James Pearl Thinks Blogging is Dead

When I click on this thread, it's hard to believe I woke up yesterday in Chicago. I am currently sitting in Pennsylvania, full of dinner. Among other things, one might argue.

As soon as D left to drop the boys off at school, I did a few quick things for my boss (in Minnesota) and our sales guy (also in Minnesota) then jumped on the bike ASAP. Work continues to go off the hook, so I need to take what I can get as soon as I can get it. I was mucho surprised and excited to see the Alpe du Zwift opened up today. When I started it up, it said "new routes" and I knew what was coming.

Basically it was a 9% climb for the most part of 2 hours.

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Yes, that is a work laptop along with the Zwift one. I am now just actively working as-needed on these rides and I even took a 30 minute conference call on the bike today. Honestly fuck it, I just don't care anymore. I'm working in the Uber, airport, and driving out to my parents (foreshadowing) so I just don't care if they have to hear my fans and squeaky-ass bottom bracket while the call is going.

Ok so big news today. Minnesota (different client from my boss and sales guy) voted today to Go Mother Frogging Live. I honestly cannot believe this day has come.

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After that call I was sort of sitting around like the Stanford Prison Experiment kids wondering what to do with my life, then it came time to go start the journey to Spring Break. Swung by the library, liquor store, pick up Zac, then Simon, then get gas, then Julia, then D at work. Hopped in the passenger seat then did a conference call where once again, the useless PM just passed the screen to me about 4 minutes into the call.

I am sure that @fidodie is wondering why the try-catch was not there to begin with. Well, the "framework" is supposed to take care of this. When you call a system global class function, you have some expectation that it will not throw exceptions. The documentation does not specify "throws" because it is not supposed to throw anything. Well, we blew it up. This thought struck me today so I figured I would share with Pat.

Dinner was one of my favorites, baked parmesan chicken & scalloped cheesy potatoes with asparagus & salad. Prepping for the eats. My mom says I look like I lost weight. Always a good sign.

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Funny - i was wondering why unexpected data in an input stream didn't go to a global exception processor, quarantine the record, and let the process keep going.......
no matter how clean the input data is supposed to be, it will be dirtied somewhere.
But thanks for thinking about me 😛 and nice job managing the situation!

congrats - 'go' is big.

Did i post up what a 3,000 piece puzzle looks like?

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Woke up at 6:30, rinsed off quickly and had a cup of coffee & quick breakfast with my parents before waking up the army. At 7:00 we got them up, prepped the bags, and fed them before we left. At 7:30 we set sail for the airport. 30 seconds later, we got a text that the plane was late. We were already in the car so we decided to forge on.

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There were like 3000 people at the TSA before us, plus/minus 2998. We were flying out of Allentown so there really wasn't much of a line to speak of. I am not sure there were even 2 people, honestly. But there was no plane either when we got there.

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Sitting there I was hungry so I got myself a breakfast burrito. Because vacation.

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After I ate, the plane arrived, people got off, and we got on.

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Flight was almost entirely in the clouds which is kinda rare in my experience. Ride was a little bumpy but not terrible. One 1 side I had a great seat mate:

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On the other, well this one is for @Carson

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Dude-man was pure butter pouring all over me. His big old ham hock of an arm kept sliding towards my lap, a result of him falling asleep and gravity.

Almost there:

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Landed, got the car, grabbed some lunch, drove 90 minutes to Melbourne.

Hung out at the pool, read some books, went inside, ate dinner, dessert, then went for a walk on the beach and checked out the monster re-beaching operation going on, 24 hours a day.

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Small airports are the best. We fly to Greensboro to my SILs. It's like night and day compared to EWR.
 
On coffee and breakfast before waking the troops:
Possibly my favorite part of the day.
That solitary moment of peace and reflection before it all goes to hell.
 
March Wrap-up

Today marks the end of the month, and while I am on vacation I still want to pause and put up some of how we're doing here. March was a rough month in terms of weather and biking outside, and race promotion. But I continue to stay on track at this point. Some numbers to quantify some of what we've got going on.

Exercise: In total I had 51.93 hours in March. Total on the year is 136.5. Strava says that my all-time record is 507 hours of total exercise in a year. If I multiply this by 4, I get 546. While the end of the year is typically lower than the rest of the year, we have not even hit the meat of the season yet. Is it time to declare this 507 hours on the table?

Blogging: 27 posts in 31 days of March. Some of these were outside my "schedule" - like this post.

Non-standard life: Did 25 things that would break me out out of the "normal" routine of life. While I understand that going to Seattle & Chicago are work trips, they are still beyond the scope of what I would do on a regular WFH day. Some of the stuff I/we did this month:

Dinner at the Oishi's
Saw the following plays: Seminar, Venus in Fur, Mary Poppins, Guys & Dolls
Saw the following 2 movies: 3 Billboards, Wrinkle in Time
Spent time in Seattle (4 days), Chicago (2 & 2 days), PA (1 night), Florida (2 days)
Rode Sals & White Clay
Went skiing

I can say without question I am pretty excited to start riding more dirt now. Yes I do love the Zwift option but I'm ready to mix it up a little bit.

Books: Read the last 2 Harry Potter books, which brings me to 8 on the year. I am hoping to finish 2 books this week alone in Florida. After those I am not sure what I will be reading.

Weight: Average weight is down 3.8 pounds from February, and I saw the 0 as a middle number last week. I have no goals here other than to not take a step back on the average weight, which could be hard given this vacation and my work travel right now.

Drinking: I have not had a drink in 356 days.

Vacation

Another day in Florida. Just our usual routine today:

* Wake/breakfast/beach/pool
* Lunch/beach/pool/showers
* Dinner/birthdays/play cards

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It was mostly cloudy today but it was in the 75-ish realm all day. We did some sand castle work but it was mostly aimless, so mine ended up the same as it often does. By far the coolest thing out there right now is this beach rebuilding operation that's going on. They have a ton of heavy machinery on the beach as well as sand barges that come close to shore and pipe the sand in. When it comes in, it blasts up in the air in a sand wash and then the dozers move it around and rebuild what was eroded when the hurricane came through in the fall. If you google "beach renourishment" you'll find a bunch of articles on it. Looks like this is part of a federal program which I am sure costs an arm & a leg. The beach is such a huge part of the economy here I totally understand why you'd want to stop it washing into the ocean and gobbling up the real estate.

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We're celebrating both of the older one's birthdays today (Zac's was about 2 weeks ago, Julia's in 2 weeks). They both love tonight's meal (curry seafood paste) and they both asked for chocolate log for dessert. As it turns out, this is my favorite dinner and my favorite dessert. Hard to beat that.

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I was going to split this up into 2 posts. But screw it. Going to try and watch the full moon rise in a bit.
 
Today I'll start with the beach tripod for @rottin'. This thing's purpose is to literally drive into the ocean and take measurements. We saw him go in yesterday once. But for the most part I think they just drive it down the beach a mile to pick up lunch.

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Today was a rinse & repeat of yesterday, for the most part. I will display my beach "art" that I made today. Started with this. I screwed up the legs but corrected it after I took this picture. Moved the feet over to make the "arms" into the actual "legs" they are.

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Was a bit ambitious in trying to build a Colosseum which crumbled when I was adding the second entrance. After it collapsed I moved on.

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I don't know. I called it the Tower of Babel.

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After lunch I created the Rubicon of Knowledge:

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And finally, I was not able to write what I really wanted to because the family was there. I wasn't even able to sneak an F in at the start of the last line. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader where I was going with this one:

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Happy Easter everyone!
 
Monday. It's actually hard to believe that we woke up just Friday up north. Almost immediately got the word that it was snowing up there. Down here, not so much. Got out of bed and hit the beach to watch the sunrise.

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Back to the house, breakfast, reading, then back to the beach for the mid-morning beach run. Just 1 castle today. Grimwald's Man Cave:

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Doesn't look that impressive, but it seemed ok in real life. Back to the house for lunch and I had to follow that with my ONE conference call of the week. That's not to say I won't work, because I will. But I am ok with that. I'm one of those people who doesn't like the work avalanche potential to get too large. So if you bleed off the pressure every 6-12 hours, it makes going back to work much less difficult and keeps your coworkers & clients happy. It's for the happiness of my future self.

I did go back to the beach after the call but not for long. We threw the football a bit (my arm is sore from yesterday) and then went for a walk. By the time we got back, everyone had gone back to the house. I was ok with going back since the tops of my feet are burnt to a crisp. I generally don't burn and have never had that issue before. This trip, for some reason, my feet have gotten blasted. So it goes.

Chocolate fondue tonight. After yesterday's 24 pounds of chocolate, that's exactly what we all need.

I don't miss the snow. Not even 1% of 1%.
 
Norm said:
Monday. It's actually hard to believe that we woke up just Friday up north. Almost immediately got the word that it was snowing up there. Down here, not so much. Got out of bed and hit the beach to watch the sunrise.

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Back to the house, breakfast, reading, then back to the beach for the mid-morning beach run. Just 1 castle today. Grimwald's Man Cave:

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Doesn't look that impressive, but it seemed ok in real life. Back to the house for lunch and I had to follow that with my ONE conference call of the week. That's not to say I won't work, because I will. But I am ok with that. I'm one of those people who doesn't like the work avalanche potential to get too large. So if you bleed off the pressure every 6-12 hours, it makes going back to work much less difficult and keeps your coworkers & clients happy. It's for the happiness of my future self.

I did go back to the beach after the call but not for long. We threw the football a bit (my arm is sore from yesterday) and then went for a walk. By the time we got back, everyone had gone back to the house. I was ok with going back since the tops of my feet are burnt to a crisp. I generally don't burn and have never had that issue before. This trip, for some reason, my feet have gotten blasted. So it goes.

Chocolate fondue tonight. After yesterday's 24 pounds of chocolate, that's exactly what we all need.

I don't miss the snow. Not even 1% of 1%.
Click to expand...

Did you guys see Space X launch?
 
Last day at the beach. Day 4 of eat-beach-pool-eat-beach-pool-eat. Just got done with dinner. But we can rewind to this morning, an attempt to appease @MissJR

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I printed out the full maze and it quickly became apparent that it was going to be 25' across. So we free-formed it and did this. Zac helped a little but soon got bored.

Then a quick one before lunch.

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Jumped into the ocean before & after lunch, and took a walk of ~2 miles, also before & after lunch. Tried for a minion this afternoon. It was passable, not great. Not many shadows in this, so it's hard to see all the lines. This one is probably a hair above my pay grade. Julia helped a bit with this one, which was nice.

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I guess he has winter riding gloves on.

I got burnt up pretty good today, which will serve as a great tan base for when we get home and get to ride outside in this nice warm weather. Good end to the solid 4 days of beach-bum town.

The next 2 days will be Universal. 2 parks in 2 days. We'll get up early and drive in the morning, park at the hotel, and shuttle over. We're staying up there the next 2 nights.
 
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Universal day 1

Shrek
Return of the Mummy
Transformers
Jimmy Fallon
Daigon Alley
Escape from Gringots
Fear Factor Show
Hogwarts Express
Both ways
Men in Black
Simpson’s Krustyland
Rockit Roller Coaster (D & the boys)

Now we’re all cooked.

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Talk about a small world @Norm ...was in one of my offices in the city today, and they were putting up a new.picture on the wall. I asked what of, and he said that he was in florida over the weekend and saw sand art in the shape of a roman structure, so he drew it.with charcoal.....chek it..

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Universal Day 2:

Spider-Man
Popeye’s Barge ride where we got drenched
Ripsaw Falls, more drenched
Jurassic River Adventure
Flight of Hippogriff
Harry Potter Firbidden Journey
Sinbad’s 8th Journey
Poseidon’s Fury
Hulk
Doctor Doom’s Fearfall
Hogwart’s Express
Return of the Mummy

And done!

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