chicken

 yesterday was intense.

i made it just in time for the yoga class, which was tough but fluid. the instructor asked me for my favorite bird, catching me off guard, and after taking some time to give it some thought i responded with "chicken". hilarity ensued. towards the end, he demonstrated a movement (balancing on hands with knees tucked into the backs of arms) and i just couldn't figure it out; at one point i was convinced that i just had the wrong body shape. when he eventually found a way to explain it to me and i got it right, i was surprised by how little strain it was on my spine and was treated to applause by my coworkers :P

the morning could be best described as a series of surprise events - it took me more than half an hour before i was able to sneak off for a quick shower between meetings.

during the meeting before my big presentation, i kept trying and failing to build an image that was being delivered to me, and eventually tried restarting docker, only to see an update pending. it looks like docker may have finally fixed whatever they broke a couple of versions ago.

from there i rushed into my presentation. i joked about it being prophetic that i'd inserted a quote slide at the beginning that said "everything is broken", because between microsoft's rug-pull with vscode extensions and our mitigations for docker's bugs made an absolute mess of everything. in spite of that, though, we got through an hour and ten minutes and there seemed to be a lot of interest, surprise and appreciation 🤷

lipgirl's lunch idea worked out really well. "i helped" (i just squeezed lemon juice), but she and another coworker put together a huge plate of really good salad; it wasn't just a good idea for us, but it looks like we might have some more people joining in on this.

soon after lunch, i headed to the warehouse to help our tech support staff on their first installation. while there, i received a call from someone i once served with who's interviewing with us, and by the time we were done i think he was convinced that joining us is a pretty good idea. i also ended up on a diatribe with my coworkers, describing some of my tokyo takeaways.

it was around 4pm when we collectively realized that we had three deployments scheduled for the next morning and they had no idea how to do them. i should mention that on a day full of pressure, our new star devops was nowhere to be found - he was preoccupied with the farewell from his previous employer. after scrambling to make space on the desks, and beginning to get the installations going (the tech support kid hadn't yet learned not to skip steps, so we had a restart at one point), we then began the process of preparing the deployments and preparing his machine to perform them.

it - took - six - hours.

there was lots of complaining, lots of joking around, and a ridiculous incident where we detected a leak in the warehouse that almost took out some of our expensive and sensitive equipment. i could have just done everything myself and bailed early, but i'm no longer the only person who can do this stuff, we learned a lot, and the celebratory vibe before we shut everything down was very real.

i came home super late, did a mind-dump with my wife and mom, and then entered into a very difficult, tiring, but ultimately rewarding fight/discussion with gd.

today:

i eventually fell into bed around 2am, with a sore back and a mind all over the place. and then something happened shortly after i fell asleep that woke me up, and i don't know if i managed to get back to sleep after that.

it's been a relaxed morning so far, i'm about to go pick up a package on the way to work and hopefully it'll be a good day.