Wednesday, January 8 2020

Dear Journal,

Good morning, everyone! How are you all feeling today? This morning I'm working from home, so without showering and commuting, I could afford to get out of bed just a little later. The dogs were pretty annoyed with how slowly I was moving, however. They like to eat at 6:45 and be back in bed with their momma by 7. Can you believe I had the nerve to feed them breakfast past 7? I'm sure I'll hear about that later.

This morning, I'm thankful for coffee. Even with the extra minutes in bed, this morning felt impossible. In fact, before coffee just about every morning feels impossible. The first moments of the morning where I sleepily trudge down the stairs, I feel like a broken robot. And just as my body feels tired, so are my thoughts. In fact, usually the first thought I have every day is wouldn't it feel wonderful to just flop back into bed and sleep until I wake up? But if I overcome my lack of will and manage to drag my sleepy legs into the kitchen, the first sip of coffee changes everything. Coffee warms everything up - body and mind. I'm truly a different person before I have my coffee. What I'm trying to say is this - don't talk to me before I've had my coffee. Sip.

This morning we're drinking more of the tequila fire department blend, which has proven itself to be worth the extra work of transferring it to a separate carafe for my continued enjoyment and rinsing all the coffee parts anew for Marissa. She's more of a Breakfast Blend kind of girl.

Yesterday was a pretty good day of work. I'm jumping into the world of golang about a year late, but better late than never. My team inherited a little piece of code that will ultimately run on Kubernetes, so to allow me to work on it, I installed the language runtime, saved my configs, and made a test project to ensure everything was working. Setting up your laptop to work on a new programming language is kind of exciting. The best comparison I can make is getting a new kitchen gadget, like a mixer or an immersion blender. Only it's even better, because unlike my kitchen, my laptop has practically infinite space for new tools and gadgets.

For lunch, my boss took us out to sushi. Most of us, me included, ordered the chef's special, which is a purely random assortment of sushi. If you have a little faith, the chef's special is a treat. Nothing beats letting someone else order your food for you. We enjoyed raw slices of salmon, yellow fin tuna, red snapper, and shrimp. And of course, I had a beer. As we were wrapping up lunch, setting aside empty plates and enjoying final sips of beer, my boss threw out an interesting question. "Let's go around and share what we're excited to work on this year." We groaned in unison, teasing him for the rehearsed segue into work talk, then took turns sharing. "When I first starting working here," I shared, "our infrastructure felt like it was impossible to change. But looking back, everything we complained about is now either gone or about to leave. Everything looks completely different." The team nodded and my boss chimed in. "You're coming up on four years this fall," he said. "I think they still give out Apple Watches for four year anniversaries." I smiled. "I'm going to just give it to Rodney," I joked.

At four o'clock, I closed my work windows and started surfing around for a new recipe to try. I landed on Chef John's potato and kale hash, which looked easy enough. After taking the bus home, I scooped Rodney out of his bed and we left for Hy-Vee to pick up potatoes, leeks, kale, Irish cheddar, and pancietta. Rodney also deliberately selected a cucumber, as if he had plans for it later. As we walked up the cheese aisle looking for the right cheddar, Rodney lagged behind finding something interesting on the shelf. Suddenly, his eyes darted up, and seeing that I was already in the bread aisle, he ran to me in a panic. He seemed to feel guilty about wandering away to look at cheese.

"It's OK, dude," I said comforting him. "Look, we come to Hy-Vee a lot. If you want to walk away for a second to check something out, I trust you. We practically live here." Rodney nodded, and repeated the last phrase I said, as he normally does. His thin voice awkwardly trailed off with practically LIVE heeeere?. Before checking out, we swung by the basket of chocolate eggs. Rodney rifled through the pile and found a Marvel themed egg - his favorite. Before starting on dinner at home, I helped him assemble the toy at the dinner table. "Iron man!" he exclaimed, as I peeled the paper back. It was in fact Black Panther, but I'm not going to sweat the details. I have faith that Disney will make approximately five thousand more big budget Marvel movies in our lifetime, and Rodney will have plenty of time to learn their names - even if he's not paying attention to them.

Back in the kitchen leaving Rodney to play with IRONMAN, I cubed some potatoes for the hash. Cutting potatoes is a lot of fun. The slices stick to the cutting board perfectly, allowing you to move quickly with the knife tip. When I cut onions, I'm glad to be done; but with potatoes, I always wish there were more.

After putting Rodney to bed, Marissa and I wrapped up the evening by cleaning our bookshelf. We removed all the books, and as she sorted them into piles, I wiped everything down with Windex. Marissa handed me the sorted piles of books, and using our geode bookends, I reassembled things. "I just need to tease you for a minute," said Marissa. "Why did you point the pretty side of the geode toward the books? You can't even see it?" Fair point. Sorting books, as we concluded last night, is a lot more fun than you'd think. It inevitably leads you to tell stories and reminisce.

So that's what I got today. Hope you all have a wonderful day today. When was the last time you sorted your bookshelf? Happy Wednesday, everyone.