June 30: It was another year of watching the world burn
Ninety-seven degrees and it's only June. End of June, but June nonetheless. Canada set two national records this weekend. The Pacific Northwest is well over 100. I can tell the Zoloft is working because I don't want to throw myself off the edge of the world. I'd hoped to run this morning, but when it was 77 and muggy at 7 a.m., the Peloton was a much more attractive option.
Jakob was teaching the fellow campers Cthulu Munchkin according to today's photos. The kid is clearly blissed out to be back at camp.
Jorj has come up with an excellent meal plan for the next month: eat out everything from the freezer. So far we have finished the ice cream. The great news is that I don't have to cook for at least a week!
June 28: It was the year after the year that wasn't
All photos from my phone for the last 19 months have imported into Photos, and are being tagged and culled. There are many cat photos. Many bread photos. Many screen grabs of Duolingo, Elder Scrolls: Blades, and Dragonvale. Myself, masked, holding my BLM sign and looking off into the distance. After wading through 12 months of photos, the exhaustion has come out of nowhere.
Jorj and I have settled into our kid-at-camp routine. The camp posts a hundred or so photos at the end of the day, and we at home play "Find the Progeny." Jakob was in today's photos, looming over everyone. J. was recognizable mostly by the t-shirt they were wearing.
June 27: Is sending half my responsibilities to Vermont a vacation?
Jorj drove Jakob to camp this weekend. Jakob is so thrilled to be away from us for seven weeks. This is the same camp we all went to last August. Somehow we got all the paperwork (with extra COVID testing this year) and luggage together before the deadline. We fit in the optometrist, annual physicals, and the hair dresser — I now have the longest hair in the family. Also the most colorful. Jakob even kept a log of symptoms for a week before. All the kids were tested on arrival, and the first photos show them all masked.
This being the third year at camp, there was no need for me in the car. Frankly, I think Jorj wanted some time alone with Jakob. He suggested Jakob make a playlist for the drive, even going so far as to *pay for spotify.* It was 36 hours of gardening, cleaning (my way), Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap podcasts, Spanish podcasts and lessons, reading, and leftovers.
We had our first in-person gaming session with Steve. Unfortunately, none of us are particularly good at the game (unless dying early is considered), but Steve did mention upgrading his parents' Mac and converting their photos. When I said I despaired of every retrieving fifteen years of 20,000 edited, curated, and tagged photos, Steve said opening Photos while holding the alt key would force it to prompt for a library to open and bam! I have access to my photo library again. The UI has gotten even worse (just as I found a way to make the "events" auto-categorization work for me, they dropped it — and they still don't have watermarking). Photos of the last six months should appear as soon as I can connect the phone to the laptop.
"Running smoothly" is not a synonym for "overstaffed."
Work has been work. We rushed to complete a new app that has gone untested because the group's lead retired and her replacement is overwhelmed. I mostly don't care: that could be due to the Zoloft or COVID burnout. Sorry, the world is almost literally on fire again, I can't find it in me to worry about your potential audit. Our team will be getting a new-to-us project manager any month now (the original date was end of June, and has shifted a couple of times to end of August). It will be nice to have a project manager whose time isn't being sucked away onto political shit. The CIO decided a couple years ago not to replace the project manager/product owner on one of our teams; someone has finally convinced him to stop this piece of foolishness and hire a damn PO. Oddly, this has been really hard, probably because our pay is shit and the CIO is a micromanager.