End of The Short Week

It was a short week this week but somehow it did was already somewhat marred by the downtime of yesterday. And because it still didn't feel like it was sufficiently resolved. I hadn't even talked to Noriel after yesterday. At least today felt like all I had to do was get through the New Hire Orientation which was first thing in the morning and I had the rest of the day to chill. That NHO (New Hire orientation) is always sort of my opportunity to ham it up a little bit. And the showman presenter in me always comes out. No different this morning, and especially since I had practically retooled my entire presentation. Anyway I put on my show and I was done before I even had breakfast and I was treated by a pan de sal sitting at my desk (no doubt Jose from HW brought me one). My intention was to cruise the rest of the day, even get in a class or two since I have a long list of them now waiting for me to take. It is pretty clear that looking at some of the modalities and energy technologies I'm looking at and some of the books and e-books and notes I've had since before I even started to be with lisa in 2006, I have had a lot of this information from way back in the day. The question I have to myself WHY DID I NOT FOLLOW THROUGH BACK THEN? Anyway I'm getting around to following through now although I still don't think I'm being consistent enough. And so I got around to catching up on stuff at least and then had myself a nice late lunch. I felt like having lunch by myself today, and not wasting time on trivial pointless lunch conversations. I wanted to appreciate the moment and being alone helped me do that. Just look at the pic of my lunch backdropped by the skyline of DTLA. Pretty cool. It would have been nice to get to cruise the rest of the afternoon. But it was not to be. At 3 PM, suddenly the internet went down. And I had to put Nelson and Noriel on red alert. It wasn't like the network hadn't gone down before and typically I would just let them do their jobs and let them tell me what was happening. But today was different because (1) parts of the system was just down yesterday morning and I don't think we had recovered from the user fallout from that (2) Like yesterday Chad the COO was around and he was in my office every 15 minutes. He had an agitated anxiety that I allowed to affect my own state. So yet again this was a lesson in controlling my state. And I did not do well. Before long it was me that was anxiously agitated and I projected it to both Nelson and Noriel I guess, being totally aware that I was simply irritated that they were not as agitated as I was. At least I was able to send out notices almost real time. Eventually the issue was traced to a fiber outage with AT&T. They fixed it by 5 PM and we were back up by 5:15 PM. Total downtime was 2 hrs 10 min. Still within SLA tolerances I thought but the fact that we had downtimes 2 days in a row makes it harder to shake off. Anyway at least we did bring the network back up and I was out of the office before 6 PM, feeling like I worked really hard and sprinted that last 2 hours of work...

I needed to decompress and I did that by walking to 7th and Fig and had myself a do-it-yourself pizza from Pizza Studio. My favorite spinach sausage and pineapple pizza seemed to do the trick. Anyway it gave me a chance to clear my head and got me to 8000 steps before I even started my drive home.  This being a Friday night and all I figured I'd just watch something on Netflix on something. I actually found a show I could binge on for the next few weeks anyway. The new STAR TREK PICARD series just premiered yesterday and just like the Mandalorian I wasn't going to get a subscription to CBS All-Access to watch it. Simple enough to just download it. Which is exactly what I did. And so i enjoyed watching the first episode of the series. Brought me back to the 90s when I was watching Star Trek Next Generation. I'm looking forward to watching Data and Number One and I hear Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine is even going to have a prominent role. Cool! Here it was, Friday night, munching on chips and guacamole, my feet up, and watching Star Trek all over again. Felt like a pretty good Friday night to me. It would have been perfect if I had just went to bed before midnight. But I found myself binge watching whatever I had downloaded and tonight it was Avengers EndGame. By the time I got done it was 1:30 AM in the morning. I could kick myself for doing this. And I still have to wake up early to pick up Johnnie at Lisa's in the morning. Why did I do this? To punish myself? OK I consider myself punished. Not quite the great Friday night anymore was it? What an annoying way to conclude it. Oh well, all I can do is keep trying. And to keep reminding myself of today's great lesson. TO THE DEGREE THAT I CAN CONTROL MY STATE AND TO EXERCISE PATIENCE, THAT IS HOW I WILL BECOME SUCCESSFUL IN MY NEXT LIFE PROJECT.  And I began to see things differently. I asked myself in the beginning of this post why I had not followed through? I thought the timing was not right? NO! It is because I hadn't learned the lesson fully. That's OK. Like golf, I get to try again. Sigh.