While I’m not religious, I’m spiritual. While he may have been a little churchy for me personally, he was spiritual and actually was an advocate for the poor and disenfranchised and that’s always a good thing. Funny how a man of God has to tell other man to take care of the less fortunate. It must be hard to push the God is all powerful message when he isn’t doing anything about that. Free will doesn’t seem to be doing what it was intended.

It’s funny how this process is now followed. I’m trying to think of what it must have been in years past, before technology. Every 10 to 30 years the pope has to change, they don’t live forever. Though I guess that the church would have had a heck of a messaging system, it still would have been odd to have a conclave and have cardinals come from all over to join.

And of course it’s a bit funny that JDV saw the pope on his last day, visited by the anti-Christ underling, he’s seen enough evil and headed to heaven.

Everything went off without a hitch today for Easter dinner, or late lunch as the case may be. It was Sandy and I, Mom and Ron and Sister, Cheri & Alan & Alene and we had the Honey Baked Ham with sides. The sides were too small so we should have doubled up but the ham was great and everybody left full.

Cortney used Ron’s grandmothers china, wow it looked nice and it must have been 100 years old. I love the idea of china but it’s silly to have a nice set of china that only gets brought out once or twice a year. I still have my dads and Sandy has hers.

It didn’t feel like a very restful weekend and I feel a little exhausted. I did get all my steps and circles done. Hopefully a good nights sleep will get me moving forward tomorrow.

For today I’m thankful for friends and family and for a beautiful day to share with them.

Sandy got discharged and a clean bill of cardiac health from the hospital this afternoon. That’s good news.

I went to Honey Baked Ham and retrieved the meal we ordered for Easter. It was smooth until it came time to pay and I pulled out the gift certificates from 12 years ago. In the end, they had to click a couple of things and scan it, it just took them about 10 minutes to figure out that’s what they had to do. Oh well, it’s done and we’ll figure out the rest of it tomorrow.

I feel like I’ve been stressed the last couple of days. Hopefully things will get back to normal in short order.

It was back to the ER today, this time it was for Sandy and chest pains. I wasn’t too worried as it was on the wrong side of the chest but given that the bill will be footed by the VA, I’m all for getting her in and checked out. She’s staying the night for tests and observation because even though it’s not cardiac related but it’s still a very uncomfortable pain. At least she doesn’t have a drain coming out of her abdomen which was how I spent my time there last October.

I have to go pick up the Easter lunch tomorrow at Honey Baked Ham. I’ll try to get it tomorrow when they open, hopefully it won’t be too packed.

It’s finally over, the electric is complete. They wired in the transfer switch today and we had one more outlet put in the hall which they managed to cut in the wrong place. Oh well, I’ve got a bunch of drywall to do, it’s just a small patch.

I’ve already got a call into big Kelly to get some insulation blown in. $10k for the electric, $2200 for insulation and we should be good to hold up until Donald Dipshit stops it with the extra taxes.

As you know I’ve been trying to figure out where the next chapter of my career is going to take me. I keep lingering with this TCC stuff and right now it makes great sense because there’s no one left doing it, but there’s also no one left on Taleo for all intents and purposes.

So where to go from here? I’ve got my degree, bachelor of science in data analytics and management (BS DAM). But that doesn’t really get me where I need to be. So some certifications are in order. I think the low hanging fruit of that is SQL. I’ve been working with it for years so I know it well. But what flavor of SQL? I think that it’s Microsoft SQL DBA with Azure certs. Seems to be lots of jobs and many are remote. I’ve been working with MSSQL since the version 6.5 days back in the early 00’s. Just need to get up to speed and nail the certs and I’ve got the next 10 – 15 years taken care of, living in the middle of nowhere hording money for retirement.

Now to make it happen. I think the first step is AZ-900 which is the general Azure non-technical test. I’ve seen people crush it in a weekend. I’ll be a little more easy going but shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. Maybe by May??? More soon…

I’ve been looking at ways to keep cool for less considering its getting nothing but hotter out there. My HVAC guy said to get a solar powered vent to replace one of the turbines.

In theory, this should help get somewhat cooler air into the attic by exhausting the super heated air. We’ll see how it works this summer.

Today wasn’t too bad for a Monday. Got some meetings knocked out and it looks like the document I did as an overview was well received. In the meeting, I was told that they were told by Oracle that it can’t do what it does. It’s really odd and I’d love to have been on the call but I’m not making anything up, this has all been done before.

Got some yard work done and Sandy went and picked up flowers and veggies to plant so the beds are coming together.

Another beautiful day. We went to moms and I got some of the windows washed. We took the bikes and biked down to main street arts festival. It was nice, we parked at the Frost building over by the church and walked over. There were tons of people so it was good people watching. We skipped the fair food and went to Razoo’s for Cajun fondue and fried pickles. The pickles were cold but the fondue was good. I half want to say our waitress Brianna thought I was cute. I haven’t seen that look in a month of Sunday’s.

We took the bike lane on Hemphill back to moms, wow that was kind of nice. I bitch all the time about the bike lanes because they’re mostly unused but damn, if you have a bike they’re great.

Here are some pictures we took during our travels today.

Can’t complain about a Friday, well maybe about how long it takes the afternoon to go by. But I’m thrilled with work, all caught up and ready for next week. Just have to do documentation which I hate but that’s why they pay me to do it.

The weather is nothing short of spectacular, we’re in one of those rare periods of time here in Texas when it’s as close to perfect as it can get. High of 80’s, sunny and breezy. Makes me wish I lived someplace I could take a walk in the woods and enjoy it. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy and am thankful for my walks here and the life I have but I hope we find our way into some forests before it’s all over with.

Tomorrow we’re going over to moms. I’m going to wash her windows and then we’re going to bike over to the main street arts festival and hang/people watch there for a while. It’s supposed to be beautiful weather again. And Sunday I’m clearing out my wardrobe to donate to something or other. It’ll be a good weekend.

More soon, thankful for the day!