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between a wife and work
Monday, October 8 2018
Fairly early at work today, I asked the head honcho if today was the day my salary began. That had, after all, been our understanding at our meeting back in late September. But no, apparently all the tees had yet to be crossed and all the eyes had yet to be dotted on the documents that would fund such a thing. It was coming, the head honcho assured me, but it was taking longer than expected. He could, however, assure me that I would be covered under the company insurance by the end of the month. That was important, because Gretchen had already stopped paying for our COBRA, so at this point every day without salaried employment is also a day without health insurance. Just to remind you, this is in 2018, for someone in his 50s with a wife in her late 40s, together owning net assets exceeding a million dollars.
Today in the workplace was unusual because I had a lot to do. I had to re-extract (this time with a different file naming algorithm) the data from that MySQL database containing attachments belonging to a future customer. And while that was going on (it required more debugging and then the 35 gigabytes of data had to be zipped and moved to a server, all of which took hours), I was trying to set up commercial self-service reporting system on a server for the head honcho to demonstrate. It should come as no surprise that any system that purports to be "easy" for an end user is probably not going to be, and to the extent it is easy for that end user at all, it is probably going to be hard for the person (in this case, me) setting it all up. I struggled with a wizard called the MetaData Builder, which is what allows me, as the person with database knowledge, to expose data to the end user in a filtered format they can digest. A few days ago, I found it much easier to do things by just editing the XML output by the wizards and configuration trees. But today I kept running into problems because what looked like the XML I needed to edit would often turn out not to be, and it was hard to tell how all the pieces fit together. For someone who much prefers not to have the rules and annoyance of end-user UIs, it was infuriating to find that they were the only way to produce a usable configuration. By late in the day, though, I had a working version running on a web server. Unfortunately, it was outside of the office VPN and so had no access to the databases it needed to access.
Back at the house, I found Gretchen and the dogs snuggling under the blankets in the bed. There was an October chill in the air, yet there was no fire in the woodstove and, for that matter, the front door was wide open.
[REDACTED]
This evening, Gretchen baked the remainder of yesterday's shells, ricotta, and red sauce, and as we ate it, we watched a segment of Shark Tank while the DVR filled with a broadcast of Jeopardy. Later we watched an episode of Better Call Saul, the one where the homesick German mine boss escapes his voluntary imprisonment from Gus Fring's meth-lab-digging operation This was also the episode where the now-mute Hector Salamaca first gets his bell, allowing him a limited form of communication.
I was in bed by 9:00pm, which makes sense given that I'd been up since 6:00am.
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