It’s been over a year since I wrote anything on here. I apparently wrote something a year ago I never published, and the last before that was in July 2022. Over a year that I’ve been out of training, a fully qualified C-130 pilot. Doing pilot things. Over a year since I spent any significant amount of time on coding, on systems administration, on anything tech, really. I’ve been drowning in work, in family matters, in attempts at businesses.

I have this mobile app I’ve been wanting to build. It’s a checklist app. Not a To-Do list app, but an app that allows you to manage your repeatable processes. As a pilot I rely on checklists, and the more I try it the more I love checklists in my personal and business life as well. Here’s the problem: I don’t love mobile development. It is new and different from the web development I’m used to and it frustrates me.

This is a letter (I guess) I wrote to a friend who is having a hard time right now. I got permission to share it in case it will help someone else: You are in a terrible dead-end job that you hate. You are in an unhealthily dependent relationship with your family members, who do not care about you as much as you do them. (Not that they don’t care, it’s just not equal) You have a boy with whom you are in some kind of relationship, but it’s not progressing how you want and you’re afraid that it’s also a dead end.

I’m finally getting that new server cluster set up, and I decided to use Docker Swarm over Kubernetes for simplicity. The biggest factor was that I didn’t need to rewrite all of my compose files for all the services running. However, there are a few caveats: I didn’t configure swarm using Ansible. It was a complex hassle, so the swarm cluster was set up manually. That’s really not that big of a deal.

I’ve been in a funk the last little bit. Definitely a couple of days, though now I’m wondering if it’s been a bit longer. Probably related to the burnout I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. The problem I’ve been having is a kind of “what’s the point” on things. Not a true depression, just discouragement on all of my projects I’m working on. The result is that I haven’t really been working on things that much.

A few weeks ago in a training I saw something that completely upended my understanding of burnout. It was a simple explanation: “chronic fatigue is also known as burnout.” I always thought those were different and independent, even though it should be pretty obvious they are not. So you’d think it would be easy to reccognize impending burnout or patterns of behavior that will lead to it, right? I don’t know why it always comes as a surprise.

Friday as I left class I knew I was getting sick. I had that pre-congestion feeling in my sinuses and was really worried I was catching the cold the girls had the previous week. That night I was miserable, feeling congested and mildly nauseated all night. Every of the many times I woke up I said a little prayer that if I was getting sick it would be over quickly. I didn’t want to lose a week of training because I had this never ending sniffles and coughing the girls had.

My family had colds all this week and I finally caught it. Fortunately it was on the weekend so I didn’t have to mess up my training schedule at all. But now I’m losing my weekend, sitting on the couch, feeling achy and too tired to do anything. I hate being sick because even things that should be easy, like programming, become hard if ony because I just want to fall asleep.

I’m reading The Entitlement Trap by Richard and Linda Eyre about how kids can be entitled and how to fix it. There are a lot of examples of how kids are entitled: they think they can do whatever they want without consequences, get whatever they want without effort, and have all the privileges without any responsibility. It’s really easy as a parent to look at our kids and see their entitled behaviors that we are training into them.

I dread customer service calls. They are almost universally terrible. Today I had two calls with customer service lines. The first was from my former electric company Reliant. The second was to my mortgage company. The first call was a surprise, and I almost didn’t answer it. The only reason I did was that it could have been work-related and I get in big trouble if I miss those. A week or so ago I got an email survey from Reliant because I had ended service with them.