Feb 26

 Did all the things yesterday. Was. Ehhh. Mostly ok.

Went for a walk with "all the girls" ( Poppy, Athena, Hazel ) through the woods, was nice, bumped into a lot of other pooches. Athena found a big mastiff type and they kinda of riffed off each other. Oh. You're kinda like me. A bit. Wanna box ? So they rough housed - gently - with each other. Athena is an old girl but still game.

Athena has a thing for cigarettes.

Pause.

Yeah. I don't know why. But for the longest time she has always ferreted out discarded butts.. and then promptly eaten them. Usually with howls at her to stop that, drop it, don't eat it. Which works 50% of the time. She does have very good drop skills - you can get her to drop something if you tell her properly. But cigarette butts. Ohhhh. There's a challenge.

She even ate a friends half pouch of tobacco once. Gobbled. Secretly. We only found out later when he went to make a roll up and had an empty spittle covered tobacco pouch.

I can only conclude she's a bit of a nicotine fiend. As her years have gone by, I've mostly curbed her need to do this. But. Yeah. Imperfect.

Make no mistake, its probably not good for her. I don't recommend it as a dietary addition to your mutts daily intake. I think I might have read its even mildly poisonous for them. But. Touch wood. It never actually seems to have hurt her. Big girl. Small amounts.

Cue yesterday. We sat down for a bit to allow Hazel a break for her beaten up ankles. Athena went round and round a patch of grass. Sniff, sniff, sniff sniff sniffffffffff.

Hmmmm. Then I spotted it. A very old, washed out, discarded cigarette butt.

No Athena.

Oh ok.

1 minute later, she started her sniff spiral. There is. Something. Really good smelling here.

No Athena.

Oh ok.

Repeat a few more times.

Hey butthole. No.

Oh ok.

I chatted with Hazel, gazed into the distance. Took my eye off Athena.

Gobble, gobble, munch.

Heyyy. No ! Drop it ! Don't eat... sigh... it. Gone.

Pleased with herself.

I called her a butthole and laughed.

Heheh. What is she like. She hasn't take any harm from it. But yeahhhh. I'd really rather she didn't eat goddamn cigarette butts. She must really like the smell of tobacco. For the record it's just her. No other dogs are interested. The running joke is that shes a smoker. Always looking for her ciggie fix. Heheh. Awright mate. Can I have a ciggie ?

My health waxed and waned whilst I was out. Hazel was very adept at spotting it. 

You ok ? 

Ehhh, yeah, I'm alright.

That did not sound confident.

Ehh, yeah, no.

It's really weird. I fade in and out. And at times... yikes. I was woken up last night, middle of the night... wow.. I .. feel.. ill. My heart fluttered. Is.. this it... Just. Lean into it.

I'm still here. So. It was not it. Seems to be getting... worse. Though.

One thing the ongoing fluctuations in health do, is take all the wind out of my sails.

Including anger.

I reflected on the last few days that it was pointless. I can see where my friend is coming from - he's in a super sensitive difficult position. This is not made easy at all by his continual denying. But in a perfect world, I should have picked up better that he was at a low state - although.. I am not sure how I could have done that ... and put on my best kid gloves with him. Wrapped him in a blanket. This is not something I've needed to do with him before. And. To all intents and purposes he doesn't need it. Allegedly. I think however, that's bullshit. I think it's a symptom of the underlying bullshit going on. A crack that has reached the surface. Step back. Bigger picture. Ah. Yes. Those emotional thresholds creeping down. The molehills that become mountains. Either that or hes a dickhead. I think its the former. With of course, the usual dose of the latter for someone who doesn't know how to behave and deal with their demons.

Put it like that. Eh. Ok. With all due loving respect. I have another nutcase on my hands. Engage nutcase protocols ( at least, to some extent ).

We all have our flaws. Those, are beginning to be the ever more evident ones that he has ( as well as a bunch of other stuff )

We all have flaws. Look at my flaws. How pretty they are. All sorts of fucked up, nihilistic shit. Self destructive. Over self critical. Problems with accepting positivity aimed at me. Over thinking. Self critical perfectionism. Shit at enforcing my boundaries. The not gladly suffering of fools. Which I have done my best to work on. But. Sometimes. I still don't suffer them that well. "I do not blow smoke up peoples asses" I was told this week. Neither do I tell people lies I was told. But I have learned to often shut my mouth.

Anywho. Sanguine about it today. And in any case. I am not sure I want to be a therapist to my friend. Or could be. Or even if he could get that place himself anyway. He doesn't need a yacht. Or a plane. Or a new car. He needs a therapist. Stat. And not me.

I did some work yesterday, made some progress, but not as much as I thought. Ughh. For the technical minded I am crafting.. lovely - truly lovely - stuff in... Vue. Which is javascript. But fancy. Professionally, I made a strategic architectural decision to give Vue a shot, eh, 2, 3 years ago ? I had already given it a go with a project and having got my hands dirty with it, it seemed like a very good tech for a variety of biz reasons, and just plain outright tech reasons - having previously gone through a whole slew of other techs in the same arena. So. Business. Strategy. Going forwards. Integrating vue into our work process. Slowly. Over time. No big bang change. Green field development should be Vue. With a .NET Core ( or if you can keep up with the fucking marketing naming bullshit, just .NET at this point ) backend.

And it's been a real good decision. It's a very nicely designed piece of front end stuff. It leans into OO methodologies nicely, something that, whilst javascript is OO, it very often doesn't deliver on, because, really, at it's heart, it just wants to script shit out old school procedural style. What this does. Technically. Architecturally. Is give you a lot more scalability. It starts to properly nudge you into decent enterprise strength sanity. Instead of ever more unwieldy crazy piece of horse shit that you typically get from javascript once you get into the hardcore. Arguably combine it with typescript - which is just javascript.. but with a pre compilation step and much improved data typing - , and you should have, in theory, something pretty damn good enterprise scalability wise. Shocking.

But uhh. I digress. Techically. Sorry if that was just all jargon.

Upshot. Vue. It's good. Capable. Nice. If you wanna do modern web based computery stuff. Go learn Vue. Fuck angular. Fuck React. ( although Angular also isn't terrible.. but it got worse.. as it got bigger .. in fact Vue was born of Angular getting strangled on its own bullshit ). Of course to truly make Vue sing you need to pair it with a backend flavour. Take your pick. Node if you're being minimal cost, on trend. Some python implementation if you're some kind of fucking idiot child. Java/.NET Core if you're more corp old school. But that's a whole other can of ball worms box.

From a biz point of view, this is an ongoing - interesting - demanding challenging. Picking the wheat from the chaff, giving promising technologies a shot ( define promising versus oooh new fad, quick lets get this piece of utter bullshit cos my friend said so ), running a project or two or three with them, and pondering the impacts to business. Resourcing. Maintenance costs. Development time. Anticipated length of life. ROI. Ugh. It's very tricky, particularly when you consider the companies or whoever fronting such new things, like any salesmen, are keen to just sell you the newest snakeoil. You have to put up significant bullshit filters. And this goes for the big boys. Microsoft are notorious for doing the biggest of ra ra parades for something they really like, want to promote and are super dead keen, gun at your head in a technical sense, for you to use. Only to then dump it 36 months later with a shrug of their shoulders, an immense budget burn for all your lost time, and a glint in their eye about this next thing though will be terrific. Uh huh. Sure buddy. Let me grab my bullshit sunglasses. If you're super bored / interested, go google some rage from developers about Silverlight. Fucking with peoples careers. Wasn't the first time. By a longggg shot. Hasn't been the last time. Ha. Sigh. Meh.

Positives.

I'm ok today. I need to rest. Despite catching 11 hours of sleep. More. Rest. Required. So. Not much to do today apart from dropping off a new laptop for someone and attending dinner.

Restttttt.