Thanksgiving in January

I feel like I’ve been a complain-o-tron on the blog recently. This bugs me a little because in real life, things are great! There are all kinds of good things going on that I do not really mention (or mention only in passing):

* Beautiful house! Beautiful wife! How did I get here?
** Kim is the bestest wife ev-ar! Smart, beautiful, funny, deep, independent, likes long walks on the beach, and all of that. She’s always on top of the dinner situation and makes fancy dishes out of non-fancy ingredients. (Except when she’s had a long or bad day, and then we’re both perfectly happy with something like mac-n-cheese or take-out, because that’s my dinner capability without lots of pre-planning.) If I come home late with an out-of-whack muscle in my back, she’ll work on it (and vice-versa.)
** The house is ours! Well, technically, I guess it is still the bank that holds the majority interest in the thing–but we’re paying our way to equity. Even though the payments are higher than rent, it feels oh so good to be knowing that they’re effectively going toward a sort of savings and not just being handed over to someone else who can raise the rent or kick you out just because they feel like it.
** The work on the house is going at a glacial pace, but it’s still going. As I have time, I’m fixing up little and big things alike. The most recent projects include weatherstripping and fixing a window the cats broke, but I’ve also done the wired network, power, lighting, demolition, security, and a number of other things.

* I’m a middle-class white guy living in America. I know that this /shouldn’t/ matter, but it does. My parents were middle-class and white, which afforded me the education and finances to also be middle-class and white. Actually, I’m not sure I can (or want to) admit to it, but I might be upper-middle-class. And I know that America is falling apart and the dollar is plunging and a recession might be at hand and things aren’t what they used to be and I don’t want to get off on a financial or political tangent. Things usually go in cycles. I like the country, even if I don’t necessarily like those in charge.

* The cats have been especially playful and cute recently. Charlotte is playing a lot more than he used to. Ebenezer is always doing something silly. I got home the other night and Ebenezer snuck out the front door, walked halfway down the driveway, realized it was sub-freezing, did a quick about-face, and ran full speed back into the house to sit on top of the heat vent. Silly cat! It’s cold out!

* Work is also going really well. I cannot talk much about it, though. The QA on a current firmware release is concluding nicely. The progress on the next firmware release is also proceeding rather well. Parts of it are allowing me to do new and interesting things and get a deep understanding of them. For instance, I’m implementing some AJAX-based web user interfaces, but without the benefit of fancy server-side libraries (no Apache, no PHP, no Perl, no Python.) The server is entirely lean C code. Because of these constraints, I’m learning a lot more about the inner-workings of AJAX technologies, rather than “call this function, get this result.” The upcoming hardware redesign is coming along quite well, too. I’m not quite as hands-on with this (at least, not until we get a blank board back from manufacturing and get it populated with parts) but will be soon.

* I’m also happy to be not-quite-the-norm and have a sense of humor about it. I work a white-collar job with plenty of white-collar people, but my shirt collar (and the rest of my clothes today, and most days) came from army surplus. I’m “the man” but have long hair and listen to industrial music. Similarly, home life doesn’t quite “fit in the box.” Kim blogged about this the other week, but it seems like automated mailing list machines are not quite calibrated to “woman gets married, woman changes her name, but not to the husband’s nor hyphenated.” I am getting the impression that lots of machines think that when a woman changes her name and there’s no hyphen, then it MUST be the husband’s name. I got my second piece of mail for “Mr. Brian Sakkara” the other day. When I see that, I know it was machine-generated and it goes straight to the shredder, do not pass “GO,” do not collect $200.

I am sure there’s a lot more, but those are the things that popped into my head on the way to work this morning.

Posted in: Dear Diary

One thought on “Thanksgiving in January”

  1. Glad to hear things are going well. I remember when we bought the house in the burbs and me pulling up in a sedan to the house. That songs played in my head as well. Days do go by… B and I will be married for a DECADE in 7 months. Our kid is now ONE.

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