Aaron's Status

7:51 pm

Spent a lot of the morning poring over Jira—something I hope you never have to do—and trying to wrap my head around how I could make myself useful. I got things in a pretty good spot, we had our stand-up, and I ended up running it (another thing I hate, but am good at).

Then I discovered it. The thing nearly every big software project has. It’s that thing that everyone kind of overlooked until almost the last minute that’s actually a ton more complicated to solve than anyone realized. A lot of my afternoon was consumed by flogging that issue into submission (ongoing).

I’d rate my back at about 85%. I took Advil twice today and I’m managing; I can pretty much do what I need to do without pain, so this is pretty minor, but it’s definitely there. I’m a bit anxious about going to the gym tomorrow, but honestly it’ll probably be fine.

I have another night’s sleep and another workday ahead before that, and then the lead class (assuming it happens) is at 5pm, which will leave me basically no time for actual climbing anyway. The class is a lot of learning how to clip the rope into quickdraws (or the pre-installed lead clips in the gym) and I don’t think it’s climbing-intensive.

I need to get my Christmas shopping in order. That’s just a thought I had in this moment.

Three weeks till Christmas break. That’s staggeringly close. 2024 is almost over. What is my 2025 going to be about? Maybe I’ll put some words behind that in upcoming posts.

I woke up today, so I might as well be badass. — Tommy Caldwell

6:21 am

Briefly recapping the weekend, we did Thanksgiving with my folks on Saturday. $wife doesn’t drink (coming up on four years) and my dad is recovering, so we had a dry Thanksgiving this year. My sister and her husband maybe had more trouble with it than we did. I think it went well overall; we ate food and then went to Winterlights, which was fine.

There’s a lot more to reflect on about having a sober wife and how my perspective has changed from what might be considered “the norm,” but not today.

Sunday we went to a birthday for our climbing friend’s son, who is friends with my son (in the way that kids that age are; fast and fickle). It was at a ninja/trampoline/arcade type place and everyone got onto the obstacles.

I was still feeling some trailing anxiety from last Wednesday but I felt the FOMO about not jumping so I got out there and it was fine. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes in to jumping around, the fire alarm went off and they evacuated us, sock feet and all, out onto the grass hill on the other side of the parking lot so that the fire department could diagnose a gas leak! So that was a thing.

After the party we got home, I ate a PB&J, and we went to our climbing gym for a little family climb. I wasn’t feeling the strongest but I sent a couple of comp boulders (graded V3 and V4 in the app), worked on a couple others, and generally felt okay though tired.

My back got a little “tweaked out” at the end and I stopped. This morning it feels better but still not resolved. Hopefully PT, a low-impact workday, and another sleep will sort me out.

Tomorrow we should finally have our first lead climbing class, which has been rescheduled a number of times. Scheduling has become a nightmare and we’re barreling toward Christmas now so we’ll see if any of this even happens.

Meanwhile, at $work we’re pushing to get an MVP of our latest project into the hands of customers before we break for the holidays, and I’m the tech lead of the project so it falls to me to rally and get this thing into shape. There is still a lot to do, but the question is always “what must be done to call it ready?”

That will be the focus of my day; organizing what needs to be done, ruthlessly cutting what doesn’t, and figuring out who does what (probably I do most of it, which is fine, but I like to know).

It always feels like there’s more to say, but that’s it for now.