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accepted offer on big brick mansion
Thursday, May 19 2016
At some point today, Gretchen got a call from our realtor telling us that our latest offer (of $275,000) for the big brick mansion in Kingston had been accepted. I was a little taken aback and conflicted about it, but Gretchen was delighted. There had actually been a higher offer, but it had been contingent on the sale of real estate in Brooklyn, and the seller didn't want to deal with that noise. It's looking like managing that property (and our purchase of it) will be a big part of what Gretchen does on a day-to-day basis, so it's good she's coming into this underemployed.
Meanwhile, I continue to be very much overcommitted. Just when it seems like some time-suck in my life is winding down (such as commitments to my mentee), something new comes along to wrest away more of my hours. The latest gig came yesterday in the form of an emergency contract with a famous American candy manufacturer who learned of my existence through Chris (the male half of the photogenic vegan Buddhists whose 49th birthday I attended last Friday). He thought of me because of my employment with The Organization when a friend of his who works for that manufacturer said she was having personnel issues in her one-man web development team. So now, in addition to everything else, I've been given a one-off server administration gig. If I build out my professional network a little more, maybe my current fulltime gig will start to seem a little quaint, much like the Geneva Conventions.
Meanwhile in that fulltime gig, my soon-to-be-departed boss (Meerkat) took the day off, making for a significantly less stressful day. When, during our daily "stand-up" nobody seemed to be taking advantage of his absence to talk smack about him, I thought I'd get things going after Da told everyone to go through their task lists and ask any questions they had about the tasks before Meerkat left The Organization. "But make sure you don't ask any questions he's already answered in one of his documents," I chimed in, "or he will yell at you!" That got everybody going, and I just sat back and basked in the pent-up bile. There's real power to be had by being the ballsiest one in a social group, and I've demonstrated my ballsiness several times with this group.
Another of my efforts with this group (or, more particularly, with the colleague who will soon be my boss, Da) has been to reign in the impulse to throw away everything Meerkat built after he leaves and attempt to rebuild it from scratch using the latest technology. Meerkat's code is old and unfashionable, but it is reliable and easy for me to work with, and I've decided that it's in my interest to preserve as much of it as I can. Being something of a slave to web development fashion, Da looks at it like a member of ISIS looking at Assyrian sculptures, and I can see that my main use of my political capital after Meerkat leaves will be to preserve what I can of his legacy. He's a terrible, soul-crushing person to work with, but, despite its lack of documentation and comments, his code is delightfully friendly and non-brittle, and it would be a lot less depressing to expand on the things he has built than to ignorantly try to copy it using whatever the cool kids are using these days (but won't be using two years from now).
This evening before I went to bed, I drank maybe a cubic centimeter or so of tincture of kanna (Sceletium tortuosum) to see what it would do. It didn't kick in until after I went to bed. I fell asleep briefly and then awoke to a surge of something that felt a little like euphoria, though it was slightly unpleasant as well. After that, I had difficulty falling asleep, though if I was stimulated, it was a very mellow stimulation. After about ten minutes I had another rush similar to that first one, though it didn't reach quite as high. I probably fell asleep about a half hour after that. My last memories were of mild closed-eye hallucinations of a slightly-irregular matrix of small closely-packed white blobs jiggling about.
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