Tag: Attitude

April 30, 2024 – My Life As a Country Song

April 30, 2024 /

No, my wife didn’t run off and my dog didn’t die. But, last week was a different kind of tough. The week before, I was dealing with the side effects of chemo and being a full time caretaker. But, we were mostly at home and sheltering in place. Last week as there was more getting out and about, it seemed like everything was going wrong.

My wife likes to say that I am ‘a glass half empty’ person. I don’t really think so. I like to think of myself as analytical and balanced. I like to see the full spectrum both good and bad. I suppose that to people who don’t like to see both sides, that is construed as negative. I fail to see how always being positive even when the odds seem low is a better trait that viewing the whole picture optimistically.

I say that because I am not complaining. I am going to get to a point by the end today. I think helpful advice is that we cannot change or dwell in the facts. My wife has cancer and we are doing what we can to combat it. All the ‘why me?’ in the world isn’t going to change a thing. It does however make life much more complicated.

This process is moving at an extremely disjointed manner. One day chemo is scheduled every other Thursday, then it is every other Friday. Take this medication before chemo, no don’t take it at all. Come in for this reason, no see this specialist. They are still doing diagnostic testing for goodness sake to determine if they are proceeding in the correct direction. Every conversation is musical chairs in who is running this process and is this information actually correct. This is the background for what I am dealing with.

Then, my son calls and says ‘my car has a problem’. He is about 45 minutes away. So, I have to drop what I am doing to go get him at 10pm. Due to a large coolant leak, I decide the best coarse of action is to have it towed home rather than risk a warped cylinder head. Imagine that I am trying to get my wife ready for an all day procedure that she is extremely nervous about while dealing with the tow truck driver at the same time because the car is locked and twenty minutes from the hospital.

The next day, my SSL certificate updates for altf4.co. Every 60 days this happens. But, it also follows with calamity. It seems like every time I go in there the user interface changes and I struggle with this process. I have come to anticipate the suck, but it does make it frustrating. This time I could not get the DNS provider to recognize my security documents. I tried and tried until I finally broke down and reached out to support. The problem was technical, I am not sure that there was anything I could do.

I was trying to setup my walkie talkies so that I could give one to my wife and I could hold onto one. This would give me some freedom to be out and about the house but still be in communication. This was the whole reason why I went through the licensing requirements that I talked about last week. One of them I couldn’t get to work. I bought new battery packs, I swapped batteries, no go. Finally, I took it apart to find some of the internal components fried.

No problem, I will break out my second set. They are not doing any good squirreled away in my emergency box for years anyway. One battery was dying, so I ordered new battery packs. Low and behold, there are a lot of aftermarket batteries that are similar but not the same on Amazon (even with the same battery model number). So, now I have two new batteries that don’t charge in my radios since I already opened them and threw away the packaging.

Last week it felt like everything was an obstacle. Everything I did had unintended consequences and nothing worked as planned. But, I want to go back to the beginning here. First, I don’t know what God has planned. I also know that I am handed scenarios that I can handle and learn from. As I am writing, things are getting better. My website is running, the batteries are cleared up, the problem is diagnosed with my son’s car and I think we have all the testing done and the path is clear on chemo.

More so than that, when things are not working right we just have to compartmentalize and be objective. Most of these things were not life altering problems. Take the problems and triage, then prioritize the work to solutions. The list might get longer before it gets shorter but we have to focus on the important things first.

End Your Programming Routine: To be truthful, I wasn’t exactly happy while all of these things were going on at the same time. But, being able to step back, it wasn’t huge problems. I suppose it is fortunate that more bad things didn’t keep happening at the same time. Mostly, step back and analyze the problems to the best of your ability. I am no electronics expert but I can see and understand burnt capacitors, Time to cut your losses and move on.

October 20, 2020 – I want to be grateful

October 20, 2020 /

Have you ever had an opinion that you alone held, especially the one where you believe you are right and everyone else is wrong? That is the kind of thing where you look at yourself in third person and you say how can you possibly believe something different than everyone else.

I guess that is way I can describe my gratefulness ‘gene’. I don’t really see it until I look back on myself in third person. I don’t tend to recognize all of the good things and tend to dwell on the negative.

Here are a list of some of the things that have happened within the last week.

  1. I have had two job interviews this week
  2. I have been helping my in-laws clean-up and organize. I took a load to the dump of their stuff and it included a bunch of mine as well.
  3. My father-in-law gave me a nice string trimmer that he is no longer using
  4. The neighbors gave me a bag full of mushrooms that they foraged this week
  5. I visited the new brewery in town with my wife for the first time. We had a nice time.
  6. I also went out with friends for a social evening on Saturday.
  7. We completed our 2019 taxes and were net neutral on owning money. This was a first in many years.
  8. My daily alignment walks seem to be helping me set daily priorities and be more in touch with spirituality.
  9. I have completed preserving everything that is available to do so. Yesterday I canned peppers as pickled jalapenos.
  10. I completed a job on-time and in-budget.

When I look at the list, almost every single item also has a negative counterpoint. For instance, I had two interviews last week and I also had two rejections. One of them came as I was writing this post; perfect opportunity to practice seeing the positive.

When I look at the list, I am actually impressed with the number of things that seem to be positive. At this moment, it kind of makes me feel like I really am a negative person. I don’t feel that way but comparing my problems versus my reality it sure seems that way. So, it is something that I will continue to work on.

I will keep thinking praying and listening to try and become more grateful. I will keep writing and speaking to show my feelings. I hope to become a better person in the end.

June 23, 2020 – Motivation, Determination and Imagination

June 23, 2020 /

I am giving credit here to Jack Spirko at the Survival Podcast for coining the three things to make a business (or any endeavor) successful. There may be a little bit of self analysis here too before I get done.

Back when I was working a job, I was a support manager for a software engineering company. One of the frequent hang-ups between adding a new customer was whether my company had in-depth knowledge of the software that we were potentially proposing to support. The prevailing position was that if we did not write the software, then we would not be able to support the software.

Yes it is true that potentially supporting software that was compiled by someone else could leave some risk. Before I get too technical, compiling is the act of taking some base level computer code and packaging it up into an executable form. You could make the analogy to baking. The code is the ingredients and what runs are the results. In the case of software, you cant get from the cake back to the ingredients unless you made the cake. I hope that was simple enough.

Here is a another fact, my team did not write any of the code that we supported. So, to them it was frequently all new. Having access to subject matter experts was possible but it was just as possible that the person that wrote the code did not work at the company anymore. Real production type emergencies did not allow us the time to do any sort of reading or studying of what the system was supposed to do anyway.

My team bid on, won and successfully supported systems that our company did not build. They did not have the same boundary issues that others did in the company.

It is time to refresh on the ‘Toolbox Fallacy’.

You see, the Toolbox Fallacy is the antithesis of motivation, determination and imagination. It is all the reasons and excuses of why something cannot be done rather than just doing it.

I am no exception to this problem. I have told myself that when my pantry project is over, I can dedicate more time to this endeavor. Then came the apartment remodel. I want to move from this free blog format to a dedicated host (when this project is over). I need to develop a clearer purpose and target audience before I migrate. I told myself that would first work on posting consistency before progressing into podcasting. I have been very comfortable posting once a day and then moving off to work on my project.

I suppose the thrust of the analysis is why am I lacking Motivation, Determination and/or Imagination in this endeavor. I can see aspects of all three. I know that in my logical, analytical mind setting goals and working toward a schedule would go a long way into remediating this. Another aspect is accountability. I could skip a week or a month without any real consequences (other than personal).

Despite all of that, at this stage I am going to hold on to the Toolbox Fallacy a little longer. I can see the light at the end of my project. It doesn’t mean that I don’t think about developing this medium daily… maybe it means that this is a hobby and not a future job. My recent spiritual re-awaking is starting to clarify aspects in my life that have long been fuzzy. It has made me accountable and thoughtful in more emotional ways than ever before.

One example of unexpected consequences was that I made a video about repairing a nail gun and now I am approaching 2000 views. I made it for a post on this blog, but now I have gotten a lot of questions about repairing nail guns. I never looked to see if there was any content out there and I made it for my own reasons, but maybe I should look at tool repair videos?

The final message for today is that I will keep looking at these principles and adjust accordingly when and where appropriate. Take a listen to the podcast because there is a lot of good information in there if you ever considered doing something of your own.