Are We Having Fun Yet?

I've recently come to a conclusion which is worrying both Kent & Michael in a fun way: I could theoretically retire right now.

It would be a thin retirement with little free cash, but it is possible. The easiest path would be to buy Mom's farm and move to Ontario: within months, I'd be eligible for the provincial health plan so my only major expenses would be property taxes, utilities & food, stretching my cash reserves much further than they would in the US. Naturally, the guys are not enthused about living in northern Ontario, and frankly, I'm on that keen on it either. But the idea of retirement has suddenly become very, very real instead of some abstract possibility decades away.

In any case, I'm still planning to keep working until I'm 60 in 2027, which is only six years away. Then things get serious.

Michael goes on Medicare this August as he turns 65, so he'll be off my work-related medical insurance. That's a slight disposable cash bump, and one less worry if I change jobs or leave employment entirely. In a year, he can claim his own Social Security at full value (he's receiving discounted funds from his late wife's account currently).

Kent just turned 60. When I retire, he could take Social Security at a discount, or hold on for just a while longer to get the full benefit at 67. I'd really like him to wait until 67, but he's had enough of working for a living since he was 30 so he may not wait.

In the interim, I'm still working to reduce our recurring living expenses, stuff as much money as I can into retirement accounts, and generally ensure we're ready when the time comes. 2,371 day left.

I had a few mysterious email broadcast messages this past week which left me scratching my head, and then exploded into all-out drama.

Only a week ago, I tested for a senior-level brown belt successfully. There was a general broadcast message that our dojo was looking for larger space, something which can accommodate a class while respecting social distancing. I also got an email indicating they were doing away with monthly credit card subscriptions in favour of monthly Paypal invoicing.

A few days ago, I got an email from my instructor that indicated he had some sort of disagreement with Victory Karate, our dojo, with a side mention of litigation. I couldn't make out the issue: it felt like I was reading one side of an email conversation, comments being made in response to questions I couldn't see. In a subsequent email, he also mentioned that individuals may have to do leverage the state consumer agency to force Victory Karate to stop monthly credit card billings. Huh?

On Tuesday, I got a Paypal invoice for the month. It was not from Victory Karate, but Karate Class Online.

I couldn't attend a class on Monday because of work commitments, but I did a zoom-based class per usual on Tuesday. For the first time in three years, Mr A was notably not wearing a Victory Karate t-shirt or gi, and it was glaring in its absence.

Today, I'm finally getting the pieces together thanks to email discussions among the other students & parents of students: there's some sort of break between my instructor and Victory Karate. It appears that the old dojo is still offering a couple of zoom-based classes in the evenings of Monday-Thursday with the junior instructor. My instructor meanwhile is doing his own full schedule of classes, 3:40 to 8pm, Mon-Fri with Saturday morning sessions, just as before.

I get this is a business issue and I shouldn't be personally invested in the drama of it all, but I do know all of the actors in this particular play, and I have an involuntary ringside seat to watch the end of friendships. I suppose part of my discomfort is also that it's so sudden and unexpected: I had no idea there was any sort of tension in play. It's a bit distressing.

I suppose as time rolls on, I'll get used to whatever this new situation is. Even if I'm double-billed this month by competing sides, I'm going to not make any decisions or dramatic moves, hoping that a clearer direction will be visible in the fullness of time. I suspect enough people are already making questionable decisions based on strong emotions, so mine don't need to be added to the mix.

It's all very sad and upsetting though.

The pandemic has shown a lot of things we were told were utter bullshit.

Our Internet and cell phone providers all claimed bandwidth was such a limited resource that they had no choice but to throttle usage. Now the limits are lifted as a public service goodwill gesture.

We were told remote telework was impossible: people can't be trusted to work unless they're constantly supervised. High tech folks already knew that was bullshit, but now traditional industries & services are finding it's not as impossible as they thought. And a lot of workers have gotten a taste of it for the first time and aren't likely to give it up easily. Managers who refuse to permit any kind of remote work are dinosaurs.

Teaching can't possibly be done remotely. Oops, we've now demonstrated much of it can. Not all, to be sure, and there are some age groups which are easier than others, but departments which flatly refused to consider it last year are now embracing it.

Now I'm thinking about future years...

Does anyone still think that Internet access is not an essential utility, like electricity or running water?

If we're going to be keeping our distance from other workers, elevators are going to be problematic. Tall, dense office buildings are going to be a challenge, but smaller buildings with escalators & stairs have a built-in health advantage.

Businesses which embrace remote work won't need large centralized office space. Even if they retain an office for respectability, they wouldn't need a dedicated desk for every employee. This has already been a trend in some fields, but it might now explode into a much larger scale.

If larger numbers are working remotely, do we need the proposed expansions to the beltway and I270 corridor near us? Currently both are flowing at a fraction of their pre-covid levels. Ending the lockdown will bring the load back up again, but if we keep telecommuting at scale, do we need the extra lanes?

We've had a lot of shortages in selected items recently. A large part was hoarding, but a large part was also imbalanced production: producers were supplying a particular mix of office vs domestic versions of their stuff, but needed time to change the ratio when the world changed. We're now rebalancing, but it may need to change quickly again.

Brick-and-mortar stores were already in trouble, but it's even harder now.

Restaurants are problematic. If there are fewer people congregating in large numbers, large (and expensive) dining rooms are no longer cost-effective, esp if there are much smaller lunchtime crowds in concentrated downtown areas thanks to increased remote work. We've always had small take-away shops and food trucks, but we may see more gourmet options as upscale restaurants scale back in-house dining in favour of take-away.

And then there's over-capacity in car manufacturing, as well as used car lots. And insurance will have to change dramatically if there are fewer cars driving vastly fewer miles: work commuting is the bulk of the miles most people put on their vehicles.

Elementary schools are probably still a good thing: the young have a difficulty enough time with focus, and lordy, teaching is hard work which needs trained professionals. But college & university campuses may want to re-think some of their capital budget items: do they need more residences and class rooms if the students are remote?

What will a remote student body do to sports recruiting? I can't wait to find out.

Shopping malls were in decline in so many areas around the country. They're now dead in a ditch in those areas. It will be interesting to see if they can rebound.

Rental car agencies, travel agencies, hotels, Lyft, Uber, Air BnB, and airlines are all in deep trouble. And I'm ok with nearly all of them going belly-up. Dinosaurs have to die off so something new can take their place, and we have huge over-capacity with a concentration of ownership in the hands of bad business managers.

Large stadium events are going to be pandemic hotspots: there is no way to social-distance in such an environment. Professional sports might still make a go of it, since their big dollars come from the television rights & merchandise rather than ticket sales. But when these big, heavily gov't subsidized structures need to be upgraded or replaced, it's going to be a tough sell to get limited public dollars for yet another massive subsidy/bailout.

I'll add more as I think of them, but I think it is beyond doubt that the future is going to look very different soon.

I got home from Canada on March 9, just as closures & lockdowns in the US were starting to take full effect. Michael arrived home from Ireland a week later, on March 16; he was three days early on his return, but international flight restrictions were being instituted and we wanted him home before every airline was grounded.

And since then? Well, nothing much to report.

I've been working from home as part of my general practice of the past 11 years. The San Francisco main office has been evacuated so everyone is now working from home, whether they want to or not. Business travel, our core business, is 20% of what it was this time last year so while our parent company Enterprise has told us to continue with our original product line & releases, hiring has been frozen. I did get a $10k raise just this past week, and my position is secure. Even if they did lay me off, they'd still be contractually obligated to give me a pile of severance, unpaid vacation time, and a large bonus already scheduled for next February.

Kent's office has gone to work-from-home as a matter of policy, replacing their grudgingly-permitting-it-only-once-per-week. They have done some staff reductions, but Kent's position was spared.

Michael's travel business has all but evaporated at this point: his Milan trip for the international LGBT travel agent convention is cancelled. We are still planning to go to Amsterdam in August, pandemic permitting.

Nearly all of our square dance gigs --dancing, calling & running events-- are cancelled indefinitely. The only thing left in the next several months is the IAGSDC convention in Denver in early July. Hopefully, the worst of this will be over by then.

Karate has also closed, but we started doing online sessions last night. It's been a huge comfort to see the gang together again, even if just virtually.

Weightlifting at the gym is my preferred method of de-stressing, but that hasn't been an option for two weeks now. Last week, I was checking websites to see if there was a gym ban in neighbouring states, but yup, there was.

I had hoped we could go to the trailer this coming weekend at Roseland, West Virginia. We haven't de-winterized yet: everything is still stored in our basement. Alas, yesterday, the shelter-at-home order was given for West Virginia, essentially closing the campground and restricting movement, so our trailer plans are dead.

Virginia and DC school systems have both announced their academic years are toast: the schools will not re-open before June. I expect our county at least in Maryland to do the same shortly. Most of our square dance clubs follow the school boards' open/closed policies, so we've lost our venues for a while longer. Ditto my karate dojo.

Back in Canada, things aren't much better: nearly every province has a shelter-at-home order, or nearly so. None of my family are sick: even Mom and Grandma are doing fine, just frustrated by being housebound. My brother and his wife were about to move from Nova Scotia to Ontario; while the sale & purchase of homes has closed, I don't know if they've found a moving company still available to actually do the move yet.

So far though, this has just been a major annoyance, not a crisis for us. The local grocery stores are still open and while there are shortages on some shelves, we're doing OK with things we can buy and the supplies we already have in stock. We had no pending medical appointments to cancel, and our prescriptions were already stocked. While our dentist's office is closed for elective stuff, they were open to finish outstanding dental projects, such as the final filling cap on my root canal of Feb 5, and the replacement crown installation for Kent this morning.

So I'm still working from the basement computer bunker, stess-eating a lot, going for four mile walks when weather permits, and reading more than I have in years. We'll get through this mess somehow.

2019 ended pretty well for me, at least healthwise.

Weightlifting continues, although I'm a bit frustrated by a lack of progress in my benchpress, among other things. Ongoing tennis elbow issues in my left arm has prevented a lot of progress, especially on my biceps. Still, I'm in better shape than I have been in years and have high hopes for 2020.

Karate also continues well. At the moment, I have a 3rd degree brown belt. This would be a intro to the advanced levels, and I still have a few steps up to black. My flexibility is much improved: when I started, I could barely front kick to waist level, but I can now easily front-kick up to head level. My side kick, not so much: there are limits to what a 50+ year old body can do if it hasn't been doing this since youth.

I was thrilled this morning to see that the belt test dates for the rest of 2020 have been posted: it's so much easier to schedule the rest of my year. Alas, the next round is scheduled in the last week of February during a must-attend week in San Francisco at the company headquarters for our audit. Figures. I'll check with Sensei if it is possible to test before or after the regular window, presuming I'm eligible at that time.

Kent had both knees replaced in 2019: July 27 and Nov 20. His recovery was pretty fast for each as he's not yet 60. The second did take a little longer because he was pushing too fast too early with a weekend trip to Cleveland prior to xmas, and a fall when we got home. Still, he just needs more walking to rebuild strength at this point.

Michael had a small scare in the fall. Following some routine stress testing, there was some arterial blocking discovered. After further scans, the doctors determined his body had manufactured enough collaterals to bypass the blockages on its own, and there is nothing they could do with surgery or stents which would improve on it, so they've decided to simply up his statin meds and continue monitoring. He's still walking miles on the gym treadmill and travelling, so there's no quality of life impact.

So in all, not a bad year. We hope for a good 2020.

I'm writing this on the plane from San Francisco back to DC after a week onsite at the SF office and the Santa Clara data center. And in all, it went well.

My old boss, Bret McGinnis, left the company at the end of December 2019. It had been a long time coming, as he and our current CTO didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of high priority issues. Our CTO is classic Silicon Valley start-up: break things, fail forward, be disruptive, avoid committee, beg forgiveness rather than ask permission, etc.. Bret worshiped at the alter of 100% Uptime, discussed joint issues with other teams as needed, and kept a very close eye not just on security issues, but audit compliance topics. Our CTO gives lip service to the issue of our PCI and SOC audits, but flatly disregards the actual rules if they are inconvenient and expects somehow that Bret & the rest of us will find some way of bridging the impossible gaps.

Anyway, Bret is gone and we have a new interim boss, Josh Woodward, working remotely from Armonk, NY. He seems nice and listens well, but he's a contractor brought on a few months ago by our CTO to consult on software development project planning. The hope is that he'll agree to go fulltime with us, but I'm unsure if that will actually happen.

So while there is a sudden gap in our team, there is some effort to fill it, and I had some good one-on-one meetings with both the CTO and Josh this past week. I can work with them in various degrees of enthusiasm, depending on the topic.

On the good side, on Friday, I received the first retention bonus following our acquisition by Enterprise this time last year. In 2019, I was offered a pile of cash for my stock options and a retention bonus of 40% of my base salary in January 2020 and again in January 2021. After taxes and 401k, it's still north of $40k, so I'm happy to have it, especially if we decide to go ahead with the house renovations this year.

I hired a new guy for my systems engineering group recently. I originally wanted him to start Jan 6 so I would be in San Francisco to onboard him myself, but he really wanted to start asap --I think there were some financial pressures-- so he started Dec 23 instead. I finally met him last week and he has been working out pretty well. Interestingly, I hired him based on the content of his resume and our telephone interviews, as well as the onsite interviews by other people on the Operations team; his references checked out well too. When I finally met him, I learned he's 10 years older than me, about 63 or so. Silicon Valley looks askance at anyone older than 30, so I suddenly have an appreciation for how hard it was for him to land a new position, and the value of working from the data rather than from appearances. If I were slightly more shallow than I already am, I might have overlooked him too in the interview process.

Our search for a new network engineer was stalled, but the CTO has named me the hiring manager for that spot so I'm now working to pick up where Bret had left off. The sooner we get an extra person in that position, the better.

Our San Francisco office at 642 Harrison Street is going month-to-month on the lease as we seek cheaper digs elsewhere. There is a small office being built out in Campbell, CA (San Jose area), primarily for the executives who dwell in the south bay area. I visited that site Friday to see how the office space is being renovated and it's looking pretty good. Naturally, all of the networking equipment and videoconferencing systems are top-of-the-line and brand new: the execs insisted on that for themselves; the new Oakland office for the plebes will not be so lucky. Interestingly, while the executive space has side meeting rooms, they've still gone with mostly an open office environment, including a standing desk in the main room for the CEO.

The renovations are only just starting on the new Oakland space, two floors at 1300 Broadway, just above the 12th Street BART station. I looked around the area Saturday, just to see the location and the amenities in the neighbourhood, but had no access to the building itself. I don't know how comfortable the offices will be in the end, but no one will starve and the public transit accessibility is good.

Having testing the BART accessibility and timing to the airport, I've largely decided that future trips will still likely be via SFO rather than Oakland's airport. Yes, the Oakland airport will be vastly closer, but it's hard to find a non-stop flight from the east coast to Oakland at decent times on an non-sucking airline. The Alaska Air non-stops between Dulles and SFO have been largely good to me, and I can handle an hour on BART to Oakland: it's only four more stations than the Powell one I've been using to my San Francisco hotel. Of course, I'll need to find a decent hotel near the office that's within policy...

We're about to start a round of SOC2 audits & evidence collection once again. In fact, I'm supposed to be onsite in San Francisco for the week of February 24 to face the auditors directly. I should book that air fare & hotel soon.

There's a boatload of small projects still in flight, but I'm feeling pretty confident about my working environment, relations with colleagues, and my future in general. The departure of Bret and a couple more people has made some space for me to grow into other managerial functions as a director, and as long as I ask for more responsibility from Josh and Neil, I'm relatively confident I'll get it. As long as I don't screw up, I'll be making their lives easier.

The biggest challenge for me at the moment is a kind of time management. Working three hours ahead of California has permitted me to do some personal stuff in the mornings: gym, medical appointments, commuting to the data center, etc.. My day picks up at noon eastern time though as meetings start in San Francisco, and they tend to run into the early evening because, obviously, that's still the business day for SF. I have to be firm about not letting much slide past my 6pm so I can still have dinner with my family, attend karate, go square dancing, etc.. I need to be more efficient in the 12-6pm hours, and to make sure my colleagues on the other side are as efficient about that too.

I also suspect that as I take on more management, I'm going to be spending more time working with Bangalore, which means more late night hours. But I'm typically up until midnight anyway, so that's not a huge burden.

So many pieces in progress, but it's working out well.

My flight home from Canada a week ago was uneventful. Per my usual luck, I had to join a work-related defcon situation the moment I walked in the door at home: no one else in the company has experience working with Solaris, Veritas volume manager, or Veritas Cluster Service. Indeed, I'd rather not myself but until we phase out that stuff in a few months, I'm still the go-to guy.

It's been 9 days since Dad died. Oddly, I don't really feel it yet. I do have moments of sadness that I'll never see or talk to him again, but nothing I would call grief or intense emotion. I suspect a huge part is that once he passed away, my primary task was to keep Mom grounded and to help her get through the essential paperwork. In essence, Dad became a project rather than a death in the family.

The Christmas holidays and the sudden trip to northern Ontario have upset my usual routine considerably. It's not a bad or resentful upset though: I was glad to spend time with the kids, and always love going back home to see the farm although the circumstances of this trip were horrible. But it was nice to get back to karate last Friday: I've missed that. Heavy snows this weekend and a dental appointment this morning have kept me from the gym, but I'll probably be back tomorrow, the first time in nearly three weeks.

I missed little work over the past while. The load was light during the holidays, even though I was on-call. Almost nothing came up while I was away, although I did log in from time to time, just to read emails and to make a few tweaks here & there to help keep the production systems stable. My task list is only just now gearing back up to a normal load, and there are good things in progress.

So, it's all a return to normality & routine now. It just feels so anti-climactic.

Dad died very early Sunday. We collected his personal effects and brought Mom back to my hotel room for the night. After a few hours of sleep, we headed back to the farm in Englehart.

On Monday, we began the process of paperwork on Dad.

There won't be an extensive funeral. The body was collected from Kirkland Lake by McDonalds Funeral Home in Englehart; it will be cremated in Haileybury today. We chose a small wooden chest for his cremains. There will be no service immediately but a celebration of life at the United Church in Englehart in April, followed by burial in the Brentha Cemetary, plot I-16. We paid Mark at the Home for their services, $3,870.

The funeral home is updating the federal government, so we don't have to make extra calls about Dad's Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Supplement or such. The CPP has a $2,500 death benefit; that should be arriving in a couple of months once we get the last paper signed. She will get a reduced survivor's benefit from Dad's CPP, as well as her own CPP and her OAS.

I've made phone calls to Primerica about Dad's life insurance policy, and to his union about his death benefits. The paperwork for those will be mailed to the farm for completion.

Dad's union pension will continue to Mom at full for ten more years, then 50% after. She will continue getting the union's supplemental health insurance gratis for the next six months, then receive paperwork to obtain it in her own name in future.

We have some issues on the credit cards: they have two Visa cards which appear to both be under Dad's name exclusively. We have to cancel those, but we also need to ensure Mom has some credit card available to her.

There were no outside investment accounts. The property & bank accounts were all jointly held so Mom retains control without probate. The Ford Escape is exclusively in her name, but the pickup truck was in Dad's: we'll have to figure that one out, but it's not a pressing concern this week.

The township has been notified of Dad's passing and we have confirmed that we will be using the plot the parents purchased some years ago.

They both had extra accident-only insurance coverage. I've cancelled both of Dad's policies to prevent further premium payments, and confirmed Mom's are still intact.

Beyond this, I'm helping put away a lot of Dad's personal items. We've taken bags of his medications to the local pharmacy for disposal. Some clothes have already been donated. His toiletries have been removed from the master bath room. I'm eating my way through is chocolate stash and his assortment of potato chips.

My parents collectively have kept a huge pile of bank statements, legal papers, invoices, receipts and so on for decades. I'm sorting out items of no consequence and documents older than seven years, burning the old stuff and sorting the current things into some vague order.

Tomorrow (Wednesday), we pick up Dad's remains and a stack of copies of the death certificate from the funeral home. We will also stop by the township hall to sign some papers prepared for us. And then we go to New Liskeard to stop by the provincial government offices to formally close his Ontario health benefits and various supplemental services he received as part of his Crohn's, COPD and mobility support. And return Dad's beer can empties as we can only recycle those in New Liskeard or Kirkland Lake --we need to keep up with the practical day-to-day issues too.

I return to Maryland Thursday; perhaps an extra 24 hours might be useful, but not enough to justify the expense of rescheduling my flight. I'm taking lots of photos of various documents & contact info with my phone, as well as recording information in Evernote and emailing my siblings daily with my progress so they know where we stand when Angela comes up this weekend to continue the battle on paperwork. At least I'll be able to say that we got 80% of the heavy lifting done before I go; we just need to complete the appropriate forms when they arrive via snail-mail in the coming week.

I've finally made it to Kirkland Lake. One of my sisters flew in from Halifax to Toronto's island airport where we met up, then few together to Timmins where I had a rental car waiting. We're now checked into our hotel and had a brief visit with Mom & Dad at the hospital.

Dad is currently in the palliative care ward. While he is not in any particular pain, he is receiving moderate doses of medication to make him comfortable, mostly by keeping his stress & anxiety at bay sufficiently so that his lungs' low performance is still sufficient. If he exerts himself in anyway, physically or emotionally, his COPD is sufficiently advanced that he cannot function and therefore becomes even more anxious, feeling that he is suffocating --because, well, he is, in slow motion.

At the moment, it doesn't appear he can go home again: his ability to physically function & care for himself, even with Mom's help, is too degraded.

This afternoon before I arrived, he had a chat with the hospital staff about medically assisted death. We don't think he's actively investigating this at the moment, but is considering his options when/if his situation further degrades to the point where he will be utterly dependent on machines to survive.

When I arrived this evening, Mom was on the phone to her mother, explaining that Dad had little time left, that he wished to be cremated, that there would be no immediate funeral but probably a memorial celebration of life later in the summer when his cremains are interred in the Brentha Cemetary near their farm. Dad was sitting upright in bed this entire time, listening to the conversation.

Dad's skin tone was definitely greyer than I've ever seen, but he was talkative, clear-minded and lucid, although periodically fighting for consciousness against the medication. His mind is good, but his body is simply worn out & failing.

At this moment, I would say that Dad is reaching the end, but it is not imminent. He will die in his own time, perhaps a few days or perhaps a few months. I have no doubt though that tomorrow will be his last birthday (77), and I wouldn't put any money on him seeing their next wedding anniversary (July 4).

As I write this, I'm OK with all of this. I will miss him, but I can see that this is no longer the life he wants, an active mind trapped in a decaying body. If he has made peace with his ending, then I'm at peace with it too. I love my father: I will not demand he live in pain just to assuage my fears or sadness, so I'm letting him go.

Mother, however, has not made peace. To the contrary, she's declaring war on the universe.

While she has somewhat accepted that his end is coming soon, she's fighting it tooth & nail. She won't leave the room because she believes the hospital will stop treating him if she's not present & monitoring. She's sleeping in his hospital bed beside him, even though crowding Dad and wrapping her arm over him makes it harder for him to breathe. She won't let Dad finish a sentence, insisting that she knows better than he does what his wishes are going to be --or tries until he glares his annoyance at her while he catches his breath to finish speaking.

She still holds that at least two of my sisters are part of the great conspiracy to murder our father, a notion she latched onto a few years ago when Dad first was diagnosed with Crohn's and his COPD became undeniable. Since one sister is a nurse, Mom has identified her as the secret agent of the medical profession, sent to monitor Dad and report back on better ways to torture him. I know how ridiculous this sounds --because it is utterly ridiculous-- but it is causing very real headaches.

Before we arrived this afternoon, Mom began shouting at Donna as she inquired about Dad's medical regimen. At one point, Mom charged at her, presumably with the intent of doing something violent; Donna, who has faced this before and is quite tired of the stupidity, simply turned and left the room, refusing to be an witness for Mom's tantrum. This made Mom even more furious and she began directing her rage at Angela, who had done nothing to this point. Angela told her directly to stop behaving like a child and that we had all come to see Dad (laying in bed, witness to the whole thing), not be held hostage to her tantrums.

As you can imagine, this didn't go over well with Mom, who became louder & more obnoxious. She then turned and kicked away a chair and a rolling tray table that were in her way. At this point, the hospital staff had to step in to address the noise level. If Mom does this again, the staff will address this as a "code white" (violent person, whether patient, visitor, staff or other) and Mom will be ejected from the hospital and refused further entry.

I have some sympathy for her: her husband is dying and she's ill-equipped to live without him, at least in the way they've been living for decades. She has mild dementia, the residual effects of mild strokes and a brain tumour. She's survived breast cancer in recent years. Most of her old social network has largely died of old age by now. But I can't accept the damage she is doing. Dad doesn't need this stress. Our last memories with Dad should be about Dad, not about Mom's exaggerated drama, conspiracy theories & inflated sense of self-importance.

I have no good answers for this. All I can say for my part is that if she goes into drama mode again, I will leave the room. I will not be an audience for her performance art. After a brief family conference this evening, my siblings are in similar agreement.

Tomorrow, we're planning to have some brief one-on-one chats with Dad to say goodbye. Nearly everyone is returning to their individual homes Friday or Saturday: kids have to be back in school, work has to be resumed, etc.. I'm here until at least Tuesday, and depending on how things look, I may extend that. We've already discussed the possibility that once we've each had a chance to say our farewells and celebrated his birthday, Dad may simply let go of his own accord. Or not. We just don't know.

And we have no idea what to do about Mom once he does pass away. What do you do when the only things which could possibly make her happy are utterly impossible, and that the only theoretically choices are Great Evils To Be Violently Opposed? How do we deal with a situation where the best possible outcome might actually be Mom's stated wish to die immediately with Dad? Again, I have no answers.

I'm still at the same firm I've been at for ten years, Deem Inc.. Indeed, this past week was my 10th anniversary, if you count from when I first started doing work for them, Jan 5 is my 10th anniversary if you count from my official start date.

On January 25, I became the manager of our systems engineering team. I was already the senior member and was doing the equivalent of team manager since the prior fall, but this was when it was made official. Unfortunately, it did not come with extra money or stock options: management pleaded poverty. I accepted it however as it definitively shifted my job title from mere systems guy into a management roll; this is something which would look good on a resume should I move elsewhere, especially if the company was pleading poverty.

It has been a good year. Besides the day-to-day activities of keeping our systems running, we cleaned out & closed down the one cage in DC3 which I had originally been hired to support & manage ten years ago. We had switched over 90% of all activity to the new cage in May 2017, so we just had to be aggressive about moving that last 10%, then securely disposing of the old equipment.

The other big project was getting our PCI compliance certificate in the fall. Because our systems store credit card information of our customers, we are required to be certified by the paycard industry as compliant with their security guidelines. Some rules had changed since our last certification, and some of our systems had aged out of compliance on their own: it took a significant amount of effort just to collect the proof of compliance for our good systems, not to mention upgrading & modifying our non-compliant ones. In all, we were successful by the deadline but it was a huge effort.

There are still quarterly activities which must be taken as part of the compliance. I just received word yesterday that we have cleared the hurdle for this quarter. Good times will be here again around March 20.

On August 8, I was promoted from Manager, Systems Engineering, to Director, Operations. This promotion did come with extra money, and a pile of additional stock options. Now several teams report to me (and me to my senior VP, Bret). I'm spending more time in coordinating activities and in managerial meetings, but I still have my finger in the systems administration side of the house. I'm still the only person who lives even approximately near our production data center near Dulles Airport.

I had two trips to San Francisco this year, two more than last year. At the moment, there is a strong possibility of another trip for the first week of February, but I'm awaiting word to confirm that.

And while I can't write more about it here (or anywhere, really) because of confidentiality issues, there is something big and wonderful happening right now with work, and I'm very excited about it. I hope to write something a lot more informative by the end of January.