Today was a busy day. I finally met a new neighbor. She is very sweet and could not wait to tell me her whole life story & show me all the pictures in our quick ten minute chat. I was rather impressed, and i liked her immediately. She then popped over again about ten minutes later to give me the Valentine’s Day cookies that she’d bought for the boys this week.
It’s nice to have neighborly neighbors. When we were first looking for our last house, we fell in love with the neighborhood before finding our home. We were impressed with all the kids outside and the layout of the neighborhood, but I kid you not, after living there for five & a half years, I was finally invited over to the house of a neighbor on the weekend before we were moving, but only to the back yard & garage—ya know, CoViD.
Aside from that, I’d met the kids of several of our neighbors, but none of their parents except in polite passing waves as either of us was driving down the street. We even made an attempt to introduce ourselves to our next door neighbors when they first moved in, but i don’t think i ever saw them again for more than a couple seconds. I had not a single phone number of a neighbor—except the now 17 year old girl who would help us with the dogs when we would go out of town & occasionally come over to play with the boys.
All that to say that it was really nice to have a neighbor stop by to give me her number and ask for mine.
Anyway, then to work. I worked with Micah some more on the poker app. I was actually pleased that while I still need practice to write similarly advanced code lines like those in the project, I nonetheless understood everything presented to me. I was even able to mildly help troubleshoot a couple items. But, yes, I was pleased that i understood what I was reading and the moves that he was making.
Then! At 130pm, i finally got to have my call with my former plant manager! We caught up a little, and I was happy to hear that they’ve been able to make some backfill hires and that in the end, they had a great production year.
Then we got to business. He was impressed with my enthusiasm and excitement for the project, and so despite my vague answers on cost & architecture (I’d intended for this to be a much more casual conversation to tell him who we are and not necessarily go over any project specifics—that was foolish of me), he agreed to accept a proposal from us. Yay! He tried to heal my excitement by suggesting that he was unsure if the other managers (my former boss & my former employee who is now a manager there and who I know hated this task) would share my excitement, but I recall conversations with both of them about wanting to automate this process, so I think they might have some hope for it. To start, we will keep the proposal small as a proof of concept to show our value. Hopefully from there it can pan out. I’m hopeful, and curbing my excitement for this opportunity is a real challenge.