What happened in 2019?
I like to do year-in-review posts every year or after specific milestones, like changing jobs or having big projects finish.
So, if 2018 was a triumph, 2019 was its hangover.
Family
Both my parents are still alive, and are ornery as ever.
Throughout most of 2019, our relationship with our son was estranged, most acutely when we flew up to Kentucky in May to see him graduate Franklin County High School when he refused to see us before, during, or after graduation.
This year we found a Lyme specialist for W, M, and G, requiring 4 total trips to Louisiana, roughly 720 miles round-trip through East Texas backroads and past Fort Polk in Louisiana. We hope both girls will be in remission by June next year.
January through May were very hard; I’ll leave it at that. The end of 2018 showed incredible promise; this year was cold and hard.
We did execute a 2-week vacation to Estes Park, Colorado, which was wonderful. Whitney found us a spacious cabin to rent, and despite the July 4th “heat,” we often had to turn the heat on each night to stay warm. Rocky Mountain National Park is a treasure, and we’re planning to return next summer. In particular, Whitney and Grace found a love for fly-fishing our last few days there and want to explore further.
Maria spent her second season in Volleyball this September and October, and Grace continues to ride at her stables each week.
As the year closed, Joey renewed his relationship with us, having joined the Army in August and reported to Advanced Infantry Training later in the Fall. He’s due for his first duty station in 1Q next year, and he spend Christmas with us, so that was a blessing.
Work
I changed teams, but I’m still at Amazon. I was working for Amazon Business, but now I’m working in Digital, Device, and Alexa Support. Basically, if you use any Amazon Digital App, my team provides your help experience.
I made this change in July. Really, I’d wanted to move in January after returning from Kentucky, but I held-out in hopes of a promotion that never came. I was assured it would, but after the second round of “It’s all but a sure thing,” I got off the train. Also, my skip-level manager, the VP of Tech, and the VP of the org left. Having been through similar things at Lexmark, I didn’t want to hang around for the inevitable re-org. People get awfully creative during re-orgs.
In the intervening 6 months, there was a big project that went nowhere and our team doing really amazing work getting our Ops house in order, culminating with our website going full continuous deployment (CD).
I also got to go to Madrid for a week, my first trip to Spain, and my first time in Europe since going to UBS in 2006. It was an exhausting trip. I got to visit the Prado museum and walk about 10 miles a day (yes, really). The Plazas (“PLAT-zuhs”) are really vibrant, and going in April meant great weather for walking.
Transitioning to the new team has been both easy and hard. Usually every team has a self-appointed jerk. This team does not have one, and has been very welcoming. I struggle with what my place is, though, because I don’t exactly fit. I’m not a mobile developer or embedded developer, though my web-dev skills came in very handy during my first project, which launched right after Thanksgiving.
Health
No surgeries in 2019, unlike 2018, where I had a cataract replaced in my right eye.
My vision deteriorated noticeably, and I now sport “invisiline” bi-focal glasses, which has close-in vision possible once-again. My dominant eye wandered over to my right eye last year, but seems firmly in my left again after a prescription adjustment. Guess all that cognitive development in my brain for decades has to win-out.
I have no regular exercise regimen, and my weight has hovered between 260-275 pounds, easily 60+ pounds overweight.
I did have a spectacular neck sprain in May requiring ongoing physical therapy through June. It seems to have resolved itself, likely related to repetitive stress.
Cars
We entered the year owning a 2018 Honda Civic and a 2009 Toyota Sienna. We exited with the same Civic (plus some upgrades!) and a 2016 Lexus GX460.
The Sienna was a perfect family truckster, but since the move to Texas, it’s required ~$2000 in repairs each year to keep on the road: Steering rack/CV boots, full new suspension, etc. Finally in May, we got a transmission growl that the dealer said required a transmission replacement. With these 700+ mile Louisiana trips and a pending 2000 mile trek to Colorado, something new(er) seemed appropriate.
After some trips to Carmax, we settled that a GX460 was the perfect vehicle, and their rock-like depreciation and terrific suspension made them ideal for both our finances and long trips.
For the trip to Colorado, I purchased a StowAway2 cargo box and hitch mount for the GX’s receiver hitch, and a rooftop Thule cargo bag. The StowAway was the real star, holding most of our luggage, since we needed 2 of the fold-up back-seats for Maria’s bring-along friend.
Thus far, the GX has cost $0 to maintain, as we got it L/Certified from Lexus of San Antonio.
The Civic spent most of the year doing yeoman duty back-and-forth to work. By year’s end, I had over 31,000 miles on it, and I started getting the itch to do some mods. From Father’s Day forward, I started asking for car parts for the car, and worked with Maria to install them. Here’s what we did this year:
- LED interior lights
- LED trunk and license plate lights
- Smoked-grey turn signals
- AEM “Cold Air” intake w/cone filter
- Garmin 66W Dashcam, with a full hard-wire into the fuse-box.
The AEM install deserves its own blog entry. Suffice it to say, modern engines don’t like vacuum leaks.
I’ve restarted doing my own oil-changes for the Civic, starting to use the Amazon Basics 0w20 Full Synthetic after a fairly compelling result from Project Farm on Youtube.
House
We stayed in the same house through all of 2019. Lord willing, we’ll be into a new one by next year.
Basically, we bought this house in expectation that Joey would be living with us. He’s now 18, and that didn’t happen, so we’re saddled with a 2-story house on a tiny plot of land, and we’d like to reverse that. We’re currently looking east of Georgetown, Texas at 1-story houses with under 2500 square feet on over 2 acres of land. Few houses meet that criteria.
We MAY be buying land and building a house from scratch. Who knows?
Politics
I gave up on any sort of rational resolution to the political problems facing our nation. We’re barreling towards “Last Reason of Kings” territory. As a historian, this makes me sad, but seems inevitable.
Tech
As the year closes, I finally took ownership of this blog away from Google.
I’m writing this on a 34" monitor, running 3440x1440 resolution. I’m still using the same 2015 13" Macbook Pro I’ve had since joining Amazon, with 16 GB of memory and a 500 GB SSD. I’ve switch from an Amazon Basics mouse to a Kensignton Trackball (wired). I still run everything through a CalDigit Thunderbolt 2 dock, and I’m running MacOS Mojave as an OS. I’m still typing using a CODE keyboard with Cherry MX Clear switches, and it’s as satisfying as when I got it 5 years ago.
Last year, I made 244 total commits, comprising 35,272 lines added and 8,417 lines removed. I made zero commits on Saturdays or Sundays.
Primarily I’m writing in Java, but I do lots of work in JavaScript, JSP, and CSS.
I use IntelliJ for most Java-related tasks, but I write these entries using Atom.
I’m using more AWS stuff every day. This year I learned about:
- Kafka
- Kinesis
- Lambda / Serverless
- API Gateway
- CloudAuth