Coffee Share 180706

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

This is a Weekly Coffee Share update.
Our get-together is hosted by: Eclectic Alli.

Here’s the link for last week.

Here’s the link for this week.

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Coffee Club Summary: 

• • • I finished my 5th week post-op and am still healing well.  Physical therapy continues and a new therapist added some new exercises that looked simple but were not.  She was good enough to tell me that the the therapy for this therapy is a good long nap.  All is forgiven. . .
      
    • Then there’s the latest on my war with nature.  One more gopher tried his skills at pressing the innocent looking plate and was thus dispatched from ever annoying any yard owner ever again.  They are getting harder to find and soon I may be able to hang up the traps for the season. 
    • If you read my coffee share from last week, you saw the first version of  “Jacquie’s Story.”  I shared it with a few others and it was well enough received that I decided to promote it to a permanent essay and part of my growing collection.  Sharing it with that set of readers was pretty successful.  Several of you let me know that it carried an important message.  If you’ve not reviewed it, you may do so from this link.
      
    • One of my existing stories is about a well-known rock quarry in the town I was born and raised in. There was some lively discussion this week about what the name of that quarry was when the event took place. I think we nailed it down and a good friend even found a circa 1954 photo of the entrance to the quarry that looked very much as it did about 12 years later when my story took place. I’ve added both to the on-line essay. If you’d enjoy a story of a young boy almost dying – but all but completely unaware of it, you might enjoy 10 minutes with The Rock Quarry Adventure.
    • I’m beginning to miss work.  Not much mind you, because the stress level often exceeds my preferences any more.  During my leave for this surgery, one of my peers, a good friend and part of the same team decided to throw in the towel and resigned.  This caused something of a scramble to cover the work and, of course, I’m still off limits which makes it more difficult for my manager to manager because my company won’t let her directly back-fill me and has a long process for hiring a replacement for him.  It gnaws at me to not be part of solving this problem.

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Greetings.  It is too hot for coffee right now.  It was okay earlier, like around 6am.  I’m ready to serve any number of chilled refreshments, including a few bottles of good Irish Guinness. My son brought a few bottles home the other night – and he’s not here to defend them. . .

It’s going to be another hot (for me) day at the southwestern corner of the California, Sonoma County Wine region. Google is predicting 82 (Fahrenheit) with 62% humidity. North of our county, there is a raging fire. It is not threatening us directly, but the winds bring us lots of smoke and thus a lot of breathing problems to those sensitive to dirty airborne stuff.

My wife is off work this week because her college has cancelled classes for the 4th of July Holiday week so we’re kicking back enjoying the down time, which for us means lots of book-reading.

The 4th of July holiday itself turned out to be a pretty cloudy day. Our city does not allow fireworks at all, but the big fire two counties north of us produced enough smoke to make us sit still most of the day. Still relaxing, but not very exciting.

I’m hoping to add one more story to my collection this weekend and keep up with the prescribed exercises my therapist has given me and perhaps get one short road trip in before the end of the weekend.

I am (sorta) looking forward to helping a team I’ve stood up at work for a quarterly project I’ve been producing for my company each quarter for the past 10 years. It’s popular, but not uniformly adopted, but this year, I have a new VP sponsoring the work and I’m very keen on keeping him happy, so I’m going to covertly assist my new-ish team in producing the report. By myself, it takes 2-3 long days of work sitting in front of the computer and I have some folks willing to do most of the task themselves which would help me solve being a single point of failure for this effort each quarter. It has consumers from our largest customers around the globe so, it is important enough to not allow a single point of failure to exist.  So I’m going to sneak out from medical leave for a few hours of a couple of days in 2 weeks.

Life is otherwise quiet, strangely quiet.  I wonder what is about to break, burst or embarrass.  I look forward to reading your coffee posts and enjoying the photographs that I know several of you will post.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend and next week.

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