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| This is my first day back in the office since M's funeral on friday. Sitting outside having my usual first smoke of the day around 8:30 am, I realized that this is a closed chapter for me. His death is fact, and I don't think I need any further closure. In fact, I think I probably need to decompress a little and not think about it for a while.
***
Saturday evening marked a return to my part-time waiting gig after a break of two weeks. The place I work at isn't even a joke. It's an embarassment. Management consists of a bunch of jaded lifers who haven't the foggiest understanding of the words service, quality, efficiency or pride. On sunday night the water heater went kaput. Which meant no hot water for washing dirty dishes. They tried boiling water on the stove, but it was impossible to boil it quickly enough to make any real difference. As a result greasy plates, cups and cutlery kept getting sent back out for reuse. Finally, we got word from the regional gm that yes, we could close the restaurant at 9 pm. This after literally hours of trying to run the dinner service without the hot water heater.
There are times when I wonder if I shouldn't just spill the beans on this place. Just let everyone know just what kind of standards the people preparing their foods adhere to. Whats the worst that'll happen? The place goes belly up? Sure, it migh mean that a few dozen people are temporarily out of work, but that's not a big deal. For one, another franchise, most likely a food-establishment of one kind or another, would move in before the Closed sign stopped swinging on the door. Besides, these people would most likely be absorbed into the other countless restaurants that plague this city like university towns everywhere. The owner of the franchise wouldn't care - he's owned this particular location for 10 years now and I'm sure it has long since returned several times on his investment. He owns several other businesses, and I'm sure he'd find a way to profit from its closure anyway. But I'm lazy and complacent, so I just shut my mouth, shake my head and resolve never to let anyone else prepare the food I eat there.
***
Holiday monday morning, and Feith had to work, because her employer sucks ass. By the time we got to her office she was almost in a full blown asthma attack, and no puffer. Took her to the emergency room (being a holiday, all the walk-in clinics were closed), where she got a new prescription from Dr. Langdon (you have to say the name in a dreamy adoring voice "Do-oooctor Laaaangdon...") as well as a note excusing her from work for the rest of the day. After I retrieved her from clutches of the aforementioned dreamboat doctor, we picked up Leah and went to fill the prescription. I had been feeling bored and somewhat melancholy for most of the morning, so we decided that a trip to the beach might cheer me up. We packed a picnic of fruit, piled everyone into the car and headed to beach for the afternoon. At noon. When we got there, it was mostly cloudy so we were initially spared the intense afternoon sun. Feith and I joined the kids in the water for a bit, but soon found our way back to shore. I tried reading, but my body wanted nothing more than to lie in the warm sun and fed grapes. I succumbed to the desires of the flesh in favour of the desires of the mind, and Feith lovingly obliged my need to be fed - 'twas deelish people, deelish  If an afternoon like that won't revive you, you might as well start digging a hole in the ground, I say. Thoroughly refreshed, we stopped by the grocery store on the way home to pick up a few things for dinner. I made bruschetta bread, Alex made deviled eggs and Feith made her potato salad I love so much. We also boiled some corn on the cob, and ended up with way too much food. Or so I thought. Between the six of us, we practically demolished all the food.
Though I was feeling thoroughly satisfied with the day, Feith was less enthusiastic about its outcome. The extreme afternoon heat severely burned her back and thighs, while the excesses of dinner left her with painful stomach gas. Needless to say, she had a miserable night last night. I got Noxzema to soothe her burnt skin and tried to massage her stomach with olive oil - hey it worked for the Romans, so I thought I'd give it a bash - which only seemed to help for a very short period. My poor baby is still in pain today. We can't figure out what it was - no one else seems to have suffered the way she did. If the pain continues through today, I'm thinking she should see the doc about it.
***
That was our weekend. I'm trying hard to get back into the swing of things at work, but I don't think I'm there yet. Several people are away on vacations and conferences, so the office is unusually quiet, even more than usual. Hence this too long and verbose post.
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| About three weeks ago we got the news that someone I've known and worked with for the last 6+ years had suffered organ failure and gone into a coma. Afew days later, he came out of his coma, but remained in critical condition in the hospital. Some of his colleagues had been to visit him a few times. M, though fighting for his life, asked for printouts of source code so he could do a little work while laid up in bed. M had given us all, not to mention his family, quite a scare. The word around the office was that he would probably need transplants, but the general feeling was that he would return to work in time once his recuperation was complete. But then, just yesterday, came the news that he had passed away. He was 40 years old. He leaves behind his wife and 10 year old son.
The news was personally devastating to me. Though I wouldn't consider M to be a friend, I'd known him long enough to feel the loss quite hard. I spent 15 minutes just staring at the email. Fuck. Holy shit. Goddamn. His poor wife. His son. The same age as my daughter. Fuck. My thoughts pinballed back and forth. I looked around at my co-workers. Not a single one of them seemed to be acknowledging the news. There was the usual banter, steaming coffee mugs, geeky jokes etc. ad nauseam. At first my mind was reeling. I couldn't stop thinking about the last time I saw M. He had looked pale, almost jaundiced. He walked with a limp, favouring his left leg. I asked him how he was. It's just my leg he said. Thinking back now, I realize he must have been in a lot of pain. I must have mumbled some lame words to the effect that I hoped it got better soon. That was the very last time I saw or spoke to him. Not seeing any reaction from the people in my immediate area began to make me feel angry. How the fuck can you guys not be feeling anything. Where is your humanity? I messaged Feith to tell her the news and how the reactions of the others in my office was making me feel. Don't judge them too harshly, she said. People react to death in their own ways. Perhaps the event put them face to face with their own mortality. Perhaps they were not comfortable expressing their emotions at work. I acknowledged she was probably right. All the same, I had a hard time shaking my anger. My only recourse was to dive as deep into my work as possible. I needed not to think about M, his wife and kids, and my seemingly unmoved colleagues. It worked well enough to get me through the day. I got a lot of work done.
This afternoon, I had a meeting. One of the other people there was P. She had worked side by side M for about the same length of time as I had, but their working relationship was far closer than mine. After the meeting, I asked if she and others from their group would be attending the funeral tomorrow. Of course, she said. They are all going. Then we got to talking about M himself. She revealed to me that M had been a heavy drinker for years. This wasn't exactly news to me - I had suspected the same from the time I first got to know M. It was clear that an already bad liver simply could not sustain the abuse of his habit and simply gave out on him. As we talked further, P said that she had been suffering a fair bit of guilt. M's drinking had been common knowledge amongst his group. But because his work remained of the highest calibre, and his personal relationships did not seem to suffer because of it, no one had ever tried to confront him about it. I responded by saying that we all have our boundaries. Call them social norms, respect for privacy, minding ones own business, whatever. The other thing that makes me really sad, P continued, was that most people in the company thought of him as a drunken slob. But they didn't know how funny, fun-loving, intelligent and dedicated he was. I could probably be counted among the people who thought him somewhat slobbish - M was a typical academic geek. He appeared disshevelled most of the time. His eyes bulged. His hair was always unkempt. He wore garish sweaters of the diamond check variety. And he was always picking at something or the other on his face. Even at his age he suffered from quite bad acne. But I was never under any illusion as to the quality of his mind. A first rate mind that man had. He was an avid chess and Scrabble player. He wielded a mean pool cue. The year I joined the company, he defeated me in the company 8-ball tournament and went on to win the event. The next year, we played again, this time in the final, and I was very, very proud to have won against him for the championship. In fact, our relationship grew mostly around the felt of the pool table. I remember him being a highly competitive, if a little conservative, billiards player. He was an excellent shot maker and could be extremely frustrating when he played defensively. We had many battles with wood and ivory.
As the day passed today, however, I found myself thinking less and less about M. I laughed, hummed along to music, made inane chatter and sipped from steaming mugs of coffee. It wasn't until my meeting with P that my thoughts returned to him in earnest. Because I sit in one area of the R & D section of the office building, and M in another, I hadn't talked to any of his immediate group until my conversation with P. And of all the people in my group, no one had known him half as long as I had - a fact I had failed to consider when I saw the non-reactions yesterday. Boundaries. Theirs were far tighter than mine, I suppose. During the course of my conversation with P, which lasted nearly half an hour, her demeanour became increasingly emotional. In her area too people had been at first reticent to talk much about M's death. They did talk eventually, but even so were restrained. Mostly by their discomfort with the nature of his death, I suspect, but also because after all, we are at work, and not sitting around someones living room or dining table. There simply isn't an atmosphere of intimacy in our company. Hardly surprising at all, considering the kinds of people we employ - bookish academic uber-nerds (and I mean that in the most respectful admiring way possible). It became clear to me that P needed to be able to express her emotions even more than I did. We ended our conversation when she finally broke down in tears, snot bubbles and all. And I wasn't in the least bit uncomfortable about it. I tried hard to ensure that she knew her grief didn't make me feel anything but sympathy and compassion. I'm sorry, she said, dabbing at her tears and at her nose with a wad of tissue. Don't be. It has to come. It should come. Every fibre of my being wanted to scoop her 5-foot-nothing sobbing frame into my arms and hold her and cry along with her. But I didn't. Boundaries. Goddamn boundaries.
I'm going to his funeral tomorrow. He won't be there. He will already have been cremated by then. They're sending his ashes back to his native Russia. I'll miss you M. But not forever. Not even for a long time. But I will miss you. Blessings to your wife and son. May they find the strength to live a full and satisfying life. And I hope you're someplace without boundaries.
| | |
| Woof! What a day yesterday - 9 straight hours of coding (ok, not straight - I might have stopped to pee, or drink coffee, then pee some more) followed by 6.5 hrs at the Grill then home to smoke a bowl and collapse into a deep, deep sleep. I woke up feeling semi-comatose, but rested. (Hope I didn't snore sweetie!)
F is on vacation as of this morning, and my vacation starts next week. We both need it desperately. Our intention had been to go to Montreal for a few days, but we had to drop those plans, thanks to the fact that my ex's boyfriend decided to go psycho crazy and stalk/threaten my ex and her son. So now we have to have Leah staying at our house to keep her out of harms way. Which means that we have to stay in town when the two younger boys go off on their camping trip. **sigh** At least we'll all be together for the week. We'll probably go camping at least once in that time, so it's not all bad.
Ok, enough of the newscast  Time for something fun. I said this was a blog for a lazy day, and here is my lazy blogger entry, thanks to www.googlism.com
(My personal favs are in bold)
Googlism for: sultan
sultan is summertime farm's pinto saddlebred national show
sultan istanbul
sultan is sired by one of the only pinto sons of the immortal world
champion sire supreme sultan and out a black daughter of world champion
status symbol
sultan is thirsty and reaches for this drink
sultan is placed on an auction block and bestows his servitude to the highest
sultan is the father of the people; the subject comes with his problems to the sultan himself
sultan is most enthusiastic about lingo and hopes to introduce it as a standard subject in upper yafan schools
sultan is known for his manichean classification of people as masters and slaves
sultan is comfortable & easy
sultan is chairman of the board of the kingdom's national airline
sultan is a licensed private investigator in both new york and california
sultan is a very rough and unkind
sultan is hassan
sultan is on your right
sultan is assisted by five councils
sultan is a unique space saving and multi functional golf bag solution
sultan is the mightiest of monarchs
sultan is professor of art at california college of arts and crafts and is represented by stephen wirtz gallery
sultan is primarily devoted to qualification of high performance superconductors used for the magnet systems of the
sultan is a good run if you don’t have much time
sultan is quick to clarify
sultan is going all out to prove it
sultan is the head of state with full executive authority
sultan is a 20th century sufi
sultan is an old logging town at the confluence of the skykomish and sultan rivers
sultan is an islamic monarch
sultan is the royal navy?s school of marine and aeronautical
engineering whose primary function is to supply the fleet with
engineering officers and
sultan is just under eighteen feet long and is quite narrow at 21
sultan is a high quality
sultan is voluminous and varied
sultan is an imported cleveland bay stallion licensed for pure and part
bred breeding by the cleveland bay society of great britain
sultan is a cleveland bay colt
sultan is always working for the welfare and better life of the people
sultan is facing a painful truth
sultan is one of the dozens of artists that doubletake gallery offers on its state
sultan is shopping supercars again
sultan is not wearing a the "sacred blue diamond" when jafar cons him out of it
sultan is painted in the lurid colors of the muslim bigot and presented as the first of a long series of jewish
sultan is nothing but a puppet of their ungodly ways
sultan is definitely that
sultan is a synthetic seed propagated variety developed by dr
sultan is assisted and advised by five councils
sultan is shown no more than 20 shows a year
sultan is actually quite fluent in the king's english
sultan is pink with a kind of star in the center
sultan is a place that offers more of promises for the coming years
sultan is pub
sultan is weak for having not yet killed his new bride
sultan is a sultry iris with gold standards and mahogany falls
sultan is both the chief of state and head
sultan is one of the most exciting bird's at the centre to be seen flying
sultan is dagelijks geopend van 11
sultan is specifically a muslim ruler
sultan is deadly with that rail
sultan is 68 km south east of chapleau by road and 64 km by rail
sultan is an interesting question
sultan is father to his people
sultan is the deputy general manager in charge of information technology
sultan is the head of state and the supreme commander of the armed forces
sultan is due to hold scores of meetings and talks with syrian
sultan is underway
sultan is chairman of the board of directors of the national
commisssion for wildlife conservation and developement in the kingdom
of saudi arabia
sultan is "still a perfumed name" on java
sultan is caught in the middle
sultan is taking steady action to make the country appealing to tourists
sultan is the leader of the faction and all of it's lands
sultan is situated in the very hearth of city center
sultan is not an intellectual
sultan is very gentle and can be handled easily
sultan is a guitar virtuoso
sultan is not an easy job
sultan is a small
sultan is head of the mohammedan religion
sultan is "a way of life that doesn't exist in very many places anymore
sultan is veryimpressed
sultan is both the chief of
sultan is a tastefully renovated old townhouse that opened its doors to the public in 1996
sultan is a cheastnut arabian
sultan is a professor of art at california college of arts and crafts in oakland
sultan is regarded as the bringer of customary law
sultan is a
sultan is due to hold scores of meetings and talks with syrian officials in his three
sultan is located
sultan is ideal for clients who wish to be in the old town but to have the luxury and relaxation at the same time
sultan is a small village
sultan is approximately 2
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| I just dropped off the face of xanga there didn't I?
It's just laziness. Back at the end of last year we were hoping to get a mortgage extension which fell through. That marked the beginning of a longish period of stress and unhappiness in our household - what with the season (NOT a christmas person, me), the disappointment, stress, kid troubles, the weather yadda yadda yadda, I just never got back on the wagon. Truth be told, I didn't really miss blogging, but there have been several occasions over the past 6+ months when I've felt an itch to start up again.
Feithy's also been bugging me about it (in the nicest, encouraging manner, of course :)). So I've decided to get back in the groove again. I probably won't be doing a lot of blogrolling this time around, just posting occasionally when I feel up to it.
To satisfy my own personal curiosity, drop me a hi if you read this - I know a bunch of people have unsubscribed, and I'm sure a great many others aren't dropping by anymore (why would you?). Ask me a question, if you like, or just wave, whatever.Tell me a joke, something interesting, something naughty, something scandalous.
****
I can't remember ever having mentioned the name of the company I work for, or the product I work on. If I have then this is moot, but in case I haven't, I'm going to use a code name for it - lets call it Mango, because I love mangoes. Anyway, we're hard at work on the next release of Mango (lets call it Mango XI, to pick a random version number). I've now been a developer here at Mangosoft for close to five of the nearly seven years that I've been employed here. In all that time, this is going to be the very first time where I am expecting to be code complete ahead of schedule. (Code complete is when we're supposed to finish writing all of the new code for the next release cycle) After code complete comes a period of testing, finding bugs, aka programming errors, fixing bugs, and then a beta period, all of which is supposed to polish up the project into a finished product ready for cd-fication and drive-you-crazy shrink wrapping.
This, for the 99.999% of you who don't work in the software industry, is one of the rarest of occurences in any profession. Usually, when a code complete date comes around, any feature that hasn't been finished is called a bug, and finished during bug fixing, or dropped entirely, if there isn't enough time. I would estimate that at least 10% of all actual development takes place in this period.
Mango XI is a particularly ambitious release for us. Although it's mostly been an optimization release, we've also reengineered large chunks of the product. In fact, at a conservative estimate, about 25%-30% of the codebase has been rewritten. My own contribution to that has been the complete rewrite, quite literally from the ground up, of the feature set I've been responsible for for the last 3 years. And that project is nowhere close to completion - it's going to take yet another release before that's done. I'm incredibly stoked about the work we've been doing, and very pleased with my own accomplishments over the past year. Looking ahead, I will be playing with stuff I've been wanting to but haven't had a chance to, which is very exciting for me. I get to rewrite the remaining half of my feature set using the very latest in OpenGL - specifically JOGL, or Java bindings for OpenGL. I have virtually zero experience with this technology, but I look forward to learning it. OpenGL has long been a standard in graphics display, and is frequently used a platform for game development. There is also a side project underway (not a company project, but a personal one) started by one my colleagues here at work (a Final Fantasy like rpg) that I'm hoping to get involved with once I've earned my graphics stripes. Exciting, gripping stuff. No really, I promise you it is!
Anyway, if you've ever been around here before, you might recognize my distinctly Discordian blogging style - painfully longwinded or cryptically pithy. Rest assured, this particular post belongs to the former category. Oh well...
| | |
| The word is in. Our financial adviser just informed me that our
mortgage application is as good as a done deal. The paperwork should be
in the lawyers hands by the end of next week. Which means we should
have our grubby little hands on the cash sometime in the first week of
december.
Good lord, but it feels good to be rid of all that anxiety.
Happy, happy day
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