As i was coming out to write, Alexa gave me my reminder to give Brusly (brew-ly) her medicine, and that’s what got me for a moment. I’ve been pretty composed all day about it. Emotionally-off, which is a defensive mechanism I’ve noticed I have when it comes to death or being terribly sad; I just kind of turn off my emotions like it’s not even happening. Probably not the healthiest thing, but that’s how i manage.
We freed Brusly this evening. She was a good dog.
I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much ready for this year to be done with. The second year in my life I’ve ever felt this way about—the first being 2016 when everything was bad from losing good friends, from being pregnant and then not, from the Great Flood of 2016 where people suffered tremendously, from getting a terrible boss who made me want to leave the job i loved, and from leaving my twenties but that one is superficial.
What sucks about 2020, is that while it has overall been a travesty of a year, a lot of really good things have happened too. I got to spend a lot of time with my family—both my parents & sister as well as my boys, I was able to focus on my career & what it’s future would be, I left a company i really respected on the best of possible terms, the stock market soared, Rex now communicates, Leo now walks, and we are contracted into the purchase of a new home, which we couldn’t be more excited about.
But in 2020, a lot was hard. Obviously CoViD is a thing that has the world almost at a stand still. People have suffered tremendously again this year, as have businesses. I was pregnant and then I was not—that one was harder than the one in 2016. Shortly after, our dog was diagnosed with Lymphoma and given three months to live. Shortly after that and almost simultaneously my little brother & his wife ended up in the nicu with their newborn baby in a nightmare that just won’t end and similarly, my husband’s brother & his wife lost a late term pregnancy with on-going issues in another nightmare that just won’t end. Then today, our dog died.
It’s been a year; that’s for sure. A short, but long rough year.
As for my task; well I got stuck today pulling in the jar. What I’d done yesterday, while it worked, didn’t make any sense to me today. I needed to be pulling in the jar file & using it to start the server while implementing it’s classes in my new app. While IntelliJ, which by the way, I’m starting to really dislike in the essence that while it makes things way easier for the seasoned developer, it causes a new developer to rely on it so much that he/she may not really understand the subtle things being executed with option-enter. Then when something doesn’t go as you thought it would, you have no idea how to fix it or make it work. At this point, I may advise a new developer (like me) to stay clear of intelliJ until he/she really understands the commands being performed. Food for thought i guess.
Oh, i was saying, IntelliJ sees & recognized the java classes I’m calling and happily puts it in my code only to then tell me it cannot compile and it has no idea what these classes are. wtf?!!!! And you know, you’d think there’d be documentation on how to do these types of things, but there’s really not a lot of good information out there because everyone relies on the internet totally relies on the tools that have been made for them to make their jobs easy that they don’t understand what they are actually doing!!!!
As the world gets easier to operate and manipulate, we get dumber and forget how things actually work. I recall when i first started my first job, i was trained as a board operator within a month of being there. Being a board operator is not a hard job because the alarms and interlocks prevent you from making any catastrophic environmental or human-safety mistakes, but they also cause the operator to not need to know how things work. That when you change the parameter in a column, you could be upsetting the quality and losing great amounts of energy efficiency. That when you start up a pump without checking that the suction & discharge valve are open that you could destroy the equipment. And no, duct tape is neither a safe nor smart solution to stopping a chemical leak and I’m not glad that you stopped it in that way!
No doubt, it is harder to learn how things work, but to do so makes things a lot easier later—especially when no one any longer actually knows how things work.
A wise man once told me as I was distilling water for my mother using a pressure cooker, a cup, aluminum foil, & ice, that “You become very powerful when you know how the world works”.