Friday, October 18 2019

Dear Journal,

Good morning everyone! Happy Friday to you, as you're waking up, getting to work, and getting ready to begin the final work day of the week. As for me, I'm in my robe in full day-off mode. The coffee just finished brewing, and in a few minutes after a quick entry I'm going to make breakfast and get everyone up.

I don't even know what we have in the fridge - I feel like I've been out of the kitchen for most of the week. On Tuesday we ate out, on Wednesday I had an after work happy hour and Marissa cooked, and yesterday was Kid Code, so Marissa put some Portillo's in the fridge for me. But as long as we have some eggs, we're still in business.

Yesterday was a great day. Our team went out to lunch with the NOC, as some of their people from Manila were visiting. We took up two tables comfortably in lower level of the Great Dane, talking about technology, computers, and podcasts. The new Office Ladies podcast debuted yesterday, so that was on my mind. "My mom wanted to watch it, and this was her first podcast, " I said. "And to be honest I was having a hard time explaining the format to her. Podcasts are weird." The few podcast listeners at the table leaned in as we waited for our food.

Podcasts are weird. Most of them are just flat out bad. A flimsy pretense, too many ad reads, iffy production quality. And many of the podcasts that are "good" are over-hyped, or have real problems with cult followers and gate-keeping.

After lunch, I finished my peer reviews, then wrapped up my project for the week, finally getting the code into our staging environment. It was a busy week, but I like getting some closure on whatever I'm working on. If all went according to plan, the team will push it out to the rest of our staging environment today using the notes and modifications we made yesterday.

After work, I jumped on a bus and came home to Rodney and Marissa putting up more Halloween decorations. Marissa was trying to angle a yard sign in a way that wasn't blocked by our little figurine of a corgi in a bumble bee costume. I headed inside to set down my stuff and unwind before KidsCode. I had about a half hour before I needed to head over. I grabbed my tech bin and wandered over to the library to set up for the evening session. I didn't have a lesson plan yesterday, but being so close to Halloween I decided I could just get away with the old "make a spooky game" stand by. The library has a bin full of candy hidden in the back for us, and I knew I could probably leverage that as a prize for some kind of last minute Halloween game making contest. We had a great time. It was a good turnout with a few first timers. One kid made a fascinating retro style puzzler where you cycled between characters named death, fear, and anger, each having special powers that could help you escape from a room. There was another entry called Trick or Treater Deleter, which was a classic zombie survival game, only instead of fending off zombies, you fought of neighborhood kids from getting to your candy. Another kid showed off changes he made to the Star Wars game he'd been working on for a few weeks, and he jokingly added a small floating skeleton in the corner so it would qualify for the contest.

After all the kids went home, we cleaned up the library room then departed for the night. I walked in the door just as Marissa was about to put Rodney to bed, so I read him his bedtime story. After Rodney went down for bed, I heated up my dinner and watched the new episode of Hot Ones with Marissa. Paul Rudd was interviewed. It was a fascinating, meandering discussion, but the real surprise was how well Paul Rudd handled the hot wings. He became one of the few guests on the show to eat all the wings without drinking any milk or water.

What followed may have been the laziest evening of my life. Marissa worked on some paintings while I took a shower and laid on the couch drifting in and out of a nap while watching King of the Hill. It's been a long week, and I needed an hour or so of power cycling.

Today, I'm feeling refreshed, and looking forward to a fun day in Chicago. Today we're dropping Rodney off at grandma & grandpa's house, and Marissa and I are going to a Hawks game in the evening, doing a lot of city wandering in between.

Hope you have a wonderful day today. If you're out there beginning your last day of work, hang in there. In no time, you'll be all done, and you too will get to lay on the couch and power cycle while watching King of the Hill. Have a great Friday.