Our house has been a whirlwind of excitement for the last 10 days or so. The first weekend of the month, we adopted a second dog from an excellent shelter here in our city. Just about 3 years ago, when my then elderly baby, lab-dachshund mix finally passed away at 14yo, I lasted in a …
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Does the “Root Cause” Even Matter?
I've been working on data processing and software for most of my career. One of my best skills in my job is finding the root cause of client-reported data errors in our products. This means that even after a ticket has been created by client support and bounced around to multiple people in my department …
Racism and White Supremacy are Killing Democracy
Last week, in the days that followed Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, and the federal holiday created to recognize it, the US Senate voted on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. While the vote on the bill was a tie (50-50, a party-line vote), the bill did not go to the Vice President to break …
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And That’s Why My Pajamas are Permanently Stained
I am a pretty excellent cook, believe it or not. I have a couple of specialty dishes (bean dip, most types of soups and sauces, almost anything cheesy like quesadillas, and I make a mean sandwich), but mostly, I improvise in the kitchen. Over the last decade plus, I've gotten to know my husband's taste …
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What We Lose as Time Passes
We decided to watch the film Napoleon Dynamite over the weekend. For anyone who isn't familiar, well, I won't spoil it, and I'm no professional movie critic anyway (not that they know anything special). What I will say is that this movie really makes me think about all the examples of the past, times gone …
What January 6th Means to Me
I took the day off yesterday. I wasn't physically ill and wasn't on vacation. I didn't have other plans. I specifically took time to reflect on the state of my country, my government and my society in light of the first anniversary of an event that I consider to be the single most vile and …
Conjuring a Theme for the New Year
Happy New Year, dear readers! I'm not gonna lie; we all thought 2020 was bad and 2021 would be better, but at this point, it honestly feels like we've just been through one huge, horrible, double-length year of anguish and uncertainty. After all that, the holidays and typical year end frivolity just didn't feal right, …
A Holiday Gift for All
Holiday gifts are a source of real stress for me. I'm a natural gift-giver, but my generosity REALLY fights against the pressure cooker that is our American capitalist version of Christmas. (I speak of Christmas over other holidays not due to any type of intentional preference, but due to my family's individual history, which has …
A Blessing Disguised as a Frustrating Imposition
This week has been a real doozy. At work, our "weeks" generally run from Wednesday through Tuesday for our weekly production cycle so I'm now coming to the end of the craziest week of my 17+ years. We had been presented with data feed inputs to enter that were all riddled with errors and in …
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Time ≠ Money
Just coming off a 4-day holiday weekend, I wanted to muse a bit about time, how it can be spent and our options for how to use it. Time is fungible, as in, it is something that can change into other things, which makes it just a little bit magical. Time passes, whether we want …
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