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still an hour and a half of sunlight left Monday, March 14 2022
As you may recall, last Monday I was plagued by intestinal distress I blamed on mediocre Indian food I'd eaten the day before in Northampton, Mass. Beginning in the middle of the night last night, I had gastrointestinal distress of a different nature: unending diarrhea. It could've been painful, which mercifully it wasn't. But it would've been better not to have it at all of course.
It was a little warmer today that it had been yesterday, which lead to substantial melting of Saturday's snow. Because of all the work I'd done over the weekend, the stress was off at work, so I could spend little bursts of time outdoors doing things like shoveling the slushy snow off the walkway or cleaning up dog turds. The main thing I did in the remote workplace was do my annual self-review, a process where I am somehow expected to give an unbiased appraisal of my performance over the past year. For the past three self-appraisals, I was submitting them to my boss Alex, who never had a problem with me giving myself a 5/5 for everything. If he didn't object, there was never a downside in doing this. But for this review period I have a new boss, a less-agreeable CTO who didn't start out as a friend and had already told us all in a meeting how upset he was when people reporting to him claimed in their self-reviews that they were "God's gift to..." (I forget what they were a gift to.) So for this review, I gave myself a smattering of 4/5s. Unlike in past reviews, I actually have a fair amount to crow about given all the tough assignments I've taken on and all the new technologies (Microsoft Azure DevOps, AWS DynamoDB, NoSQL, Docker, AWS Fargate, and AWS Appstream) that I've learned in only two months. (And I'm more than half a century old!)
At 5:00pm I took a stroll up the Farm Road and back, and when I got back to the house, Gretchen had just returned from her shift at the bookstore and, because of Daylight Savings Time, there was still an hour and a half of sunlight left. I was feeling a little sleepy and out of sorts from the day's battle with diarrhea, so I decided to take my usual Monday evening bath. Nobody made any real dinner tonight, so when Gretchen and I watched Jeopardy!, I was eating Triscuits with Miyoko's sundried tomato garlic vegan cheese spread (a great combination). Gretchen and I have been enjoying the winning streak of Maureen O'Neil (I don't want to search for more about her for fear I'll find she lost on a subsequent show), the now-three-day champion of Jeopardy!. She's a spunky blond woman who often lucks her way to victory. We like that she doesn't take the game too seriously, makes bad wagers in Final Jeopardy, and always seems a bit tipsy.
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