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had to be revanquished
Friday, September 23 2016
Gretchen headed off to Asbury Park, New Jersey today to participate in a two-day workshop. Since the weather looked promising, she intended to go to the beach. Here in Hurley, though, the sky was an early-autumn grey and the air was a little colder than was appropriate for the inertia of being dressed in our summer clothes. Despite that, I made a french press of coffee and we drank it outside. Due to the ongoing drought, there are almost no mosquitoes, making our yard a radically different place from the way it was in, say, mid July.
On Fridays, The Organization has an all-hands meeting at the office in West Hollywood, and those of us who work remotely call in to participate. One person for every department sums up the department's work, and it's supposed to be "snackable" and "uplifting." Our leader Da always gives the update for IT, and for some reason he always says how many tasks we completed for the week and that we "are going to complete a whole lot more." Today he had to be in a meeting with investors, so it fell to me to give the summary at the weekly meeting. (At this point it's pretty clear that I'm the de-facto second-in-command in IT, though that's only five people.) I was actually pretty nervous in anticipation of having to speak, and I wrote down what I would be saying. I've never liked the thing where Da talked about how many tasks we'd closed, so today I joking said the usual thing about the number of tasks closed, but then added that some of those rose from the dead and had to be revanquished.
[REDACTED]
It was still the middle of my workday, but I slipped out a little after 5:00pm to get provisions from Hurley Ridge Market. We would be hosting a debate viewing party on Monday (for Clinton's first debate with Trump) and the food would be from all the places Donald Trump likes to disparage (particularly Mexico, China, and the Middle East). Gretchen had prepared me a shopping list of mostly produce items, a thing for which Hurley Ridge is not especially noted. I managed to make it to the Tibetan Center Thrift store a few minutes before closing, but there was nothing there I wanted. They did have a set of Panasonic DECT 6.0 phones that looked similar to the phones we use, meaning they might be a good source of spare parts (recently one of our handsets had a speaker go dead inside it, and the replacement I installed was too big, resulting in diminished volume). But I didn't know enough to pull the trigger on such a purchase.
Meanwhile, there'd been a series of server difficulties that I'd had trouble fixing (because, in my inattention, I was restarting processes on the wrong server or failing to log in as a superuser). While I was out, there was a bunch of dialog on that in Slack, and I didn't get a chance to jump into that conversation until I'd stopped at the West Hurley Park and was walking the dogs in the woods in back. At that point I could tap out a few pithy things about what, for example, "too many connections" means to a MySQL dæmon.
This evening I actually watched teevee on my own for the first time in a long time. There'd been a number of episodes of Bering Sea Gold> recorded on the DVR, and that's the kind of junk food teevee I watch when it's just me, Ramona, and perhaps Sylvia or Clarence.
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