Tag Archives: life

family

Remembering Loafy

Loafy
Loafy, June 2021

It’s probably sad to say that a cat is your best friend. But, for better or worse, Loafy was my best friend. He’d been through a few different family members before I agreed to take him when I bought my first home late in 2009. I didn’t realize the blessing I was about to receive.

I’ve had a few cats that have had a lot of personality and Loafy was definitely one of them. When he was younger he used to tear up and down the length of my house chirping, for lack of a better word. He would come running from anywhere when he heard me open a can of food or a bag of treats. And like Mugsy he just seemed to know my mood, especially when I was down and would always try to cheer me up.

Because he’d gone through several homes I wasn’t always exactly sure when his birthday was. I was pretty sure it was in 2004 but was told June and March at different times. Regardless, last year he celebrated his 19th birthday. During the pandemic I had almost lost him. He started losing a ton of weight and being extremely tired. I found out he had hyperthyroidism and knowing that he hated pills or anything of the sort, and being blessed with resources, I decided to get him radiation treatment.

I was terrified. The only other time he’d been in surgery of any sort he’d had a really bad reaction to the anesthesia. Plus being so frail I was convinced I was about to lose him. Thankfully he pulled through, although I do think I annoyed the vets with how often I called to check on him. Unfortunately through the sickness and everything else he’d lost his hearing but other than that he was in pretty good shape for a teenage cat. Plus he now had a new quirk where he didn’t realize how loud he was and would scream. It used to drive me nuts. I’d give anything for it now.

Just before Christmas he started to be very tired and lose weight again. I knew something was up. I took him to the vet multiple times and they’d treated him for cold like symptoms. His kidneys had started to go a few years ago but had stabilized at stage 2 as I adjusted his diet. But just after I got back from visiting my family for Christmas he’d started to get real bad. They had done bloodwork only a few months before but I got him retested and that’s when they told me it’d progressed to stage 4 and he probably had a few weeks left at best.

I was devastated. I had prayed and begged God or the Universe or anyone that would listen for him to go peacefully in his sleep when his time came. But now I knew I’d have to once again make that difficult call all pet caretakers dread. His last weekend was the most difficult. I knew I wanted to use my vet but they were only open half days on Saturday and closed on Sunday. On Friday he was doing really bad but he rallied on Saturday and stayed stable until Monday morning.

But Monday I could tell it was time. He could barely hold himself up. He had lost all interest in food or treats. It was just time, as much as I didn’t want it to be. Life is cruel in making us choose to have our family put down, even if it may be a kindness in saving them from suffering.

It was January 22, 2024 and I had lost my best friend. Now it’s been just over 7 months and while I’m still so thankful that I got him in my Life and for so long, I do miss him so much.

The one consolation is back when Loafy was around 9 I decided he needed a buddy. So I had gotten a kitten named Grizzly. He’s about to celebrate his 11th birthday on Halloween and we both miss our best friend. Neither of us is as close to each other as we were to Loafy, but at least we still have each other.

Loafy and Grizzly
Loafy and Grizzly, January 2021
life

Be not afraid

Be not afraid to…
…live your life on your own morals.
…let others live their life on theirs, so long as they do not harm others.
…be alone.
…share your heart.
…show compassion and empathy.
…speak your mind.
…let others speak theirs and, more importantly, to listen when they do.
…make decisions that scare you and force you to grow.
…forgive yourself, most especially when you don’t think you can or should.
…show your love to those you care about, openly and earnestly.
…pick someone up when they are down.
…let someone else pick you up.
…help when you can, how you can, with no expectation beyond the recipient paying it forward – if they so choose to.
…be yourself and, as a result, keep only those around that accept you.
…live, love, embrace and share joy, laugh, and burn fiercely in your passion, because we never know when the ride will end but it will always be before we are ready.
life

On Guilt

I haven’t posted in a long time. I’m going to try posting interesting essays / thoughts I find in my “On This Day” on Facebook. We’ll see how well they do and/or how long I bother.

With no further ado, on guilt:

Guilt is a powerful emotion. It’s a form of self evaluation in which we introspectively criticize ourselves for past actions. Guilt is interesting in that it’s self applied. While others can influence our movement towards in inherently we must assign it to ourselves for it to have meaning.

So what is the meaning of Guilt? It’s a learning tool. When we feel Guilty about something mainly it’s because we feel that a past action was not handled in a way which we are proud of. We feel that we could have done something more or different and changed the course that we’re on now. It’s Potential – we feel Guilt because we surmise that by changing that action we’d be on a better course than we are now or a better person for doing more – even if it didn’t change the eventual outcome.

The main problem with Guilt is that although it is a learning mechanism it is also potentially crippling. It’s hard to release Guilt, hard to move past it. That same Guilt which we should learn from can cloud future Decisions and cascade into further Guilt.

So how do we handle Guilt? We don’t shy from it – we learn from it. We don’t let drive us – we let it guide us. We forgive ourselves – even if we don’t want to. Even if it’s seemingly impossible. Because in the end though we can learn and though we can made different Decisions in the future we can’t change the Past – it’s inherently immutable. The longer we hold Guilt the more powerful and damaging it becomes. As disheartening as it is we must remember that we are not perfect – for if we were, what a boring would it would be. Our mistakes, follies, misjudgments and failings make this World someplace that’s worth residing it. It’s the payment we must make, Guilt, sometimes for being imperfect.

In the end Forgiving ourselves might be our greatest act of Charity.

life

Doesn’t anyone just need a UI Developer anymore?

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So in light of the fact that I maybe be unemployed soon due to circumstances beyond my control I’ve started to reacquaint myself with the job market and the jobs that I might be qualified for.  It’s been an interesting experience to say the least.  Unfortunately, there seems to be two prevailing job types:

  • Marketing position – involves either designing e-mail campaigns include HTML e-mails, which are not fun at all, or some sort of SEO / social networking skills to drive traffic to the site.
  • Jack of all trades – involves 7+ years experience in design (Adobe Suite), front end (XHTML & CSS), middleware (PHP, Java, Ruby, etc) and MySql.  Basically able to design web applications from the ground up.

So, I don’t know.  Maybe I’m looking with the wrong terms or in the wrong places?  Doesn’t anyone just need a good UI developer nowadays?  I mean I have excellent XHTML and CSS skills.  I can design for cross browser compatibility.  I can quickly turn design flats / mocks / comps into UI code.  I’m learning quickly when it comes to design skills (Adobe Suite) and I have a Commercial Arts background – granted it was in high school but I studied art and drew art by hand for 4 years.  I’m willing and eager to take on the design part of the UI – something I haven’t been able to do in my previous positions.  I have some Javascript – including Prototype and jQuery – skills and would be interested in eager to take on more with regards to the UI aspect of these (effects, etc) although not really the parts that go more into middleware (form handling, etc).  I have some middleware capabilities as they pertain to the UI – logic checks, loops, role checks, variable insertion, etc in Ruby, ColdFusion and PHP – as well as experience building on the WordPress framework in PHP.  I have experience in SEO including crafting with web standards and internal linking strategy to maximize organic SEO as well as instructing a user base on social networking strategies to grow inbound links.  Finally, I have experience working with and educating a large user base as well as identifying usability issues for that user base in future design features.

So, being a realist, I have to assume the deficiency is with me.  However, I’ve worked for two separate professional organizations and both needed someone that was only a subset of what I’m looking to take on.  So is there no middle ground?  Can you only do the icing or the whole cake?  I hope not.

The main issue lies in that to be a good UI developer you have to focus on the changing field.  New browsers are released every year and updates are made.  You have to be aware of what bugs exist in major browsers – especially Microsoft ones – and understand quickly how to fix the rendering issues in those.  You also have it identify web trends (web 2.0 design, AJAX integration, etc) and include them in beautiful and usable designs. By broadening focus too much – to middleware or backend development – you lose the ability to do that.  I realize you don’t want to be too specialized but I feel crafting a beautiful design, coding it with web standards and cross browser capability in mind, and inserting any jQuery effects that add to it is a pretty big slice of the pie, so to speak.

Also, design and UI work is more artistic versus middleware / backend which is much more logical and analytical.  So it’s very difficult to be of those two minds.  I just feel expanding the focus to that is going to dilute the whole output.  Finally, it really is of no interest to me to design controllers or write queries so I feel my output would not be as useful or good as something I’m passionate about like the front end.

So I don’t know what the answer is.  But I’m discouraged moving forward.  It does make me wish I had taken more time to grow my freelance portfolio as this would be the perfect time to make that jump and see if I could make it on that.  Unfortunately, it’s just not an option.

Advice or insight welcome.