Friday Five: Of Hand-flapping and Nice-To-Haves
1. Work/Programming
At this point I have 13 years of industry experience as a Software Engineer. It occurs to me that I have learned some interesting lessons.
First, I am a documentation animal. If I have to answer the same question twice I poke the answer into my technical wiki so that I can point people there instead of having to answer the question YET AGAIN. Honestly this is for my own sanity. Added bonus, it makes me look like a rock-star considering how few other engineers do documentation.
Second, because I’ve had the luxury of working in a healthy corporate environment I have very high expectations when it comes to meetings (they need to have a purpose, and the outcome needs to be either a yes/no decision or there needs to be a task list with deadlines). Unfortunately this makes me very impatient when faced with hand-flapping meetings that seems to accomplish nothing but venting.
Also because of the “healthy corporate environment” I’m addicted to testing things in a stage/uat/qa environment before the change EVER goes live. In fact I find working with some of our vendors kind of apalling because they seem ok with “pushing the change live to test it”. Just that statement makes me shudder. SOP: Write code, test in dev box, deploy to stage box, get stake-holders to test in stage box and sign off that they agree that the changed code doesn’t break anything and fixes whatever issue they wanted fixed, THEN deploy to a production environment. When I can’t follow this SOP I kind of get grumpy.
Lastly it’s the ability to say “I don’t know” and be ok with not knowing. I don’t need to know how to do everything.. but I do need to know who to tap to get things done. Being ok with “I don’t know” has really helped me a lot. This has also helped me in meetings to be the person who can identify the tasks needed to complete the project.. but not feel that I have to do all of the tasks. I am TOTALLY ok with identifying work for other people to do.
Oddly none of these things are really hard engineering skills. I mean yeah, I’ve learned a half dozen distinct programming languages.. and a ton of cool tricks with those languages and about a dozen other hard engineering skills over the years.. but when I think back to the things that make me a better engineer.. it’s the soft skills that have served me best.
2. Home
The sewing room is mostly cleared out.. I’m hesitating to remove the sewing table because it will help me to sort through the baby stuff, which I need to sort sooner rather than later, BUT it’s a very short step to get rid of the table and setup the guest bed. So I’ll call that 95% done.
That said, Fearghus’ brother and sister-in-law will be visiting us next week, so we need to get the guest bed up before they arrive.
Earlier this week we purchased a crib and combo dresser from Craigslist.
Plus side: only paid $240 vs the $700 for buying it new
Minus side: Seller neglected to mention that some of the fittings were missing. Luckily Fearghus contacted the manufacturer and new fittings are in the mail as we speak. We should have that setup in plenty of time. For now it will be setup in our bedroom.
I think at this point (aside from sorting out the baby stuff and identifying needed clothes) we’ve covered all the basic necessities for the baby. I still need to buy a mattress cover and sheets.. but they’re on my list.
3. Health
Weight hopped around a bit this week. I blame the fact that we ate out a few times. Regardless this week I’m down 0.5 lbs from last week to 336.4 this morning.
My morning Blood sugars are trending up a bit(83 three days ago, 86 two days ago, 88 yesterday, 94 today). The NP has prescribed an after-dinner walk to help to bring that down.
We met with the doctor today. The last time we met with him he was recommending we induce at 39-weeks. Since then the recommendation from {some industry OB/GYN official group} has changed and since my blood sugars have been kept in check and since our weekly non-stress test has been normal, normal, normal, he says the recommendation has changed to let the pregnancy go until week 40. The hope is that I’ll naturally pop into labor towards the end of week 39. Otherwise we now have a date to induce on our due date of 11/18. I like this new recommendation a lot. I figure as long as everything is looking good and the baby’s not having problems then maybe my placenta isn’t wearing out too soon (the original reason for the recommendation to induce at 39). Induction looks like NO FUN AT ALL and I’d like to go natural if at all possible.
This means I’ll be asking Teh Intarwebs and all my friends for their best hints on what causes natural labor to kick off. So far “long walks” and “spicy foods” are leading the recommendations.
4. SCA/Projects
I received a tunic, a pair of pants and two hanks of fabric from Miach and Sciath. I made a pattern for his tunic, rus pants and over-coat. I turned the tunic pattern into an actual tunic which I’ll be delivering to Them tomorrow at Coronet. The rus pants I plan to finish next week and deliver.. eventually (maybe Boar Hunt)? Tomorrow I’ll also turn over the pattern for Miach’s coat. At this point I feel that I need to try to focus on the baby, not on SCA sewing projects so despite the fact that my helium hand is totally itching.. I’m going to pass that project onto someone else.
Baby garb and a baby blanket are totally on the radar.
5.
I spent a lot of this week going over “lists of baby things you really need that you’ve never thought about”. From that I pulled out a list of things I -actually- think we’ll need.. and confirmed that a lot of the lists are just hand-waving engineered to get nervous parents-to-be to spend a lot of money on nice-to-haves or just plain silly things. (honestly!! if an emery board will work on baby fingernails, why do I need a fancy battery powered baby-fingernail-grinder?) I reserve the right to change my mind after we have the babe in arms.
Future:
October 25: Alton Brown Tickets/Cynaguan Fall Coronet (daytrip)
November 2: FREE WEEKEND!!!
November 9: Collegium Occidentalis (maybe not)
November 16: FREE Weekend!!!
November 18: Baby’s Official Due Date (also the date we’ll induce if labor hasn’t already happened)
November 23: TBD (My Mother in town visiting)
November 28: Thanksgiving Weekend
December 7: Boar Hunt (maybe)
…
January 3-5: 12th Night, Concord CA? (maybe)
Mirrored from Results Typical.
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