I exaggerate on the title; despite what tales I tell, I have gotten better sleep this week than many weeks several years ago when I worked at a grocery store.
This week started off with a bang. At my work, it was my rotation to be "on call", and there wasn't a moment to lose come monday Morning when I had to drive out an hour or so away, early in the morning to restore a school's entire network by plugging in a slipped power cable. That was fun enough, but then I drove another hour back north, took care of an issue there, drove another hour back down south, took care of another issue, drove back halfway north to the office, and then homeward. It was a day of back-and-forth. And the fun didn't cease there, as I found myself that night and all of next morning playing a new game called "can you forward a single port on a network". It is the kind of thing that should have been easy and quick, but took me hours and hours. It turns out I had actually done it right almost totally from the get-go, but there was something I wasn't told about the device I was trying to port forward, making it virtually impossible to do so, which was the source of my hours and hours of frustration, questioning, soul searching, and possible cursing. In the end, it worked, though.
There were more cliffs to climb at work, including having to work on my two days off this weekend, but in the end, my complaining would come off as first-world problems. In honesty, however busy this week has been, it's also been nice, and there has been no shortage of things to do. This weekend (between having to leave on call for work), I've spent time with family, and they are always a fun bunch to be with. Within my wife's family there are about 4 of us who have birthdays all in the course of a week, so it was a celebratory occasion for each of us. I came to the realization, in fact, as I was journaling my thoughts the other night, that this has been an odd birthday; but I stopped for a moment, considered my wording, and realized there's no particular thing (at least in my case) as a "normal" birthday. Growing up as a child, I suppose some were fairly similar, but the older a person gets, the less common a routine celebration becomes. I know certain people who love celebrating their birthdays, and others who would much rather not. I fall somewhere in between. But I digress; as we consider occasions and seasons in our lives which we might consider differing from the usual, and especially as we consider how difficult a time or task may be, consider that perhaps it's not all that different from things you've experienced before, or sometimes the exact opposite. Even death itself is not all that different from birth, and yet takes on a much different air for most people. So, consider before you sit a moment with your despair, anxiety, or apprehension: you've done this before- it had a different face back then, and seemed different- but you've come a long way, even where you are, and that is no small significance.
Meanwhile, I carry on with the everyday life. I'm weaning my way off of Windows now, and really diving into Linux (specifically Pop OS). There's no denying it's different (echoing the theme of my last paragraph, apparently), but it is by far the most user friendly Linux system I've seen out there. If you feel a little brave and have a spare laptop or PC and enough knowledge or ability to learn how to do so, I totally commend you if you decide to try Pop OS yourself. Not only is it pretty user friendly, it's a humongous step in jumping the prison ship SSS Microsoft and avoiding their hard-handed attempts to advertise to you and steal data.
ANYWAYS, happy November, enjoy the weather!