2025 Weeknote 34 : KABOOM… like a SpaceX rocket on the launch pad

August 18 – 24

My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work, but with personal stuff, too. Learn more about weeknotes.

What a week. Some successful liftoffs overshadowed by a rapid disassembly.

Personal weeknotes

Okay, personal weeknotes are first this week because man… family stuff dominated my thinking and took up a lot of time, too.

• Last week I noted the work I and the rest of the nuclear family had been doing to move my parents from Ohio to Tennessee, getting into a (very nice) assisted living facility. We moved some furniture, boxes, clothing, and so forth. We set it up in the new apartment. Everything was ready. Except my father. For reasons too complex to get into here (and because it’s not really my story to tell), my father freaked out and bolted back to Ohio after staying a single night in the new apartment, during which he feared being locked in (residents can come and go anytime they like), hated the activities, and gathered complaints from other residents to justify his actions, and didn’t sleep a wink. (He also feared their dementia care for my mother would involve strait jackets and powerful drug injections, which is flat-out insane.) So he left, took Mom with him, and returned to their house in Ohio that had already been cleared-out of their TV, one of their couches, a lot of clothing, and other stuff. They’ve been back in Ohio ever since, and only today (Sunday, a week after the move) did he even speak to any of us kids. Now he’s talking about buying me a bigger house so he can come live with me. Yikes. As one might imagine, this has occupied just about all my time and mental head space outside of work. And it’s messing with my siblings as well. We’re baffled, angry, sad, and worried all at the same time.
• Aside from the psycho-drama of the assisted living / dementia situation, as a practical matter I had to make the trip back from Tennessee on Monday and it was an ordeal. I encountered traffic jams in every city and even between the cities. I remember the Interstate Highway System being a remarkable infrastructure achievement in my youth. But today the country has about 115 million more people than it did in 1980, and it shows.
• We’re now just about 30 days away from our trip to Northern California, and given everything happening above, I cannot wait. I keep tweaking my backpack plans (which are a dry run for the Camino de Santiago in 2026), landing most recently on combining a 25-liter backpack and a 9-liter sling / waist pack.
• Amidst all the other chaos, I got a new glasses prescription this week, now that the post-cataract laser work has more or less settled down. I’m hoping everything comes in before the trip out west.
• Oh! And during the drive back to Ohio on Monday, I stopped off at the Buc-ee’s in western Kentucky and it was absolute chaos around lunchtime. The gas was a great price, the massive bathroom was clean, and the snacks were legendary. And yes, they had Deer Corn at this location, so there’s that. This was my second Buc-ee’s location visit. I used to drive by them in Texas years ago when I went down there for project work, but never actually stopped at one. Now that they’re a cultural phenomenon, I’m always curious to see the circus.

Professional weeknotes

• For the first time, I participated in an interview from my car on a long-distance road trip. That was interesting. I got off the highway, found a place to park under a tree (to stay cool), joined the Teams call with a strong 5G connection, and yeah… it worked. I’m not a fan of remote interviews, but in this case it wasn’t for someone under me, so my participation was less crucial.
• Meanwhile… we are still trying to figure out how to attack the ADA situation. My colleague Sarah and I are now on the hook to develop a proposal for county leadership that combines staffing, consulting, tooling, and an overall program that includes remediation and capacity-building. And we have to build this while doing our normal jobs.
• This week saw our third Recognition Awards program, where we hand out mission patches (in the form of stickers) to teams that have accomplished projects with notable impact. In this case it was for the first half of 2025. We’ll have another session over the winter for the second half of 2025. Delighted to see how this has evolved. We brought out the whole organization (about 100 people) and even added an “ice cream social” component.
• And then on Friday we had the GX Foundry’s Season 10 Finale event, where the GX teams gather to share their work from the past 8 weeks. It was another nice collection of accomplishments, with more coming, of course. I always mean to do a post about it over the GX Foundry site, but time is always slipping away. (Maybe I can work with our new Communications person to work this up into something for each of the 6 times per year we do this.)
• Finally, with a tip-off from folks one state to the east, I’m thinking more about the “squad” model popularized by Spotify, but also used in the professional services agency world. The idea is to vertically align autonomous teams around clients/products, but then have a horizontal layer focused on skills/professions within the teams, like product ownership, design, and engineering. Our team is not huge, so we can’t cover every possible professional role in our overall team. But we’re big enough to break out into a short list of squads. More research, thinking, and modeling to do. You know, while everything else is going on.

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