Wednesday, June 23 2021

Dear Journal,

Good morning, friends. Happy Wednesday. I hope you fellow midwesterners are making the most of this strange mid summer cold spell. Who would have thought that Wisconsin's last week of June could feel like autumn in San Francisco? Others, wherever you're reading this from, I hope you're also feeling comfortable.

Pray for Marissa today. Don't worry - she's absolutely fine. But she has to wake up early this morning for a haircut appointment. Tough guys who wake up at 5 AM can save it. I think anyone who has to wake up earlier deserves sympathy, no matter what kind of schedule they're on.

But still - I'm amused carrying on with my day while Marissa wrestles with this crisis. A silent balet of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance precedes between each of her snooze alarms. Just before heading downstairs to write, I stood over her bedside, shaking her into the land of the waking.

Sip. So how is your week going? I'm going to try not to bum you out with my chipper "Friday" mood. Today is my last work day of the week, and facing workdays like these are so easy. I imagine I'm practically glowing right now, and why shouldn't I? Any problem that comes up today can wait until Monday, and an eternity stands between now and Monday.

In other news, I'm back to journal writing at the dining room computer. The back spasm scaries have returned, and I suspect all the laptop couch typing has agrivated those whiny cubital tunnel nerves. It feels good to lean back in a chair, type at a real keyboard, and gaze upon a screen that's bigger than 12.5 inches.

I've also tried to reinvigorate my half-assed upper body exercise regiment. I don't get any fulfillment from push-ups and pull-ups. Honestly, I find exercise kind of tedious, but it's good for my posture and it helps stave off computer typing pain. For the sake of time, I space out these little exercise push-ups throughout the day: twenty-five minutes of typing, a couple of push-ups, a couple of pull-ups, then a four minute break to scroll through twitter. It's a good thing these bursts of exercise happen in off camera in the privacy of my bedroom. I feel so jockish taking breaks from the computer to bang out some push-ups. But that's just typical jock me: I'm all about breaking a sweat, pumping iron, and most importantly getting swol.

The big highlight of yesterday was our post mortem - sorry, we call them "retrospectives" now, which sound a little nicer. We're still walking through all the fallout that happened from Amazon's outage in the Frankfurt datacenter earlier this month. The meeting was productive and educational. If you'll allow me to briefly cheese about Zendesk, one of the things I'm most proud of is our culture around incidents. If you were in the room with us, you might describe it as honest and chill. The meeting is really just one long, patient exchange of questions, explanations, and theories. For a meeting about an outage, I find them strangely uplifting.

After lunch, I took a short break to sort out my outfit for the wedding later this week. A spider-man costume, Drive jacket, and eight different hoodies eclipsed my dusty buindle of "nice clothes" in the back corner of my closet. Marissa and Rodney were hanging around, undoubtetly hoping for an entertaining fashion show, and I certainly didn't dissapoint. I put on a spectacular parade of ill-fitting clothes. I had a tight chested suit jacket that made me look like a boss bitch. I had some dusty, awkward-fitting dress pants that made me look like an imitation Don Rickles. I tried on a skinny cut pair of H&M dress pants that made me look like a snake molting in reverse. Just to amuse myself, I took a deep breath and snapped the clasp shut at my waist. As soon as I released my grip and exhaled, the metal clasp flew across the room like a bullet - the grand finale. It goes without saying, but unfortunately I think I'll need some new clothes for this wedding.

Marissa went shopping with Rodney yesterday. She picked him out a Jurrasic World LEGO set. It's currently resting high on the window sil sparkling in all its glory in the morning sun. We're saving it for after the wedding, reserved for the best behavior, but we got him some smaller things to play with too. In good timing, Rodney's new Dude Perfect book also arrived in the mail. And speaking of that book, we have a bone to pick with Dude Perfect. After seeing an ad on their Instagram page, Marissa put in a pre-order on Amazon. A full week after we pre-ordered the book, they promised that everyone who pre-ordered this book would get an autographed copy and be enterered into a raffle to win a dune buggy. Our "pre-pre-order" must have excluded us from all these perks. Rodney's copy wasn't signed and I'm not holding by breath for a new dune buggy any time soon.

Today should be a pretty quiet day. I have to add some stuff to my incident report, cut work for the team, and later I'm taking the interns out to lunch - more accurately, they're taking me out to lunch. I live all the way on the east side, and they're on campus. The two parts of town couldn't be more different, so I've tasked them with picking a restaurant. With great hesitation, they suggested a mysterious restaurant they call QQ.

"QQ is crazy," said Connor. "It's underneath a Subway. You have to go down these stairs into the basement to eat there. And it's right next to the computer science building, so it's always filled with engineering students."

Based on everyone's jokes, I get the feeling that QQ is terrible in a charming, satisfying way, and I'm all for those kinds of places. At least we'll fit right in. Readers, I'm excited about my first trip to QQ, and you can expect a lengthy and thoughtful review when I return.

That's what I got today. Have a great Wednesday, everyone.