Saturday, September 21 2019

Dear Journal,

Good morning everyone! Happy Saturday to you. I had a great start to the weekend. At work, morale improved, as we finally started to make some progress with recreating some of the conditions for the incident last week. We're starting to find answers, and the new discoveries had a positive effect on everyone. I spent a good amount of time performing "chaos testing", which basically just involves standing up a copy of your service in an isolated environment and breaking it in various ways, looking for weak points. Yesterday, I set up 100 VMs that did nothing but submit a giant text file to our service. I wanted to create a lot of network noise, so in an homage to one of my favorite movies, the payload just included ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY ad infinitum. For lunch, I grabbed a wrap from the Good Food cart and ate it on the terrace, staring at the water.

After work, Marissa, Rod, and I went out to eat at Sal's pizza. Sal's is a solid pizza place. It's difficult to park there, and it's pretty busy during dinner, but it's one of those places where you just need to call ahead before you leave, and it all works out. I wolfed down one of their small thin crust pizzas, then polished off the rest of my beer while Marissa and I chatted about the neighborhood. We set up this little Friday outing to check out a new part of the city and start gathering intel for when we move someday - not that it's happening any time soon, but Marissa and I feel differently about it. The thought of moving terrifies me, so we agreed to occasionally go for walks in different neighborhoods just to start easing me into the idea of living somewhere else someday. We parked the car in a lake-side neighborhood on the other side of the Yahara river, walked around the block, and sat at the playground for a while. If we had done this thing three years ago, I probably would have been defensive and felt the need to play devil's advocate, pointing out everything in the neighborhood that troubled me for fear that if I didn't, we'd be throwing our stuff in a moving truck the next day. But I didn't. Maybe I'm a little wiser now, but I decided to just walk, listen, and keep my opinions to myself. It paid off, because Marissa decided she didn't like the neighborhood much either. Looking back, I probably could have avoided a lot of arguments that way.

After finishing our lap around the block, we jumped in the car and went home. I put Rod to bed, then spent some time cleaning the kitchen. I shirked some of my chores on Thursday night when I fell asleep on the couch, and it felt good to get things under control again. I even used some extra lettuce and tomatoes to pack a lunch for Marissa to take to her agility trial this weekend. Don't tell her, but she thinks I wrote a heart felt note on the napkin, but all it says is "I'M PRISON MIKE!".

After chores, we finally finished up the movie Hitch. I barely paid attention to the ending. I was working on some code for my website, but I'm pretty sure everything worked out for Hitch. Sure, it got a little rough for a minute when Sara Meelas assumed the worst about him, but Hitch really took his sweet time clearing the air, didn't he? He waited until the end of his dramatic speech before making it clear that he didn't work with the gross guy that seduced her friend. Really Hitch? You could have started with that piece of information and put everyone at ease.

This morning, Rodney and I are hanging around the house watching Thomas the Train while Marissa and Ziggy drive to an agility tournament in Milwaukee. Rod and I are doing a bit of potty training. Up until now, Marissa's been fighting the good fight alone, so I wanted to get some hours in myself. Update - we're on our fourth pair of underwear and Rod has only been up for about two hours. What's amazing to me is how quickly he can urinate. I look away for two seconds, then suddenly he's standing in a puddle of water, wringing out his underwear.

After I finish journaling, we're going to take a walk to the grocery store, and if the weather stays decent, we're going to shoot hoops at the community center. Later today after I get dinner going, I'm hoping to get some programming in. I'd like to finish cleaning up the script that publishes my blog, and I've been dying to get some time with my new miniature kubernetes cluster.

Hope you have a wonderful day today, and thanks for reading. Remember, before you get defensive with someone you care about, wait a few extra minutes to see if you actually disagree. It doesn't have to be a long time - just a few minutes. Which is apparently enough time to piss your pants twice.