Life -- not too bad

Since folks have been asking: I'm hanging in there. There are still some bad moments (I expect that's going to continue for a long while), but the past couple of days have gone decently well. A few high points for a random diary entry --

Work has gone very well this week, and that's done much to improve my mood. Memento's been very understanding, but *I* have been very frustrated at how little I've been accomplishing at work. I nominally went back to work more or less full-time last week, but didn't get much done. The past few days, though, have seen a real burst of activity on my part, with the result that I've gotten done most of what I set out to do this sprint.

(This was helped by having a heart-to-heart with the product manager, who admitted that, while he *gave* me wireframe-level designs, he's not actually attached to them -- so long as I give him the spirit of what he wants, he's cool with it. This gave me wiggle-room to redesign the features to be more consistent with the rest of the product, resulting in vastly cleaner code -- and cleaner code almost always means a more-usable product to boot. Clean code and usable designs both flow from consistent abstractions.)

Last night was Council, which was fairly ordinary, but I finally got to meet the current Provost of Felding and give her a ride home. This does my heart good: I still fly the Felding Taxi Corps badge on my car, and I always enjoy getting to help out the students. We chatted a bunch about SCA stuff, including the Friday dance eventlet that I'm teaching for in a couple of weeks, and it generally, again, left me feeling useful.

The ice dam has been coming and going. Oddly, it seems to be consistently worst when it is coldest out -- far as I can tell, the freeze is sealing off the dam. When the weather gets warmer, the leak stops, so it appears that the water is managing to find outlets when the temps go up. This is lovely: it suggests that the leak is self-limiting. And the thaw over the past couple of days was fabulous: there was something primally satisfying about taking the ice pick to the now-softened ice on the driveway.

I'm keeping extremely busy, which is part of why I've been posting a bit less. This weekend looks like utter insanity -- poker Friday night, game playtesting on Saturday, and Cooks Guild on Sunday -- but for now I'm erring on the side of Too Busy. I'll need to back off from that some, but for now it's helping me avoid dwelling too much.

(Next Monday will be hard, though. I think I need to get a rose for her grave -- that'll be painful, but I don't think I can cope with not doing so...)

Life -- not too bad

Since folks have been asking: I'm hanging in there. There are still some bad moments (I expect that's going to continue for a long while), but the past couple of days have gone decently well. A few high points for a random diary entry --

Work has gone very well this week, and that's done much to improve my mood. Memento's been very understanding, but *I* have been very frustrated at how little I've been accomplishing at work. I nominally went back to work more or less full-time last week, but didn't get much done. The past few days, though, have seen a real burst of activity on my part, with the result that I've gotten done most of what I set out to do this sprint.

(This was helped by having a heart-to-heart with the product manager, who admitted that, while he *gave* me wireframe-level designs, he's not actually attached to them -- so long as I give him the spirit of what he wants, he's cool with it. This gave me wiggle-room to redesign the features to be more consistent with the rest of the product, resulting in vastly cleaner code -- and cleaner code almost always means a more-usable product to boot. Clean code and usable designs both flow from consistent abstractions.)

Last night was Council, which was fairly ordinary, but I finally got to meet the current Provost of Felding and give her a ride home. This does my heart good: I still fly the Felding Taxi Corps badge on my car, and I always enjoy getting to help out the students. We chatted a bunch about SCA stuff, including the Friday dance eventlet that I'm teaching for in a couple of weeks, and it generally, again, left me feeling useful.

The ice dam has been coming and going. Oddly, it seems to be consistently worst when it is coldest out -- far as I can tell, the freeze is sealing off the dam. When the weather gets warmer, the leak stops, so it appears that the water is managing to find outlets when the temps go up. This is lovely: it suggests that the leak is self-limiting. And the thaw over the past couple of days was fabulous: there was something primally satisfying about taking the ice pick to the now-softened ice on the driveway.

I'm keeping extremely busy, which is part of why I've been posting a bit less. This weekend looks like utter insanity -- poker Friday night, game playtesting on Saturday, and Cooks Guild on Sunday -- but for now I'm erring on the side of Too Busy. I'll need to back off from that some, but for now it's helping me avoid dwelling too much.

(Next Monday will be hard, though. I think I need to get a rose for her grave -- that'll be painful, but I don't think I can cope with not doing so...)