State of my Union, July 2022

I don't have any particular thing to say. Just sort of noodling around and had nothing better to do than peck at the keyboard, so here I am, on a cool gray morning in mid-July, wondering what to say and do.

Well...not really wondering; I've got a busy and, I hope, fun day ahead. Volunteering at a local park. A Japanese brewing exhibition. Block party around the block. And then a home game of our women's pro soccer club.

But now? The Little House is quiet (as the local garage band has finally given up trying to cover Paint It Black, thank Asmodeus...) with everyone asleep except Drachma the Merkitty and me. So let's start with them.

Okay, Me; wassup?

Mostly the usual; work.

But that's not as business-as-usual as usual. 

For one thing, the local branch of my company is kind of imploding. We've hemorrhaged good people - three in the last quarter - and we're down to four:
1) the least-liked and least-respected senior engineer,
2) a complete noob who comes across as utterly green,
3) a tech who is at best marginally competent and has a weird, shifty personality, at that, and
4) me.

The fucked-up part is that my corporate doesn't seem to either know, or care, how to improve this. They know the senior engineer is kind of a putz - it's been his clumsy lack of management skills and greed to bag shitty development work that has gone a long way to driving off the good people - but won't either can him or try and fix him.

Instead their solution is to bring one of the Puget Sound office rainmakers down here to generate work.

The supposed plan was that this would help kickstart getting Portland good work...but this particular guy doesn't bring in "good" (that is, interesting, challenging, demanding engineering project-type work) work. His stuff is just the other guy's writ large - boring Earthwork 101 mass-grading development projects.

And, to make things weirder, he's set up a completely parallel-but-separate construction monitoring program here, all run out of the Seattle office. His staff and tech people use our equipment and office space while keeping their schedules and needs utterly hidden.

It's ridiculous and frustrating.

Add to that we just lost our last good field staff guy last Friday. I've got to work with the noob and the creepy guy, neither of whom I trust.

Frankly, I'm ready to hang it up.

Seriously. Our financial person looked at our assets and the actuarial tables and told me that I could legitimately retire this fall and not end up living under a bridge before I die. That's looking ever more attractive right now. I'm sick of trying to herd these boobs and noobs, I'm tired of the boring bullshit development work, I'm ready to give something else a shot.

(Narrator voice: "It became obvious that not all was well...")

Okay, wow, that sucks? What about Me, Personally.

Meh, fine.

I'm relatively healthy. I like where I live - sorry, Tucker, Portland still isn't burning down amid Antifa terror - and I like my life outside work. My knees are slowly healing, tho it took a fuck of a long time and I still have weird after effects - the top of my feet, the instep? is sort of numb, like when your arm or leg "goes to sleep"? Like that, and I have no idea why - but the horrible insomnia is gone, at least.

I am getting old. I can feel it in the slowing of my pace, lower energy, and slowly growing stiffness and creakiness. I don't feel like I'm going to take an Ivana-tumble-down-the-stairs (and how about that for a conspiracy-theory story, eh..?) but five years ago I could pretend that I was still in "vigorous-late-middle-age".

Now?

Fuck, I'm old.

I still enjoy the things I've always enjoyed: the world around me, the world of imagination and creation (I've recently gotten on a weird manga kick, and my reading is now vigorously interspersed with stuff like Sweat and Soap...). I've set up a gaming table downstairs to renew my enjoyment of tabletop wargaming. 

I still follow soccer - the Timbers (tho the cost finally persuaded me to yield my season ticket- a grand a year is too fucking much - and write the Thorns over at the Riveting! website.

My Bride is a treat. She's hitting the gym regularly and sewing and (also) reading and just being her, which is fun. 

The Girl is deep in teenland; she's salty and quirky, she's become a horror of a mess in the kitchen (where I'm rapidly becoming even more of a Neat Nazi - I hate when she cooks and leaves ingredients and cookware scattered all over...) and creates shockingly professional drawings and ever-more-impressive pottery.

The Boy is...gah.

His brief foray into low-end low-wage unskilled work (bag boy at the local grocery) ended in less than 100 days. Now his "plan" is to strike at a lineman job at PGE, but he seems in no hurry to get there. He mostly hangs out and games - which is mostly what he did in grade school, middle school, and high school - so it's like having a monster (because he's grown up into a big beast - with a neck beard, which is "ugh" but fuckit, it's his neck) kid still around the place.

He drives me kind of nuts; I want to chase him out of the house into the Navy or VISTA or to college or...something. It just feels to me like he's wasting his youth sitting in his old room playing HALO or World of Tanks.

But...he's an adult, technically. So he's his own boss to an extent.

I just wish corporate would kick himself in the pants a bit.

Oh, and Drachma the Merkitty?

He's living The Best Life.

Since little Nine's death he's the One and Only Boss Kitty. He gets to prowl his range, demanding with imperious meows that the support staff open doors for his entering-and-exiting pleasure. He has splendid quantities of food whenever he wants it. He gets to hunt - his latest prey appears to be dragonflies, for some bizarre reason - and proudly presents his game bag to the suitably-appalled humans.

The Girl still grieves her Little Cat and still wants another, more loving kitty...

(Drachma has become slightly more affectionate - at least, to me - but he's not really a "lover kitty". He won't cuddle with you or tolerate much holding, unlike Nine who was a complete love sponge. He really is how my Bride described him when asked whether he was a Good Kitty: "Well...he's good at being a cat.")

...but she's up against it. Drachma, obviously, is a hard "no", as is The Boy. The Bride is a "maybe" and I'm a "maybe but leaning no", so the Girl - after a brief spasm of cat-looking - appears to have conceded the One-Cat Family setting so long as Mister Mister is the cat.

So. That's that.

What about this place?

Well...I'm still struggling with that. This is the most writing I've done here in a long time. I've taken several stabs at doing a Brusilov Offensive battles piece but just can't seem to work up the enthusiasm. It's just dire Great War shit; people dying in pointless ways and to make matters worse it's the two most incompetent of the combatants, Austro-Hungary and Russia (the Italians are a special case...) finding ways to get their own people killed. 

And outside of personal stuff like this?

Well, for soccer I have my other blog. I'm really done with writing filler and oddball-news stuff. I've given thought to completing the Army I Knew series but am kind of at a point where it becomes less gripping and more All About Me. Maybe I'll give it a stab after I retire.

Politics? Oh, God. That's just dire.

Seriously. How many ways are there to say "Wake the fuck up and stop electing fucking Republicans!" How many times can I return, like a dog to its vomit, to the appalling reality that somewhere between a quarter and two-fifths of the American public are worthless, Bible-banging, gun-humping, woman-and-minority-hating, learning-despising, disease-enabling, fascist-loving shitbirds who will cheerfully either herd me and mine into the camps or look away while their Three Percenter and Oath Keeper bros do it?

I'm fucking sick of what my country has become, fucking angry that all the shitty things that I thought we'd driven from the public square - racism, proud ignorance, white power, religious nuttery - and into private muttering have returned out and loud.

The GOP must be destroyed. It's really just that simple, and just that impossible.

But that's for the next post; a State of the City and the State and THE Union.