Rooks - Tracking the Daily Grind...

[Waldo]

16 hours ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

God save us from two-cycle engines.

 

My dad was able to make a weed-eater run for decades by always draining the gas tank after he was done then starting it several times to burn off all the gas. 

 

I have no better than a 2:1 ratio of time spent using to time spent fixing and maintaining 2 cycle engines, I never have good luck with them.

[Rooks]

17 hours ago, Waldo said:

Have you ever watched any of Paul Sellers videos?  I learn quite a bit from him.

 

Definitely watched some of his videos. He's definitely a great resource and gives out tons of amazing information. There's so many great woodworkers on Youtube from both Paul's generation and younger generations. I'm probably more of a power tool woodworker at the moment, but I'm slowly building up my hand tools. Now it's just a matter of finding time to use the tools and actually learn the skills. Honestly, if things pan out, I think I'll probably give up my career in tech once our house is paid off, and try my hand doing a custom shop in both woodworking and metalworking. 

 

17 hours ago, Waldo said:

I just don't need to spend hours of my weekend time a few times over the summer trying to make a little engine run (leaf blowers and trimmers are even worse, darn things always need attention).

 

Yeah. I'm finding more and more I want to skim out the general maintenance of stuff from my life. Time is becoming more and more valuable. However, our lawnmower is also our snowblower so it's important enough for our household that I'll keep doing the maintenance on it to make sure it keeps working. 

 

16 hours ago, Elastigirl said:

Glad you have a chance to get out of the house and use your skills to help others

Thanks! Confirmed today that I did indeed get a job. Start next Wednesday.

 

16 hours ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

God save us from two-cycle engines.

 

C'mon now. 2 cycles can be a load of fun. They definitely rip when it comes to ATVs or go-karts. Although I only have 2 of them at my place now (weed trimmer and chainsaw). Riding lawnmower and push mower are both 4 cycles.  

[Waldo]

6 hours ago, Rooks said:

 

Definitely watched some of his videos. He's definitely a great resource and gives out tons of amazing information. There's so many great woodworkers on Youtube from both Paul's generation and younger generations. I'm probably more of a power tool woodworker at the moment, but I'm slowly building up my hand tools. Now it's just a matter of finding time to use the tools and actually learn the skills. Honestly, if things pan out, I think I'll probably give up my career in tech once our house is paid off, and try my hand doing a custom shop in both woodworking and metalworking.

 

That's super awesome.  My brother is giving up a career in tech to become a hobby farmer, can't say I'm not a bit jealous (tho I do find my career very fulfilling).  I get asked a fair bit if I ever do it for money or want to; I realize though I make cool stuff it takes me a really long time to do so, which is a problem if its an income.  Maybe when I retire.  It is nice that for the most part my shop work is completely free of any sort of schedule except the task at hand and immediate future.  Its also not helpful that the cooler stuff I make, the longer it takes.

 

I don't really have room for a table saw in my shop, so I built around a bandsaw instead, which goes well with a lot of hand tool work.  I'd like to get a planer eventually to save time; cleaning up rough cut boards with hand planes works but is slow.  But that's for another project, the one I'm working on has no need and its still going to be quite a while.  If I'm being honest I've decided to do a fair number of projects specifically because I would need to buy a tool I don't have to do it.

 

Have you done many projects for others yet?

[Rooks]

On 3/31/2022 at 7:54 PM, Waldo said:

Have you done many projects for others yet?

Not for money. I cut apart and re-welded an ATV bumper for my neighbor after he destroyed his existing one. I had a few chunks of metal laying around that I made it easy enough. But like I said, I didn't charge him as I know he doesn't have money to spare and I wanted to be neighborly.

Besides that, I've got a few projects I told my wife I really wanted to do myself for our house, namely among them a dining room table with leaves. I attached a design I did of it back in 2019 (and no, I still haven't even bought the lumber for it). I wanted to go crazy and build it out of like cherry or something, but she said I should just do construction lumber. She's right because I'm going to probably screw things up on this build, and I shouldn't try and build a $5k table my first attempt.

Anyway, once I get those projects done, I'll have a bit more freedom to choose projects, and maybe even attempt to batch up some ideas that I could sell for profit. I've had a really cool idea for a wooden laptop stand that is completely collapsable for awhile, that would be fun to knock out 10 of them and see what I could sell them for. 

[Rooks]

On 3/30/2022 at 2:38 PM, Rooks said:

• Did you consume alcohol?
• Did you take a cold shower (at least 1 minute)?
• Did you spend at least 10 minutes working on some sort of home project?
• Did you spend at least 10 minutes aimed at fitness?
• Did you spend at least 10 minutes reading? 

 

Something I wanted to elaborate a little more on is that I'm not aiming to be perfect on any of these tasks. Most I'll be happy if I can hit 4 out of 7 days at the moment. More broadly speaking, I set a basic guideline for on the alcohol question to try to hit 200 days for 2022 without alcohol, and 300 days with a cold shower. The others, I didn't set any specific goals, more just trying to track now to determine if things are improving or getting worse.

 

Last week's stats (two days overlap from previous report, but I'm going to go with weekly reporting):

• 4/7 days without alcohol. Good through the week, and then had some adult beverages to relax Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
• 6/7 days with a cold showers. 
• 3/7 days with home projects progression. 
• 3/7 days with fitness. 
• 2/7 days with reading.

Highlights of the week. We are quite successfully attempting to do maple syrup for the first time this year. My wife setup 6 taps on our 3 maple trees. We ended up lowering it to 4 taps after finding that some weren't running, but we think that was installation error now. Then when we reinstalled the taps, I used too big of a drill bit. That said, even with our mistakes, we still managed almost 40 gallons of sap over about a 2.5 week period. This weekend we did our first boil outdoors (my wife has been doing a lot inside on the stove for a few hours every night). Saturday, I welded up a metal grate for our fire pit, and we spent probably 6 hours outside boil 10 gallons down to about 3. I could see a sap boil being a fun yearly event to invite folks over to hang out. This was alright as the weather was pretty solid on Saturday and I got to put a really good dent in to the brush pile I've been meaning to burn. Overall, I think we'll probably end up with around a gallon of sap. We tried some out on Saturday before our sap boil (some that my wife had finished indoors) and it was quite tasty. One thing we couldn't figure out was how it was invented. Who had the thought of saying "This water coming out of this tree is a bit sweet. I wonder what would happen if I just put it over a fire for 12 hours straight?"

 

Otherwise, not much to report. Fitness was alright. Only got in 1 fitness session after the weight sessions Monday and Tuesday and it was really kind of disappointing. My company slack has a channel named "Mpls-Running" and they post a lot about meeting up for runs once a week. I thought it would be fun to see some of these folks in person for the first time in awhile, and get a workout in so I planned to attend. No one else showed on time. One guy got there 5 minutes late, but I had already started my run assuming no one else was joining. That said, he also went for a 5 mile run. I did 1.2 and that was enough for me. Was just a bummer that I thought I'd get to see a bunch of folks and have a nice jog with them, and then no one showed. 

[Scaly Freak]

41 minutes ago, Rooks said:

One thing we couldn't figure out was how it was invented. Who had the thought of saying "This water coming out of this tree is a bit sweet. I wonder what would happen if I just put it over a fire for 12 hours straight?"

 

"Huh. This sweet tree water sap that  put in a cup and completely forgot about several weeks ago is really thick and delicious now. I wonder if the tree sap thickens like this if I boil it, like some other liquids do?"

[Waldo]

4 hours ago, Rooks said:

Besides that, I've got a few projects I told my wife I really wanted to do myself for our house, namely among them a dining room table with leaves. I attached a design I did of it back in 2019 (and no, I still haven't even bought the lumber for it). I wanted to go crazy and build it out of like cherry or something, but she said I should just do construction lumber. She's right because I'm going to probably screw things up on this build, and I shouldn't try and build a $5k table my first attempt.

 

Back in 2019 I replaced the top to our table.  We loved the table, a really sweet midcentury design with splayed legs.  However it was supposed to have leaves, but ours didn't comes with them.  We bought the table way back before we had kids.  Instead of trying to match the top, which was a walnut veneer with thick solid edging (typical midcentury construction), and make leaves, I just made a whole new top that was a larger size.  I made it out of walnut; 4/4 worked with the profile I wanted so it only cost an arm, was able to spare the leg.

 

Big thick stuff like your design, oof, rough.  Have to find a source for real cheap big stuff. I semi have one, got some 8/4 cherry beams at $50 each, but its real spotty (drive an hour outside of the city to see what they have at the hole in the wall sawmill).  I'm using a little bit of it for the base of the speakers I'm working on.  Prices for walnut have gone completely bonkers around here since the start of the pandemic, as if they weren't before, but cherry can still be found pretty reasonable. It grows local and ofc we grow some big ol trees in georgia.

 

I wouldn't use construction lumber though.  If you look hard you should be able to find some hardwood at reasonable prices, even big stuff; there's plenty of trees and sawmills out there.   And the top and bottom can be different species (you can dye to try to color match).

 

I've picked off a lot of the low hanging fruit around the house; its either some real big things (vanity, dresser, wall shelving unit) or stuff I want to make myself (speakers, chair, mame arcade, new bench) left to do.  After I finish these speakers I might try to make a copy of a Wegner Cigar Chair, but that's still a ways away.  Forever project still is taking forever.

[Elastigirl]

Making your own syrup  sounds amazing! I wonder a bunch about how people figured out a lot of foods- cheese, milk (how calves drink it why don't we try squezzing the udders to see if we can get stuff out) beer, etc. And I wonder if there is still cool stuff left for us to figure out.

 

Edit: And thanks to the amazing genius who figured out ice cream!

[Rooks]

14 hours ago, Waldo said:

Big thick stuff like your design, oof, rough.  Have to find a source for real cheap big stuff. I semi have one, got some 8/4 cherry beams at $50 each, but its real spotty (drive an hour outside of the city to see what they have at the hole in the wall sawmill).  I'm using a little bit of it for the base of the speakers I'm working on.  Prices for walnut have gone completely bonkers around here since the start of the pandemic, as if they weren't before, but cherry can still be found pretty reasonable. It grows local and ofc we grow some big ol trees in georgia.

 

I wouldn't use construction lumber though.  If you look hard you should be able to find some hardwood at reasonable prices, even big stuff; there's plenty of trees and sawmills out there.   And the top and bottom can be different species (you can dye to try to color match).

Yeah. My original design was to use 2" thick for everything, and I think the legs were 5x5? Overall, I'm thinking I'm going to skew that done to 1.25" for most things since that will still be plenty strong enough. I also have concerns about how far the table will hang off when all the leaves are installed. Feels like if I want to make the table top that thick, it's going to have so much weight out over the ends, it'll just rip itself right off however I attached it in the middle. But maybe I'm overthinking it. 

I will be calling around to some places in the next month or two to see what they'd recommend and what I can get for what prices. I'd love to not use a home center for multiple reasons for sourcing the lumber. Also, not going to lie and say that I haven't thought about setting up a chainsaw mill and sourcing it myself. My sister has multiple dead oak trees in her yard that need to come down soon for starters and there's enough posts on social media about downed trees that it wouldn't be terrible to get enough lumber. However, then I need to either kiln dry it or wait a few years for it to air dry. So definitely a few downsides. But honestly, seems like the appropriate thing to get into given the ever rising prices of lumber, even if I don't use it for this project.

 

10 hours ago, Elastigirl said:

Making your own syrup  sounds amazing! I wonder a bunch about how people figured out a lot of foods- cheese, milk (how calves drink it why don't we try squezzing the udders to see if we can get stuff out) beer, etc. And I wonder if there is still cool stuff left for us to figure out.

 

Edit: And thanks to the amazing genius who figured out ice cream!

 

Indeed. We humans have figured out some pretty darn interesting things when you really stop and ponder upon them. 

 

17 hours ago, Scaly Freak said:

 

"Huh. This sweet tree water sap that  put in a cup and completely forgot about several weeks ago is really thick and delicious now. I wonder if the tree sap thickens like this if I boil it, like some other liquids do?"

 

That's a really good point. I never even thought about evaporation. I know there are concerns in modern days about leaving sap out in warmer temperatures, but that's a really good theory!

[Scaly Freak]

1 hour ago, Rooks said:

That's a really good point. I never even thought about evaporation. I know there are concerns in modern days about leaving sap out in warmer temperatures, but that's a really good theory!

 

Boiling something to thicken it is basically evaporation at a higher speed thanks to a higher temperature.

 

I'm a firm believer in the notion that most of the really groundbreaking discoveries in crafts that have been around for a long time, were either initially a mistake, or someone trying to salvage a mistake.  

[Rooks]

Week of April 4th:

• 4/7 days without alcohol. 
• 5/7 days with a cold showers. 
• 3/7 days with home projects progression. 
• 1/7 days with fitness. 
• 4/7 days with reading.

Week of April 11th:

• 2/7 days without alcohol. 
• 6/7 days with a cold showers. 
• 1/7 days with home projects progression. 
• 2/7 days with fitness. 
• 3/7 days with reading.

Not ideal results for sure.  Work has been stressing me out a lot lately which is something I think I've been unwilling to admit for a long while. It's not that the amount of work is stressful, but rather, my teammates are just intolerable. My manager is really hands off, and I get the impression he just wants to be an engineer still, and has never done any reflection or improvement on how to be a good manager. He just sort of goes through motions of being a manager, and devotes most of his time to working on engineering projects. He's an older gentleman so being honest, I think it was just promoted to management since he was reasonable organized and at some point his years of experienced something thought meant he'd be management material.

Another of my peers just doesn't listen to anything I have to say and works at a snail's pace on things. I'm not sure if I've irritated him by explaining processes to him despite me being lower than him in both time at the company and title, but I have at least 5-6 documented cases of me outlining things to him via Slack, and then a few days later him asking questions to another person on our team that were outlined in my message. And also he constantly goes off and works on side projects that are unrelated to the work we are actually trying to get done. Yet he's never told to drop it and focus on the priorities. 

 

And then another one of my peers just has zero sense of what it means to be on a team or do any work together. He seems to just want to be given a project where he can go off on his own and be left alone for weeks and then dump a pile of code on us (his team) with zero information about how this things works or what the intent is. I could be viable if he was reasonable at documenting things, but he's not and he just creates stress with any project he's involved in. And to top it all off, he's the type of guy that just complains about everything because every person at the company is obviously trying to make his life more difficult. 

 

So yeah. Not a great work situation right now. To clarify what I mean by not admitting is that for a long awhile, if someone were to ask me how work is, up until recently, I would have said "Fine". But I think I'm beginning to realize this is really wearing me down. It's routine at this point where I will lay awake in bed replaying all the things I think these people have done to me, and how I'm going to tell them off the next day. Sometimes it goes on for an hour or more before I can finally quiet my head voices enough to fall asleep.  So I guess step 1 is admitting it. I've started talking with my boss's boss about this (he actually asked for my opinion on the team situation unprompted) and I was very honest. He has told me he'll work on it, and he really wants to keep me at the company, but I've heard it before, so I'm skeptical to say the least. So who knows what'll happen with all that, but I have begun looking for a new job. So far, I'm not having much luck finding things that I have the credentials for. I would love to be a DevOps engineer, but most places currently hiring require Kubernetes experience which I'm lacking. 

 

In a bit of positive news, my daughter qualified for a national competition. I'm not supposed to post the name of it on social media until May 1st when the results go live (hence why I'm leaving this a bit vague), but we are super proud of her and we'll be taking a weekend trip to LA where she'll compete at the end of June. So that'll be fun. 

[Elastigirl]

That sounds stressful, sorry. Maybe he will retire soon, and you will get a better manager.

Congrats to your daughter!

[Tanktimus the Encourager]

Toxic work environments are not fun at all. Here's hoping something works out.

[Shello]

That does sound like a rough work environment.  It's promising  that your manager is asking about it.  I'm guessing someone else has said something and he's at least clued in to the problem and that you aren't the only one feeling the stress from it.  Hopefully something does get done about it.  

[Maigs]

On 3/31/2022 at 1:39 PM, Rooks said:

Yeah. I'm finding more and more I want to skim out the general maintenance of stuff from my life.

Same here. Currently the only thing at my house that runs on anything other than electricity is my car. And we have a riding lawnmower, push mower, weed whacker, chain saw, and pole saw (plus a second car). It's sooo nice to literally push a button and the mower starts, no need to transport gas home, then used oil away, etc. 

 

On 4/20/2022 at 1:50 PM, Rooks said:

Work has been stressing me out a lot lately which is something I think I've been unwilling to admit for a long while. It's not that the amount of work is stressful, but rather, my teammates are just intolerable.

I left a cushy 40 hour/week max job that paid well for a job that has me doing 70 hour weeks 3 months a year for less money and it was 100% worth it to work with better people. I'm a big fan of not staying in awful work environments any longer than necessary. Fingers crossed that either boss's boss can actually improve things or you find something better soon

[Rooks]

Week of April 18th:

• 5/7 days without alcohol. 
• 6/7 days with a cold showers. 
• 2/7 days with home projects progression. 
• 1/7 days with fitness. 
• 5/7 days with reading.

Overall, a better week than some of the previous, but still not prioritizing workouts. That said, the last few weeks have felt extra heavy with the work situation being what it is. The day after my previous post I ended up having a pretty heated discussion in Slack with my co-workers, and sadly I was very much in the minority. The co-worker that doesn't really do anything team related was spouting off about how we were completely blocked because Dev teams refuse to work with us, etc. I pushed back hard saying that it's just not true at all, and he responded by basically saying that Dev teams we work with our inept and can't do anything. I told him that was unacceptable to talk about our co-workers that way even in a private channel. After some back and forth, my other two teammates piped up with responses that essentially just didn't take any sides. 

 

I then had my 1:1 with my manager and he didn't say anything about whether I was right or wrong. That said, he did tell me that's he being moved out of his manager role to go back to more engineering focused position. Overall, that's a win in my book, and the person coming in as interim manager I think knows his stuff. That said, I don't think that transition is happening for a few months still, so nothing is changing any time soon. I've started looking for other job openings. So far, it seems like most of the skills I've gotten in this role aren't that transferrable, which is unfortunate. Means I might have to go back to a QA job if I want out of this current role, which I don't like either. In other words, do I pick a career I don't like to get away from a toxic work situation. I think so, but man I don't want to as I really like the role I've been doing.

 

In positives, I've been really enjoying the book I just finished. I had heard about Masanobu Fukuoka and his One Straw Revolution book on some podcast awhile back. His work centers around natural farming, and how we can farm without much work, and still have it be good for the environment. For Christmas, I got a book named "One Straw Revolutionary" which was written by one the guy that helped him write the original book. Being honest, I had wanted the original book, so this was a mistake, but at the same time, it was a reasonable intro. The book talked more about Masanobu Fukuoka's life and how he influenced people, but didn't have much talking about his actual farming method. And it definitely makes me want to read the original more. 

 

Next book I started was The Name of the Wind, the first book of the Kingkiller Chronicles. I've heard from multiple people that the 2 books in the series are great, and the first 100 pages seems solid. I also was drawn in a bit, because Patrick was great in his time on Critical Role during Campaign 1. That said, I can't help but feel that Mr. Rothfuss is going down the George R.R. Martin route, and the final book of the series will never be released. I really hope not. That said, I've started so I'm at least going to read the first book.

 

On 4/20/2022 at 7:29 PM, Elastigirl said:

That sounds stressful, sorry. Maybe he will retire soon, and you will get a better manager.

Congrats to your daughter!

 

You are a fortune teller. 

 

On 4/20/2022 at 8:42 PM, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

Toxic work environments are not fun at all. Here's hoping something works out.

 

Thanks Tank. Something either needs to change or I'm not going to work here anymore.

 

On 4/21/2022 at 10:40 AM, Shello said:

That does sound like a rough work environment.  It's promising  that your manager is asking about it.  I'm guessing someone else has said something and he's at least clued in to the problem and that you aren't the only one feeling the stress from it.  Hopefully something does get done about it.  

 

I've basically told anyone who asked about it over the past 18 months, and every time I've said something, the people I have told have said "Yep. We are aware of the issues and we are working on it." So I don't think this is something that people aren't aware of. More when you hear "we are working on it" for 18 months, and nothing changes, I can't help but feel it's not being worked on.

 

On 4/21/2022 at 7:34 PM, Maigs said:

I left a cushy 40 hour/week max job that paid well for a job that has me doing 70 hour weeks 3 months a year for less money and it was 100% worth it to work with better people. I'm a big fan of not staying in awful work environments any longer than necessary. Fingers crossed that either boss's boss can actually improve things or you find something better soon

This is good to hear. I likely will be following suit soon.

[Rooks]

Something I meant to add, but forgot. I had a really weird experience this past week that's one of those random experiences that really gets you thinking about life and death, and all the goodies in between. Back in the fall, I had been connected to a gentleman who was a former master machinist. He had all sorts of crazy tools, and was looking to sell some of them since he was using them less than he used to. He seemed in great health, and definitely still fully cognitive. I chatted with him for probably 2+ hours, listening to him talk about tools and things he'd built, etc. I really enjoyed it. That said, as the weather was going to turning soon, we agreed we'd touch base in the spring and see about how to get some of these very large pieces of machinery moved to my place (with a transfer of funds of course). I even remember him saying when I was leaving "No need to rush. We have plenty of time to figure it out."

 

Well, I just tried to reach out, and found out that he had passed away just after Thanksgiving. Superficially, I'm a little bummed as it means odds of me buying these tools is lower, but also because I had honestly hoped I could make friends with this guy and hear more about his story and his learnings through years of machining. He was only 70 years old. Life is so fickle and fragile. 

[Rooks]

Week of April 25th:

• 7/7 days without alcohol. 
• 6/7 days with a cold showers. 
• 4/7 days with home projects progression. 
• 2/7 days with fitness. 
• 5/7 days with reading.

Starting the week out great with 2 workouts (light overhead day, and a heavy squat day), and then just puttered out mainly because of work business and depression. I won't rant about because it doesn't help. I have started looking for other jobs (applied to 3 or 4 so far, but haven't heard back on anything yet). 

 

I've been annihilating The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. I'm 400 pages in. 300 pages in a week is pretty great for me. And I've been spending a decent amount of time working on stuff at home. Nothing mind blowing, but I'm at least keeping up with some basic spring tasks. 

 

Oddly enough, that's about all I have to report this week. 

 

 

[Shello]

On 4/28/2022 at 12:01 PM, Rooks said:

Life is so fickle and fragile. 

Indeed it is but yet this is a lesson we (or rather I) tend to continually forget as I go about my life and am only reminded by stories like these.  

 

Good luck on applications!

[Rooks]

Week of May 2nd:

• 4/7 days without alcohol. 
• 6/7 days with a cold showers. 
• 3/7 days with home projects progression. 
• 5/7 days with fitness. 
• 5/7 days with reading.

Wow. That was a week. First and foremost, I got in 5 workouts which is quite the record for recent memory. 2 days were just walking on a treadmill with my weight vest, and 3 days were weights. Very happy with that, and hoping I can keep that momentum going for at least a little while. 

 

On the work front, I had finally settle on the idea of moving on from my current job, and had sent out at least 4 applications, when my boss's boss (Director of our department) reached out to me asking if I'd like to start running a large meeting that involves our entire Engineering organization. Very good opportunity for getting my face more visibility, but I couldn't really think of how to decline without telling him the scenario. So I did. I've had a good relationship with this gentleman so I knew he'd be understanding about it. Sure enough, he was, and we had a long chat on Friday afternoon about options for me. Needless to say, the most appealing option seems to be staying with my current company for the time being, as I'll end up working under him directly, with him pushing to have me in a management role in 3-4 months. So the pendulum about where my career is headed has swung back drastically. It feels like a no-lose situation at this point. He's going to come work directly with our team in the next few weeks to start setting much clearer expectations of work, and announcing that I'm getting put into a "Lead" role where I'll be his under study while he sorts things out. Then once he feels better about the team, and assuming I've sufficiently meant his standards, I'll be put in as the team manager and he'll go back to his Director role to tackle his next problem. It's going to be a really tough first management gig, but I honestly want to at least try. 

 

Another random event that happened was that the widow of the machinist I told you about called me, and said she'd honor her husband's agreement with me. We got to talking a bit, and she actually asked me if I'd do her a favor. Felt a little strange given this was the first time I'd even talked with this lady, but turns out she had bullet cases engraved with her late husband military information, but was struggling to find someone who would drill a hole through them to be able to make them into keychains. I said I was pretty sure I could do that, and so now I'm working on a project to honor the man who I only met once. Feels good being honest. Once I get the bullets done, I'm going to have to figure out how to move this very large heavy machinery over to my shop and start having fun with it. 

Oh, and my wife wanted sushi for Mother's Day. So we went out to a local joint that actually just re-opened their dining in option (they had been take out only during all of the pandemic). It was amazing, and we ordered too much (per the norm with our family and sushi), but I managed to not overstuff myself and feel miserable for the rest of the evening. Was a complete win. Sushi is amazing. For folks that haven't tried it, please please do. Even a simple Philly Roll will change your life. 

[Shello]

There's so much good stuff in that post!  The work situation sounds very promising!  

[Rooks]

Week of May 9th:

• 4/7 days without alcohol. 
• 4/7 days with a cold showers. 
• 4/7 days with home projects progression. 
• 2/7 days with fitness. 
• 5/7 days with reading.

Last week was goofy. Felt like I basically did nothing, but looking back, I made some solid progress on some house stuff. Fitness wasn't good, but I'm in the middle of a big project at work, so that's a pretty common trend (want to keep making progress on the project so I skip the workouts to get more time). 

 

Been enjoying the 2nd book in the Kingkiller Chronicles, although haven't quite been engulfing the book like I did with the first. Maybe it'll pick up again as I get more into the story. 

 

Otherwise, not much else to report. 

[Rooks]

Oof... it's been a hot minute. I had a rough two weeks, but bounced back strong last week. 

 

Week of May 16th:

• 1/7 days without alcohol. 
• 4/7 days with a cold showers. 
• 2/7 days with home projects progression. 
• 0/7 days with fitness. 
• 2/7 days with reading.

Week of May 23rd:

• 2/7 days without alcohol. 
• 4/7 days with a cold showers. 
• 3/7 days with home projects progression. 
• 0/7 days with fitness. 
• 6/7 days with reading.

Week of May 30th:

• 5/7 days without alcohol. 
• 7/7 days with a cold showers. 
• 5/7 days with home projects progression. 
• 5/7 days with fitness. 
• 7/7 days with reading.

I honestly don't really know what happened with those 2 weeks, but the simplistic part of my brain just says alcohol consumption goes up, productivity goes down. It's pretty well established at this that I can't just drink a little. I'm either not drinking, or it's going to 3+ drinks. Which is why I really need to start shooting for 5-6 days off per week. It just makes it too hard to really stay in the swing of things, when it means I'm going to waste a full day feeling groggy and slow after drinking. 

 

The weather has been beautiful here the last week or so, and forcing myself to at the very least go sit in the sun every day for 10 minutes. Not sure if it's helping or not, but more sun sure as hell can't hurt me (barring of course me falling asleep out there). 

 

My company did a pretty awesome thing, where they have given us every Friday off from Memorial Day to Labor Day, so last Friday was the first of those. Tackled 6 items on the "maintenance" list that I've been meaning to do, and still had time to get some woodworking time in before kiddo got home from school. It's going to be glorious having a day every week where I can pick exactly what I want to get done, and not feel guilty about ditching my kid or wife. Also, my current manager has finally started the official transition out of the team, but he's been skipping like 50% of the team meetings for the last month, so he's been checked out of the managerial role for awhile already.  Anyway, him leaving is giving me some hope things will start to turn around soon, but I'm still trying to remain somewhat skeptical until I actually see some improvement.

[Rooks]

Week of June 6th:

• 6/7 days without alcohol. 
• 5/7 days with a cold showers. 
• 3/7 days with home projects progression. 
• 2/7 days with fitness. 
• 2/7 days with reading.

Goals definitely fell off last week. On Saturday the 4th, I drank quite a bit, and woke up with a really sore left foot. No idea what I did. I don't think I kicked anything as I wasn't black out drunk, but man, it hurt to walk on most of the week. I still managed two sessions of weights with it, but it definitely put a damper on my desire to do cardio. Also, Kiddo finished school on Thursday and the finishing of school just seemed to mess with all my planned activities. And finally, I seem to be back into my discouraged mindset about work (it's definitely a bit of a roller coaster with how I feel about work). It's great that we have Fridays off, but man... I'm still really frustrating with the level of accountability on our team. Even worse, I know I'm slacking because of that lack of accountability. I'm doing enough to stay ahead of poorly performing teammates, but man I want to be on a team that is just kicking ass and taking names where I'm struggling to keep up with folks who are just crushing it! Hopefully, things start changing soon. 

 

Two bits of exciting news. First, my daughter is a finalist in something called the Braille Challenge. It's pretty cool and I'm a bit of a proud papa. News story here if you want. 

Second, I was able to purchase the mill I had mentioned a few posts back. Nothing like spending 5 hours with some good friends moving a 4000lb 90+ year old piece of machinery. Going to take some electrical work to get it up and running again (since my shop doesn't have 3 phase power), but I don't think I've ever been this excited about a tool. That said, it's also far and away the most expensive tool I've ever bought. Plus this thing probably made things for World War 2 and it's still perfectly functional. How awesome is that? Makes me want to restore it. But that might be a project for down the road. Let's get it running again first. 

 

 

[Tanktimus the Encourager]

That mill just screams "I will outlive you, and your grandchildren will use me to make things for their grandchildren."