[Weekly - F/Sa] Week In Review

I LIVE

Work was relatively quiet this week. And cold. And rainy. Field tech life is great in spring, fall, and most of summer, but it's not a lot of fun in winter. Yuck.

Kids are healthy. Winter break approaches quickly!

Bought a shed online this week, but it was damaged in transit, so plans (which include my dad driving up to help prep the ground and assemble the shed) are pushed back.

Sneaking in short bursts of gaming here and there, but still missing multiple games with my ToJ peeps. As always, grateful for TF2sdays.
 
It's almost Christmas!

Gift shopping is done.

Living room isn't quite ready for a tree, but maybe we can still pull it off. May depend largely on my wife finding more success motivating our children than I've had so far. ("Do you want a Christmas tree, kids?" "Yes!" "Then get to work!" "But we don't want to!" o_O)

Work is quiet and will likely remain quiet until the new year when it will very, very likely get crazy busy. Not looking forward to that. :/

Older child has a cough and runny nose, but is otherwise in good spirits. Hoping it's not the start of yet another wave of sickness in the house. But I still love these little Petri dishes on legs.
 
I SURVIVED CHRISTMAS

As expected, Christmas ended with my children getting way, way too much new stuff and randomly distributing it across the space my wife and I spent so much time and effort to clean. T_T We're trying to reclaim lost ground today, but it's slow going.

Those in the family who were sick seem to have fully recovered. Yay!

Had a two-day work week. Thursday and Friday were about the quietest work has ever been. Anticipating going from 0 to 90 in early January and trying not to dread it.

Back to chores!
 
I'm still waiting for someone to come along with a C-C-C-C-COMBO breaker post (this is my 7th consecutive post in this thread!), but still wanted to pop in with an update.

My older daughter has FINALLY recovered from not one but two illnesses (the flu then something else immediately after, probably a virus) and went back to school on Friday after missing almost 2 weeks. That's a big praise right there.

The little also got sick, but recovered much more quickly (4 days instead of 10).

I'm so happy that we're all healthy again!

Back to church this morning, too, and it was so good to be back.

Winter is the worst time to be a field tech and I'm eagerly anticipating spring (assuming we GET a spring this year and don't straight from winter to "sprummer" like we did last year). I'm getting ready to do more driving to help out other folks on my team replace computers in mass quantities and I'm praying that road conditions don't get nasty.

In the last week, our water heater and furnace stopped working, our fridge is freezing the bottom shelf of the main section, and we had tornado sirens go off between 11 p.m. and midnight (which means we had to get the kids out of bed and into the hall bath). Fortunately, the utility company was able to get gas service restored the morning after we discovered the outage and a repairman was able to fix the remaining issues on the furnace, which we caught early and avoided any major damage. Still, an unexpected $425 repair bill stings. We're grateful it wasn't the thousands of dollars to replace a water heater or a furnace we had feared. Praise God our house is operational once more!
 
Well it's been a while since I posted, but I hit a major milestone in work (yay!) that then required some weeks of recovery time (still in process) catching up on too many other things that got neglected in the meantime.

Spending some time on spiritual and physical health issues, both going well now that I can devote some genuine attention to it instead of just token efforts to try not to backslide too far in the course of daily life.

Hit kind of an odd impasse in spiritual direction that I wasn't really expecting and haven't posted much about before, but turns out to be a fundamental issue to honestly deal with now in some productive manner or another. Long story short, it's a really unpleasant experience to be an Eastern Orthodox Christian in America.

Now how much of that is my problem versus other peoples' or just one of those things that just is with no real practical solution other than to keep relying on the Lord to navigate through it, I'm not really clear on at this point. Some of the unpleasantness is avoidable to some extent by hiding behind the more ambiguous classification of "Bible Believer" to avoid issues with people who want to get into unproductive arguments over stupid stuff, but even going that route there's still a lot of stigma to not having much options in local churches to attach yourself to unless you're okay with spending a couple days a week role-playing something you're not in order to hang out with a group of people who think your true theological framework is a damnable heresy.

For the most part, I think I've become mature enough and competent enough to handle the role-playing if a position is gained from it that allows me to assist in church-provided services to the local community that do more good and reach more people for Christ than I can reasonably expect to do on my own, but over the past couple decades, local churches in the places I've been have seemed to be withdrawing more from their communities and more focused on serving themselves, so my enthusiasm for playing along has been waning proportionally. And most recently, my latest set of spiritual ponderings over how publically Christian as a Christian business owner do I really want to be, really brought home to me is that my main concern is not at all over how much do I want the world to know about my Christianity -- I genuinely don't have much concern over that -- but how much do I want other Christians to know and have a public place to dispute about it, and that's a whole different scope of problem to consider. Maybe a scope too big to be within my personal power to do anything meaningful about, so I'll keep praying on it.
 
Not sure I have a good or meaningful response right now while at work, but didn't feel hitting the like button was quite the way I wanted to show acknowledgment of your post. I find it interesting to hear that you have found it unpleasant to be Eastern Orthodox in America simply because a number of people from non-demon, but basically evangelical undergrad (men and women alike) have gone on to become Orthodox and found it a boon to them across the board. But perhaps you mean precisely what you say, that it's rough to be Orthodox in America, and not something else.

Anyroad, sorry to hear that's been rough. Wish I could be of greater utility or encouragement at present.
 
Kendrik said:
Not sure I have a good or meaningful response right now while at work, but didn't feel hitting the like button was quite the way I wanted to show acknowledgment of your post. I find it interesting to hear that you have found it unpleasant to be Eastern Orthodox in America simply because a number of people from non-demon, but basically evangelical undergrad (men and women alike) have gone on to become Orthodox and found it a boon to them across the board. But perhaps you mean precisely what you say, that it's rough to be Orthodox in America, and not something else.

Anyroad, sorry to hear that's been rough. Wish I could be of greater utility or encouragement at present.
Click to expand...

While it's always encouraging just to be heard even if nothing helpful can be said, that is actually some very helpful information to me.

For clarity, I do mean precisely Orthodox in America. It's actually a great help in global or special services ministry, which is more what the Lord calls me to than local ministry. But there's always that nagging desire for connection to have local people around to talk to with some basis for mutual understanding and support, and even in online ministry there are people who will (often vocally) judge your worth as a Christian based on your local connections. Plus I do have a lot of genuine concern about local communities that seem to be suffering, but that's more of a "because I care" kind of thing rather than something the Lord specifically calls and equips me to do something about.

Your mention of knowing others who have gone into Orthodoxy from other places besides just being born into it is very consoling on another level though, in that I haven't personally been in any social circles where that wasn't a totally unheard of thing and it's always been hard to try to explain both to myself and others why would God give me a conviction for a denomination that wasn't well respected or represented where I'm at. But hearing that it's not only an unprecedented thing but also found to be useful rather than hindering in service is very reassuring. Thank you :)
 
So happy that @Krissa Lox broke my posting streak! Thank you! /cheer

Relatively calm week at work this week with the exception of Friday afternoon. Glad for the weekend.

Getting ready for my older daughter's birthday party today. Happy birthday, girl! <3

Getting close to the end of the Epic Shed Saga(TM). My dad plans to be here this morning to assemble a wooden platform for the shed then a company will be out Monday to assemble it. I originally cringed at the idea of a third party finishing the assembly, but my dad made the point that everything related to this project has gone sideways at nearly every turn.

Kids and @Ember still in good health.
 
Welp. Major week. Next week will be bigger, though.

Got confirmation that we're cleared to close on our first house, so we asked to get our closing date bumped up to 3/8. We'll have our first house then!

Also, kinda crushin' it at work this week. Pushing out new versions of things and fixing problems and stuff. Now at a point where I feel like I can say, "They made the right call picking me," and not just because it benefits me. That's a nice thing.

About an hour from now, I get to go home finally and be with my wife and kids. Kiddos aren't feeling well still, so that's too bad. :/
 
Tek7 said:
Getting close to the end of the Epic Shed Saga(TM). My dad plans to be here this morning to assemble a wooden platform for the shed then a company will be out Monday to assemble it. I originally cringed at the idea of a third party finishing the assembly, but my dad made the point that everything related to this project has gone sideways at nearly every turn.
Click to expand...
Huzzah! The shed got assembled on Monday (after some "comedy of errors" hijinks involving screws, washer, and super glue gel). We've had some light precipitation since then, but I plan to wait until our first moderate or heavy rain (or snow + time to melt) to confirm the shed is waterproof before moving stuff in.

Family is still healthy.

Job is still decent. Work life will probably go from 0 to 60 painfully quickly when our department has a Windows 10 image ready for the standard workstations. Not exactly looking forward to it, but not dreading it either since I've just about had my fill of relatively quiet work days (at least, for now).

Intended to install Krita on my tablet PC running Linux Mint this week only to discover I'd installed it previously. I threw together a few basic scripts to quickly enable or disable the touchscreen so I could play around with doodling in Krita without accidentally drawing lines when I rest my right hand on the screen. Excited to participate in some art prompts with more experienced artists in the #art channel on the CGA Discord!

So very ready for spring. Hoping that we get more than two seasons this year...
 
Home
Home life is going okay, we have a lot of stuff going on all the time so it's hard to make sure that we're NSYNC on everything. Heavyarms is learning how to get into more more things, while running around frantically. I'm hoping he can spend a little bit more time with Grandma and grandpa but they've have weird health stuff occasionally that prevents him from being able to spend time with them.
That I need to figure out how to take care of some ice dams that are occurring on my roof. And I'm considering getting a snowblower to to help the whole neighborhood, because block is covered in snow and nobody knows how to shovel very well, except my neighbor to the right of me that puts my shoveling to shame. But they also take trips during the winter so it's a bit inconsistent.



Work
Work stuff could be better. I went to a big conference and usually I get a 5 x return on the trip investment. This time I did not get any closed deals. It's a super bummer because it makes 2018 feel like a failed business year among other problems. I started the year with a lot of renewed vision for redoing my accounting systems, creating better systems for websites, and building up my team. But it looks like none of that is happening. At least some accounting stuff is put into place, but it is a quarterly based system so I don't get to see any fruit until end of March.


Ministry
This side has been doing pretty good. We are trying to help a lot of miscellaneous people. Elderly, single dads, families moving, and college students. we love our college students a lot and although it's hard to watch them make mistakes sometimes, I think it has been a good year so far.


My relationship with God,
It has been good, but I do feel more and more of a pull to pray on a deeper level and to really try and do more intercessory style prayer.
 
Been getting a lot of work done lately, but not much of it makes good storytelling.

My main website is up and running, though I'll still be adding more content for another couple months or so. And got new social media profiles started. More for business purposes than personal use, but since business includes gaming, sometimes I'll have interesting stuff there. I put links in sig in case anyone is interested.
 
My week and weekend were... messy. Younger son got notably sick, and the docs decided he needed to be tested for measles. So that was a whole whirlwind. Fortunately, no measles! And he's getting better! But I missed a day and a half of work to get home. But in the midst of all that, I also had to sign for our house (and drive a form up to my wife, find a mobile notary, and drive it back down first thing the next morning). Then had to wait around town for keys. Meanwhile, my sister-in-law decided to come up from Portland to help us (in addition to being a great and helpful person, she's also been a nurse in baby departments for many years). So that was awesome, but I had that much more need to get things done and move on.

Of course, by the time she got there, the fever broke, and he was well on the mend.

So, Saturday, we loaded up a pickup and our Pilot, made a trek down to our new home. Unloaded. Went back. Then, Sunday, loaded up the pickup again, took sister-in-law to the airport, then came down to our new home, unloaded, got essential set up, and got to stay the night. So, for the first time in... a long time... I was able to get up at 6:30 for work, leave the house at 7:30, and said house be my house with my family there. :D

So yuh. It was a week and a weekend. Planning to make our big push move this weekend. Taking Friday off for it, even.
 
Survived. Which is a thing. Went back up on Friday to pack and prep for big move on Saturday. Things took some turns along the way before we started loading up, but we finally got there. And, in the end, we got a lot more moved down than we were expecting to. Then spent all day Sunday working on unpacking and getting moved in. Now, it's back to work as usual. Will have another short run this weekend, but gonna keep that one a lot more simple.
 
One "last last" run to get our stuff. Was just a day trip. Only Christmas tubs and the piano really remain. (And my golf clubs!) Got our bed frame assembled this side of our new mattress being delivered and finally usable (mattress tech is crazy now).

We're getting much closer to moved in, which is a different thing from relocated.

We also went to a local church for the first time (first viable opportunity amidst all the moving), where we comically met our next door neighbors and found out that they are leaders of worship at the church. haha But looking forward to going back next weekend.

Just the regular work grind aside from that. Also found out that my netbook can work as a (middling performance) dumb terminal with my PS4 via Remote Play. In turn, been able to play a bit of Elder Scrolls Online again, and very much glad for that too.
 
Good Saturday morning, all!

I'm currently recovering (and, I pray, nearly recovered) from a head cold which has been bad enough to be annoying but not bad enough to keep me home from work. We're still feeling the effects of @Ember's 6-day work week last week. Her getting an emergency call Sunday morning (and having to make the 1.5-hour round trip) didn't help. Monday gave her a very brief chance to recover.

We woke Tuesday morning around 3 a.m. to a call from her parents that her 96-year old grandmother had fallen and been taken to the hospital. She was stable, but had fractured multiple bones in her face and there were (and are) concerns that her remaining vision might be at risk. My poor wife couldn't get back to sleep before going in to work later that morning. (I fell asleep about two hours later and got one more hour of sleep.)

My wife's parents watch our kids, so I ended up having to take unscheduled time off to watch the little for the day. I took the opportunity to clean and organize at home, then it was time to make lunch, clean more, pick up the older child from school, get them ready for activities, and all the other things that are harder to do on not enough sleep. We survived and I went back to work the next day.

Speaking of work, our workload is likely to ramp up considerably in the next week or two as our largest project is set to resume soon. I know I've posted elsewhere (and, on occasion, ranted on Discord) about how simplified my job is compared to 5-10 years ago when hardware techs would fix or replace components rather than replacing entire computers. I'll refrain from repeating that rant, but the thought of my work consisting almost entirely of replacing computers for the next several months has me thinking maybe it's time to take another look at the IT job market in my area again. But then I usually come back to the stability and flexibility of my current job and it's hard to invest what little free time I have aggressively searching for other employment.

TL;DR: Week was rough, but we survived. Wife's grandmother fell but is stable. Box replacer wants to do more than replace boxes.
 
Tek7 said:
Box replacer wants to do more than replace boxes.
Click to expand...

You might be interested in checking out the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. Although the author is an academic, he does a good job of covering this trend in IT (as well as elsewhere) and being practically realistic about where societal expectations need to be pushed back against to preserve our vocational competencies.
 
So my business is pretty much at capacity now, which is great but now I need to figure out how to make it more efficient so I'm not up late all the time :-)


there have been several other life things that have been coming up, that makes switching between life, work, Parenthood, and gaming sometimes a bit difficult. The little bit more of a mental toll, is starting to impact me I think.

Then we don't even get to the spiritual things at that point :-)

my wife and I are trying to build into our schedule these work books to help challenge us together. The first ones we bought were for the screwtape letters. But getting time and mental energy has been more difficult than not.
 
@Ember's grandmother passed away at the age of 95 this week, so she spent much of the week helping her mom. Our family rode with her parents and her brother for the 8-hour round trip yesterday.

We're back at home today and catching up on chores and cleaning.

Work was more hectic this week, mostly because of another team's failure to test an update and our team being instructed to prioritize replacing hardware and updating drivers for other drivers to get things working again. This work week reminded me where our team ranks (hint: it's not high) and inspired me to take another look at outside opportunities. Unfortunately, I didn't find any good fits during my (admittedly brief) search.

Everyone in the family is healthy and I pray it stays that way for a while. We went a long time without any sickness in the family, then I got sick with a cold in late March and only finished my round of antibiotics on Thursday. (I'm skipping most of the details, but rest assured the illnesses were minor. I didn't miss any work, but I was sick of being sick about halfway through.)

I'm hoping to get back to the usual routine this week, but we'll see how it goes.
 
Home
Ups and downs. We considered trying to buy a tri-plex, but not sure its the lord's will just yet. We just booked hotel for our anniversary and we are stoked to get out of town and check out Walla Walla Washington. Its where Walla Walla Onions come from XD


Work
Work is doing a bit better. We've implemented a new program for website hosting and its doing a lot better. We're still getting through a few trouble clients, evne those who think God has brought them to us to build their website.... Long story....
Really just trying to stay on top of current clients while trying to figure out systems to help automate our sales and management better. We are considering getting a computer programmer on board so I can do less of the actual work and more sales.... but we'll see.....

Ministry
This side has been doing pretty good. We are trying to help a lot of miscellaneous people. Elderly, single dads, families moving, and college students. we love our college students a lot and although it's hard to watch them make mistakes sometimes, I think it has been a good year so far. Helping out a single dad a lot lately who just got full custody of his kiddo. Rough and broken stuff, but just spent an hour at McDonalds with him and another dad and it was pretty fun to see..... Until my kid hit his kid and I had to politely discipline my child in public XD


My relationship with God,
It has been good, but I do feel more and more of a pull to pray on a deeper level and to really try and do more intercessory style prayer. Trying to keep to monthly ultra long quiet times with daily quiet time and devos but church events keep getting in the way XD that abd we've been sick a lot but excited for what God is doing.

CGA,
Stoked to see this getting more traction in the articles and even in Discord, there has been a huge uptick in usage imo. Considering trying to bring the streams back a tad. Just wish Twitch's channel stuff was easier to manage and more dynamic.
 
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