Conjuring Up Animal Spirits

Psychic Entropy (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991)

information that conflicts with existing intentions or that distracts people from carrying out intentions

Over the past several months, I've been finding myself visiting and revisiting in a dark emotional space. It is not despondency. All is not lost. I still have enough perspective to know there are many in the world who are enduring much worse than me.

No, the specter that haunts me is that loss is accelerating with time, and with that there is little renewal or recovery. My resources for coping financially and emotionally seem to be on an irreversible path to exhaustion, and what scares me is what I will do if I reach that point.

Yes, I keep the bills paid, and I haven't fallen behind on anything. Still financial hits keep hitting, depleting me of my savings, and I don't ever seem to have much room for replenishing savings.
The biggest hit by far was having to replace the roof back in September. That wiped out close to two thirds of my savings. I took another hit in October when I had a drain clog. The installation of a cleanout cost me $750.

The severe winter stressed me out because I was worried about the furnace giving up the ghost. It seems like every couple of years, the igniter has to be replaced at a cost of a couple hundred dollars, and the last time the furnace tech was out here, he said that it was probably time to get the heater and central air replaced. Fortunately, the furnace didn't die, even in the worst of the bitter cold from the polar vortex. To be sure, I kept the thermostat as low as 61°F, and I had to fight the temptation to listen to the furnace every time it ran for evidence that there were problems.

At the end of February, I started having slow drains and burbling toilets whenever I drained the sink or washed clothes. The first plumber who responded said I had raw sewage coming into the crawl space and needed to have a restoration service come out and fix things before they could look into doing any repairs. He said at a minimum they would have to replace the cast iron pipes and relay part of the line out to the sewer, which would start at $3,700.

Opting for a second opinion resulted in a less severe diagnosis. They rain the drain cleaning and found roots. That cost me $250, and I know that I will need to have the pipe redone because the house is 50 years old. I need to get estimates for that, too.

My brakes needed work done in late March, which cost me another $430.

I not only lost a coworker to meaningless gun violence at the beginning of the month, I was the one who took the call from his father-in-law trying to find someone at work to notify as they went through his cell phone records.

My older dog had a stroke over Easter weekend.  At the time it was happening, I had no idea what was going on and was almost certain we'd have to put him to sleep.  He has recovered, but still has some wobbliness when he walks.

The tooth that I had a root canal done on last year needed to be pulled last week when the gum in the vicinity started to swell.  It turned out to be a fractured root.

One thing that has kept me going has been my relationship with my girlfriend, with whom I've been together for just about three years, but even that has been subject to challenges. Our weekends without kids have been aligned so we've been able to have time to ourselves, but for the last month, her ex-husband has been cancelling out on his weekends, claiming he doesn't have enough money, so we haven't gotten to see each other for more than a couple hours at a time.

I haven't been living extravagantly. When I changed jobs at the beginning of 2013, I knew that I'd have to curb expenses, and I have done well keeping fixed costs down. But after taxes and support (still at the same level as my old job) take their bite, I'm living on about 46 % of my gross income. If you take into account that X has been asking me to pay for piano lessons for the past six months, it's probably less than that.

I hit an emotional trough by the beginning of April and arranged to get some counseling through my EAP, which provides six sessions. The counselor is having me try to come up with some activities I could participate in to get me out of the house. I've been looking over things to do at Meetup.com, but I haven't seen much that I could see myself doing.

I am pretty sure I am fighting depression, and it's affecting my ability to see how things could get better. Keynes wrote about the idea of animal spirits as a driving force in humans, the urge to do something rather than nothing, based on something other than rational calculation. To take risks, making leaps of faith toward the future, without dwelling on what could go wrong. My struggle is that my mind keeps seeing wrong turns and risks everywhere I look.

The constant loop of concerns wears me down, distracts from from focus, and leaves me feeling more helpless.  The term psychic entropy seems very fitting.

On the upside, I have been getting approached by recruiters who have been interested in whether I've been interested in making a change. If I could find a job that paid better and didn't require a death race to work, that might be the first step to getting past this horrible rut.

Second Guessing Tape Kicks into High Gear

I read the news today oh, boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
-- The Beatles, "A Day in the Life", Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Capitol Records

On Thursday morning, the RSS feed of a local business news show made my draw drop. There was a press release about how my former employer, Company Line, had agreed to be acquired by THE Big Bad Database Company. Terms were undisclosed, but the story percolated all the way to the top of the food chain the tech and online marketing trade publications.

A good chunk of the day that followed involved me chatting online with some former Company Line coworkers with whom I keep in touch. A couple of them had exercised stock options upon their departure. The earlier hire was thinking he'd come out ahead by about 40 percent. The later hire was going to lose $0.50/share.

All of us were surprised by the news. To the best of our knowledge, the company had achieved little traction in the past year. A major product redesign went live early in the year, and I know that there had been a major build out of analytics infrastructure for tracking site traffic. I had also received reports of as a host of demo-driven-development features rolled out because the self-important product guy who came on board back in late spring 2011 had promised them to potential sales customers.

Indeed, in the acquisition press release, the three big-name clients they cited all had been subscribers for at least three years. The acquiring company isn't buying an existing or growing revenue stream. There were suggestions that the application will complement feature gaps in another marketing application that it acquired last year. It's also worth noting that the acquiring company is seeing stagnation in its existing markets and is playing catch-up in the world of cloud computing. This acquisition gives them some buzz and an air of seriousness about its strategy.

Still, the press, both locally and nationally, is touting this as a win. The spectre of self-doubt that likes to nag me in these moments reminds me that I left and chose to exercise none of my options. Although in retrospect the stress was wearing me down and making me more irritable in my latter days there, the spectre suggests that I didn't have what it took to get them across the goal line. Bowing out gracefully was the best I could hope for.

I have put myself out to pasture, doing largely maintenance programming with no real greenfield development in sight.

Nearly three quarters of the savings accumulated since the divorce have been swallowed up largely by repairs to the roof and some drain line work. Although my gross pay decreased by about $500/month (since 7/1, that gap has narrowed to just under $300), I continue to pay child support at the same level. I have a car payment now, and lots of costs have gone up. My sense of financial security is worsening. In my darker moments, I think the only options I have left at retirement are hitting the lottery and suicide.

This is what plays through my mind when I feel doubt. I know it's probably skewed. I try to remind myself of the saying "You cannot be replaced," but somehow it can't compete with the anti-mantra "You aren't that great. You've never been, and it's not going to get any better. Why try?"

I can't bring myself to commit any kind of self-harm. Not yet at least. But I am seriously lacking things to hope for. Things that make it worth getting out of bed in the morning. I don't trust the universe.

Seven Years Gone By... What's Next?

Seven years ago, I published my first post on this blog.  It was a heckuva ride for the first couple years.  I posted pretty faithfully, with posts being pretty lengthy, detailed pieces.  After I changed jobs and moved on to a post-marital life, this space became increasingly dormant.  If SiteMeter's counter stats are to be believed, most of my traffic are visits from Google's crawling software.

Lots of other blogs, which were displayed on this space's blogroll have since gone through similar changes.  Anais keeps chugging away at LiveJournal, and Digger will resurface every once in a while with an update.  Otherwise, the overriding majority of posters are like the illusory mathematicians and carpenters wives about whom Dylan wondered rhetorically in the final verse of "Tangled Up in Blue".  Yet still, I am on the road, looking for another joint.

So here is where things stand on my end...

I still make my home in the Circle City, living in the same house that I've lived in since Oct. 2000.  I'm also still very much involved in my daughters' lives.  They are now 10 and 8 years old.  The X keeps them booked on a pretty tight schedule during the school year.  Two of their scool nights are filled with dance classes.  During the competition season, that also includes an occasional Friday night.  On Wednesdays, they have piano lessons.  I work a early-shifted schedule that day, pick them up, and see them off to lessons and help with homework.  They stay with me on alternating weekends, and this summer, I have been taking vacation time to spend days with them. 

Both get pretty decent grades, As, Bs, and the occasional C, but my older daughter struggles with math and has trouble retaining concepts.  She loves to write stories and letters to her friends.  She also gets a kick out of drawing comic strips, but unfortunately, most of them are about bodily functions.  The younger is a lover of art and prolifically draws pictures that she keeps in binders.  I'm grateful that they've found creative outlets.  They're very much into pop music, much to my chagrin. :-)

As for me, I changed jobs shortly after the beginning of the year.  I accepted the offer with the Biggest Post-Secondary School in the State, which meant a pay cut.  Fortunately, I got high marks on a mid-year salary review and got a pay increase that restored a little over 40 percent of what I gave up making the leap.  Given the school's budgetary situation, I am very grateful for that. 

Working for a large organization like this has taken some getting adjusted to.  The pace is much slower, and you wind up getting locked into holding patterns while waiting for several divisions to reach agreement on where things should go next. 

I've been able to make some positive contributions, eliminating a big chunk of software development backlog, but all of that has been with bug fixing and extending some pretty dusty legacy applications written in the Perl programming language.  The next project I will be working on will be a mixture of Perl and newer code written in Python. 

Their project management and planning processes are in dire need of updating.  There is no infrastructure for deployment or automated testing.  Business analysts are basically order takers for project sponsors, rarely pushing back when sponsors or proxies overprescribe a solution.  The software that runs their mainline business functions does not have uniformly maintained environments for development, testing, and production, so it is commonplace for problems to be encountered when code gets promoted from one environment to the other.  Fortunately, there are some in leadership who want to modernize and have been willing to ask for my input on how to revamp things.  During my time at Company Line, I oversaw similar modernization efforts.

Living on the reduced pay has been a stressor for me.  I opted to keep my child support payments at the same level as what I was paying out under my old job.  About 35 percent of my net pay goes straight into the X's bank account, and I think she still gets paid more in child support than what she grosses with her current employer.  I've been cooking at home more, and eating out less.  I also take leftovers with me for lunch at work. 

Still, there have been some added challenges.  For one thing, on the Friday before I started my new job, I wrecked my car after hitting a patch of ice on a side street, so I started off the new year with a new car payment.  In February, the dentist decided that a crown that had been giving me problems since October of last year was in need of a root canal.  In March, a small part of my roof on my porch started to collapse due.  There was a lack of ice and water protection near the gutter and leakage over time resulted in rotting.  Insurance doesn't cover such things, so that repair work will require the replacement of the roof.  The price tag will be around $9,500.  I will be financing a little under a third of that because to do otherwise would basically wipe out the saving I have accumulated over the past five years.  I am praying that my air conditioning doesn't die this summer.

The recurring series of unfortunate events left me feeling some deep emotional lows.  I did see a counselor at the beginning of May through my employer's EAP.  He suggested I start doing freelance work on the side to supplement my income rather than trying to find a higher paying job.  I also went to the doctor to see about getting put back on antidepressants.  I went of venlafaxine for a month, but it resulted in anorgasmia.  Although my current employer is supposed to have great health coverage, I was being charged around $190, about six times what I was paying for venlafaxine at my old job at the same pharmacy (in network), and the cost of doctor visits went up about $30.  Yes, both plans were high-deductible.  The whole experience left me feeling that I can't afford to be treated for depression.  I have been doing my best to keep things together by trying to avoid negative thoughts.

On the relationship front, that is going pretty well.  I have been seeing her for a little over two years now.  We talked about blending families some at the beginning of the year, but the house issues  from March meant that I had less money for remodeling and expansion work.  We still see each other on the weekends where we don't have our kids, and I come over to her house for dinner once a week, usually on Tuesdays.  I took my first out-of-town vacation in over seven years about a month ago, joining her and her family at a rented cabin down by the river that forms the southern border of the state.  She is struggling financially, too.  Back in September, she took a job that is more in line with a postgraduate degree she has been pursuing, but there was a pay cut involved, so I know she has been stressed over that.

That's about all I can think of for now.  If you have additional questions about what's been going on, let me know in the comment section.

Late Night Listening XLII: Take Five (Years)

The title for this post is inspired by Dave Brubeck, whose passing last week gave jazz lovers reason to pause and reflect the richness of his life's work.  It's probably cliche to express a fondness of "Take Five", but I especially love this recording, which sets the tune to lyrics.

If you click around the 2007-era post archives on this blog, you'll turn up a lot of agonizing about a lengthy and stressful job search, which wrapped up at the end of that year.

The year 2012 has seen a similar search, playing itself out over the course of a year, but not the national scale.  Almost all of my job prospects have been local to the Circle City, with the few national ones being those which had telecommute options.

The motivation for moving on started out as a growing dissatisfaction with the job, as the product veep started to grate on my nerves more and more.  But as the year drew near to an end, it became more and more apparent that the company's future was becoming ever so more cloudy.
 
At this late hour, I have my eighth job offer of the year on the table.  I also had my share of rejections (five to be exact).  Most of them stemmed from lack of familiarity with a particular language or technology and an unwillingness to take a chance on me assaulting the learning curve.

The present offer was extended formally to me this past Thursday evening, with a request that I make a decision by this Tuesday, and I have been at levels of anxiety that I haven't experienced for some time.  I've bought some time by sending a list of clarifying questions to the hiring manager, and he as responded by asking me to come up to the office for another visit.

All and all, unless I see some serious red flags during my visit, I will accept the offer, but I want to make sure I don't hate myself in the process.

So where did the other seven offers come from.  I'll itemize:

1. Subscription-Based Online Business Reputation Listing of Angela -- originally applied for engineering position for search; offered me lesser development role involving more generic website development; offer extended in Feb.; increased pay by 2 %.
2. Big Pharma Marketing Collateral Warehouse Fulfillment -- suggested by local recruiter; would have involved Java MVC framework development with dysfunctional source code tree and hosting on a mainframe; offer extended in Feb.; increased pay by 2 %
3. Education Employment Screening System -- applied for senior engineering role; somewhat shaky operation with production servers hosted in their building's basement and strange Java/SQL Server architecture; offer extended in Feb.; decreased pay by 5.3 %
4. Local For-Profit Professional and Trade School -- suggested by recruiter; school spent $2 M on outsourced development in China for custom built social network; brought in-house in desperate need of scalability; offer extended in late June; maintained same pay
5. Bean Crock 24-Hour Restaurants --  suggested by recruiter; restaurant chain needed a senior level developer to come in and bring code base and build process under control; turned down job before they could give me a salary
6. Consulting Firm for Big New England Insurance Co. -- suggested by recruiter; would have been contracted to contractor; enterprisey development team built newfangled insurance quoting site without good knowledge of JavaScript; needed JavaScript debugger; offer extended in late Oct.; 16-percent annual increase in pay
7. Red Diamond that Does "Great Things" Seed and Pesticides -- suggested by recruiter; would have been a 6-month contract to help a biostatistician build a web interface around some statistical analysis code that would help them make decisions on where to funnel R&D dollars; offer extended in early Nov.; 6 percent annual increase in pay
8. Biggest Public Post-Secondary School in the State -- responded to ad; surprisingly progressive IT team looking to bring mature and effective development and operations people maintain legacy apps of ill repute and develop new apps using open source technology stack; 6 percent decrease in pay but awesome health insurance, retirement savings plan, and vacation time policy

Yep.   That's right.  Tons of effort to find a job only to wind up taking the one with the biggest pay cut.  That's the biggest part of my ambivalence towards accepting the offer.  In the long run, the benefits may turn out to be a better deal, but giving up $500 gross per month is a tough one to digest.

Of secondary concern is that the job would require the return to a car-based commute.  With my current job, I've been riding the bus into work for the most part.  The only days I've driven have been situations where I needed to be somewhere, and taking the bus to get there would have been impractical or would have required me leaving too early since the service is hourly.

I won't be driving as far as I was driving for my job that I held from 2005 - 2007 (19 miles versus 25), but it will be to the northeast side of the metro area, passing through two or three traffic choke points.  That means more stress from the drive, more costs on fuel, and the possibility that I'll finally have to ditch my 2000 Saturn L Series which has like 168,000+ miles on it.

Finally, I will most likely be giving up my flexibility in hours.  One of the things that has kept me tied to my current job for so long is the fact that I do have the ability to shift my hours as long as I am getting stuff done.  That means that I can take off work at 3 pm on Wednesdays to pick up my kids from the bus after school and take them to their piano lessons, if I have to.

On the bright side, even if this is an academic institution, their leadership seems to be heading in a more forward-thinking direction, and I will continue to work on an open source technology stack and get a crack at doing some bleeding edge technology stuff as well.

Moreover, of all the potential employers, this is the only one where I didn't feel like I would need to take a shower at the end of the day because I felt like I was doing something either shady or evil.  Since this is a vocational and technical school, my work would be helping people get an education that would open new doors, rather than shifting wealth towards the already wealthy.

I can probably  make it through the pay cut.  It will require eating in more and being more stringent about not saying "Yes" to every expenditure that X asks for.  There is a chance I could also supplement some of that lost income through freelance work, but that would be new territory and I don't know if I have a deep enough rolodex.

Late Night Listening XLI: Are You on Fire?

There's something about the season... the shortening of days, the changing of clocks, or perhaps the contentiousness of the nation's political Zeitgeist... that works to stir up my existential angst. But when you throw in an Indigo Girls concert, that kicks things up to crisis level.

This past Friday, these talented souls put on an amazing show in a college town southeast of here. I had purchased the tickets back in mid-July when my Beloved had heard they were scheduled to play there. It was my first time seeing both of them live. This past May, I had seen Amy perform solo at a snug local venue and was similarly blown away.

I remember being hooked on them after seeing the video "Closer to Fine" on Mtv back in the early fall of 1988. I hadn't even turned 20 yet, but the song's yearning to transcend the confusion of living spoke to me strongly. Their harmonies, unlike anything else in the mainstream, lured me in.

I was in my second year of college, struggling mightily with organic chemistry, worried horribly about a grandmother who had endured a horrible accident that would leave her an invalid for another 16 years, and still stuck in an estrangement from my father that had lasted for almost four years.

Unfortunately, it was also a time of limited budgets, so I didn't invest in a copy of that album. The song would wander in and out of my mind over the years, but for the most part, I didn't follow their prolific career.

When I moved to the Circle City in 2000, I started listening to an indie rock station here, which would play newer tracks from them. In 2005, I borrowed a copy of Retrospective and it gave me a chance to sample their work in the years between.

My Beloved, by contrast, is a huge fan and has followed them throughout the years, and has been to multiple concerts. I smiled as I would occasionally glance over to watch her singing along to her favorites.

The performance on Friday was interesting from the standpoint that their opening act, the Shadowboxers, doubled as a backup band, a group of young guys who have some killer harmonies in their own right.

The show had many moments that touched me, but the most powerful performance was their rendition of "Kid Fears". Amy and Emily started off alone, and toward the end, a member of the Shadowboxers comes on stage to sing the male vocals. The emotions the song tapped in side of me have left my mind playing that part of the concert over and over.

The overall state of my life is difficult to describe, and there are probably changes on the horizon, but I can't quite puzzle out what form it take. My employer, Company Line, is probably reaching a point where it is time to pull the plug. Despite revamps in the product and efforts to create a more effective sales program, the traction hasn't been there.

After having been there for almost five years and seeing a lot of people come and go, and having seen my closest coworker been dismissed ungracefully after she burnt out, I have struggled most days to get of out bed and get to the office.

I've done some job searching over the summer and fall. I have been presented with three more offers, and I've turned them all down because they were not natural steps of growth or not good cultural fits.

Amid all of the work uncertainty, my relationship with my Beloved keeps me going. The loneliness and isolation I've struggled with in the past has become a distant memory, and I've been spending way less time living inside my head when dealing with problems, which is why I haven't felt the need to post to my blog for a while.

We've been together almost 1 1/2 years, and the emotional bonds have grown stronger. And much to my surprise, both her kids and mine have been very comfortable with us, although we do get some ribbing over displays of affection. We're still a ways away from merging households, but it has become an ever increasing reality with the passage of time.

Although there are many planes in our connectedness, music is perhaps the strongest one, and we have had countless conversations over what we love most and what it means to us.

Perhaps some of the emotional heaviness I experienced at last Friday's show was an elevated awareness of the time that has passed over the past two-plus decades of my adult life and the sorrow that so many of those years were spent without knowing her, or even knowing of her existence.

Sometimes, I catch myself wondering if things would have been better if we would have crossed paths at a much earlier point in our lives. My Beloved puts it into perspective by saying we met at the right time in our lives, when we were ready for each other, shaped by the bumps and scrapes of living life.

Although that ascribe to the Universe a level of grand design that I don't quite buy into, she's probably right in the sense that we are who we are now because of the things we lived through, and that to think that we could have lived for the better by meeting earlier on would be foolish because at that stage of our lives, we were very different people.

When I hear this, I know she is right. To meet her at this stage of my life couldn't be a better time, for there is still plenty life to be lived, and everything leading up to this point has made me realize just how rare this kind of sustained connectedness can be.

Where Do We Go from Here?

I saw where Digger Jones posted an update on his current situation over at the Wordpress version of Reality & Redemption. I chimed in with a note of my own.

A glance at his blogroll made me realize not only how little energy I have put into blogging the past year, but that many of those who found themselves in the Diggersphere of anonymous bloggers, those with relationship issues determined to find resolutions via cerebral or spiritual means, have since shut down, gone private, or gone dormant, if not intermittent. My analytics show I still get on average of four or so visits a day, but most of that traffic is Googlebot, so a webcrawler has become my biggest fan.

I found myself with a few spare moments this morning, so I thought I would try to tap out some updates on my life since the end of 2011.

Kids On Friday, the kids finished up the third and first grades respectively, and did OK for the most part. She loves to read and write, pouring herself into projects where she has to create reports. With school out, she has been obsessing with writing her own story. She's finishing up her second year of piano lessons and will have her first recital this Thursday. The younger daughter's passion is in drawing. We go through a lot of crayons, colored pencils, and markers. Both are finishing up another year of dance. Their fourth and final competition was this past weekend. The end-of-year recital is in two weeks. Instead of a national competition, they will be going to nationals. Work

>I am nearing in on 4 1/2 years with my current employer. They are treading water and trying to finish up another round of securing money to keep running. I had an unpleasant conversation with the the product veep in early January, after I got back from some time off during the holidays that made me think he might be pushing for me to get fired.

He was complaining about the "lack of urgency" in my team and how other departments seemed to be stressed out but we weren't. We were losing clients and we were going to be very behind in the marketplace if we didn't start developing at a much faster rate. I asked him for some clarification to identify instances of where we had fallen short. He complained that we weren't releasing a lot in December.

I noted that we had several members of the team who had to use up vacation time at the end of the year and would lose it otherwise. He said it was more than that but couldn't give me a quantitative description of his vague complaints. He went on to say that if it meant sacrificing some application stability in the name of new features, he'd be willing to make that tradeoff. I asked him what that meant exactly? Was he willing to give up 99.9 % uptime? Be willing to offer service credits for downtime? He wouldn't say.

The next day, I called up three local recruiters with whom I had worked with in hiring capacity in the past few years. They put me in touch with some leads. One was with a local company that had been around for a long time but had gone public in November. The other was with a marketing service fulfillment company on far north side of town. There was a third lead that I don't really count because I believe that the recruiter was misrepresenting the role to me as well as my goals to the prospective employer. The interview didn't last more than a few minutes. I also secured an interview with another, more established company a few blocks away, based on a job posting. I got three offers, two of which were slight increases in pay. The other was a drop but had more employer coverage of health insurance.

I was on the brink of making a decision to take one of the jobs when I learned that our lead sales guy was leaving the company with only one week's notice. That would take the sales department to one person. Moreover, the lead over in the support department would be going on maternity leave in a couple weeks.

If I were to leave, that would be three out of four director level roles quitting the company or going on an extended leave. Rather than run the risk of burning bridges, I withdrew from the job seeking process. Fortunately the companies extending the offers understood and were glad to see I put my employer before myself.

While the job search was going on, I worked to get my team to retool the development process so that we could push releases in a more automated fashion so that we could deploy code more frequently than once a week. The changes we made were enough to mollify the veep. We started shipping so much so often that just this past week, he had to request that we start putting a 48 hour hold on deployment of user-visible features so the client relationship managers (read: people who couldn't make it in sales or product support and got transferred) could weigh in on it.

About a week after I withdrew from my job search, the CEO asked to have lunch with me. He asked me how things were doing with me towards the end, and I let him know that I was approaching a point where I was ready to think of moving on. He seemed both surprised and distressed. He asked me what was driving it. I said part of it was working for so long at the company and that I was ready to do some development on something different. I also expressed an incompatibility with the veep. He said that he didn't want me to leave and asked me to work out my differences with the veep.

In April, one of the three recruiters I had been working with contacted me and let me know that she had another possible lead for me. This one would be for a local professional school that had build its own social portal with outside contractors and wanted to bring development in house. Things were still in the budgeting phase, so nothing was certain. I did have an initial conversation with two managers in April and that went well. They had me undergo a technical phone interview on Friday of this past week. The interviewer was a third party because the in-house development team is a Microsoft centric bunch, and the portal is built on open source technology. If the job work out, I would make my transition sometime in July.

Relationship

On May 14, I celebrated one year since my girlfriend and I started exchanging e-mails. Our in-person meeting anniversary is on the 24th. We've been doing a lot of reflecting recently, and both of us are very happy with where we are. We are committed to the long haul, still keeping our kids in the top priority spot, but looking forward to a day several years out where we share a place of our own.

Prior to meeting, both of us had struggled with a lifelong sense of not really clicking with anyone. We have very much in common with respect to past experiences, world view, and love of the arts. I've started to attend her church, which is has similar ties to my own upbringing, but more progressive. We are content just snuggling or sitting together and reading. We also help each other out of our shells so we see a lot of live music, most recently at a concert by a certain somewhat famous folk rock singer who also has an edgier bent when she plays solo.

We have not only become lovers but also playmates, best friends, and confidants. I will probably have some more good things to write about this in a future post, maybe in the next few days.

Any other questions?

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

And so a year comes to end, with this quite arguably being the quietest year of this blog's existence. The last post here was way back in July, over five months ago.

With the new year aligning on the boundary of a week, I've been feeling extra motivated to get my life squared away, tending to loose ends here and there. Because I took the last two weeks of the year off so that I could be with my daughters while they are on holiday break, I felt a lot more freedom to take care of neglected items.

I've made pretty good progress. My to-do list has been shrinking, but there's a number of things that I have been avoiding. One of them is taking in the year's worth of recyclable material that has accumulated in the garage. If I let that go much longer, it will definitely start to take on a hoarder feel to it. The other is working my way through a pile of junk mail and old bills that need to be shredded, which has been accumulating since mid-April, the last time I did a clean-up of that pile.

Kids are doing mostly OK...

My older daughter is in the third grade this year. She enjoys reading and writing, but math is a challenge for her. She's also very timid in the classroom, so she doesn't ask questions readily when she is confused. The end result is that her homework and test scores tend to bounce between extremes of really good and really bad. We met with her teacher and worked out a plan of action to encourage her to do more asking of questions.

The younger daughter is struggling some with school. The enthusiasm for homework that she had in her preschool and kindergarten years seems to have disappeared. She has her good days and bad days, but they are not the same kind of extremes seen in our older daughter. She's been experiencing some anxiety about school and missing me. There have been some mornings this year where she didn't want to go to school and complained about wanting to see me. She is currently seeing a counselor under X's EAP.

Both of them are involved in dance and girl scouts. They will be on the competition dance team again this year, and their nationals event will be down in that big amusement park in the Sunshine State. The older daughter is in year two of her piano lessons, and her teacher says that she demonstrates a lot of natural musical skills. The younger daughter has found her muse in drawing. Every weekend she stays with me, she makes a stack of drawings. Some of them are scenes involving family. Others are more abstract, and others are based on things she's learned from art class at school.

I'm burt out on work...

The VP of Product continues to cause me no end of frustration. It wasn't until sometime around October, five months into the job, that he decided to actually learn more about how our development process works. Up to this point, he had been using our issue tracking software as a to-do list, dumping in a random list of ideas every week, usually about the time that he had his one-on-one meeting with the President.

He's injected himself into all aspects of the company's operations, sitting in on sales and account management calls, overseeing marketing operations, stepping on the toes of product support, and micromanaging the engineering team. The director of the product support team, my most senior developer, and I do not like him at all.

Yet because he's a smooth talker with the sales team and the account managers, arguably the perennially underperforming branches of the company, those groups love him. This has led to a situation where things aren't getting any better, and the ones with the greatest say in the direction of where things are going are the least effective people. I don't hardly have the energy to put in the overtime anymore, and I don't think any of the options I have accumulated over the past four years have any real value,

I've tried to hold on as long as I can, but I can't take it anymore. After the first of the year, I'm putting my resume into circulation. A job search has its challenges, because the Circle City is a small town when it comes to tech. Chances are, wherever I go could run the risk of souring relationships somewhere.

The market for interesting, well-paying work around here is pretty sparse. Much of software development is done on the north side of the metro area, which is more sprawling and affluent, which means my commute may take a turn for the worse. I also may not have the flexibility with hours that I currently enjoy at my current job. Plus since I have served in a coding/leadership responsibility the past 2+ years means that my current salary is at the high end. Ideally, I'd like to find something that allows me to do interesting work but allows me to telecommute because I don't want to move away from my daughters.

My relationship with my significant other is going well...

It's been seven+ months since I started seeing my girlfriend, and life has been very good on that front. She has been a blessing in that the loneliness that plagued me for so long has been dispersed. I am a much happier person, and the contrast of now versus what was life with X was night and day. Not even in the early years of my relationship with X did I ever feel so cared for.

There's a lot in common between my girlfriend and me. We both survived marriages with spouses who refused to be financially responsible. We both have felt out of place with the rest of the world, and neither of us feel like we fit in down on the south side of town. We have an incredible passion for music, and a warped sense of humor that makes the world bearable at its worst. I've been able to have some of the most revealing and deep conversations of my life with her.

She's been a good influence on me. We've seen a lot more live music, including Gov. Davis and the Blues Ambassadors, a local band, Ben Folds with the ISO, the Civil Wars in a short private concert set at a radio station, a local high school jazz band, and the Leisure Kings (still just as funny as when I saw them two years ago). On some weekends, we have lazy time, watching an indie flick on Netflix or listening to weekend public radio and OverEasy on Sunday mornings.

I've met her most of her family at a few functions, including a fall cookout and Thanksgiving, and I really enjoy being around them. They are a well-read bunch, with eclectic tastes, moreso than I would have expected, given their past histories. It's been much easier to interact with them than X's family, which was much more drama oriented and fixated on watching TV. I introduced her to my kids for the first time in September, and they've warmed up to her after that initial round of bashfulness. She met my mom in December.

The status of the relationship is very pleasing to me. I'm finding that the reading and studying on anxiety management in the context of relationships several years ago was time well spent. At times, when she is stressed with work or kids, I am capable of soothing her rather than letting it affect me. We also work well together in cooperative situations, be it moving furniture or cooking meals.

We get each other, and because it has taken so long for us to find someone who does, we put a lot of care and attention into the relationship. While we are nowhere near talking about marriage, we both see this as being a very long-term relationship.

For someone who was so bent on keeping separate compartments between parenthood and new dates, I am surprised how much this relationship has challenged my original vision of loosely coupled monogamy. Unlike that desire to remain guarded against vulnerability, I am finding myself more open to the potential of intimacy, even at the risk of pain. I don't feel so quirky and different with her.

So as I close out 2011, I am a much happier and less lonely soul. I still have my annoyances, and the year to come may bring some big changes on the work front, but I feel like I'm moving in the right direction. My new year wish, to the perseverant few who have stuck with this blog, even as it has stagnated, will find their own lives moving on a similar path of positive existential resolution.

Earworms Come from the Strangest Places

Was reading the news yesterday and saw an obituary for Ed Flesh, a guy who was responsible for many a TV set design, including that of many game shows. The crown jewel of his accomplishments was the original Wheel of Fortune centerpiece, but it was his work for the $25,000 Pyramid that caught my eye.

As someone who consumed way too many game shows and cartoons as a child, I do have memories of this show, including its earliest incarnation, which had a $10,000 value. Flesh wasn't the originator of the set design, which included that overwhelming pyramid used for the winner's circle round, complete with chaser lights that seemed to march in time with a jazzy/funky theme that is burned into my mind to this day. Sure enough, there are plenty of mavens who have transferred old video clips of the show to YouTube, but someone was diligent enough to post a high quality audio of the theme song.



Now I can't get the d@mned thing out of my head.

Late Night Listening XL: Limping My Way to the Half Decade Mark

And now after some thinking
I'd say I'd rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery
Serving something beyond me

But I don't, I don't know what that will be
I'll get back to you someday soon you will see

-- Fleet Foxes, "Helplessness Blues", Helplessness Blues, Sub Pop Records

I'm still alive, even if this blog is in a moribund state, most likely a victim of deep procrastination. It's hard to believe that I started this blog five years ago today.

Rather than write in painstaking detail over the last six months since my last post, I'll try to capture the big changes and list the challenges that remain before me.

Work

Lots of slicing and dicing in the professional world. I'm still at my job. I still have my title and paycheck, but the landscape has undergone some radical transformations.

When I started with Company Line, I was the tenth full-time employee and first full-time rank-and-file developer. The fact that I've stayed on for this long is pretty remarkable. The only people who have been here longer are the CEO/founder and his niece.

The biggest change has been in sales, which has gone from over ten to five, one of whom is on a performance improvement plan and probably will get the axe in a month. The shrinking has been a mix of firings and voluntary departures.

The next notable is a major change in the managerial makeup of the company. The once immovable and incompetent President who pushed me to the edge of burnout left the company at the end of February, selling off her stake in the company as well. Taking her place is the guy whom we hired on in December of 2009 as the VP of ops. He proved his mettle in the summer and fall of 2010 turning around the performance of the post-sales team, stemming the churn of clients choosing not to renew.

My ex-boss, who returned to work for us as a contractor in November remained on with us up through the beginning of May. Upper management talked about making him an offer to come on full time, and this would have been a welcome development, but because there was delay after delay in formulating an offer, a window of opportunity opened for coastal recruiters who were aware of his talents.

He interviewed both for The Social Network and Shake-em-Up, the rapidly growing company in the Big Apple. He got offers from both of them, and turned down The Social Network on the premise that everyone he interviewed with was "a prick". He took the offer, much to the chagrin of upper management. Before reaching his decision, he spoke with me about his ambivalence in taking the offer. The other place would offer him challenges up to his mettle, and it was clear that he had outgrown the tech scene here. He's still young, not completely tied down, and has no children, and he knew of the struggles I had faced with the Online Payment Subsidiary of the Big Online Auction Company.

The Director of Marketing, whom I pictured leaving soon because she enjoyed a teflon coat in the days of the former President because they were sorority sisters, left in April for a position with a small e-mail marketing outfit up on the north side. A professor of marketing at the local business school has been filling in as the VP of marketing, and she's been whipping that department into shape, demanding from them faster turnaround times and better use of data.

The overpriced executive VP of sales, who had been commuting weekly from Beantown, said good-bye in mid-May after the President decided that we needed to free up his healthy size salary for product development. Further motivating the departure was a track record of extravagant travel and material expenses, including a very large screen TV that no one could quite explain.

My team also underwent changes. Our User Interface engineer, who had been with us since the summer of 2008, got a good size offer from Car Sales Management Software Company up on the north side. His commute shrank by many miles since he lives in the upper northeast burbs, and his salary shot up by about 15 grand. His departure capped off the near total replacement of my team, with our IT guy leaving in June 2010 and the System Engineer departing in October 2010. In the months in between, the other back end engineer and I have handled the job of user interface development, and we've held it together. Fortunately a new hire for our team will be starting in another week.

(warning, next several paragraphs include some ranting)

We took on a new VP of product management in early May, after upper management realized that they wouldn't be able to put my ex-boss in this role. This gave the CEO to hire someone whom he had been wanting to hire for an undefined role for over a year, mainly because he was afraid of the guy being hired on by another company in town.

The guy has a reputation of being a technically proficient entrepreneur, but in this town, to earn technical proficiency cred, you don't have to do much. As part of his role, he assumed the title of Product Owner in the SCRUM sense, even though he had zero experience with Agile development methodologies.

In two and a half months' time, the director of product, another software engineer, and I are ready to throw him from the roof of the building because he's established him as a self-important douchebag. Most of his e-mails and request tickets are injected with turf-marking language and condescending insults. At one point, he lectured the development team on the adequacy of his skills by stepping through year-by-year of his LinkedIn profile.

Despite our team's efforts to provide him with guidance and training in Agile, he has demonstrated very little desire to learn how the process works. Rather than putting together user stories for planning meetings, he would come unprepared with vague oral descriptions and hastily prepared mockups. We refer to his style as "screen shot driven" development where there are lots of markups but little explanation behind what the user interface is supposed to do.

At the last sprint planning meeting, his third such since coming on board, he told us quite openly that he had very little idea of how to write one. He also routinely makes additional feature requests outside the scope of the planning process, which is a big no-no in Agile.

Having to deal with him has been a drain on the morale of both my back end engineer and myself.

(ok, rant over)

Family

A couple of departures over the past few months...

My mom's Chow had to be put to sleep because she could barely walk. Given that my mom lives alone, her dog was a major source of companionship. She recently adopted a St. Bernard from a rescue shelter and while the dog is a handful, she's really enjoying it.

My stepmom's dad passed away in June. I wasn't that close to him, but he was a good guy who remained physically and mentally active until the cancer took its toll this early spring.

At about the same time, I was worried that I was going to lose my dad, too. Ever since he had a stroke back in Nov. 2001, he's seen an ever growing list of prescription medications. According to my stepmom, he was on 20 different medicines.

In May, his health took a turn for the worse, and he wound up in intensive care for several days. The doctors determined that his kidneys could not keep pace with the accumulation of drugs in his blood stream, so he was slowly overdosing. Giving him a few days to dry out and then pare back the meds to some bare minimals helped him recover.

My daughters made it through another year of school. The older daughter advances to third grade with a mix of As and Bs, with Cs in math. The younger daughter will start in the first grade next month. They are now 8 and 6 years old.

They recently took home top honors in the petite division at their nationals dance competition that was held on the east coast a couple weeks ago. I got to see them perform their final round on a live webcast. The trophy was almost as tall as they were. I was very proud of them.

I've been seeing quite a bit of them this summer. Although it's nowhere near as bad as last summer, where X had me keeping them almost every weekend, they have been staying with me on alternating weekends. With my workplace trying a summer hours policy, which means most people take Friday off, I've been keeping them overnight on Thursday nights and having them spend the day with me.

Dating

I answered an ad on the big free online classified service in mid-May, and it's had a big impact on my spirits outside the workplace.

The situation is nearly ideal. She is a mother of two, with her kids being a few years older than mine. We are close in age, with her being a couple years older than me. She's been divorced for about three years, and puts her kids first. She's not looking to tie the knot, but she wants someone to share her alone time.

She lives on the south side of the Circle City, a couple of miles from my house, and is a social worker. Like me, she's been through her share of existential crises. She's a free spirit at hear, kept grounded by the kids. She loves good music, and there is a lot of overlap in our tastes. Both of our spouses had problems living within their means.

This may seem weird, but at the age of 42, I have for the first time experienced what might be described as chemistry, and for the first time I have felt wanted. Our sensual tastes have a lot of common ground, so the intimacy is strong. Neither of us see the possibility of marriage as long as the kids are at home, so this will probably grow into an arrangement of loosely coupled monogamy, which is what I want for now.

That's the news from here. If you have further questions, just drop a line in the Comments section and I will try to address it in a timely manner.

This is Just Asking for a Security Breach

Saw this posted on a techie forum:

Cupcaking: A fun, sexy, secure way to heat up your relationship

It purports to be a safe way to share naughty media with a paramour. I took a look at their HTTP headers to see what they are running for their server software:

$ curl -v -o /dev/null http://www.cupcaking.us/
* About to connect() to www.cupcaking.us port 80 (#0)
*   Trying 204.236.129.38... connected
* Connected to www.cupcaking.us (204.236.129.38) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.16.4 (i386-apple-darwin9.0) libcurl/7.16.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7l zlib/1.2.3
> Host: www.cupcaking.us
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2011 22:28:30 GMT
< Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Fedora)
< Set-Cookie: ubvs=76.240.199.148.1294093710639827; path=/; expires=Sat, 02-Jul-11 22:28:30 GMT
< X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6
< Set-Cookie: ubpv=p%2Cc1423c26-1246-11e0-96a1-12313e003591; expires=Wed, 06-Jul-2011 22:28:30 GMT; path=/
< Content-Length: 16936
< X-Unbounce-Variant: p
< Connection: close
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
< 
{ [data not shown]
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 16936  100 16936    0     0  33730      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 60566* Closing connection #0

An old version of PHP (released in May of 2008) doesn't speak well for their security savvy. If I were you, I wouldn't try it out just yet. :-)

The Doctor's Diagnosis...

... a serious case of acute bronchitis. Prescription includes industrial strength cough suppressant (guaifenesin-codiene) and a 10-day antibiotic regimen (augmentin). Of course, that gives me a chance to pull up my favorite song that refers to codiene.

As the Passing Year's Last Embers Flicker and Fade...

Yes, I am still alive.

No, I have not abandoned this blog.

Yes, I have been horrible about not posting.

No, I don't know whether I this post will mark an increasing frequency of content.

There's a lot of catching up to do, and I fear that this might quickly degenerate into something like the enumeration of all things seen in "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"[1], so bear with me.

Current Status

Physically, I am finishing the year on a down note. I'm staying in for New Year's Eve, opting to listen to the folk radio programming on the nearby university's fine arts station for my entertainment.

I have been ill for most of December, and it has taken an even harsher turn the past week. The symptoms started around three weeks ago. I attended my employer's [2] holiday party, which was held in one of the rooms in an upscale steakhouse in town. This is an old building, so it was spacious, with tall ceilings. Over eighty people were present, so the noise level being what it was, I carried my own conversations at a volume well above the comfort level of my larynx.

The steakhouse chased us off shortly after 1 am, so a remainder of us walked to a very smoky martini bar in the heart of downtown. So I endured a couple hours of smoke inhalation, followed by a half-mile walk back to my car at 3 am. The temperature had plummeted, causing the precipitation from earlier in the day to freeze and slush. I spent most of the next day asleep, recovering from a very long night. Fortunately, I cut myself off from alcohol consumption around 10 pm, so I was sober, albeit very tired, by the time I did put the keys into the ignition.

On the following Monday morn, I was running late for my bus, and I had to run to make it in time for my ride into town. The run took place in bitterly cold air, single digit temperatures, so my lungs were on fire. Over the next week, I developed a cold that moved into my lungs, most certainly morphing into bronchitis. Since then, I have coughed so much that my chest and back muscles ache from the repeated strain of each hack. This week, I developed a fever, and have been able to retain some semblance of humanity with the help of generic NyQuil and Ibuprofen. I'll probably have to see a doctor on Monday if things haven't improved.

I took the last two weeks of December as paid leave. I had accumulated 32.9 days of paid leave through a lack of vacations. It worked well as my kids were off from school during that time, so I've had them staying with me during the holidays, which saves the X the cost of a sitter. I had hoped to take them do to something fun at a local museum, but my health didn't cooperate much the past week. We did do some christmas shopping together. There have been plenty of movie nights, which they love. I took them shopping for new coats, and we've spent some time putting together their Christmas gifts.

The Struggles of the Workplace

My employer continues to plod along. Since the VP of Ops took over the management of post-sales accounts, the bleeding of clients has subsided. They still have a lot of goofs over there who are willfully non-technical and all to prone to wig out over small issues. The sales team has been a train wreck, with many months falling far short of their targets. Most of the people who were hired on at the beginning of the year have been since let go. The ones who remained have not closed enough deals to cover their base pay. I look for there to be some major bloodletting over there with the new year. That's not to say everything has been a disaster. The company will gross probably a few hundred thousand over last year's numbers, but we're going to be only about half of the number that they were planning on hitting during budgeting last year.

My team reaches the end of the year a bit behind on its development schedule and way overworked, but we are definitely on an upswing.

We went through a lot of candidates trying to find a new IT guy to replace the one we lost in mid-June, but we managed to hire on someone new for mid-September, just in time for the departure of the Systems Engineer, the guy with the most knowledge about setup and operation of the production environment.

The software engineer we hired in February and I split the task of monitoring and troubleshooting on wayward servers. Things held out okay for about a month until mid-October, when we had an extended disruption of service that resulted in a several hours of total outage. The problem was prolonged by our misunderstanding of how the configuration of the load balancers at the front line functioned.

The ordeal started around 1 am on a Friday morning, which happened to be a time when I was still up from the previous day. We troubleshot almost non-stop over the course of the day. I finally had to turn in at 5 pm for a three-hour nap since I had been functioning without sleep for almost 36 hours. When I returned from slumber at 8 pm that Friday night, they were still at a loss as to how to lessen the load on the front end servers. I then walked through every step of a request and figured that the problem was in the handling of rerouted requests between data centers. With that information, we were able to get some help from the former system engineer. We wrapped things up 10 pm, almost 21 hours after everything started.

You can imagine what life was like for me after that. My team and I conducted a lengthy postmortem and I filed the largest outage report of the company's history, weighing in at over fifteen pages. Most reports did not exceed two pages. The weekly management meetings weren't pleasant as I had to answer questions about what I was going to do to make sure this didn't happen again. The outage report contained a good sized list of lessons learned and action items we would need to implement.

A couple weeks later, the president and CEO managed to lure my ex-boss, who left us in the mid-summer of 2009, back as a contractor. I was glad to see him coming back because I knew he was a sharp guy who could help us get the recommendations implemented. Indeed, when he was weighing the decision to return, he asked me whether I would be willing to stay on if he came back because he enjoyed working with me. But on the other hand, I was worried that the president and CEO would decide that services were no longer needed.

Fortunately, that proved not to be the case. My ex-boss took on most of the managerial meetings that made my job a drag, which freed me up to be more involved with coding. I continued to lead my team and hold them accountable for meeting commitments. With some complications from a failed database server in early November, the ex-boss took it upon himself to rework our system configuration and deployment to reduce inconsistencies and human dependencies. By the end of the year, we had completely new servers in production with the new and improved management infrastructure in place.

Another thing we were able to do at the end of November was find a great candidate for the System Engineer role. He had been involved with maintaining high-traffic, production website and was already familiar with many of the technologies we used, which made him a rarity for this area.

All told, we now have a pretty solid team that I love working and socializing with. I just wished that the rest of the company could find its bearings.

The Struggles of the Home

A few weeks after I wrote my last post in this space (mid August), the X opted to bring the kids to my house rather than me come meet her somewhere on the weekly night out with the kids. Not only that, she let herself into the house and started to forcibly clean up my cluttered house. She said that she was worried about me and thought I wasn't functioning. Still, she seemed to take joy in throwing things away, especially things that I would have recycled.

Soon thereafter, I changed medications from escitalopram oxalate to desvenlafaxine after indicating to my doctor that I had suffered several unpleasant side effects from the first prescription. That has seemed to help me uplift my sprits. I did some additional housecleaning and hired some cleaners to do a deep down clean of the whole house. I actually moved back into the master bedroom, getting a frame for my mattress. I bought a second mattress for the daybed/trundle combination so that the girls could sleep in beds of their own.

I had one big jar from my past in October. One of my coworkers at a former employer killed himself after becoming despondent with a long struggle over health issues. He was only a year older than me. We were good friends at work, maybe not super close, but we had lots of deep and funny conversations only true geeks could love.

I traveled to the Land of Lincoln to attend a memorial service. It was the first time I had been there since leaving about five years prior. It was good to see some other former coworkers. One of the unexpected aspects of the event was that the deceased party's entire book collection, which was very large and of high quality, was on display and free for the taking.

Soon thereafter, I started giving myself permission to buy new books on things I saw myself wanting to learn over the year to come. Part of this was an act of rebellion against the default stance of non-indulgence that I had taken for so many years. Another part is longer-term strategic -- namely, I see this year being a major turning point at my employer -- either they figure out what they are going to do, or I will need to find work elsewhere. I need to invest in my own skills to keep the doors open.

To that end, I invested in new computing hardware, based on purchases of on-sale components. It may not have the raw power of a gamer's dream machine, but it certainly can pull its own weight. I finished assembling the components earlier this week. It has a quad-core CPU, three hard drives that are set up in a RAID 5 array, and 8 GB of RAM. The goal was to create a machine where I could set up and run virtual machines for development and testing.

As of this week, I've also broken down and gotten a smartphone -- an HTC Droid Incredible, which was free with 2 year contract with my current phone provider. The touch screen keyboard is taking some time to get used to,

The X got her home broken into in early December. The burglars made off with her TV, the Wii and its games, and her laptop, which had many pictures from 2009, which she had not backed up. She has responded by getting an alarm system installed and adopting a black lab. Oddly enough, the burglars did not take the kids' handheld game consoles, her digital camera, or the desktop computer.

Looks like we've got ourselves a new year, and it's pouring down rain outside. I'll close up for now. If you have other questions, please leave them in the comments. The best of wishes to all of you who continue to check this site for updates.

[1] -- Don't get me wrong, no one can touch Dylan's work as a lyricist, I just want to make sure my narrative provides context in addition to facts.

[2] -- No, I haven't changed jobs yet. More on that in a bit.

Late Night Listening XXXIX: Just a Little Unwell

Spent most of today in The Small Town, visiting with my Dad. My stepmom is on a weekend trip to the Windy City with a close friend of hers who also doesn't get much downtime. They are staying with a son of hers, who lives up in the outer burbs. My daughters are with me to provide him some cheer.

The X spent today with about five other school moms moving stuff from her apartment to her new house. She offered up a love seat and easy chair that she had taken when she moved out because she's getting new furniture for her new house.

But I didn't come here to talk about that...



This past Thursday, I paid a visit to my new primary care physician, and explained how the illness from a couple weeks before had been a wake-up call for me. I then talked about how I had been through some life changes in the past year, and that I had been in an increasingly dark space. I took some questionnaires, and she put me on some samples of Escitalopram, because it is indicated for depression and anxiety.

I'm hoping that this works. In the moments I feel most isolated, I feel as if I my interests and desires are nil.

Work is no longer the Foreign Legion for me, a place for me to forget. The guy we had lined up with an offer for the UI position declined our offer because our health plan is so crappy compared to where he works now. The response from my boss was to throw her hands up in the air and say that we won't be hiring anyone new for my department for the rest of the year. I can't deal with management that one day tells me that we need to hire hire hire, and then when we get the chance to hire, we don't have the ability to offer a decent compensation package.

The resumes I posted last weekend are getting views on the boards, but nibbles have been largely constrained to financial services buckshotting recruiter letters to anyone with a pulse for sales positions. I've also gotten some leads for positions in the suburban Empire State, the Deseret, the land of Art Deco and Dance Clubs, and the Windy City. Right now, I'm keeping things local.

Has it Really Been Four Years?

Yeah, it has. First post went up on 7/17/2006. I was 37, and this was supposed to be a refuge from the flack I had been taking on the PA Forum. Now this blog covers about 10 percent of my life on this planet. Let's celebrate with something a bit more upbeat.

Granted, critics will argue that Bowie's artistic apex occurred in the 70s, but to me this video represents a different kind of finest hour, and it's one that speaks to me louder in my dark moments moreso than Ziggy Stardust. So let me indulge a bit.

What's happened in the four years?

The forum itself got a new home, leaving the initial post with a mess of broken links. It's gone through some turnover in people, but from what I hear, the topics recycle pretty regularly.

This blog turned up a whole new social graph for me, much of it centered around the frustrated writings of Digger Jones. He's gone quiet, as have many of the anonybloggers, including Therese, whose writings and conversations I miss very much. Fade to Numb and Have-the-T-Shirt went private. Anais, Cat, Trueself, and Drunken Housewife still blog away. Dad's Life and Tom Allen still post occasionally. FADKOG is still writing her megasized posts true to form.

As for my real-life... The marriage that this blog intended to save died about a year into the blog's existence. My kids have grown by leaps and bounds, and now both of them are in school.

I got myself out of the dead-end startup and channeled a huge amount of energy into rebuilding my career. I've come along farther than I ever hoped, but the past year has been an increasing drain on me.

How did I celebrate the blog's anniversary. It was pretty uneventful. Took my dog to the groomer for a much needed bath, brush, and nail trimming. Took the kids out for a late lunch. Enjoyed them as they labored away on little art projects, much of them taken from a Disney themed "make it yourself" book that I had as a child.

This evening, I got my resume uploaded to the four big job boards, making it anonymously searchable. For now, my geography preference is set to "no relocation". We'll see how many nibbles I get from the recruiters and how clueless they might be.

I've been flirting with the idea of finally putting a profile up on the mother of all social networks, but I can't quite bring myself to do it. I fear there are too many demons from my past that will be summoned with the friend requests. I think that Google's Paul Adams is onto something about the need for friend compartments in social networking apps. Those of us who have unspoken social graphs need such things.

You Know, I Don't Find This Stuff Amusing Anymore

The latter part of this week was a wash with respect to productivity.

Starting late Wednesday night, my throat started to turn scratchy. By the time Thursday morning rolled around, the soreness worsened, my head was aching, I was measuring a body temperature of 101.3 oF. I took the day off trying to rest it off.

For a while, I feared that drinking no liquid after having three beers with coworkers at the end of Wednesday had left me dehydrated.

Past-the-sell-by-date acetaminophen, the only fever reducer on the premises, was having minimal impact on the fever. I had to pick up the kids from the dance school at 7:30 pm, since X was working until 11 pm. I picked up some ibuprofen on the way there and took them home, put them to bed, and slept on the couch at X's apartment, waiting for her to get back from work. I started to develop chills around 10 pm.

She got back from work around 11:15 pm, surprise to find me sleeping. I told her that I had been through a rough day with the fever and sore throat. She said that her friend, who had watched the kids during the day and brought the kids to the dance school for their summer class, had noticed that I looked rough.

I drove home shivering and climbed into bed. The chills subsided, but I woke up at 1 am measuring a temperature of 102.8 oF. I got up and went to the couch in the den, where there at least was a ceiling fan.

Not being able to sleep, I looked up my health plan to see if the primary care physician I specified some two years ago, but never visited, was taking new patients. The plan's network directory said "yes", but the website for the doctor's practice said "no". I decided it was a lost cause on that front, so I started to look for other doctors in network and in my zip code.

I found a doctor less than a mile away who was accepting new patients and called my network first thing in the morning to see how I should go about changing the primary care physician. I found out that the choice isn't handled by the network, but by another agency that deals with the providers. So I got that number and gave them a call. They said I should just call them back when I got an appointment set up.

So I called the doctor and got an appointment set up for 1:30 pm that day. Then I called the agency, which said "no can do". I said that the doctor was on the network. The person handling my call said that it wasn't enough to be on the network. The provider also had to be "contracted" with the agency.

I noted that made the network directory virtually useless because of this undocumented subsetting. The agent then looked up their directory and found four providers in my zip code who were listed as taking new patients. I started calling the list. One was taking new patients, but couldn't see me until next month. The next one's office wasn't open yet. The last two were at the same practice and no one could see me until the middle of next week. The receptionist there said I might want to try a Minute Clinic.

So I went to the Minute Clinic and waited for a little over an hour to be seen. I paid $122 for an inconclusive diagnosis, other than my throat looked "pretty raw". About $50 of that was spent on a tests -- a quick test for strep that turned up negative.

The second got sent off to a lab and wouldn't hear anything back for 24 - 48 hours. Because prescribing antibiotics for an infection is a no-no without evidence of a bacterial infection, the recommendation was to continue the ibuprofen and rinse the throat with salt water. The temperatures continued to vacillate above and below 100 oF for the rest of the day, with the fever being completely gone today. Throat is still raw, though.

I have a strong feeling that succumbing to this illness was driven in part to my body not being able to withstand a steady diet of stress over the past couple of months...

• I haven't had a completely kid-free weekend in over two months. One weekend where I didn't have kids (June 26 - 27) was because X took the kids to the older daughter's dance competition in The Volunteer State. I wound up keeping them two nights before they left. Another weekend, the first in June, was offset by the fact that I put in 16 hours working at the daughter's dance recital and its dress rehearsal. Her reason for the extra weekends has been that she has had to work extra hours to pay for the house, but there have been a couple of weekends where I've found out after the fact that she wasn't working.


• The divorce and mortgage have been a very stressful process. I already have noted some instances of X's bitchiness when I didn't have answers for her on whether the divorce was final or that my mortgage refinance was ready to close. In addition, the mortgage lender was being very invasive about some petty things. I understand their need for bank statements and pay stubs, but when they started to dispute the legitimacy of the divorce when they said that there weren't enough items listed on the division of property request list, I about lost it. Apparently because we weren't at all out war over everything, we were considered questionable, not taking into account the child support payments I had been making since X moved out in Aug. 2008 and the fact that she lived in a separate residence for almost two years.


• X has been sending a steady stream of money requests... I've paid 100 % of the younger daughter's all-day kindergarten tuition (first two installments totaled $600). Paid for two months' worth of summer dance classes at $135. Because she was in danger of not having enough money to close on her house, she asked for two sums of money -- $1,059 and $1,500 over a period of three weeks. This was on top of the $3,600, half the 2009 tax refund, that she claimed entitlement to even though she was not gainfully employed, save for a couple of part-time jobs in 2009. Pile on that the cost of trophies won at dance competitions.


• The President and the CEO have no clear vision of what they should be hiring for our department. All they know is that development isn't as fast as they want it to be. The CEO gave me flack a couple times the past couple of months for not being more aggressive in recruiting at the same time that the President told me that we needed to be careful about starting salaries. The CEO decided that we needed a VP for me to report to, so they did some recruiting, brought in someone I once interviewed with back in 2007. After many hours of interviews, the other managers decided the candidate wasn't a fit. So CEO decided that maybe we should hire this over priced guy we considered for a UI Engineer who was making more at his current job than what I make. So we brought the guy in for another interview with management. It wound up with a split decision. Meanwhile, our team gets a candidate we talked to back in Oct. 2008 whom we bring in this week, and the President starts talking like we might not hire him even if he does well on the interview.


• The Executive VP of Sales continues to target big clients, and because his sales team can't carry their own weight in the technical vetting, both my team and I get brought in on conference calls, sometimes just so they can show they have someone with a big title on the line. As much as a big game he talks about "strategic HR" and hiring only "A team players", two of his hires he brought on in February already have been canned, and another is on the bubble.


• My IT guy, who got me in hot water with the President when I refused to fire him on the spot back in April, decided that rather than work with me in a smooth transition out, he would quit on me with minimal notice in mid-June, once he got the mortgage for his new house closed and started a new job the very next day. Since then, my systems engineer and I have been slogging through the IT demands of some very non-technical people.


• Two weeks ago, the display on my 2 1/2 year-old laptop refused to re-illuminate after bringing it out of sleep mode. I feared the worst, thinking my laptop had died completely. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to ping the computer from my other old laptop and got a response. The webserver also responded to requests, so things were still alive. Found out later on that the issue was caused by a horrible defect in the video chipset and was so onerous that Apple was replacing the video hardware at no cost, even if the machine was no longer under warranty. A local Mac reseller got my laptop fixed and it was back in my possession at the end of the week.


• During a pool party at my dad's on the 3rd of July, my stepmom called us aside to talk about her situation. She said that she had seen the doctor recently and had been diagnosed with severe depression, caregiver burnout, and ADD. She was in need of some time away, and wondered if we could take turns coming down to visit my dad while she was on a brief vacation. I can tell from his actions that my dad can be very high maintenance, so I don't think she's exaggerating. My brother and I were willing to do this, but it saddened me that he has become such a drain.


• My house is still a mess, and most nights I can't bring myself to attack the paper pile I've mentioned in prior posts.


• I think my car has suspension problems and its air conditioner is non-functional. The thought of having a car payment again terrifies me.


• With seemingly annual repair bills of $300 on the heating and air conditioning, I know it's only a matter of time before I'll need to replace that.


• My attempts to locate some divorce support groups on Meetup.com around here were futile. One is closed to new members, and the other is about 25 miles away and meets on alternating Sunday evenings. The ever helpful organizer of the closed group said I should go look for a support group at a local church (heaven forbid there should be respite for those in crises of faith) or start one of my own.

I have been talking about being in an increasingly dark space for a while. And I know I've gotten advice and even talked about getting help. I think the illness this week was my body telling me, "We can't go on like this."

So on Wednesday at 3:30 pm, the first time that one of my eligible doctors can see me, I'm going in for a check-up, and I'm going to talk with her about how this is taking a toll on me and that I probably need formally evaluated for anxiety and depression, if not Asperger's.

I've also decided that its time to say no to X on money. We've got a divorce decree in place, with a child support schedule based on state guidelines that factor in income, health insurance, and child care costs. The child support payments she get are as much as her pre-tax income for her job over the same time interval. If she can't make that work with her life, then she needs to do one of the following:

• Readjust her lifestyle (e.g. give up the deluxe cable package with DVR and the Droid Smartphone) and live with what she's got.


• Get a higher paying job.


• Find a sugar daddy.

What sent me over the edge was a conversation she started today while she was fixing our older daughter's hair for her team's performance at a local dinner theatre tonight. She tells me that she's signed up to work the concession stand for the dance school at all of the home games for the local pro football team, so she'll need me to have the kids those days even when it's not my weekend to have the kids.

She's worked some of the games in the past two years, but never all of them. When she does it's an all-day thing because they have to be on-premise for the setup, and then they have to wait a couple hours afterwards because they have to turn the money into the bank at the stadium. On the days when it's a Monday Night Football game, I've had to take off work early to get the girls.

I asked her how many home games there were, knowing that there would probably be eight of them plus some other special events. I expressed reluctance to just accept that. She said that my other option was to pay her for a babysitter during that time because it didn't make sense for her to work the games, which earn her maybe $8/hour for tuition credits.

I started to put together an argument that the child care allowance for child support was based on child care needed for employment, not sub-market barter work, but I stopped myself because I remember from the parenting class that potentially contentious financial discussions shouldn't happen in front of the kids, and both were present. I told her that we'd have to have this discussion at a later time.

I am angered by the sense of entitlement she continues to have, even now that she is supposedly on her own legally. Making such an in-your-face demand for time or money after you've repeatedly offloaded extra overnights and requested or demanded thousands of dollars in assistance beyond an already generous child support allowance seems like a really bad calculation. Prior to the divorce, I was more lenient for many reasons... wanting her to get on her own on an even keel, wanting the kids to be taken care of, not wanting the kids to be let down over the house. Now I know this has done nothing but to create disrespect.

The following scenes capture that lack of respect in a nutshell...

Scene 1: On June 28, X sent me this text message:

Ok (older daughter) is performing at (northwest side dinner theatre) on july 10 at 6. Tickets will be 146 total for all of us to go. Then they will watch high school musical Tickets r 25, 25, 48, 48. I could pay for one ticket if u wanted to pay for girls

I agree to this. On July 2, she sends me a text telling me to drop off a check for $146 at the dance school mailbox for the tickets. I presume that she is going to pay me back for her $48 ticket. A week goes by without reference. Today, I send her a text message asking if she is going to reimburse me for her ticket. She replies, "Sure." At the performance, she hands me a $20 and a $5. I ask her what that is for, and she says, "The ticket." I thought about asking where the other $23 was, but I got the hint.

Scene 2: We drive separately to the dinner theatre late this afternoon so that I can take the kids home with me for the evening. As I arrive, she tells me that I need to go back to her place because the older daughter needs the gloves and bracelets for her costume. It's about 5:20 pm, and the dinner starts service around 6:30 pm.

I tell her that it is probably going to be a little over an hour to make the round trip, because it's about 30 miles. She then gets testy with me about it saying that if I can't do it, then she'll just have to do it. This is not a realistic option because she will need to help the daughter get ready for the performance during that time.

So I set off on my way, trying to go as fast as I can without running afoul of speed of safety. About 25 minutes into the trip, she calls me to ask me whether I've made it. I tell her that I'm still about eight miles away. She seems irritated and tells me to call her when I get to her place.

I get to her place and get the forgotten items and head back up. About 30 minutes into the return trip, she asks me where I am. This time, I am a couple miles short of the exit. I arrived right around 6:30 pm. Just in time to catch the last line of buffet goers.

In the grand scheme of things, a couple of gloves and bracelets seems inconsequential. Even if she were the only one lacking these accessories, she was in a troupe that numbered over 20 dancers. She was among the younger members, who are less visible. It was an exhibition event for which the school received no compensation, yet the dinner theatre sold 81 tickets to the families of the dance school student body. It was not for a competition, where they would have gotten docked points.

I've been in this situation numerous times before. I am given ownership of a problem that is of her making (like forgetting to make sure all costume items are packed). There is not so much an expression of remorse at having to ask or even gratitude that I would do this for her. There is only disbelief that there would be any other option than me doing what she wants done. It's a dynamic I've seen in our relationship from the early days, on the wedding day, and even during the divorce.

I have been subconsciously aware of it. I think now that I am no longer legally bound to her, I am free to admit its full existence in all of its ugliness.

I don't know what I hate more. Her for treating me this way over the years or myself for having not stood up to it. Either way, there is no other word for it than "hatred". I FUCKING HATE IT.

Drama TXT from the X

The X sent me a series of texts this morning to find out whether I had found out when they would do the closing for my mortgage refinance. I replied informing her that I had left a message on the loan officer's voice mail just before 9 am this morning and was awaiting a reply. She then wrote back this:

Then who knows when u will close. I am just about to throw in the towel. I will just concede to the girls that I am a horrible mother and we will live in apt forever. I am sure it won't be the only thing that I cause them to have therapy about

Bear in mind that this was the mortgage lender she recommended to me and is the same one who is handling the mortgage for her house.

Letting the Coworkers Know

Stress level over the past 30 hours or so has been pretty high.

Yesterday afternoon, I had trouble bringing my work laptop, a MacBook Pro, out of sleep mode. The screen remained dark. For a bit I feared that the machine had failed entirely. Later on I got the idea to try requesting pages from the web server that was running on it, and I got responses, so the machine was not lost.

I later verified that this was the symptom of an issue that existed with the video chipset on the laptop, and that Apple was replacing the part at their expense. So the computer will be resurrected in some way, but at signficant loss to productivity.

One of the lingering questions that has dogged me since I started my current job, way back at the end of 2007, was when should I let my coworkers know that a change in marital status would take place. Over that time, I've taken very discreet approach. I talk about the kids, but don't mention much about X.

Last week, after the divorce was finalized, a feeling of heaviness began to sink in. I needed to dismantle the facade and at least admit that I wasn't married anymore, so I didn't cringe when someone asked me a question about "my wife" and I was evasive about details.

I decided to have a conversation with another manager with whom I have a pretty high level of trust. I knew that she had been through a divorce prior to coming to work with us two years ago, and had some inklings that it was a pretty difficult one. I gave her some basic facts. She said she had sended that I had been "off" the last few days of work.

I asked her if she had any advice to offer from her own experiences. She said that the divorce made her feel like such a failure that she couldn't bring herself to let her coworkers know and wound up quitting her job after the divorce was finalized

After I wistfully noted that quitting wasn't much of an option for me, given support obligations, she recommended that I at least tell my boss and the rest of my team. She also gave me the contact information of someone who had counseled her with her own divorce.

Later that day, I broke the news to them. I think my team didn't know what to make of it. One of them wondered why I had chosen this time to disclose. Another said that I had done an amazing job of not letting on that there was trouble. I made it clear to them that what transpired had its roots well before I started working there, just so they didn't get the impression that working there had been a factor.

I felt like the weight had been lifted, but I also still had an awful feeling. This evening, I felt restless and depressed. I finally tore into a huge pile of junk mail, newspapers, and other things that had been sitting on the floor for weeks, the aftermath of an earlier attempt to clear the clutter off of a kitchen table. I managed to put a dent into it, but I was feeling stir crazy and felt like crying at times.

I will get through this. I have to.

And Now, She is Known as Simply "X"

It's official. The divorce is final. I went over to the City County Building early on Wednesday afternoon to pick up the signed divorce decree documents. It had been a harrowing few days with work involving meetings, a stressful release, and an elusive database performance issue that was bringing the production environment to its knees.

Against this was a recurring stream of IMs, e-mails, and text messages from the woman who had been my wife for 14 years, two months, and three days. The 60-day waiting period from filing to decree review passed over the weekend, so she developed the (unreasonable) expectation that the document would be signed and ready to go on Monday.

When I called the office on Monday to check on the status, I got an answer that it wasn't done yet and that I should check back on Wednesday. She was not happy about that, badgering me to call the office back to find out why. Sure enough the slow grind of justice delivered on the schedule that they told me.

After her last nag message, which included the text, "Divorce ? ? ?", I was finally able to write back that the documents were ready and that I would pick them up in the afternoon. She texted back saying, "Thanks for taking care of this." I wrote back saying, "No problem. I guess you can now make it 'Facebook official' as they call it :-p ." She wrote back with this statement:

U know I didn't mean to hurt u. I'm sorry it had to end this way. I'm glad we can still be good parents to the girls. Thank u for giving them to me.

I didn't know what to make of that.

I felt a deep sadness after picking up the papers, a sense of acceptance that I had failed in this relationship... a lingering doubt over that feeling of being different, defective, and inadequate. I could not self validate in the moment.

Where do I go from here? There are still loose ends... getting the mortgage re-fi wrapped up, getting the house restored to order. Right now it looks like a scale model of the 9th Ward in New Orleans circa mid September 2005. I need to start making time for making new real-life friends. I need to start getting resumes out there before I lose my sanity on this job. I need to get some help.