2025 Weeknote 25 : Let’s not do that again

June 16 – June 22

My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, typically focused on work. Learn more about weeknotes here.

My weeknotes are very tactical this week. A lot happened in this crazy week.

There aren’t a lot of work or professional insights here as the week mostly revolved around family and medical stuff, with days off and other stuff mixed in. It was weird.

But if you’re a completionist and you just gotta know what happened, be my guest! I should have more professional stuff next week, as the upcoming week is the final week in the current GX Foundry “season.”

• Mon, 6/16
  • I took the day off work at the last minute, to help out with a medical emergency.
  • After getting a request from my father Sunday evening, I drove up to Toledo first thing Monday and spent the day and the night at the hospital where my mother was getting treatment and testing following her latest vascular dementia-related stroke the prior week. This is emotionally exhausting work and it robs you of sleep, too. But my father needed a break after 3 days at the hospital with little to no sleep. I provided updates to the rest of the family throughout the day and night.
• Tue, 6/17
  • I was still in the hospital in Toledo this morning, keeping tabs on the shift changes of nursing staff, talking with the occasional doctor, and texting updates to family. My father returned mid-morning and I was able to leave around 11 or so to head home. So it was 24 hours in the hospital without a break, which… yeah… that happens sometimes when family is in trouble, but it is hard.
  • My mother was actually permitted to move out of a hospital room to an acute rehabilitation room, and made the move in the early afternoon. But she was resistant and my father couldn’t countenance keeping her at the hospital, so… he signed her out and took her home, shocking everyone. To this day I wonder whether I might have convinced him to let her go through the rehab program to regain strength and have consistent medical care available. Everyone was disappointed and concerned.
  • I made it back home in the early afternoon, showered, napped briefly, and caught up on some work before getting 12+ hours of sleep.
• Wed, 6/18
  • I headed to the office for a “normal” work day, with a series of 1:1 meetings, an exec meeting, and a team meeting.
  • I then headed to a local restaurant / bar for a going-away party for our outgoing CISO, for a couple hours.
  • Finally, I headed to the Columbus Clippers game, since I’d had tickets for months. I took 3 colleagues with me. But we got rained out around the 4th inning, which was a bummer, but I was fine with getting an earlier-than-expected chance to get to bed.
  • Amidst all of the above, I kept tabs on the medical situation in Toledo along with family.
• Thu, 6/19
  • This was an official holiday—Juneteenth—and I was thankful to have it in this particular week. I needed the day off to catch my breath.
  • I wrote and shared a brief blog post about Juneteenth, partly to share my thoughts, partly as a sort of “meditation” in the middle of all the other chaos.
  • I kept tabs on the medical situation in Toledo today, mostly by checking in with my brother, who made the trip from Louisville to Toledo to help out.
  • In the afternoon my wife and I drove 2.5 hours over to Fort Wayne, Indiana, taking the dog with us as well. We had tickets to see stand up comedian Kyle Kinane at a comedy club there, so we drove over, got a hotel room, went to the show, and stayed overnight. The show was pretty good, but it was marred by a couple who were high on something (my wife surmised it was cocaine) and were disrupting the comics a bit. Too bad the club—who had all kinds of rules you had to agree to—didn’t take action to remove them.
  • We stayed overnight in Fort Wayne.
• Fri, 6/20
  • I took today off work so we could go see my parents after the Fort Wayne event on Thursday night. Plus, so many people were taking today off anyway, it didn’t make sense to rush back to work.
  • We got up and drove from Fort Wayne to Toledo this morning, to join my brother, his wife, my father, and my mother, just a week after the original mini-stroke that hospitalized my mother.
  • The house was… not great. I took it upon myself to clean up some cat urine in the carpet that had gone un-treated (my parents are old and their noses don’t work like they used to), and we simply spent time with family.
  • After my parents went to bed, us “kids” got together at the local hotel we were staying in (we’ve all sworn off staying in our parents’ house) to talk about the situation and figure out what to do next. This included dialing in my sister from a few states away. She’s making her visit next week.
• Sat, 6/21
  • We got up, checked out of the hotel, and went to my parents’ house again. My brother and his wife left around 10am, heading back to Kentucky, and we stuck around a bit longer, leaving around 11am or so to head back to Columbus. I helped my father buy a new computer (!) in the middle of all this, since his old PC can’t run Windows 11 and he was concerned about it. I’ll have to setup that computer next weekend.
  • We drove home, and just crashed. The cat hadn’t seen us in 2 days so he was freaked out (but had plenty of food and water, so he was fine physically).
  • To distract ourselves from the current mess and focus on the future, my wife and I talked about bit about the Camino next year, but more specifically about arranging a 4-day test hiking trip this fall to confirm (a) we can do day-after-day long hikes, (b) we actually like it, and (c) we have the right gear.
• Sun, 6/22
  • My wife and I finalized plans to head to California this September, to do a 4-day hike up the coast from Half Moon Bay to San Francisco, walking 40 miles over 4 days. This is our “test hike” to confirm our gear is dialed in, confirm we can do it, and confirm we really, really want to do 170+ miles in Portugal and Spain next year.
  • I learned just how much bird seed costs when we went to a local store to refill our stock for the bird feeders we’ve setup outside. That was a shock. Maybe the birds can go somewhere else! That or they need to start paying.
  • We exchanged more messages with family about the medical situation in Toledo. We’re trying to figure out how to get my father to give up his job—he’s still working full-time at 87 years old—and move to a mixed assisted living / acute memory care facility, ideally near one of the three kids. He wouldn’t even entertain the idea a year ago, or even 6 months ago. But now it’s clear that something must be done. So we’re all starting to research facilities in our areas and figure out where Dad wants to end up with Mom.
  • For the most part this was a slow day, with a few chores and a lot of time spent just spacing out, trying to get ahead of the week coming up (which will also be a bit chaotic, just not to the same degree).

I’m just hoping the week coming up, despite having several non-work appointments, will stay under control. Except for the excessive heat, of course.

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About this week’s header photo