It is Sunday night, January 31, 2021. It has been a rather uneventful day, to be honest with you.

Tonight I’m pondering tomorrow’s delivery, and thinking about heading off to bed sooner rather than later. There are puppies to attend to, and alarms to double check before calling it a night.

There is a peace in the quiet moments, pausing to reflect on my family, my career, some stuff that’s happening in the world. Everybody needs a little vacation from all the noise that goes on around us. I’m happy when I can get a break from dogs barking… the neighbor pooches run free, and they like to come crap on my lawn and get my dogs riled up. They’re bigger breeds, and out dogs are snack size for them. I think keeping them inside is the wise choice, but I wish I had a more effective way of running them off without hurting them.

That’s all I’m going to go for tonight.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Saturday night, the 30th of January, 2021. It’s been a rough day for this sportsfan, as my favorite college basketball team is in a slump. Worst slump I might have seen in all the years Lisa and I have lived in Lawrence.

So, that’s the kind of thing that happens sometimes. KU has had a cloud hanging over it for several years now. That cloud isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

There’s other clouds gathering as well, and I have no control over which way the wind blows.

I’m going to head off to bed here in a few minutes and ponder life, the universe, and everything. Might watch a little Saturday night live, too.

It’s just not a great day for me to write. It’s an odd sort of mindfulness, but the reality of it is, sometimes I have it sometimes I don’t. Better to pause and back away, with the purpose of being better tomorrow.

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

Peace y’all.

Hey gang, It is Friday night, the 29th day of January, 2021, and this old dog is ready to hit the sack. It’s been a work week, and I’ve done the work, and now I’m ready for a Friday night bedtime reward.

Don’t take that the wrong way. Sleep is the reward of which I speak. I’m not going to start writing a blog about the intimate details of my marriage.

Wait… how much money?

Just kidding. I love my wife, but I love her and respect her enough to never go into such prose. There’s plenty of that out there already.

Yeah, and then I start thinking about what I want to write about tonight.

I guess the respectful retrospective on my dad has kind of flown the coop at this point.

Our puppies are cute. So, there’s that.

This weekend might be a fairly unadventurous one. I probably ought to get a little more work done anyway. I have my High Performance training that I don’t want to get too far behind in… (Right? I signed up for the class, I need to fulfill the obligation, it’s good training, and I could stand a refresher).

OK. That’s about enough drivel from the Bobster tonight.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Thursday night, January 28, 2021. It’s been a day, some good things happened. Lisa and I had a nice dinner, we watched some basketball, and we spent some wonderful time with dogs.

Not too shabby.

Fireplace is kicking out more than a couple BTUs right at the moment. This sweater is keeping me one notch above cozy, and edging towards a being a little too warm.

Tomorrow will be a tough day, as it likely will for years to come. It’s my dad’s birthday. He passed away in August of 2019, and I think about him a lot. I wonder if he was proud of the man I grew into. I’m a dad, like him. I’m a flawed human being, like him. I do what I think is right in the situations that present themselves, like him.

I’m thinking about doing some more writing. There are other blogs to be written, and some other things I need to do to set down. Part of my brain is kind of locked into writing as if my future grandchildren’s memory/knowledge of me might depend on it.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Wednesday night, January 27, 2021. I was having a pretty good day today, with class going well, and I was just answering questions online and supporting my training partner this week.

Then, I saw a post on social media. A high school classmate of mine had passed away. I made an assumption, and I’m still riding that likelihood… he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer a few years ago, and I’m pretty sure that cancer ended up taking him.

It’s been a curse on his family, with several family members, including the baby of the family, Pat’s sister, Susan, who died from a different form of cancer a number of years ago. I’ll always remember Susan’s smile and positivity while she participated in so many high school theatrical productions.

I had Pat in some classes, but, at first, we didn’t have much in common, we ran with different crowds.

But there was something about Pat that caught my attention.

With all the students that I went to school with back in the seventies and early eighties, Pat was unique. In his back right pocket, there always seemed to be a handkerchief, and in his left back pocket there was that one thing that gave us something to talk about.

Pat always seemed to have a paperback book in his back pocket.

I remember asking him about it one time, and he joked, “What? You didn’t think I could read?”.

Yeah, I kind of screwed up that conversational opening. But we started talking about books we liked and we had something in common.

Pat was the guy that introduced me to a couple of different authors, most notably, George R.R. Martin and the Song of Ice and Fire.

We had been in touch through social media. and chatted from time to time. We talked about his cancer diagnosis when it first came down, and we talked about treatment.

And we talked about getting together and throwing back a bottle of better booze when he got a clean bill of health.

That didn’t happen.

I bought a bottle today. It’s a 19 year-old bottle of Glennfiddich. It’s a commemorative “Age of Discovery” edition, aged in a Bourbon cask. I’ll crack it here in a few days and raise a glass to Pat Maxey.

I think then I’ll set that bottle off to the side, and raise a glass with fellow Salina Central Class of ’81 classmates that drop by my digs as time goes by.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Tuesday night, January 26, 2021. I’ve got a nice fire going in the wood-burning stove, and the heat coming out of that front is enough to fill the room with a gently, glorious breeze embracing me like a warm blanket.

I’m teaching a class this week, and the primary instructor and myself have divided up the work load. I covered the first six modules yesterday and today, and I’ll hand off to my partner in the morning as we tackle modules 7, 8, and 9. I’ll be back on deck first thing Thursday morning, but the rest of the modules fall to him, and that’s great because I get to hear a great instructor deliver the content I am not as comfortable with as I would like to be.

After this week I’ll have delivered 9 of the 15 modules for this course, and I anticipate I’ll get the others delivered in the coming months.

In a few weeks, I’ll be sitting a different class, the follow on to this one, so I can teach the AZ-304, rounding out the complete suite of Cloud Solutions Architecture classes. After that, the Azure Security class will be on the horizon. Ideally, I’d like to get to a point where I’m delivering one of each, AZ-104, AZ-303, AZ-304, and AZ-500 in a rotation.

I think somebody once said that if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

I feel that way about being a Microsoft Certified Trainer. I just renewed for year 26.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Monday night, January 25, 2021. Lisa and I are the only humans in the house, and the tiny little squeaks we hear in the background emanate from the little dog crate, as the two pups play and the rest of us watch in the awesome power of delicate life.

I’m taking a class on creating a high performance mind set, and it has given me some solid food for thought. I’m thinking about things I really haven’t contemplated in years, going back to some of the seminars I participated in back in the early 90’s. Matters of goal setting and time management, life balance and the perpetual pursuit of excellence.

A long time ago, I really got into the motivational speaker thing. I’d go to see the big names in self-improvement, and I’d listen to the audiobooks, and read the articles, and buy the expensive planner (OK, truth is, I still buy a planner… and sometimes I actually use the thing to track stuff).

I listened to “The Secret” audiobook… ok, truth, I think I’d like to go back through it again. I do wonder about the Law of Attraction and Creative Visualization.

There’s always good material out there for those that want to dig into it. Some of it I really like, but because there’s always a buck to be made, there are some guys out there that really aren’t that great. You get some good, you get some mediocrity, you get some that you drop off in the canister on your way out the door There are some really good motivational speakers out there, and I hope you find some folks that speak to you and reach you, and find a way to help you transform yourself into the best version of you that you can be,

OK, that’s an article. A post on this 20,951st day of my life.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Sunday night, the 24th day of January, 2021. I am very pleased to pass along that the Kansas City Chiefs have defeated the Buffalo Bills and will be facing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the Superbowl on February 7th.

It was a good game, and the Chiefs gave up the lead early, but came back with a vengeance, at one point up by over 20 points.

The Superbowl this year takes place in Tampa Bay. The Buccaneers will be sleeping in their own beds. Playing at home is a big advantage in a normal year. This is no normal year.

On the negative side, my primary internet access has been down most of the evening. I’ve made a couple of support calls, but I’m concerned that the lack of connectivity will adversely affect my delivery starting tomorrow morning. I have reached out to my training partner to let him know about my internet challenges, and I hope to get it resolved sooner rather than later.

I need to think about hitting that hay. I am trying to get more sleep, trying to get a solid 7.5 to 8 hours of sleep as part of a high performance training program I am participating in .

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

Peace y’all.

It is Saturday night, January 23, 2021. Had a somewhat productive day, for a Saturday, with some work, some laundry, and a run to Kansas City to pick up a piece of furniture.

The dogs are well, and the two little ones are just so darn cute.

Got some steaks in the sous vide, set to go on the grill just before tomorrow night’s game, Chiefs hosting the Bills.

It’s a writer’s block kind of night, with me thinking about too many things other than writing.

So, I pause and spend a few minutes holding our now four-week-old puppies.

Tomorrow is Sunday, and I’ve got some more rep work to prep my demo environment for the class starting Monday. I need to remember to log in and activate my Azure Pass and the Premium P2 trial for Azure Active Directory.

Sometimes I just take a look at all the things I would like to accomplish and wonder where the time went.

I’m going to wrap this up. I’m just not into writing a whole lot tonight. I wrote more than enough last night to cover a couple of entries, so I’m not going to beat myself up over not having much to dwell on.

Go Chiefs, beat the Bills.

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

Peace y’all.

It is Friday night, January 22, 2021. My wife is calmly sleeping in the recliner next to mine, and my dog, Odin, is whimpering because the one toy he absolutely wants to play with more than any other toy has rolled under the couch out of his reach, and he wants me to get it out for him. It would be the fifth time tonight if I were to get up and retrieve his toy for him.

My wife says that Odin is doing a good job training me.

It’s all a part of my new normal.

Normal.

One word that means something a little bit different for everybody. For some folks it means one set of standards based on experience and the way that one person feels. And that’s ok. That’s ok for that one person. It’s a subjective truth.

My normal, my subjective truth, is unique for me, just as yours is your normal. It would be wrong for me to require you to adopt my definition of normal… unless, of course, your definition of normal involves being a serial killer or rapist.

President Biden has announced a reversal of the transgender ban for the military. An old high school classmate is opposed to it. Granted, he’s also a Trump supporter, and liked Trump’s LGBTQ agenda. It might seem a bit snarky, but I think Trump would’ve preferred that community just stayed out of his sight. He had his idea about normal, and he wanted to impose that set of beliefs on everybody else.

My normal is no one else’s normal.

If somebody else’s normal makes me uncomfortable, is the problem with them, or is the problem my own?

All too often, people would rather deny freedom to others because it makes them feel icky, it makes them feel uncomfortable, it makes them feel … something.

I think at the heart of it, folks just can’t wrap their minds around the idea that we all deserve to be happy, and so long as you aren’t hurting anybody else, it’s really none of your business.

Suck it up, Snowflake. The first sex change procedures took place in 1952, almost 70 years ago.

That’s quite some time. Preceded a lot of the modern civil rights laws that were enacted during a tumultuous time in the US and the rest of the world. Today, we accept all those civil rights changes (most of us do anyway… ironically, the same folks that have problems with equality for all, also have a problem with folks transitioning their gender… no coincidence, I think) without blinking an eye for the most part.

Let’s give those folks a chance to find their own normal. Let’s not force others to accept our definition of normal.

I’d rather be in a foxhole with a transgender soldier that felt good about his/her/their life than with a miserable human that was so tired of having to accept other’s “normal” that they were ready to flip a spoon and check out.

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

Peace y’all.