• The spark of creativity has fizzled. Which is fine, as I've come to accept that it comes and goes.
• It does leave several projects I had in progress or wanted to work on up in the air.
• These included a new backend for this site (considering going to Statamic, and a completely new website dedicated to electronic music.
• Instead of productive creativity, my brain is currently absorbed by slither.io. Talk about a fruitless endeavor. It is fun though, and not every moment needs to be filled with being creative.
• These are lessons I've only really come to understand here in my mid 50s.
• Mid 50s. Fuck I'm old.
• In other news, the wife and I spent three nights out last week. For two people who tend to stay within their comfort zone, this was pretty amazing.
• We went downtown to see Sarah and meet her boyfriend. We had dinner at Georgia Brown's. In a word: divine.
• That was Monday. Tuesday, the Mrs. and I were back in DC to see the Nationals lose to the Rockies. Had a really good time and given how easy it is to get downtown now, we've decided we need to try to get to at least one more game before the season ends.
• Wednesday we went to a brewery for their "One-hit Wonders" music trivia. Again, great time, and gave me ideas for my own music trivia, which was on...
• Sunday, I hosted music trivia for the wine club at the winery the Mrs. works at on weekends. It was the first time I've done music-related trivia (I host trivia in a non-music format twice a month there), and it went over like gangbusters. From the patrons to the staff, I had nothing but compliments about what a good time they had and even praised my music selection. I'm very much looking forward to doing more music trivia type events.
• This probably should've been a regular blog posting and not a list, but oh well.

• Driving around the DMV has gotten worse. People are not paying attention, feel more entitled, or too absorbed in their phones. Every time I'm out now, I witness something ridiculous; people running red lights, not stopping at stop signs, swerving all over the roads. Every. Time.
• Been playing bachelor this Fourth of July weekend, as the wife has gone back to AZ to visit family and friends. Her mom messaged a few weeks back saying her dad wanted to see her. Her dad is in his 80s and when someone that old wants to see you, you go.
• As no one's around to tell me what to eat, the first day she was gone I had three bowls of cereal. That's pretty much all I ate that day.
• I took Friday and Monday off so I'm enjoying doing pretty much the same old thing, but for a long extended weekend. Today will involve vacuums.
• Took my drone (no affiliate link) up and watched some of the neighborhood fireworks that way. Was pretty cool to view the bursts from "eye-level". Will do it again next year.
• Work is essentially back to normal. No more "unassigned" tickets in the backlog. I think we can finally call that monster of a project that ate up 4 months of my life done.

Another work related one, and given that's all I've seemingly been doing lately (as per my last post), then that's what you're going to get.

Ran into this bit of code today:

.p-noborder > .p-tabview .p-tabview-panels {
  border: 0 !important;
}

.p-noborder > .p-tabview .p-tabview-panels {
  border: 0 !important;
}

Exact same code, and right next to each other in the file. According to GitLens, one was from 2 years ago, the other 3 years.

Job security, am I right?

I didn't want June to slip by without a post, but when realizing I hadn't written in some time, I also realized I didn't really have much to say. The biggest thing is work. We had a huge project at work whose deadline came and went (We all waved at it as it went zooming by), and I've been dealing with the mop up (re: bugs) for the past six weeks. Starting towards the end of April, project management let us all know that we needed to get this project done ASAP as they were going to present it to our government client for free, as a way to "grease the wheels", as we were up for recompete.

It was without a doubt, one of the most poorly planed projects I've been on. I won't go into details, but to put things in perspective, we had not one, but two post-mortems about what could have gone better. There might have been a third, but management threw in the towel.

There's finally light at the end of the tunnel... I'm down to less than twenty bugs, so yay. They would be easy enough to clear out but I have normal sprint work as well. So, they sit in the backlog and I get to them when caught up on work.

But yeah... that's where most of my focus as been. 60+ hour weeks, some weekends, too many meetings, and blah.

I think it's time to take some days off.

I've recently found myself exploring options other than Goodreads for tracking books I want to read and have read. While I do enjoy some of the features the Goodreads app on my phone has, mainly being able to scan a barcode and have it added to my "To Read" list, I really don't visit bookstores nearly as much as I used to, and instead rely on algorithms and reviews on book sites to tell me what my next read should be. To be truthful, my primary reason for moving away from Goodreads is the fact that it's Amazon-owned. As I already give them enough of my data, any little action I can do to take back some control of my reading habits is a good reason to switch.

So I've signed up with StoryGraph, and I have downloaded Book Tracker and Reading List on my iPad and phone. After some consideration, I opted to pay for Reading List, and hope to make good use of its "pro" features such as iCloud syncing (I currently do most of my reading on my iPad), statistics, and I can share it with the wife if she desires. She recently purchased Book Tracker, so it might make for an interesting comparison. Though she does 95% of her reading via Audible books, so not sure how that'll go.

I also purchased a refurbished Kobo Forma eReader, as another way to remove myself from Amazon's greedy tendrils. The Forma has another draw for me over the Kindle I currently have: physical buttons. The Forma has buttons on the side for page turning, AND it can rotate the screen, so I can hold it with my left or right hand and click the buttons with out too much effort. I never really enjoyed having a touch screen to turn pages, because, well, I would often touch the screen and turn pages. I am a klutz so it happened often. And, most importantly, it accesses Libby, the app I use to access my Library. Which is why I don't visit bookstores nearly as often any longer. I love my library! And the other two I have cards for as well. If you don't have at least ONE library card, you really should take a look. They're so much more than books nowadays.