It is Saturday morning, January 22, 2022, and I am starting my day with coffee, scrambled eggs, and bacon. Threw back two big glasses of water while my coffee was brewing, and I am sated.

Sometimes I start off the day with news, right up until they get to some update on the pandemic and hospitalization numbers. Then, I must confess, it does get me down a little bit. ICUs and hospital beds are still being occupied by so many people that picked the wrong hill… the unvaccinated one. To me, the anti-vax misinformation campaign is being pushed by the same sorts of people that would take pleasure in a whisper campaign to convince some vulnerable victim to commit suicide. They do it just to see how much influence they can have on a person, and when they find out they can convince someone to do something that shattering, they revel in it. It strikes me as a form of sociopathy.

I guess people don’t get it. Every time an unvaccinated American dies, somebody somewhere revels in some sick joy.

Ok, back to other topics.

Wrapped up the second time through of my newest course, and it went very well, I really enjoyed working with my training partner this week, and he did a great job with the material… any time I can sit a class with a teammate and learn from their experience, that’s a win. I have my weaknesses just like anybody else (developer-related topics), but today I feel like I can wrap my pointy head around the topics just a little bit better.

Basketball games later today, KU@K-State. The KU head coach just lost his dad a couple of days ago, and now we go into an arena that has a reputation for not always behaving well. I do hope they take the higher ground and don’t mock the passing of Coach’s dad. That would be a very unkind thing to do. I guess we’ll see later this afternoon.

That’s enough for now. I’ve got a prep week this next week, ramping up on another class, and helping with the revisions to another.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Friday, the last day of my work week, and the 21st day of January, 2022.

I woke up this morning to the sad news that Meat Loaf, born Marvin Aday, has passed. This is sad news to me. His role in “Rocky Horror Picture Show” was a debut, but his album “Bat Out of Hell”, featuring songs written by Jim Steinman, was one of the greatest albums in rock and roll history.

I started off my little tribute to him on my Facebook page with the opening spoken line from “You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth”.

“On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses“

Gees.

The guy sang overly dramatic anthems of love and loss, and they all just seemed to “stick”. “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad” “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” “I Would Do Anything for Love”.

Ugh.

2022 is off to a rough start.

I’m going to keep this fairly short this morning, then go into my workspace and crank up his debut album. The world lost a voice today.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Thursday, January 20, 2022. It is ten minutes past six in the morning, and the coffee maker has just made that gurgling, bubbling sound to let me know that the carafe is full of my preferred morning beverage, coffee made with freshly ground medium-roast Tanzanian Peaberry.

There’s lots of talk about the economy, the virus, the Russians, the January 6th hearings. There are a lot of people out there that still prefer misinformation over truth with verifiable evidence. You can lead a horse to water, but…

Class is going pretty well this week. One thing I try to do when a new class enters the mix is teach it early and often. There’s always a bit of a ramp-up time with a new course as I try to get comfortable with all aspects of the subject material and get comfortable with the banter about the class. I want it to flow, y’know? It’s only my second delivery of this class, but I know I’ve got more deliveries scheduled in the coming months. I’ll get there.

No real revelations to share this morning. Just working through my day, trying to establish the routine of getting up, writing, meditating, coffee, breakfast, gratitude. Like I just told my daughter, just focusing on being a better human being today than I was yesterday… we’re all works in progress.

That’ll do for now.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Wednesday morning, January 19, 2022. It’s fairly relaxed around here, and thoughts have turned to having COVID tests at hand just in case. The Biden administration has implemented a program to provide millions of tests for US citizens so we can all get a better grasp on this pandemic. Let’s hope it opens a few eyes, I’ve ordered four.

I may be downplaying current events. There is still a whole lot of smoke around the former guy and some of the business practices his organization endorsed when it came to the valuation of properties – one value for the banks, and a different value when it came to taxation. Ol’ Donnie and the crew might have a bit of trouble on that front with the District of Southern New York. I won’t shed tears if they get brought up on fraud charges.

I’ve got my second day in the classroom a little later this morning. Not expecting any real challenges with today’s deliveries. I do have a meeting with my manager as well, and I expect that to be nothing but positive.

All in all, this day should be relatively uneventful, and sometimes boring is good. Seems to appeal to my blood pressure.

I’ve got some other things to tend to this morning, so I’m going to wrap this up and get going on my day. No outrage to spew out onto the page this day.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Tuesday, January 18, 2022. Time for me to get in my expense report for the month.

I hope you are well. More and more people are not. There have been multiple school closings around the state due to COVID outbreaks, and now I’m watching talking heads on TV debating whether progressives should apologize for closing schools down during a highly contagious pandemic that has five million people worldwide.

Dear lady on TV. I am so sorry that you have been inconvenienced. I get that you need to use our public school system to keep an eye on your kids while you write articles for whatever periodical you write for. You seem genuine in your concern for your kids and their education.

The problem isn’t really the kids. Almost every kid in the world has a pretty robust immune system and will bounce back. I completely get that you’re willing to sacrifice a few kids nationwide/worldwide for the advancement of the rest. But there might be a better approach.

I doubt she has volunteered to be a substitute teacher. That is a pinch point in her argument. The need for hundreds of substitute teachers in our local school district has led to a chance in the rules… at this point, if you have a high school degree (not college, certainly not a college degree in primary or secondary education) and have passed a background check. I guess the upside is that we won’t have to worry about Lauren Boebert lining up with her gun belt and bandolero to teach American History or Constitution class.

I’m worried. My wife is a university professor and department chair. She is working under a directive from the provost to show up on campus every single day. No remote classes. I’m not going to go into her health/medical history, but there’s enough there to give both of us cause to worry.

I get to teach from home today. Remotely. With an audience that will likely span time zones and continents.

All I can do is pray that she doesn’t get it and that if she does, the vaccines work for her.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Monday morning, January 17, 2022. It’s going to be a day. On the plus side, it’s a national holiday, a day of remembrance for perhaps the greatest civil rights leader in US history, Martin Luthor King. Also on the plus side, the Chiefs knocked off the Steelers and likely sent Ben Roethlisberger riding off into the sunset as his career as a professional football player is drawing to a close.

Then there is the other side of the coin. A high school friend messaged me last night to let me know that a mutual friend had passed due to COVID. She was a classmate, a musician, a military wife, and a military mom. She was a good person, but somewhere along the line she apparently decided that getting vaccinated was the wrong choice for her. There is a little less music in the world today, thank you anti-vaxxers.

It pisses me off. This was an unnecessary death.

There is so much irony, much of it quite bitter, about this pandemic. We have vaccines. We have a distribution plan. And we have folks out there spreading volumes of misinformation about the vaccine.

The numbers are back to going up each week as I track the COVID-19 mortality numbers each week. Twelve hundred more dead this week than the previous week, and the numbers have gone back over 12,000 for the week.

Wake the hell up, people. Get vaccinated.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Sunday, January 16, 2022. I have a cup of coffee clearly in need of a refill, so that may be the ultimate limiting factor in determining the length of this blog post.

I’m going to try and give my brain a day off. I say that and I immediately turn to the topics at work that require the most attention. I’ve had a couple of ideas, and I’m anxious to implement them, but it doesn’t need to be done right now.

“Hey, all you amateur crastinators, come check me out! I’m a pro!”

I’ll jump on Discord later and hang out with some friends on Virtual Table Top and make a world safe for humanoids and their friends. That engages and distracts at the same time. I’m very grateful to the crew I get to play with just about every Sunday afternoon.

Tonight, I get to watch my favorite NFL team play in the first round of the playoffs, as the Kansas City Chiefs host the Pittsburg Steelers. With this possibly being Ben Roethlisberger’s swan song, and the return of his favorite wide receivers off the Injured Reserve list, I worry that this could be a trap game, expecting the Chiefs to be thinking about next week rather than this week. There will be a couple of calls that will be outrageous and I will likely be among the fans screaming at the TV when they happen, but they’re part of the game, and a future source of arguments and threats of bodily harm between the bros.

I hope it’s a good game. I hope nobody gets injured (the difference between being hurt and being injured, right?), and, as a person that accepts his bias, I hope the Chiefs win. I’ll also hope that it can be credited to the defense rather than any struggles Big Ben might be having with nagging injuries. I hope it’s a classic.

Alright, looks like my cup needs to be refilled. Might be time to watch church… been doing that since the beginning of the pandemic.

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

Peace y’all.

Had to double-check my days… in the past I’ve often popped in the wrong day (how many days I’ve been alive), but I have made it a regular task to go check my “How many days have you been alive” page at imrodmartin.com.

58 years and change.

With more change to come, I guess.

It’s snowing this morning, and there are talking heads on TV discussing political issues du jour. Former Democrats complaining about Democrats, Former Republicans complaining about Republicans. Right now I’m glad I’m not aligned with a political party… but I do wish I could have a say in the primaries of both parties. Lately, there have been questionable candidates on both sides, more focused on advancing their parties than advancing the cause of the American people in total.

Maybe I should avoid politics today.

I like books.

Empty ones. With either a grid or dot pattern.

I like to write in them. I think everybody should have one at the ready to jot down tasks, ideas, and the things that pop in your head that sound interesting or funny at the time… the kind of things that are better kept quiet depending on the context of the moment. Some things are definitely best unsaid, but I have no problem jotting them down and enjoying them later when I take a moment to review the other relevant notes that I hopefully remembered to write down when I was also focused on a quip that I found humorous.

I have soft covers and hardcovers, and when Borders went out of business, I think I bought every 5″ x 8″ grid journal they had in two different stores… much to my wife’s chagrin.

Not all journals are created equal. Some definitely have features I like a little more – the consistency of a Moleskine, or the professionalism of the Code and Quill Monoliths and some of their other offerings (including a habit system, which we could all use from time to time to create more positive habits).

OK, that’s enough for now. Time to grab my planner (yes, I still use one) to mark some things down, goals, achievements, as well as review my milestones for conquering western civilization. Just kidding… why would anybody want to be responsible for this mess?

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

Peace y’all.

Today is Friday, January 14, 2022. Watching some of the news and it’s all gloom and doom. Kind of got me thinking, and I’m going to start off with a story about lemmings.

Back in the 50’s, Disney was very good at making nature documentaries. It dove-tailed very well with their family-friendly movies and television programs. They had an image to maintain. In 1958, they created a nature documentary called “White Wilderness” about wildlife in the far northern regions. One segment of the show featured lemmings, small rodents in the same family as voles and muskrats. It was in this documentary that the legend/myth was created that lemmings committed mass suicide.

From the Alaska Department of Fish and Game:

“According to a 1983 investigation by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation producer Brian Vallee, the lemming scenes were faked. The lemmings supposedly committing mass suicide by leaping into the ocean were actually thrown off a cliff by the Disney filmmakers. The epic “lemming migration” was staged using careful editing, tight camera angles and a few dozen lemmings running on snow covered lazy-Susan style turntable.

“White Wilderness” was filmed in Alberta, Canada, a landlocked province, and not on location in lemmings’ natural habitat. There are about 20 lemming species found in the circumpolar north – but evidently not in that area of Alberta. So the Disney people bought lemmings from Inuit children a couple provinces away in Manitoba and staged the whole sequence.

In the lemming segment, the little rodents assemble for a mass migration, scamper across the tundra and ford a tiny stream as narrator Winston Hibbler explains that, “A kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent and, carried along by an unreasoning hysteria, each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destiny.”

That destiny is to jump into the ocean. As they approach the “sea,” (actually a river -more tight cropping) Hibbler continues, “They’ve become victims of an obsession — a one-track thought: Move on! Move on!”

The “pack of lemmings” reaches the final precipice. “This is the last chance to turn back,” Hibbler states. “Yet over they go, casting themselves out bodily into space.”

Basically, Disney frightened a bunch of rodents into killing themselves.

These days I’ve heard more than one talking head say that they would rather die than take the vaccine.

I can’t help but draw a comparison. It’s not natural to kill yourself, but some folks apparently are willing to do so rather than take a vaccine because they are afraid.

Seems to be trending.

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

Peace y’all.

Good morning! It is Thursday, January 13, 2022. Today is the last day of my new course delivery, and next week, I get to do it all over again.

Regarding my post the other day when I was a bit “under it”, meaning the weather. I had an old friend reach out to me in the comments to let me know that he’s got my back covered, and I certainly appreciate it. To be honest, it came as a surprise… I didn’t know he read my blog posts at all (I don’t do much promotion other than a Twitter post).

Thank you, sir, for your support. It matters.

After I get this wrapped up today, I’ll go back through in my own head about what we got right and where we could stand to improve a bit. I think this week has gone pretty well for a first delivery or new content, but I am keenly aware that deliveries I do 6 months from now will bear little semblance to this week’s class.

OK, enough about that. Sitting here, waiting for my coffee to finish brewing, contemplating eggs or low-carb toast with peanut butter for breakfast (right now, the idea of toast and peanut butter with a cup of coffee is winning). Plotting my day out with breaks at 10:15 and 2:15, and a one-hour lunch… I have a tendency to work backward on my day, calculating the start time, the end time, subtracting the breaks, and there you go – that’s how much time I have left to deliver today’s content. It’ll be a reasonable day, covering three subjects that migrated pretty cleanly from the previous version of the course.

OK, that’s enough for today. Time to get my cup of joe and get my brain dialed in for the day ahead.

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

Peace y’all.