on the range.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning, folks. It’s a beautiful, albeit windy, Sunday in rural Douglas County. Apologies for not posting yesterday. Lisa and I started off the day going to the garden center, and the day just kind of slipped away from me from there.

After my morning with Lisa, Dane and I went out for lunch. Buskerfest is happening this weekend in Lawrence, so the downtown side streets were filled with musicians, magicians, balancing acts, and various other street entertainers. We grabbed some tacos and nachos.

After that, Dane and I stopped at a little game shop in east Lawrence, The Dragon’s Hoard. Nice little place, will likely pick a few things up when the opportunity requires a new book or tabletop game.

Last night, Bonnie was focused on a book, so Dane and I had control of the remote, so we watched the premiere episodes of “Obi Won Kenobi” on Disney+. We enjoyed that.

Today, we’ve got a slower day, and I get together with guys online later this afternoon. I think we’ve got pork chops for the grill tonight, and a slower day overall. I probably ought to get some plants in the ground as well.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Friday, May 27th, and I am thankful for the last day in my work week. After a couple of meetings this morning, I’m contemplating taking Friday afternoon off and relaxing to start this Memorial Day weekend.

Folks are still talking about the Uvalde shooting, and how it was handled, and possibly mishandled. I’m reading folks post suggestions about how to address the issue, and they get dumbstruck the moment I ask them, “How do they handle it in other countries where this happens?”.

This doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world. Anyplace where it has happened, Tasmania, Australia, the UK, Norway, they took swift action. No, they didn’t redesign buildings to make them safer. No, they didn’t implement active shooter drills. No, they didn’t implement more thorough background checks.

They did something that is unspeakable in the United States. We love our guns more than we love the victims of firearms.

In my life, I’ve known at least half a dozen people that were killed with guns, more if you count the suicides.

It’s time we do something, but I know we won’t. The NRA and their lobbyists are in the ear of every politician they gave money to and they are making absolutely certain that there will be no real changes to the law. The gun lobby and the manufacturers that make these weapons make more money following a massacre such as this because they thrive on fear. Fear of changes to the law. Fear of the “other”. Fear of some societal change.

The right-wing is all for making sure the women have their babies, but after those kids are born, in the eyes of the gun lobby, they are no longer looked at as people… they’re just silhouettes.

I bet if the children of the gun lobbyists were losing their kids at Sandy Hook, Parkland, or Uvalde, they might take action.

They won’t though. They are going to protect their source of revenue, and damn the collateral damage.

I need to take a break.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning. It is Thursday, May 26, and I made the mistake of visiting the comments sections again. It’s amazing to me how some folks want to steer a conversation in a particular direction to justify that person’s feelings towards another group of people.

People can suck sometimes.

Last night I replied to a post an old friend made. He posted pictures of the kids that were killed in Uvalde, Texas the other day. I replied in a rather neutral tone that after Sandy Hook, nothing changed, and after Parkland, nothing changed, and after this shooting, I wouldn’t expect anything to change either.

Then it became a cavalcade of stupidity.

One guy (who I ended up blocking) blamed everything but the availability of guns. He wanted to talk about the problem was a lack of masculinity, the rise of antifa and BLM, and trans kids. Seriously. What the hell was this guy’s problem, other than testosterone toxicity, mixed with ample portions of racism and homophobia. He absolutely was dead set on changing the subject.

Another clown simply stated that as I lived in Kansas, my opinion didn’t matter.

Well – regarding that… I’m a liberal living in Kansas, so, yeah, I’m used to being told my opinion doesn’t matter. There’s only one opinion that does seem to matter, and that’s the opinion of an energy billionaire based in Wichita who pretty much runs the Kansas GOP, and controls the state government.

I need to get ready for my day.

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

Peace y’all.