[Weekly - F/Sa] Week In Review

This last week was my daughter's first week (well, 3 days) of kindergarten and she's loving it so far.

@Ember and I scrambled to get our house ready for my parents to visit. They arrived yesterday and we've had a great time with them so far!

Work has slowed down a little, but this next week will probably pick up the pace. It's good to enjoy the (relatively) quiet times while they last, because they never seem to last long. :)
 
Work is busy and about to get busier with projects coming down the line "Soon"(TM).

Schedule is packed. My daughter has kindergarten 5 days a week, dance one night, church another night, and my wife works late Thursday.

I miss PC gaming and multiplayer gaming in general. I did make it to the ToJ TF2 game night for the first time in about a month! It was a blast. :)
 
This last week saw my 30th birthday, the gender-reveal ultrasound for our baby, and the proper start of the semester with a corresponding work hour reduction.

Birthday celebration went well. My wife is awesome, and we also got to go to dinner with a few of the good friends who've made Michigan a lot better.

We're having a boy! Hooray! We've done our best to not express preference/hope, in order to not even at this level create opportunity for mis-perceived disappointment. But we're super excited, and now we get to actually buy baby clothes and stuff without being super worried about gender neutrality. :D

Because I work for the seminary as a student, my hours are limited during the school year. Still making enough to make ends meet, but having financial kick in again is hard to complain about. All the same, with being cut in hours, I now have a little more time to not stress about writing my Master's thesis. Hooray!
 
Oy, what a week. Not a bad week, just...a long one.

Work is ramping up again, with projects on the horizon and a department move scheduled for next week. This week was productive, but I felt like for every 1 ticket I closed, 2 popped up to take its place. The highlight of my work day today was a fantastic lunch at a Thai restaurant with one of my team members and a former co-worker. The company was great and so was the good!

My daughter seems to be doing great in kindergarten, though she's still...rambunctious at home. I'm told that's normal and starts to subside after the first semester. Her school's Open House event was this week and she was thrilled to show us around. I felt sorry for my younger daughter because she wanted to get down and play with all the books and art supplies, but she's a cute little hurricane and it was neither the time nor the place to make a mess.

Church is going fairly well. I may end up participating in a Wednesday night Bible study, but, as awful as it may sound, I'm not in any hurry to add anything to my or my family's schedule right now. Maybe after the start of the new year?

This week wore me out and next week is looking quite busy as well. Maybe things will slow down after Wednesday and I'll be able to relax a bit...
 
With one of our techs out this week, work was crazy busy. I survived and even had my ticket numbers at a manageable level again by Friday afternoon. Good times.

My older daughter has a second ear infection, so soon after the first. Poor thing. Another round of antibiotics, but she's weathering it well.

All in all, a pretty good week.
 
A whole week without Dr.s appointments at the VA, it's a miracle. Trying to catch up on getting the house cleaned up for a church picnic at our place. My lady fell late Thursday night and we were at ER until 3 AM. Nothing broke, just aggravated arthritise, and lots of scraps and bruises.
 
Saturday, we had a "Bundle of Boy Barbecue." We were getting a little pressure to have a gender-reveal party, or a baby shower, and were not especially interested in either, but we ended up finding this middle ground of a barbecue celebrating that we're having a boy. Had a bunch of seminary and church people over to share in the celebration, and even give some parental grilling. haha It was good times, but exhausted us.

Prior to that, the week was business as usual. Work, thesis writing, shopping, housework. All that good stuff. No complaints. Just the usual.
 
This week was...less hectic than previous weeks for work. Taking a day of PTO (paid time off) on Wednesday likely helped in that regard, though I spent my day "off" working harder at home cleaning than I would have at work.

Our younger daughter still isn't sleeping through the night and this week was average, which is to say that our sleep was sub-par as usual. We're surviving, though some days we're running on fumes.

Not much of interest to report this week, but we're alive and in relatively good health (though I've had a cough for two weeks--no other symptoms, just the cough). God is good and He has blessed us richly!
 
I just finished a project of mine that I have spent years of hard work on; I stepped 251 songs for Stepmania (Doubles mode included for each song) If anyone is interested in playing it, here's the link. (Use the most recent version of SM 5, please.) I am also working on adding more bonus packs, too

http://www.mediafire.com/file/urt10v1rrbn4g8w/PIU+4+ITG!.rar

You should make another thread, in addition to this post, so people can find your work easier. Hard to see all that work go unnoticed :) . I don't play the game but I'm sure someone does.
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Also fun fact we can dance if we want to. We can leave your friends behind. Cause your friends don't dance and if they don't dance well they're no friends of mine. :p
 
So I took a day off work this week and had to dedicate nearly an entire day to training, so the remaining 3 days were very busy. I still ended my week with fewer tickets than I started, so it was at least productive.

My younger daughter is leveling up all the time--new words, putting basic sentences together, identifying numbers and colors. (She can already identify almost all 26 letters of the alphabet.) It's awesome to see and I'm trying to enjoy it to the fullest since it's unlikely we'll be experiencing this phase of a child's life again (until, God willing and in the right time, we get to be grandparents some day).
 
So, I've been a bit silent but its been good and busy.

We just had 26+ students in our house last night from 7pm-12am, decorating our house for Christmas, making their own stockings to hang in the house, having over excited freshman climb a fully extended lean-to ladder into a tree because he wanted to put Christmas lights on one of our large trees outside.

Financially, my business is finally solid enough for regularly taking care of expenses. My wife just started a IT position at University of Idaho which has been super awesome! Every best practice IT personnel could do, they do and she has been loving it.

So it will be a couple of months before we become solid financially but we're finally on a good standing.

Admittedly I've been convicted of Acedia ("Dante describes acedia as the failure to love God with all one's heart, all one's mind and all one's soul; to him it was the middle sin, the only one characterised by an absence or insufficiency of love. ") But also general slothness since our finances have leveled a little bit. But the other part is that my stress level has gone down a lot and my body is finally resting better.
 
Return of the Week In Review!

This week at work was far less hectic than last week and the week before. (I spent almost all of the previous two weeks at work on projects, which means my work tickets piled up. I work as a field tech for health care IT.) There was still plenty to do, but I could actually focus on working my queue and get my ticket numbers down.

Thanksgiving yesterday went very well with newly discovered members of @Ember's family joining the party. Much food, much family, much fun.

Today will be time to clean clean clean and maybe have some fun this evening. Raising two children and giving them much (though never all) of the attention they desire makes it a challenge to keep a clean and organized home. And that's without regards for time to relax, read, and play video games.

We'll be heading in to the end of the year starting Monday, so I'm hoping work will calm down a bit. I have my doubts, though. I'm still hoping to find more time for working on the house, playing games (maybe some more Heroes of the Swarm or Overwatch?), and catching up with friends online.
 
So I got some goodies last week: Steam controller, Overwatch, and Pikmin 3. Pikmin 3 is still in the wrapping (and likely will stay there until I finish Wind Waker), I've played 1.5 matches of Overwatch (had to abandon my first match to leave to pick up my daughter), and I've tried about 3 games with my Steam controller so far.

When I was young, I had the time to play games but not the money to buy them.

Now I have the money to buy (some) games, but not the time.

So for all those folks who've recently entered the work force, whether you've earned a college degree or not, enjoy that tiny little window of opportunity when you have both the time and money for games. Family is most definitely more important, I adore my children, and I wouldn't trade my wife or kids for the world, but enjoy the season of life you're in (within reason, of course; ministry in the local church takes priority over games as well, though I'll be the first to say that the two are not mutually exclusive).

Okay, tangents aside, last week was much lighter at work, which was fantastic. There's still enough to fill the hours, but I felt I could respond to tickets in a much more timely manner.
Heart of the Swarm, Heroes of the Storm, whatever, dude. It's all HotS to me. :p
Fun side note: I received an e-mail from Amazon today informing me that Legacy of the Void (which I purchased for $18 shipped last month when it was out of stock) should arrive on my doorstep in mid-December. Huzzah!
 
Been a heck of a week, fam.

Last Thursday, my mother-in-law came to visit us. We went on a day trip to the "world's largest Christmas store" during that time, and made lots of cookies.

Sunday, ma-in-law still here, I got word that my grandpa, whom had previously fallen and taken injury, was hospitalized and on life support. By evening's end--and next morning's verification--he was entirely dependent on life support. He also had a DNR that said he didn't want to be on this kind of life support.

It was stretched out over the week while my dad (along with my mom, who flew together from Florida to California to be there) was to make the call of whether or not to pull him off life support. That decision was made Wednesday. Last night, around 8PM eastern, my grandpa passed away.

Tuesday, ma-in-law went back home. Wednesday, I tried--and failed--to make it through the work day. Yesterday, I made it through the work day and even to the gym. We--my wife and I--also signed paperwork for life insurance now that we have a kiddo approximately a month out from due date.

And now it's Friday. Got a full work day ahead of me. Finally normalizing (all of my emotions were cranked to 11 while I like to usually keep their expression in a 4-6 range whether I'm feeling like a 2 or an 8).

Gave in to my grief habit of spending money on distractions and bought the PS4 release of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and the phenomenal Bethesda Pinball pack for Zen Pinball 2. As of last night (which is also when I started playing it), I was sitting at 181 on the worldwide leaderboard for the Doom table.

So yeah. It's been a week. Whoof.
 
@Kendrik I'm sorry to hear that you lost your grandfather and I'll be praying for your family as they work through their grief. Specifically, I'll be praying that his passing will draw them closer to the Lord rather than see them drift away or even turn violently away from Him. Loss has a way of clarifying many things in our lives, sometimes to our ultimate benefit and sometimes to our detriment.

We--my wife and I--also signed paperwork for life insurance now that we have a kiddo approximately a month out from due date.

Also, good on you and your wife for taking the time to get life insurance. @Ember and I have been meaning to the same for months, if not years, but life with two kids is so jam-packed right now that it doesn't leave much time to properly research a major decision like life insurance and there's so much static out there it's likely to take a big chunk of time to choose a company and decide exactly which options are right for us.

I admit my post feels trivial in the wake of your loss, but I'm trying to get in to the discipline (though I do enjoy it!) of posting every week in our weekly threads.

Work this week was nice and quiet, giving me an opportunity to get caught up and even help another team member who's helped me out several times in the past year. Feels good, man. (And it doesn't hurt that I got to log ~75 miles on my mileage expense report and get some great windshield time in the process. :D)

This week, my older daughter had an ear infection (she's still working through the antibiotics, but never suffered except waking up one night around 2 a.m. with ear pain; she's been 100% ever since) and my younger daughter had/has an upper respiratory infection. Tonight, the little had an on-again, off-again fever. She'd be crying, clingy, and sleepy one minute (and even fell asleep in my arms late this morning) and then running laps around the living room later on then back to punky a while after that. Poor kid. She passed out early tonight and I can't help but suspect that we're going to suffer for it later. Such is life with two young children in December. They're adorable, they're so sweet, but they're also vectors for every disease their classmates bring to school.

Aaand she just woke up. Gotta go.
 
I had a business trip and flew to Dallas-FortWorth area, Irving City to be exact, and was there for two days. Whirlwind week and behind on work but playing some Overwatch on occasion with my wife and a few friends.

Business is good. Trying to see if I can get a VA or freelancer to help with somethings here and there
 
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