02/25/2025 - Fun in the Sun

Today's Rating: 8/10

Song of the Day: Good Luck, Babe! - Chappell Roan

Current Book: Secrets of the Stoics - Jason Hemlock

Yesterday was one of those days where the morning was average/below-average, but the afternoon/evening more than made up for it. I like to envision it as a roller-coaster with a large climb at the beginning and then a fun downhill ride the rest of the time. Strangely, it seems that these posts are easier to write for bad days than for good ones. I'm not sure what that says about me....

I woke up with the standard sense of dread that I typically have on workdays and shuffled to my cell for the day. Nothing major had come up overnight, so I set out on the few tasks I had written out for the day. I typically write a to-do list for tomorrow's workday at the end of the previous workday so that I don't forget what I need to do in the tsunami of bullshit that drowns out everything else.

I reviewed the documentation that I had written the previous day, made several edits, and submitted two PRs (pull requests which basically are just requests to update something). I'm holding off on sharing these with the team to allow time for more edits; I planned to share them out the following morning. I gave my updates in the daily standup and left for my walk for the day. My mom joined me for the day which was nice to have the company. The walk started off gray and cold, but midway through, the sun broke through and started warming up (which immediately improved my mood). In total, we walked 3.62 miles in 63 minutes.

When I got back, I was greeted by the surprise of all surprises. Can you guess what it was?

Great job, you were absolutely correct if you guessed that my least favorite client had another request for me to handle. This time, I had the pleasure to have a whole one-hour meeting for it! It was a fairly simple fix entirely in their realm (a memory limit they had incorrectly configured) which resolved the issue for them.

My boss reached out to me to monitor a different clients application while they did some load testing, so I did that for an hour or so. They were running into issues, but the head SRE engineer (SRE - Site Reliability Engineer but what it really means is Sleep Really Erratically because if you work SRE say goodbye to any sort of consistent sleep schedule) was actively helping them.

For the last thing in my workday, I handled a ticket submitted by my former team to get some Jenkins configuration updated which was a fairly small change and quick to implement.

After work, I ran a couple of errands with Maddie. We went to Target to return some clothing she had purchased and to pick up a couple of things we can only find there in town. Next, we went to Walmart to get a couple of other items that we needed as well as a few items for her work. We finished the errands in record time (shoutout to Maddie for not getting distracted in Walmart) and stopped at Sonic for drinks (two Diet Cokes with vanilla). We made it home around 5:30 PM giving me 30 minutes before I had to be at tennis.

I had doubles planned for 6 with three of the better players in Alexandria (Jerry, Edwin, and Bryan). This was without a doubt one of if not the best doubles match I have ever played and was definitely the highlight of my day. The match took 2.5 hrs to play and did not even go to a 3rd set. Everyone was playing well, but I feel that I have not played that well in quite some time.

I headed home around 8:30 PM. Maddie had gone out to her parent's house that evening for dinner and brought back some leftovers (crab soup/beef stir fry). The crab soup was excellent, so I had a bowl of that as well as some more of the pot roast. I'm also technically in the "maintenance mode" for my weight trying to maintain around 170 lbs. However, due to the extremely long doubles match, I had a massive calorie deficit for the day that I needed to catch up on (younger me never would have seen that as a bad thing). I had two bowls of cereals to get me closer to an even calories in/calories out although there was still a slight deficit.

I head to bed around 10 PM and read for about twenty minutes before lights out at 10:20 PM.

Thanks for reading and see you tomorrow!