Win of the Day

It was a warm enough night to sit out and enjoy coffee on the driveway while watching my girls play with their friends. Not a real care in the world just watching the kids have a blast.

This thread made it to page two! Thats a big thing for me. IMAGE(https://emojipedia-us.s3.dualstack.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/thumbs/240/apple/271/smiling-face-with-hearts_1f970.png)

Secondly, I discovered youtube-dl (which downloads videos), and that if you have ffmpeg installed, you can basically get super high quality downloads, depending on what’s available. So... I downloaded 9gb+ of Taylor Swift music videos, live performances, interviews, and smaller concerts (I already had the tours downloaded). In case of emergency.

Switched gas providers today, saving our family about 150EUR over the course of the next year!

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It’s a small win, but a fun one. Finally got my wife into watching The Good Place (no, not at the end of s1 yet), and I forgot how much I love the swear filter. So I found the list on some ad-littered website and just made a page on my site for it.

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Mother-forking shirtballs!

I had been developing a play about my ancestor, an abolitionist newspaper editor who got murdered by white supremacists in 1837. Going into March of 2020, I was making a ton of progress but... the pandemic killed theater. So I basically panicked trying to imagine how the show might work and got nothing done for most of last year.

Then something changed a few weeks ago. I can't speak to any one thing knocking me out of my stasis. Like so many moments of stasis the way out was a combination of minor things. Exercise, diet, sleep, life circumstance, friends showing up in just the right way. Whatever it was, my brain shifted away from the funk it was in and that let my thinking on the project change. I realized this could very much be a limited series podcast run. Instead of living in that mindset of "I've stalled on this" I looked at it with fresh eyes. I had a ton of writing, research materials, and the equipment required to shift the medium from stage to audio. The topic has only gotten more timely, not less.

I started reworking it, not thinking I was doing anything but tinkering. I got an episode 1 script draft and test recorded it. I sent that out to some people and got notes. I did some revisions. I pulled together a second draft.

This morning, I recorded that draft. Then it hit me: this project is back on. I'm doing the "not fun" stuff that happens between the idea forming and the thing being made.

I need to start writing subsequent episodes, there are all sorts of things I need to figure out before any of this is anywhere near ready for prime time... BUT for the first time in months it feels like a thing that will get made and not an ambient failure.

After months of creative roadblocks on this project, that feels HUGE to me.

That's my win for today.

After struggling with credit card debt for 18 years and 3 months, I paid off my last card this morning! $0.00 balance on both cards after paying close to $14,000 over the past year

Awesome news on being debt free! We are real close and I can't wait....to put that now towards mortgage and student loans!

This thread got Thread of the Week in the March 24th Conference Call.

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I love you, love your energy, don't ever change <3

I slept amazingly well last night. I woke up in the middle of the night, rolled over, and that was it. Did not have to get up and go do something else. I just went right back to sleep.

I feel amazing this morning, and I want to wake up like this every single day for the rest of my life.

Scored a job interview!

My raise officially kicks in today and will show up on my paycheck in 2 weeks. I will be transitioning to my new position at work in the next several weeks. My new boss has a career path for me that for the first time in a long time has giving me hope for my career rather than staring at a brick wall.

With our girls now 4 and 5 years old, we've been selling a lot of baby/toddler stuff while spring cleaning. Today, a prospective buyer for our faithful Croozer bike trailer came prospecting.

While I was showing how to fold/unfold, assemble/disassemble the trailer's bike or buggy mode, I noticed that the bike adapter thingey has a lock, but no key attached. Several thoughts raced through my head, with "This might take a while" and "I hope my wife didn't take it with her" being the more family friendly ones. I went to gather everything from the key drawer, about 30 keys in all.

And then... the first key I tried worked!. Grinning ear to ear, I told the buyer "You just witnessed something special today." She laughed, paid the agreed amount (no haggling!) and went her merry way.

At 11:48am EDT, I became a father.

Vargen wrote:

At 11:48am EDT, I became a father.

CONGRATS ON THE NEW HUMAN!

Vargen wrote:

At 11:48am EDT, I became a father.

Congrats.

And as always, we have a thread for that

Vargen wrote:

At 11:48am EDT, I became a father.

Achievement unlocked: Genetic Imperative

Vargen wrote:

At 11:48am EDT, I became a father.

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Amoebic wrote:

I love you, love your energy, don't ever change <3

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My wife, instead of getting the huge raise she was promised before covid hit 13 months ago, you know, did not.

She did get said raise this past October, AND THEN Greece stopped doing extra, extra taxes to get itself out of debt, so that huge raise, became a HUGE RAISE. So then, we didn't expect she might get a big bonus as she sometimes does around Easter. In the past, at her much lower salary, her "big bonus" would mostly get us out of debt we accumulated in a year, but not quite.

SHE GOT A BIGGER BONUS.

I should maybe mention she's the CEO of a company with around 120 employees, that is owned by someone outside of Greece. She started as a sales rep. And she's...completely changed the whole model of the company, very successfully, three times now (Greek Financial Crisis I, Greek Financial Crisis II, and Covid Lockdown Time).

And at Easter, it's standard for most people to get a 1/2 month salary extra. Cause Greece. So she gets that too. At the HUGE RAISE level.

So, in the next...30 days, she's going to be paid more than my gross annual salary, as net salary and bonuses.

So yeah. We'll be going out of debt. And getting laptops for the two older kids.

And...not going nuts, but...you know. Going...a little nuts. Possibly more.

So yeah. I'm very proud of her, and really happy she's finally getting recognized.

Nice thread.

What a fun thread! Thank you for bringing some positive vibes to kapow that pessimistic outlook that was once again rolling in (for me).

Let's see. *thinks* I was able to break things down and walk it through so that a colleague could grasp new duties, and a few errors, that had been confounding them. Seeing people succeed is awesome. It felt good to have a degree of worth as well.

Our 4 year old refused to go upstairs with mom to shower, so I conspired to strip her naked so she could surprise mommy with a bare-butt dance. Drama avoided, hilarity ensured!

Appointment made for a J&J dose through work on Monday. Can not wait to be done with the anxiety of working retail and worrying if today’s jackass with the mask not covering their nose will be the one that gets me.

After 3 hours of debugging why my local project was failing on a certain file when CircleCi ran (It's an automated test runner), I discovered that somehow, someway, I had not added the file to my code repository. Literally stumbled on the solution. I was renaming things to be filename.yml instead of filename and my git mv command was like, “Sorry, bro, I don’t know that file”

I also then was easily able to get my other app I wanted to get up and running on it, much easier. Also, my style cop was easy to appease and now I've got proper validation even when I forget.

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I finished a movie I was 1/3rd through and then I watched a whole notha one! Late to the party, but What We Do In The Shadows has wonderful payoff in the end, and Seven Psychopaths is a blissful enjoyment of Sam Rockwell being completely chaotic and also stars Christopher Walken, Colin Farrell, Woody Harrelson, and has some Tom Waits in it. I laughed the entire way through.

This is a win over depression and anxiety and not being couch bound all weekend long.

I LOVE What We Do in the Shadows, and the series is amazing!

My youngest (8) didn’t get out of bed until 8:30am this morning, even with an egg hunt in the works!