Month: April 2020

Tonight, The Streets Are Ours

6th April 2020 6th April 2020 by Sleeper in , , No Comment

Those people, They got nothing in their souls;
And they make our TVs blind us
From our vision and our goals.
Oh, the trigger of time it tricks you
So you have no way to grow.

But do you know that
Tonight the streets are ours?

Saturday

Getting far too used to lazy starts. Sent the kids downstairs to watch TV while we lounged in bed. Eventually dragged ourselves out of bed and fed the kids before making a half-hearted attempt at tidying up the kitchen and doing a bit of washing up.

Dragged the kids out into the garden while J was doing a fitness class over zoom. There was much grumbling at first but they both enjoyed planting out the potatoes, and I got the lawn mowed as well. Looks like it’s full of moss. I’ve given up on the front garden, it’s always been pretty scrubby and over the winter it seems like a wild invasion of violas has happened; big parts of the lawn have been usurped by little purple flowers. A few weeks back I sprinkled a load of meadow seed over it; seems like that’s starting to wake up, and later in the year it’ll look wild but pretty.

Just as everything was going a little too well, I sliced into my finger while trying to prepare lunch while distracted by arguing from the garden. The knife is super sharp, so it took a while to get a plaster on it and mop up the blood, but it’s not too deep a cut so in the grand scheme of things, an annoyance rather than a problem.

After lunch, took the bike out for the first time in a week. Aiming for 10 miles, I got home and Fitbit clocked me at a mere 9.93. Damnit. Most of the journey was uneventful but there were a few clowns out there – a group of three women, all pushing buggies close to each other and nattering, and what seemed like the entire population of a small riverside council block sitting out on deckchairs on the grass by the river. The path was a little busier than I’d have liked, and while I could stay well clear of everyone it felt a little claustrophobic at times.

Back home, something had gone wrong with the performance test they’re running. Attempted to log on to AWS but found I’d been locked out of my account. Eventually gained access, having resorted to calling the offshore help desk, and diagnosed the problem as a failure of an application on the other side of a VPC endpoint that belonged to an entirely different part of the business. Cooked a chicken casserole while answering questions on slack, which turned out better than I’d expected (the casserole, not the work, which was much as expected). Got the kids into bed and had a chilled out evening watching the first Ant-Man movie.

Sunday

Another late, lazy start. Goodness knows where my body clock will be by the time this all ends. At least I had some determination to get things done; spent part of the morning fixing a jammed curtain rail that the kids had done a proper number on, and had been getting increasingly broken over the past six weeks or so. Checked in every now and then with work but all seemed quiet; ready for the big release.

Given the rumours of a more stringent lockdown, I took advantage of the weather and headed out on my bike again, this time sticking to roads. A little bit further this time, but out for about the same amount of time; avoiding potentially crowded (in the loosest possible sense of the word any other year) river paths was probably a good call, I think.

Made pizza for dinner from the “pizza base mix” packets I managed to buy on Friday. Turned out well enough but I don’t think I’ll be repeating the experience, it’s a very expensive way to buy flour and yeast mixed together, and hopefully by next week I’ll have plenty of both. Spoke to mum while the dough was rising, she’s keeping her distance from the world; her only annoyance right now is that her Tesco delivery had no eggs. She’s getting out for walks early before people are about. All sensible stuff.

School term ended on Friday, with a grand total of exactly zero fanfare! As a special end of term treat, we promised Sleeper Jr. that he could stay up late and watch Spider-Man: Homecoming with us. I’d suggested that on the assumption it would be with all the other MCU movies on Disney+. Nope. Thanks, Sony. Fortunately it was available for streaming from Amazon but only paid-for, rather than inclusive. Thankfully it was pretty cheap, or I’d have had to find something else to watch instead. All entertained, I escorted him off to bed, then we headed up ourselves not too much later.

One Foot in Front of the Other

3rd April 2020 3rd April 2020 by Sleeper in , , No Comment

How did I come to this, where every song I sing
Is nothing but a list of pain and suffering?

We never will forget, and no, we will not forgive!
We’ve fought hard not to die, yet we don’t know how to live-
How do we change our world to what we want it to be?
How do we move beyond all of this misery?

Thursday

Ouch. Maybe staying up till midnight talking nonsense isn’t such a good idea after all. Woke at 5am with a headache. Eventually dragged myself out of bed at 7, got the kids up, dressed and breakfasted, then went back to bed for half an hour before I started work at 9, by which time I felt mostly human again. Settled in for a sprint planning session that lasted far longer than it had any right to. I’ll be glad when this project’s over and I can get back to my normally-scheduled work routine.

More cold cuts for lunch, this time in bagels; we’re running out of bread. Lunch was cut short a little as my boss needed an urgent catch up before I headed into an interview at 1pm. We’ve had a run of disastrous candidates; today’s was thankfully an exception, but I don’t know if they have what we’re looking for. Emailed our recruitment team to set him up with the next stage; that will tell me pretty quickly whether he’s any good. For once I had an afternoon free of meetings; I was able to get some work done almost uninterrupted!

Had a long, useful talk after the kids were in bed, about what we can do in the short to medium term about childcare arrangements. While right now we’re not paying anything (or at least, a nominal amount) to the nursery, it’s a struggle to fit full time work in and keep the kids from killing each other. We’ve got something of a plan; hopefully it’ll work out well enough.

Friday

Woke at 7 from a nightmare involving trying to contact my mum who’d been admitted to a hospital which bore an uncanny resemblance to Bristol Temple Meads railway station, with added shades of Altered Carbon; people at the reception desks kept tapping at their computers and then talking about sleeve death. I’ve been trying to stay away from current events news too much, to keep the kids’ mental health up as much as anything else, but it’s still obviously getting to me.

Went straight in to an early morning call with my boss to discuss a sudden, unexpected, incoming political bunfight; gave him the data he needs to push back hard. Found myself dragged into a meeting as a result, but managed to give all the details required quickly enough, in contrary to some of the other endless meetings I’ve been in.

Braved the supermarket over lunchtime; wasn’t too horrendous, and at least in the rapidly-moving queue outside everyone was maintaining a reasonable separation. Had a brief chat with the guy marshalling the queue who took advantage of the fact he was outdoors to sneak a crafty roll-up; he’d bee there since 7am and was just getting to the point (at 1 in the afternoon) that he could take a break. Sterling work there; he was in decent spirits despite what must be an enormously boring job. Inside, at least in some aisles, the social distancing wasn’t so great, but armed with the scan-and-pay app I managed to stay away from majority of people and get almost everything I wanted, the exceptions being flour and frozen vegetables, of which they had precisely none. I could at least get pizza dough mix so the plan for home made pizza isn’t out of the window.

Back to work on my return, mostly head down apart from one Zoom call to say goodbye to P, my now ex-boss, and an apologetic one from the new boss asking me to keep an eye on Slack over the weekend due to a badly organised performance test run happening.

Spent some lovely time with Sleeper Jr., talking about major events in recent-ish history; concentrating on the good we’ve been talking about the Apollo missions and the Berlin Wall coming down. We watched some footage from both on YouTube. It’s been nice to actually educate him on things he doesn’t know about, and which aren’t computer programming or maths related for a change. Tomorrow, we’ll maybe get to do some gardening!

Splendid

2nd April 2020 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in , No Comment

Woke up this morning feeling super!
Where’s the butler?
Pass me the butter!
My muffins are freshly baked;
Wake up and I stretch and shake.

My life? Well yes, it’s great –
Like I live on a slice of special cake!

Tuesday

Up at 7. As usual, one child was raring to go while the other needed dragging out of bed to get breakfast. Today was my day for working with interruptions so settled myself down at the kitchen table. In contrast with the last few times, I somehow managed to help out with English schoolwork at the same time as writing CloudFormation, making lunch, handing out felt tip pens and debugging python. Vanished off upstairs for an hour at 12 to run an interview but otherwise stuck to the kitchen for the most part.

Lunch was cold cut doorstep sandwiches made with the legendary bread-borne-of-beer. I really liked them but the bread’s dense and it was probably a bit of a struggle for the kids given the combination of thickness and density.

At one point the there was Minecraft-themed yoga in the living room. I had no idea such a thing existed, but, hey, whatever keeps my meetings free of interruptions…

There hasn’t been so much bickering today either. At one point the seven-year-old was playing Minecraft on Switch, and I gave the four-year-old Sonic Mania to play on the big screen to keep her quiet. She seems to have fallen in love with Knuckles the Echidna; most likely because he’s pink. There was a lot of dying on the first baddie and almost as much “Daddy, I’m stuck!” but she had fun.

Seems like today was a calm-before-the-storm kind of day; there are ominous clouds on the horizon in terms of juggling-all-kinds-of-outstanding-projects. A baptism of fire for my newly enlarged empire, ahem, team. I’m too settled. Surely something is going to upset our cosy new routine soon?

Wednesday

Think I’m starting to adjust. Woke up again at gone 7, made a start on work. The usual nonsense over breakfast, then mostly hid upstairs trying to get some work done, which seemed like a lost cause. Not because of the kids, but because of the number of meetings in my calendar. A grumble on a private Slack about the fact that we were supposed to be meeting for beers tonight turned into arrangements for virtual beers, which was good. as was the presentation I delivered talking about the infrastructure scheduling work we’ve been doing.

Found the time during my lunch break to prep the ingredients for a paella, which turned out awesome at dinner time. I should cook those more often. Managed to shepherd the kids into bed at a sensible hour then settled down in front of FaceTime. Was really great talking to everyone, a welcome antidote to the outside world. Eventually crawled off to bed, a few drinks down, at midnight.