Today is our 15 year wedding anniversary. I got the wife a stuffed baboon decked out with crystal earrings and a gold paper clip bracelet. I don’t know what to say other than that I love this woman, I love being married to her, and I love the institution of marriage in general. When we got married all that time ago in Las Vegas I thought that I was embarking on an exciting new chapter in the book of my life. Since then, and over the years, I come to realize that I don’t like this metaphor anymore. My life is not sequential chapters, and I’ve discarded the idea of my life as a book. The life I have now is perfect for me. It’s certainly more than I could have ever imagined. This is where I am now and forever. No more chapters to be written. There will certainly be more ups and downs throughout our lives but with the wife beside me these will all just be events to deal with and to overcome. I’m very conscious of the fact that she works so hard in all aspects of her life. I try to work hard too to give back to her as much as I take. I never take the state of our relationship for granted. In this since I’m always trying to “date” her, like I’m always trying to better myself to make myself more attractive to her, in hopes that she would marry me all over again.

Yesterday I woke up Jack at 5AM and took him to the bus for his wrestling meet in Chatham. Then the wife and I went over there at 9AM and sat on cramped, hard plastic bleachers for 5 hours to watch four simultaneous matches in a gym. Wrestling seems to have lost it’s luster especially now that baseball is around the corner. That is Jack’s passion, sport-wise, and mine as well. He’s not going to go track this year. Normally his mother and I would be all over him to do some sporting event like this for the spring. But he matter-of-factly stated that he doesn’t like track, he’s not going to do it, he’s going to do another activity (scholastic bowl) in it’s place, and he will work out at the gym every night to stay in shape. He’s still just 13 years old but seems very confident in these choices. He sounds like he’s at the age of reason where he can make choices like this for himself. I remember being around this age and being so stubborn. If there was something I didn’t want to do, I would not do it, end of story. I wouldn’t give some drawn-out explanation or reason or excuse. I just would refuse. This is why I have to laugh when I hear experts talk about “how to get high schoolers to do X, Y or Z.” Like, “how do we get high schoolers more interested in math?” And then there’s lots of discussion from experts about how to implement this idea. And then it gets introduced to the schools. And then teachers have to teach it and they get judged and graded on how well the high school kids learn it. And if the teachers don’t teach it successfully the get passed around to other schools or demoted. And then the school ends up on a state watch list. All of this because kids are stubborn; I don’t want to learn this damn math when I’m in high school and there’s nothing teachers can do to make me learn it or be interested in it. Lol. It’s sad that some much hubris is created and so many adults lives are affected just because teenagers have their own agenda. I don’t know. I know that teachers and educators have a job and a mission to educate children, using whatever methods are available. They can’t just give up on kids. I just hope their mindful that sometimes it’s not a failure of the teachers. Sometimes teenagers are just stubborn arseholes.

Today is also the Super Bowl. I guess I’m rooting for the Chiefs because they’re the closest team to me. And Kansas City is a cool place. Everyone else is rooting for Taylor Swift lol.

There’s been so much work at my job to ensure the Super Bowl video is a trouble-free as possible. There are quiet periods around the Super Bowl to ensure that no network activity is going on that may disrupt the game. There is more activity this year than previous years, for this event. But live sports are our bread-and-butter. As more live sports go to streaming I’m left wondering – how do I still have a job? When I started this job 16 years ago I thought it would last 5 years then I’d move on to something else. But I’m still employed today. I’ve been prepping for the day my job ends ever since my job began. I’m always trying to improve my skillset. I’ve gotten an MBA which I haven’t used because my current job is so awesome. We’ve got zero debt except our mortgage, and even that is an enviable ONE POINT EIGHT FRICKIN’ FIVE interest rate. We’ve got the six month emergency savings. We have everything in place for the (maybe) inevitable day when my awesome job ends. And I have to accept this. In order for new awesome jobs to be easily created, you have to allow for old awesome jobs to be easily destroyed. This is creative destruction, an essential part of capitalism. I don’t want to lose my job because it has great health insurance, which is crazy expensive to purchase on the open market. And I’m also 48 or 49 years old, which means I’m OLD; The main skill I have to offer to another company at this age is wisdom and experience, which probably means I would have to be some sort of people-leader if I wanted to make the same salary I make now. And I don’t identify as a good leader or boss. My dream is to last at least another 15-20 years at my job and retire. That’s the best outcome.

I had a good visit with my friend John on Friday. He had mentioned that he thought both his wife and himself were losing their jobs. I was personally worried for them and wanted to see what the situation was. But I was also curious to see if this was part of a larger layoff trend going around. Since I don’t go out and talk much to real actual people, talking to John was my closest barometer of what the employment weather was like. I was pleased to hear that he wasn’t losing his job. He thought he might be in jeopardy but only because of some weird backstory going on, which is why I like John. He is hilarious. He and I are a lot alike in our interests. He is really the only one of my friends where we can sit and talk for hours about work and interests and above-the-board stuff like that. My other friends, we talk about more grounded real-life personal stuff. Which is cool, but I like to talk to John about crazy stuff. I was telling him how I have all these hobbies and interests and was hoping that they all converge at some point in the future, like everything will coalesce into some uber-hobby that maybe even makes some money! But we both agreed that, living in the rural area we do, our hobbies will probably be nothing more than amateur pursuits. John is also cool because he and I are sort of in the same salary range, so I can talk to him about my hobbies and goings-on without feeling conscious about my lifestyle. I know this is kind of a crappy, classist way to look at friendships (and life). But it’s there, especially since I’m acutely aware of status symbols and conspicuous consumption and class structure. Maybe someday I’ll lose my job, the wife will lose her job, and we will all be back at square one. This doesn’t bother me so much, going back to a less prosperous lifestyle. What scares me is the very idea of being ok with being broke, of losing ambition for doing bigger and better things.  Ambition is free, I keep forgetting that. No one can take it away from me. But I’m afraid of ambition being beaten into the ground by a crappy job. But a crappy job has always enhanced my ambition. These jobs have always focused my ambitions and goals with a laser-like precision. 

Emma had her senior night for the dance team on Friday night. Soon she will be out of school and the wife and I will see where she can get a job. After our summer cruise I will do the paperwork for her to change her last name to match the rest of us. Too much hassle to modify her passport now. Also, our July trip has morphed from a San Diego focused trip to a more reasonable LA trip. This is better, because we’re going to be flying into LAX anyway and picking up the Toro rental there. If we stayed at our original AirBNB then we would be in the VAN for an hour or more just to go anywhere. So now we have a house in Anaheim. Our San Diego excursion will probably only be a trip to the zoo and Padres game on July 30. Luckily we will be way closer to Universal Studios and Disneyland. Ted will be us. Matt might be with us. Laina might be with us. It is turning out to be an awesome experience all around. 

I’ve been 3D printing like crazy lately. I got my Prusaguitar done and assembled. I put some pictures and videos up on Facebook to show what I’ve made. My real motive for putting stuff on FB is for people to see it and associate 3D Printing with Me. And who knows, maybe is someone needs something printed they will think of me first. I did this same thing a couple of years ago when I made a post about Bitcoin. Then when I went to a gas station to play with their Bitcoin/Crypto ATM the attendant there talked about “someone in town who was really good with Bitcoin.” I’m sure she was talking about me, unless there’s someone else more successful than I in this town of 6,500 people. I doubt it. It was also the case when I had my computer repair business. I liked to work on computers but more importantly I wanted to establish myself as a knowledgable computer person to all these customers I was networking with. And then maybe that would lead to getting a job offer, and out of the job I absolutely hated at the time. Maybe this is why my Dad always had some side-hustle going on, whether it was making moccasins, selling night crawlers, creating bizarre methods to track lotto numbers…he was looking for some way to get out of his job and make money elsewhere.