Evie Day 823

Good morning, and a happy start to the Western work week. Today is 16 June 2024.

I’ve had a week. I had some things going on last week that hindered my ability to drop a few lines about my day. New classes to deliver, and meetings about some follow-up work on a project I completed a couple of months ago. Today, I have invoices to get out and some work to get started on. I’m keeping busy.

Father’s Day was great around here. Lisa made a great breakfast, and all of my kids were here. Evie was with her dad, so I missed her, but I’ll get to spend quality time with her on Wednesday – our summer day-of-the-week with our granddaughter. Dane bought me a new pocketknife – red brushed aluminum handle with a shark-tooth Damascus blade. Very sharp, and sharp-looking.

There was tragedy while I was absent. A Minnesota State representative and her husband were gunned down, and another state rep and his wife were both shot. Two assassinated, two others attempted. The man involved was a hardcore Trumper… but some folks on the right have been in denial and have spread disinformation about the shooter (now captured by the Minnesota state police), whose name is Vance Boelter. Senator Mike Lee of Utah said “This is what happens… When Marxists don’t get their way.”

Sorry Mike… this guy is one of yours… and you owe Minnesota democrats an apology. This is all on the MAGA movement, and you’re in it up to your eyeballs.

This week I’ll be around more, no major appointments, just work. Wednesdays with Evie… I predict there will be ice cream at some point Wednesday afternoon. Thursday night, we’re having a dinner to celebrate Dane’s 24th birthday.

In the meantime, coffee awaits, as well as breakfast and some papers to sign.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 817

Good morning, and a very happy Taco Tuesday to you all. Today is 10 June 2025.

Yesterday was a productive day. I dove into my prep for my upcoming sessions, and it looks like I’ve booked some content review work that will keep me busy for the rest of the month, with no need to travel beyond the sunroom.

I’ve got some stuff going on today and tomorrow, including the short drive to Kansas City.

Late last night I had a bit of a revelation. I’ve been fighting with my lawn mower battery – charge it up, then it turns over, and then it dies. I took some trash out last night and noticed that the headlamps on the mower were on – I’m guessing that I’ve developed a bad habit of turning the key too far to the left when I shut it down and put it into a night-time mode… and constantly draining the battery.

Other than that, not much to share, other than my disdain towards an administration that is calling out the Marines as a law enforcement agency to quell some protests in LA. There is an irony – a president, obviously racist, seeking to arrest and deport folks that speak Spanish is a city that has been speaking Spanish long before English-speaking colonizers hit the beach. There’s a reason it’s called “Los Angeles” and not “Angel City”, Donnie.

OK, time to get the coffee brewing and law out the plan for the day.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 816

Good morning, and a very happy Monday to you all. Today s 9 June 2025.

OK, let me give y’all a little recap of the sausage workshop Lisa and I attended. No grinding, all of the meat was pre-ground… and I still have to figure out my meat grinder, so a walk-through would’ve been nice. They had coffee out, as well as bagels and cream cheese, but no samples of cooked versions of the sausage we were making. 2 of the sausages were free-form, make your own patties, and 2 were stuffed into sausage casings… and they only had one sausage stuffing station that every had to wait in line for twice. It was this instructor’s first class, and he had very good credentials, but he struck me as more of a working chef than a teaching chef. He’ll get better. In the meantime, Lisa and I are keeping our eyes open for more classes, both at the Kansas City Culinary Center and at a couple of spots here in Lawrence that we just discovered.

This week, I’ll be busy. I’ll be able to write tomorrow, and likely on Thursday and Friday. Wednesday is probably a non-starter, with some other stuff going on that I can go into later on.

The pool is just about where it needs to be with the chemistry and balance… all we need to wait on now is more heat. I don’t care to get into a cold swimming pool – call it the “Costanza Syndrome”.

LOL… Lisa has on an episode of Columbo again… it’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s first time on screen, as her mother, Blythe Danner, was about 4 months pregnant, and the baby bump is visible in her tennis outfit.

OK, time to get started on my day. Workshops to review and some other tasks I need to address. Lisa told me she has a business dinner tonight.

In the meantime…

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 813

Good morning, and a happy last day of the Western work week to you all. Today is 6 June 2025.

I have my class schedule set for next week, and all of the other necessary steps addressed. This morning I have another chat with a prospective training company. The biggest difference between working fulltime as a technical trainer and being a freelance technical trainer is the time commitments. Before, I really only had to worry about delivering my courses and learning new technology. Now, I have to do those things, but now I also have to “hustle”… reach out, constantly make new training contacts, debone my email so that there isn’t as many distractors.

It has been raining all week, with the temperatures outside never quite reaching 80 degrees F all week. Lisa has been trying to get the pool chemicals balanced so when it does warm up, the pool will be ready. The additional rain creates some of its own challenges.

Tomorrow, Lisa and I are going into Kansas City for a little fun. There’s a class on sausage-making that we’re attending tomorrow morning at the Culinary Center of Kansas City. Lisa gifted me a sausage grinder a few years ago, but I never broke it out and got busy with the thing. This removes some of those excuses, and opens up a different set of doors. Lisa hopes we can make our own chicken-apple sausage. I look forward to giving it a try.

OK, time for me to get a pot of coffee going and toss a couple of English muffins in the toaster.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 812

Good morning, and a happy Thursday to you all. Today is 7 June 2025.

Sorry about not writing yesterday – our day became busy early. Lisa and I have offered to keep an eye on Evie on Wednesdays during the summer. We get to spend time with our granddaughter, and Gracie’s daycare expense goes down by a day charge. I think we get the better part of that deal. There was much coloring and cookie baking at grampa and gramma’s house, and lots of Bluey on the Disney Channel.

I had a couple of phone calls yesterday to firm up my activity for the rest of the month. One company has been keeping me pretty busy. A different company wanted to book me for a half-days over two weeks at a shot. Here’s the thing from my perspective – a work week is five days, and the classes I normally deliver run four days, some three. Lately, I’ve been doing more one-day classes… but if one of those one-day deliveries falls in the middle of the week, it limits my other work opportunities. If a vendor wants me for 20 hours a week over two weeks, I can’t teach any full-day classes at all. I don’t think that vendor will be coming back around though… the expression on the recruiter’s face when I told her my hourly rate was a full-on “yeet”… she wasn’t ready for that.

Next week I’ll be delivering a couple of one-day classes focused on AI to groups of educators. I’m looking forward to it.

Tonight, I’ll gather around the flat panel display to hang with the guys. I’m not sure which campaign we’re running tonight, but all three of the guys do a great job and we all have fun.

Today, I need to get a couple of invoices out. In the meantime…

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 810

Good morning, and a very happy Taco Tuesday to you all. Today is 3 June 2025.

I work up and checked social media, looks like more folks I know at Microsoft have been laid off. The term popularly used “Riffed”, a verb created from the expression “reduction in force”. If you are involved in artificial intelligence, you’re safe, but anybody else, here comes the scythe.

It’s been a few months for me, and I’m making ends meet. Unemployment never came through for me. After the fraud on my account in 2020, they’ have implemented such tight security that even those of us that are legitimately unemployed can’t get benefits. I’m glad I saw the writing on the wall and found some freelance work to keep me busy. I’m talking with another vendor tomorrow about some possibilities. It has been a little weird, getting approached to teach different cloud technologies. I’m not sure if I’m a great fit to teach the Alibaba Cloud.

In the meantime, I can reflect on 6 fun years at Microsoft, and now my blood pressure has dropped twenty points… that’s a net win, right there.

We had a little rain earlier this morning, and thunder can be heard coming from the gray skies. Odin has already assumed his preferred location on my legs.

Last night, Gracie and Evelyn came over for dinner. I made a quick spaghetti sauce with beef and marinara, then made some bowtie pasta to go with it. I like preparing different shapes of noodles for my granddaughter. I like to make the rainbow pasta as well when she’s around… different colors to make a dish a little more inviting, perhaps?

I’m going to need to clean out my workspace. I ordered a new standing desk so I can do a little better separation of my creative stuff from my work stuff.

Coffee is made, time to get a cup. Lisa made cinnamon rolls the other day, so that’s another win for me.

Tonight… there will be tacos.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 809

Good morning, and a very happy beginning to the Western work week to you all. Today is 2 June 2025.

OK, I know it’s been a couple of days… let me explain.

Last Tuesday I had a content review session in the morning, and that lasted until 10:30 in the morning or so. After that, it was time to head to the airport. I flew out of Kansas City, connected in Phoenix, on my way to Santa Ana/Orange County/John Wayne International Airport. I had to deliver a session on prompt writing at a community college in Mission Viejo (Saddleback Community College) for folks that worked in the California university system. I would like to say it all went off without a hitch, but there were some aspects I would change if I could.

The following day I delivered a one-day Azure fundamentals course on an East coast time frame… I was still in California, so we started at 6:00 AM local time. I kept the coffee at hand, and wrapped that day up right on schedule. A 6:45 AM flight out on Friday, and home by 3:30 Friday afternoon.

The one-day classes are fine, but if given a choice, I like the three or four day classes. It’s a little more of an intensive project to string a few one-day classes together, sometimes with different vendors. If you land one day in the middle of the week, you aren’t likely to get two or three more one day classes to fill out the week… the week is pretty much consumed by the one-day.

OK, meanwhile back here… we had a very nice weekend. Dane had a party to go to for his girlfriend’s brother’s college graduation. Gracie and Lisa went to Sams Saturday and ran some other errands on Sunday. Today, Gracie is going to come back over with my favorite granddaughter for dinner. I think we’ll take the safe approach with spaghetti instead of the lobster thermidor with béchamel sauce. Don’t forget the Spam.

This week I have a certification exam, so I have that to focus on. I think I could stand to focus on making a pot of coffee, too.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 803

Good morning, and a very happy Taco Tuesday to you all. Today is 27 May 2025.

Yesterday was a day, pretty gray with intermittent rain throughout the day. For those of you that are familiar with Memorial Day weekend in Kansas, rain is to be expected. This year, we had three straight days.

I had to get a little content work done yesterday, and it went OK. What I forgot to do was send my revised content to the subject matter expert when I thought I did. I remember writing the email, and I thought I remembered attaching the file and hitting send, but I guess I was mistaken. I received a mail from him around 8:00 last evening, and I went “whoops!”.

We have a meeting in another hour and a half on that content, and then after that the rest of my day will get interesting as well. I have a delivery tomorrow, new content, and I need to dive into that rather aggressively.

We’re watching “Columbo” again this morning. William Shatner might be sporting the least attractive moustache I have ever seen escape the 90s. Shatner is playing a gossip columnist, and the entire episode would be better if Shatner’s character had been offed at the beginning of the episode.

I need to ponder the day’s taco acquisition strategy.

OK, time to make coffee, get a little breakfast, organize a few things, then tackle the rest of the day.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 802

Good morning, and a blessed day to you all. Today is Monday, 26 May 2025. Today is Memorial Day . I hope you have time for reflection and remembrance.

We’ve had a pretty good weekend here. We had all of the kids over on Saturday for awhile, with Bonnie coming in from Belton, and Gracie and Evie coming over for a chunk of the day as well. We had more of the same yesterday, with a few hours of Evelyn to ourselves while Gracie went to get new tires put on her car. I tried to get a little work done yesterday, but I was quite pleasantly distracted. I normally have a SUnday meeting with the tabletop guys, but with this being a 3-day weekend, there were other responsibilities for us all.

As soon as I get this done, it will be time to take a look at work stuff. I have some content revision I had to attend to… I wasn’t real happy with my initial concept, and neither was the project SME (Subject Matter Expert). I’ll work in that this morning, and try to get it out by noon. After that, I need to look over some of the documentation for a workshop I’ll be running on Wednesday, followed by a fundamentals class on Thursday.

Memorial Day weekend around here is generally a great way to open the summer, but you can bet there will be at least one day of rain. This time around, we’ve had rain every single day. It backed off enough yesterday so I could use my grill – Lisa and Gracie did a little grocery shopping on Saturday, and picked up some really nice steaks to drop on the grill.

Lisa’s robotic vacuum/mop stopped in the middle of the night by the dishwasher. She reset it a few minutes ago, and now the dogs are not happy… they don’t like device. Odin looks at it suspiciously, and Lucy just randomly barks at it… but then, Lucy randomly barks at just about anything.

OK… it’s that time.

Today I will pause for reflection. My dad, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I always pause to think about John George Yenne, a 4x great grandparent that died fighting for the Union during the Civil War. He’s buried at Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

The man went to war in his early 40s, leaving his wife and kids behind, fighting for an ideal.

Thank you.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.

Evie Day 799

Good morning, and a very happy Friday to you . It’s the end of the Western work week, and today is 23 May 2025.

I wrapped up my class yesterday afternoon, and I think it went pretty well. Today will be a bit of a prep day, with an 8:30 meeting with a training company, another call later about a couple of one-day deliveries for next week, and some content creation work. I already received an email from the UK about my July schedule, so all-in-all it’s not a bad way to start the day.

I think I would like to get my hands on a bagel for breakfast, though. Onion bagel, toasted, chive cream cheese, and black coffee – that one of my favorite ways to start the day.

This weekend is a long one. I’m not sure if I’m going to write on Monday morning or not. I think I will spend some time reading this weekend. StoryBundle has a new collection of titles for writers, so that might be worthwhile.

Last night I was able to gather around the LED display with the guys, and we are settling into the next chapter in the campaign. The Big Bad Evil Guys. It’s all just for fun.

Time to think about coffee. The bagels will have to wait, and the peanut butter and honey on toast will have to suffice.

I hope the world is treating you better than you deserve.

Peace y’all.