Bill Roper's Journal

Today's big development: I got a haircut. I now officially look employable again. This is not so much a concern at the moment. Call me in a few weeks and we'll see. :)

But I had a couple of good phone calls this afternoon with friends, one of whom was a former co-worker.

And the garbage has gone out, because you've got to keep these things moving.

Tomorrow, I have my previously scheduled eye exam. I'm hoping we can get along with a dilation this trip, since both eyes have been dilated in January and the eye with the vitreous detachment was dilated and photographed again two weeks ago (so was the other eye, but no dilation there). In any case, this will get me another year of contact lenses ahead of any deadlines.

I *need* to file a Medicare application for me and Gretchen, but I can't do that until I get the form from Oracle, which they do not seem to plan to give me until April 10th, at which point my current health insurance will expire. I may have misread this, but it seems, well, bad. Non-optimal. Vaguely punitive.

But maybe I've misread the paperwork. I will be going over it again tomorrow along with my tax return, which still needs to be filed. After I check it again...

*sigh*

I dodged last year, but I have been caught in the latest wave of Oracle layoffs today. I am still waiting for information about severance and such.

The worst part of this is going to be arranging health insurance for the kids. I am trying to figure out what options are available. (COBRA, for a short while, at least, but that's a terrible choice overall.)

I did not *quite* make it to 44 years at this job. But that is the length of my career, as I am now (with high probability) retired.

I had work that I wanted to finish and I'm sorry that I won't get to do that.

You all want to hear the *funny* part?

Yesterday, I checked in the last changes that cut our calculation time on complex models by more than 50%.

Today, I am laid off.

My boss was saying that Michael Jordan ought to allowed to retire, resorting to a basketball analogy.

Instead, I hit the three-pointer with time expiring to win the game. And then got waived.

Ah, well. Time to set up the recording computer up here... :)

Today was our annual APBA baseball draft. This is an eight-team continuous ownership league, so there are a lot of very good players on the existing teams. We also have a cap on quality starting pitching, so there's a good big of jockeying for the starters available under the cap. This year, the cap was going to limit us to five or six starters.

I was drafting last, which means that the team was successful last year, a good thing. My starting lineup and bench were largely solid and hard to improve upon given what was available in the draft. My starting pitching was strong, but could always use some help. My bullpen had completely disintegrated, aided by Emmanuel Clase's foray into illegal collusion with sports betters, so it had to be completely rebuilt.

I would have liked to collect another outfielder, but the only one who really suited my needs, given that I have Juan Soto, Julio Rodriguez, Byron Buxton, and Ronald Acuna, was Roman Anthony. And he was available to me with the eighth pick of the draft, but I decided that I really needed Hunter Brown, a quality starter from the Astros, instead.

Roman Anthony was drafted with the next pick. I was not surprised.

It was now time to rebuild the bullpen, starting with a couple of strong relievers with control, Adrian Morejon and Randy Rodriguez. There was no great hurry to draft the rest of the bullpen, as there were a lot of similar relievers available, so on the fourth round, I collected catching prospect Samuel Basallo from the Orioles. He is not allowed to play this year due to limited at bats, but since I already have Moreno and Herrera at catch, that was not a problem.

In the fifth round, I drafted promising Brewers pitcher Jacob Misiorowski -- in this case, one pick before the fellow drafting after me was prepared to take him. Yay, me!

In the sixth round, I continued collecting Jacobs. No teams really needed a shortstop which meant that talented A's rookie Jacob Wilson had gone into freefall in the draft. I stopped that fall.

The seventh and eighth rounds added two more quality relievers, Bryan Abreu and Brad Keller.

In the ninth round, I picked up Sandy Alcantara as a pitching prospect, hoping that he is now completely recovered from his surgeries.

And for my final draft pick in the tenth round, I grabbed reliever Garrett Whitlock to finish rebuilding the pen.

With the exception of Jacob Wilson, this was what I will refer to as my "Duracell Draft", as there were nothing but the two sides of the battery, pitchers and catchers.

This was largely a draft which relied on going with the flow and seeing what came my way. Overall, I'm quite happy with it.

Now, let's see how the team does. :)

The itsy bitsy project that I was working on seems to be successful. More testing is required, of course, but the right things seem to be happening, which is good.

I have a whole bunch of projects that need to be completed tomorrow, because Sunday is the annual APBA baseball draft for our league.

Time to get to work!

Tomorrow is Cubs Opening Day and Gretchen is going to drop me off at the Skokie Swift so that I can reasonably get to the park since the Remote Parking won't be open for a weekday day game. Unfortunately, the Cubs have moved the Remote Parking lot this year so that it is over near Lake Shore Drive, which might benefit people who already have the option of taking the Red Line down to the park, but which is -- I suspect, as I haven't driven it yet -- going to be a lot more inconvenient for those of us coming from points northwest.

I guess I'll find out.

To add to tomorrow's entertainment, we got a notice from Public Works today that they are turning off our water for 6-8 hours starting at 8 AM tomorrow morning for work on a water main, followed by a boil order. This means that we are going to be getting up very early, while we still have water.

Pitchers (and catchers!) and such have been filled so that there will be some water available while I'm off watching the Cubs.

We had talked about making chili for dinner tomorrow, but -- all things considered -- ordering in Chinese is looking like a better bet. :)

Having spent most of yesterday working on work, I spent most of today working on different bits of work. :)

I am *still* going to Cubs Opening Day on Thursday, unless my knee (which is gradually improving) decides to become very, very bad. I am working to avoid this.

The Illini men's team has moved on to the Sweet Sixteen in the NCAA basketball tournament.

Let's see if they can go further.

(I am convinced that they could beat any team on any given night. There's also some danger that they could lose to any team on any given night. But there are fewer "any teams" left to lose to, as the competition is getting tougher.)

I learned some new things at work today, which is always good.

And today, the ginormous box that the new mattress came in went out with the recycling and is no longer decorating our living room. :)

We celebrated St. Patrick's Day by baking the corned beef that I picked up at Sam's Club this morning (on sale!). This is not the cheapest available corned beef, but I remember buying the Kroger brand corned beef one year at Mariano's and greatly regretting it. And it is a *lot* cheaper than the Vienna corned beef. :)

And I'm back from Thing. :)

I had a good time, had some good conversations, was in a couple of small, friendly filks, and got to meet Debbie's puppy. These are all good things for Thing.