Baggy old blahg

I bought my first xmas gifts today. For 2018, that is. No I’m not gonna tell you what they are. I will say they are nothing big and fancy, just stocking stuffer kinds of things. I bought them on my phone, at work, not without some difficulty due to an imperfect UI. Because of the imperfect UI, I just barely managed to make it to the daily standup on time, which wasn’t a good thing because AW was out so me and FZ had to drive today.

Oh don’t worry, the meeting is friendly (we were collectively wishing for whine today, a good dry red) and the shopping took maybe five minutes of my day. The rest of the day was spent in an intense html/css/javascript debugging session. I work with some of gnarliest old-skool javascript you can imagine and it would NOT be a productive use of my time to make a major overhaul. A lot of business analysts don’t do any kind of coding at all. I am an exception because I maintain a high-fidelity product prototype. I pick away at the code when I need to and then the next time I encounter it I often have no clue what it does. Modus operandi? Insert “alert” statements everywhere and hit the F12 key to show the rendered source code…

It is odd for me to be buying xmas gifts this early in the year. Usually I am scrambling the last week before xmas. These items were presented to me via a promoted Instagram post. I know… I know it’s probably not a good idea to follow ads on social media platforms but if the right thing comes along, I sometimes succumb. The next challenge will be *finding* these items when the season rolls around in whatever “easy-to-find” location I hide them in, probably somewhere in the Landfill Dungeon. Will I find them in December? Will I remember them in December? Will they become “mystery gifts” a few years from now?

In which my mouse allowed me to provide her some mooooooom advice… She is taking a rocket trip to a shoreline campground somewhere on Lake Michigan and I could not stop myself from reminding her that swimming in the great lakes can be very dangerous via undertows and riptides, etc. Well, not to mention that the water is just plain COLD at this time of year. I know that Mouse knows all that (having spent a good part of all of her summers on the great lake they call Gitchee Gumee) but I can’t help thinking about what I perceive as an uptick in recent years of folks drowning in Lake Michigan. I am saddened when I read news articles about these incidents. So many of these folks have no experience with BIG WATER. They are more accustomed to our shallow inland lakes or swimming pools and when they get out into BIG WATER they are overtaken by waves or undertows or riptides or whatever. Not to say that shallow inland lakes and swimming pools are not dangerous too because they certainly are. Even coolers have been known to drown toddlers.

This is less about Mouse (who was very polite about listening to me) than a general PSA to everyone who might happen upon this paint-drying blahg. Take water safety seriously. We do at our Lake Superior family beach and we have never lost anyone although we have had some scary near-misses. As I have said before, as children, my cousins and I could always get an adult to watch us swim, even if they had to wear a winter jacket in order to sit on the beach. As an adult I spent countless hours sitting on the beach counting heads, sometimes without even being offered a bathroom break by other adults in the fam 🐽. But even that is okay (I forgive you bro’). I love sitting on the beach and I love watching kids swim 🐸

The target? It is old. It is taped (via very old tape, it looks like) between two Landfill rooms, the Chitchen and the Aquarium.

One Response to “Baggy old blahg”

  1. Margaret Says:

    People don’t realize how cold water saps their energy and body heat. We have many drownings here, in our lakes, rivers and in the Pacific Ocean. Lots of water, and too many overconfident swimmers. What is UI? And I haven’t had a thought about Christmas yet, nor gift buying. (one of my least favorite things to do)