Bill Roper's Journal

I decided late last week that trying to go to any of the Reds vs. Cubs games this week would be a fool's errand. This meant that I could work on other things today rather than planning to get to the ballpark early. Earlier than *usual*, in fact, because the Cubs moved up the start time of the game from 6:40 to 6:10 to try to avoid the incoming rain.

You will not be surprised to learn that the game is currently (6:30 PM) being delayed by the rain which seems to have arrived rather earlier than anticipated. My father, the meteorologist, would have been amused, I'm sure. I need to see what my wife, the meteorologist, thinks about this when I head downstairs in a few minutes.

In the meantime, I took K out to Red Robin for lunch today, because she has been craving their steak fries for a while. When I got home, I started working on cleaning off my desk -- you may remember this project from a month or more ago -- so that I could find Gretchen's marriage license for her marriage to Doug, which we had to retrieve from the County Clerk a while back for a project that is *still* not completed, but which it was required for. It was discovered finally and has been united with *our* marriage license so that we have all (I hope) of the necessary paperwork to take to the Social Security office tomorrow and beg for mercy.

The problem is that none of us have *any* functional medical insurance at this point in time. We have applied for Medicare, but that is not yet active. We can pay for COBRA (which we will end up doing for the kids), but that will not actually *cover* anything useful for Gretchen and me, because we are eligible for Medicare, even though we do not yet have it.

The decision to manage the COBRA this way is a particularly venal one by Oracle management.

Which circle of hell do the traitors get consigned to?

I have decided to make my previous post private.

But it felt *really* good to write it.

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 made a few more improvements to last week's project at work today. It is now ready to go off for testing.

I have figured out how much money I need to move to cover the taxes that are due April 1st and April 15th. It is a stupid amount of money, assisted by a visit to the emergency vet along with a bunch of other things. Happily, I have the stupid amount of money available, but owing taxes and estimated tax payments is a big swing from expecting a refund of around the same amount. We'll manage.

And I have found a second error in my not-yet-filed tax return that needs to be corrected and have notified the accountant, so I will be waiting for the next revision to show up. Correcting the first error sent my Federal taxes down; the second error will send my Illinois taxes up.

Tomorrow, I get to get up annoyingly early for a follow up visit with my urologist after last year's lithotripsy. Sadly, the X-ray on Friday suggests that the festivities may not be quite complete, but we'll see what they have to say.

Whee!

The bug list having cleared, I've embarked on a small side project at work. It's already had one useful result, which I've checked into the code base which will eventually get merged and shipped. Now, I'm going to use that useful result to see if I can make the side project work in a short period of time, like a couple of days.

Naturally, a new bug came in during the middle of this, but I fixed it and dispatched it back to the reporter, so I hope to be able to continue on that side project tomorrow. :)

I spent a lot of time over the weekend working on getting bugs fixed for our upcoming release. More time than I really should have, but -- on the other hand -- I am taking Thursday off to go to Cubs Opening Day, so I suppose these things average out.

I need to pick up the guitar. I have two song prompts sitting waiting to be used, but they require a bit of time and nurturing. Work is sucking up the creativity right now.

But that will change. :)

I made a good amount of progress at work today (some of it at 2 AM). We'll see if we can keep that up tomorrow. :)

In other news of progress, Gretchen saw a different branch of the eye specialist that she went to about the cataract surgery. It looks like they can prescribe some contact lenses that will provide a massive correction for her keratoconus, which will be a *very* good thing.

This doesn't mean that she doesn't need cataract surgery. It just means that she might end up with two eyes that are working well.

I dropped K off to catch her bus back to college -- once the bus came to the correct stop. It went to the one that they went to *last* semester. *sigh* But the offspring was eventually successfully dispatched.

I'm assuming that they got there. I haven't heard otherwise...

I came home, did two loads of laundry, and finished looking at the APBA cards for the upcoming draft.

Tomorrow, it will be back to work.

And I think I get to work on something new and interesting. We'll see. :)

I've merged the reference counting changes to our code so that we can build it for testing. There will be a brief shakedown cruise, but I think we'll end up with things being much more stable once we finish this up.

The treadmill left for its new home today and the library looks a good bit less crowded. This is good.

In keeping with the theme of moving things, today at work was largely spent rearranging things so that I could combine two classes into one. I think that's done and I can move on to the next bit of this project tomorrow.

Yay, me!