Hmmm. With the Stresses Ahead in Everyday Ramblings

…a delayed front garden in the neighborhood. Each year this family leaves the garden until late in the season and then over a couple of weeks they put in a bunch of effort and get the tomatoes and squash in. To me it signifies that it is possible for both renewal and redemption with a little extra effort almost after the fact.

Like that feeling you get after you’ve cleaned up for company and they are just about to arrive.

This is nice, why don’t I do this more often?

I am slowly starting to feel relatively normal but it has taken about a week. My hip and leg appear to be functioning nominally as my toe continues to heal and other than a little annoying tenderness in my back it is back to normal. I continue to sneeze and have periodic sinus headaches and inflamed mucus membranes because of stopping all the allergy medication but I am learning to manage it.

The good news about that is I am being better able to manage my food intake without the antihistamines and at least have stopped gaining weight. I am super focused on just getting five servings of fruit and vegetables a day. She says with a small bowl of stemmed grapes by her side.

It continues to be high summer here and hot. And now very hazy as the fires ramp up all over the western United States. So far it isn’t smoky here but there is a lot of gunk in the air. There is a rumor of a little rain tomorrow. We will be happy to see any at all at this point.

Hey, I am ready; I got a new pair of (slightly bigger) rain pants.

And I am ever so grateful that I have a place to call my own to put said rain pants after listening to all these stories of folks evacuating to return to everything gone.

I need to come up with a Diary Name for my (newish and quite unusual) boss. I would like to call him Mr. Spectrum because he certainly is on it but that could be considered, umm, ablest so let’s go with Mr. Multiple Screens, because he has a number of them in his very neat office.

Mr. Multiple Screens has a bit of an aversion to human contact and we have been dealing with another department that wants us to take on some additional work and upper upper management has agreed. As we were going back and forth about what they want and what we can do I finally asked if we could, you know, actually meet, so I could show them what we have available and how it works.

Last Monday he asked me to figure out how to set up a virtual meeting (with video) to show them using this tool called Cisco Meeting. He wanted the meeting to be the next day bumping right up against an out of office appointment I’d had on the calendar for weeks.

I had participated in a meeting using this tool last year and it was a bit of a disaster. You could hear people eating, dogs barking, feedback, and we could see empty chairs. It was all quite bizarre. I didn’t even have the software on my newish laptop.

To say that trying to figure out how to use this tool under such a short deadline with a lot of concern about the outcome of my presentation if it didn’t go well was incredibly anxiety producing. At one point I had 5 people helping me, with remote access into my system. Saint Joe was a trooper as well as I was using him as my test subject.

In the end my tech support gave up and said I should try going into the office and doing it from there. I can see it now… I am in my office on my laptop with Mr. Multiple Screens two offices away having a video meeting. Sigh.

If I were younger and more ambitious I would have stayed engaged and up all night figuring it out. But instead I contacted the third party involved in the project via email and asked him if there was any way in heck that he could come down to our building and meet us in person. (He used to work in our area and we have a friendly relationship.) Mr. Multiple Screens was not pleased.

So, I expended some political capital (of my ever diminishing stash as I near retirement) to make this happen. The meeting was a big success, all the technology worked and everyone was happy (ish). And now we move forward.

Yesterday afternoon in the office Saint Joe and I practiced with the virtual meeting software and were able to get it to work well enough that I can feel pretty confident I can run a meeting through it if I need to but man…

My guess is that this is just the opening volley in what is going to be an intense and stressful work year ahead.

Hmmm, maybe blood pressure medicine isn’t such a bad idea?

Last updated August 12, 2018