Make Your Bed and Don't Ring the Bell

I am really, really sad, and no it doesn't have anything to do with election day. It is still 3pm local time as I'm writing this, and polls aren't closed on the east coast even yet. I'm mourning some things. I began reading, well, listening to, Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking. I'm not too far in, but I'm assuming it recounts the year of her life after the death of her beloved husband. In it I recognize my own grief and that I too am in mourning.

I'm in mourning for a life that I never really had, though. I'm in mourning for the way things might have been. The best friend I might have had. The perfect marriage I might be enjoying. The purposeful job that would make me spring from my bed. Joan Didion had a husband she loved, a sort of shred career she loved, a child who lost her father. Lots to mourn. Ashes she could bury. Memories she would savor the rest of her life. I have memories I want to erase.

I will not be mourning for the person I was, though I would take a whole lot of joy in cremating and burying him. I hate that person. Maybe that is why I have so much shame. Because even as I loathed that person I continued to let him live inside of me. Why do I have this hatred of who I was only last week? I'm not sure I even came upon the realization until the past couple days, but I am finding out why now. That former me lived with no core values.

Core beliefs and core values. "Core" means they are at the heart of something; they are at the heart of our thoughts and behaviors. A video we watched in IOP described our core beliefs as the lens through which we see the world. If you see the world as a generally safe place, you will greet the stranger walking toward you on an empty street. If you see the world as a dangerous place, you may cross the street. Core beliefs aren't necessarily positive. I see myself as an intelligent and compassionate person. I also believe myself to be a lying, selfish, perfectionist imposter who has a ton of God-given talent and yet makes no positive impact on the world. Core beliefs can be pretty rough.

Then yesterday in IOP we began an examination of our core values. Now, core values are generally positive, but it doesn't mean we always live up to our own values. Our therapist played the following video for us. You may have seen it as it is from 2014 and made quite a stir for a bit. https://youtu.be/yaQZFhrW0fU I'd love for you to take the time now to watch it if you have the time. It's about twenty minutes long. Please check it out later if you haven't time now and haven't already seen it.

I had heard about the speech before and had always meant to go watch it just on the line "Make Your Bed". Jen always insists on making the bed. I hardly ever did it if left to my devices, though I understood the lesson. Take care of the little things. Then worry about the bigger things. Plus it being the first task of the day, it gets the ball rolling on the rest of the day. I feel like the author of Atomic Habits must have talked about the speech. I'll come back to Atomic Habits at some point. What I wasn't ready for were the other nine lessons in the speech.

The second lesson is to find someone to help you paddle. I guess it really shouldn't be summarized as find someONE to help you paddle. You need a team. This world is too much for just two people in a boat. You need a team. I hadn't put together a team to help me. 

There are a couple lessons in there about overcoming failure with determination that reminded me of No Mud, No Lotus and embracing suffering. I wonder if Buddhists make it through SEAL training at a greater rate than other religions. I wonder if any Buddhists actually go to SEAL training. Thought: Do Buddhists make the best warriors? I can still make myself laugh even now.

The sixth lesson is about taking risks to achieve something meaningful. I am not generally a risk-taker. Sober me isn't anyway. Like I said, I believe I need to be perfect; therefore, I don't extend myself like I believe I should. I don't put my neck too much on the line. I try to avoid getting anyone upset with me. So I hide. I do not let people get in touch with the real me in case they do not like the real me too much. I hide my thoughts and actions that others might get upset about. Thus a perfectionist, lying, phony. And at this point watching the video I feel like this speaker is taking dead aim at me.

Seventh lesson - deal with the sharks and don't run away from them. (By the way, my brother and I just watched a segment on sharks. They don't circle you. You won't know a shark is there until you are being attacked. Then punch it in the nose!) If you all only knew how much the shark imagery reverberated with me. "He is speaking to me!" I might have been wearing my shark socks or boxers! (I was wearing duck boxers, but still...) I wish I had dealt with the sharks at Nordstrom better. I let them run me off. Would it have been worth being fired over rather than laid off? I don't know. I feel bad for the good people left though out there swimming as the sharks circle...

Eighth lesson - Be your best at the darkest moments. At this point in group therapy I have tears starting. Also realize I am in a room of 20 and 30 - somethings. Men my age with my problems don't go to group therapy unless it is court-ordered. (Btw, mine is NOT. I'm just weird.) Many, many men with my problems don't make it to be my age or just give in to the bottle and divorce and drugs. Anyway, so now this naval officer is admonishing me that I need to be my best at the darkest times, and all I can think of is how when things got bad I gave up. That old me did not have any sort of personal values that kept him going for him.

Ninth - the power of hope and singing when you are up to your neck in mud. I have to admit that even now I have very, very little hope of anything. I honestly cannot let myself look too far ahead. I am trying to deal with the right here and now. If I were looking ahead I would not be publishing these thoughts to a public forum. I do not have a job yet and who wants a perfectionist, lying phony? My only choice is going to be to run for public office at some point. I am right up to my fucking neck in mud and it is hours and hours before dawn. And the only songs that come to my mind are the horribly sad songs.

And when he got to the last lesson: Never, ever ring the bell, I fucking lost it and left the room. We talk today about being triggered and on one side of society's ideological fence it gets a ton of importance and on the other side talk of people being triggered is dismissed with words like "snowflake". I understand now being triggered. I don't remember much about my suicide attempt, but the images I do have in my head are horrifying. Like being in an actual horror movie that you cannot escape from. At the same time, I have learned some skills to cope with emotional distress. Go to the rest room, do some deep breathing, throw some cold water on your face. We don't need "safe spaces for snowflakes"; we need to teach our young people coping skills. But still today I have had that line in my head all day, "Never, ever ring the bell." 

Never, ever ring that fucking bell. Stick to your values, and Do Not Give Up! I am begging you: Whatever it is that you are thinking about, if it is important to you, do not give up on it.

Trying to Sleep in a Muddy Foxhole

I went to bed last night wishing I could just get in a time machine and go back several weeks. That's progress. For the preceding three weeks I either didn't sleep or went to sleep hoping I wouldn't wake up in the morning. Right now I know it will be difficult for me to sleep tonight. I am feeling an awful lot like I hope I don't wake up in the morning right now. I am also trying to remain mindful, though, to focus on this very moment and each successive moment and not worry about either the future or the past.

I am reading No Mud, No Lotus by Thich Nhat Hanh. He was a Buddhist monk. I highly recommend reading anything by him. The premise of this book is embracing suffering, as that leads to happiness. Just as a lotus cannot grow on a marble slab, we need mud in our lives, ie. suffering, in order to experience happiness. The key is mindfulness, being in touch with this very moment and examining it without judgement. What we are learning in my Intensive Outpaitent program is very similar - being mindful, examining how we feel without judgement. I plan on writing more about mindfulness in the next few days.

I had told my therapist before that Alcoholics Anonymous is not my kind of religion, but as the saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes. And, brother, there are bullets whizzing by me in the form of cravings for alcohol. So tonight was my second night in a row of AA. If you want to stop drinking, it's a great place to start. For my alcoholic friends who kicked it without the help of AA, I would also encourage you to attend at least one meeting. You may find there is someone there like me who really could be inspired by you and your story. It helped me yesterday and tonight to hear people's stories, to see people, young and old, a lot like me, relatively normal folk who just have no mastery over alcohol. It also hurts me a bit to see people getting their six-month chips knowing I had done almost seven months before I blew it all up. Those people were all on day 5 at one time though too. I have been on day five Lord knows how many times! One day at a time. One moment at a time.

Check on Your Managers! We are Not Okay!

In dealing with my current issues I have had to turn to my social support system, the friends and family who love me and care about me. I can barely get out of bed in the morning let alone schedule doctor's appointments and job interviews and get myself to therapy. I've been really encouraged, though, by the people who have reached out, and I want to turn a sad story into a success story.

As I think I this support system what stands out is how much I have isolated myself over the past several years. It certainly is no coincidence that this corresponds to the Covid pandemic and working from home. However, I think it began even earlier when I moved into a management role. I feel like the manager role can intrinsically be a lonely one if measures are not taken. As I said in an earlier post, I believe the measures are there in work I have already done in therapy and in DBT, but they can be easily forgotten if not regularly practiced. I intend to write more here about those DBT skills and how they relate to work in order to do my own practice of them and maybe to help some others out there.

I was thinking on how I have not made new friends in several years. When I was out drinking and carousing with my engineering peers, it was easier to get past my own social anxiety, have fun, and make friends. Some of those friendships even stuck. When I moved into a management role, though, I certainly was not going to do any carousing, and I really limited how much drinking I would do, already knowing my propensity to overindulge at times. I did not want anyone I supported to see me inebriated. It became even more difficult when I gave up drinking as I could not get past the social anxiety enough to open up to people. 

Now I know all other managers out there are not depressive alcoholics with severe social anxiety, but I do believe that in that manager role you have fewer work peers and those peers you do have are incredibly busy. I think back on the halcyon days of playing foosball or ping-pong at work! Now, no one has that kind of time anymore even when we were still all in the office. I regret now not reaching out to my manager peers at Nordstrom socially more.

I will also say, it was nice, especially in an environment where I was getting no feedback back from my boss, to hear from someone I was supporting as a manager, "Hey, I know it can be a rough job, but I think you're doing a great job." My team and those people I worked with every day - those are the people who knew what kind of job I did and that feedback was very motivating, inspiring. 

So, today's lesson is if your manager is doing a good job, let them know it. It can otherwise be a very thankless job at times. Despite the provocative title, your manager is probably really okay but will appreciate it nonetheless.

Seen Better Days

**** Trigger Warning for Suicidal Ideation ****

I'm back. It's been a bit of a long layoff for me from writing. I want to dive right back in, and I really want to make better use of my blogs and hopefully get to some interesting things, but for the moment, I need to get this out of the way so that you all have some context of where I am.

When we last talked I was probably still gainfully employed by Nordstrom. Apparently more for my gain than for theirs because I was let go the day after Florida got clobbered with Hurricane Ian. I think that maybe I will expand on that a bit further later. In fact, I believe I already have something written out that I was waiting to post. Technically, my last day is November first, and I would rather not jeopardize the last few days I have on the payroll.

So, being in a hurricane (okay, technically it was just a tropical storm at that point when it passed directly over Cape Canaveral with its 60mph+ sustained winds) was one of the least exciting things to happen in the past month. I created a little tempest of my very own. Looking back now I can say that I lost track of the things that are really important and forgot a lot of the therapy that had helped me so much over the previous two years. I only saw myself.

I would love to apologize to each and every person that I know and especially the ones I have hurt. Having a major depressive disorder and being an alcoholic are not things that people should need to apologize for any more than people getting cancer. However, even people with cancer can, and do, make hurtful decisions to others and for those decisions I consciously and willfully made that hurt others, I will apologize for and make amends.

First of all, I am safe now. As safe as anyone else who needs to drive the streets and highways of the Denver metro area. Secondly, I had another suicide attempt. I won't go into details now. Was it serious? I didn't hurl myself in front of a train, but I wanted to die. I was frustrated at just how difficult it was. I was also very, very drunk.

There was a jug of wine in our outside refrigerator that had been there for a very long time. Several years I think. I had been eyeing it. I knew, I knew, I knew, that if I tapped into that in the time that I did with Jen out of town and feeling the way that I did about my life, there would be a very good chance that I would not come out of it alive. And then I poured myself a drink from it.

To be frank, I wanted people at Nordstrom who had made the decision to let me go to hurt. That's why I did what I did. There are other factors that made me not happy with life, primarily generalized depression. I want to apologize to those people at Nordstrom, but again, I'm not going to apologize for being sick. There were things before that I wish had gone different and I apologize for not speaking up about that. I hope, though, that there is some sort of impression that I left with them and with my friends in the Thrive ERG that can help make a difference in the lives of Nordstrom employees who suffer from mental health issues. Erik Nordstrom, if you are reading (because that's what CEO's do. They read personal blogs all day.), please help lead the charge on improving the mental health of your employees!

I'm not living at home. Jen needs her space to sort through being hurt by me, by those conscious decisions I made as well as those depression made for me, as do I for myself to get better. My brother has been awesome in hosting me and in balancing my need to get out and be engaged in life and work as well as letting me convalesce.

I'm in an outpatient treatment for mental/behavioral health now. I've been through this three times already, and my very first night of this go-round I was just amazed at all the stuff that I had learned previously but had neglected to continue practicing. Like going to the gym for our physical health (something I need to start doing again!), we need to be practicing and exercising our mental health on a regular basis.

I'm writing this on Wednesday 10/26, and I am probably going to save publishing it until Monday 10/31 or Tuesday 11/1. I have an interview that I did with Amazon Web Services and the decision is set to be made next Monday. I would not want this post to affect that either way. And I suppose if I wait until 11/1 then Nordstrom can't let me go for cause either. It's sort of shitty that I have to hold my tongue on the internet for those reasons, but this is the age we live in.

--- Writing again later ---

I got too close to a good friend and ended up ruining that friendship and endangering my marriage. People have asked why. The truth is I don't know. I don't have a good answer for Jen nor anyone else. The only other thing that I want to say on the subject is that I miss my friend, very much, but I know she wants the best for me. What is best for me right now is to concentrate on my marriage. I also want to apologize for breaking my promise to her that I wouldn't hurt myself while she was out of the country. What can I say? I'm a liar.

I've hurt Jen too many times. She deserves better. She deserves someone who always puts her first and then her boys. I haven't done that. Of course I want the best for her, and I thought I could give that. But I have been selfish. I put myself ahead of her and at times put my job ahead of her. And I am so, so sorry for that. I hope she will want to keep me in her life forever. 

I did not get the AWS job. I am okay with that. It was not the right job for me, though I did all I could given the circumstances to come away with that job offer. I have several better things in the works. One of them is going to find out that I am the perfect fit for them.  

There are better days ahead. 

Kanban, an Interlude

I was interviewing a candidate from a large, well-known online retailer yesterday, and we were discussing the development process he uses in his current job. Like most candidates I speak with, his organization uses a form of Scrumbut. "Scrum, but we sometimes the sprints are two weeks long and sometimes they are four. Or "Scrum, but we use developer days instead of points." Or, most egregious of all, "Scrum, but we don't do retrospectives." (That constitutes a blog post all its own.) At Nordstrom we do Scrum but don't have dedicated ScrumMasters. I think that is becoming more and more typical (Also a topic for another post.) and has been this particular candidate's experience as well.

I asked about Kanban. "Oh, we tried that when I first started. It didn't really catch on." Why did he think that was? "I'm not really sure. People just didn't see the value in it." Were there WIP limits (limits to the amount of work in progress)? He didn't think so. So, no. Were there explicit policies that defined when tasks moved from one status to another? Not explicit ones. Then it was really no wonder they got no value from the kanban process. That's not to pick on this big e-tailer either. One of my own teams at Nordstrom is facing that same challenge, and it isn't something one changes overnight.

I have seen at least several interesting origin stories of kanban from the Imperial Gardens in Tokyo to a visit to a PigglyWiggly in the United States. Most everyone agrees, though, that its use as a form of development practice began with developing automobiles at Toyota in the 1950's. As line workers reached the end of their parts inventory, they sent a bin to a backroom along with a card signaling just what part and how many were needed for the worker to keep a sustainable pace of work. Two foundational pieces of kanban as a software development process were born then: that kanban is a "pull process" where the worker is pulling just what they need rather than having parts pushed to them, and that the work is limited to just what the worker can accomplish. In doing so, Toyota eliminated waste associated with a worker having too much of one part and not enough of another, workers waiting around for needed parts, and workers spending too much time restocking unneeded parts.

A key principle of Agile software development is promoting a sustainable work pace. Limiting the amount of work coming into the pipeline to only the amount of work that can be worked on at any given time is optimal. I could go into an explanation of Little's Law here, but anyone who has been in a traffic jam with seemingly no reason other than the sheer volume of cars on the highway knows that by forcing even more cars onto the highway people are not going to get anywhere sooner. Unfortunately many businesses feel like things will go faster if they just add more cars so long as those cars are all laying on their horns. "But THIS one is HIGH priority!" Or the dreaded, "What if we added more people?" Yes, because what would really help this evening commute to move along is to bring in the dump trucks, excavators, and graders to begin adding lanes at this very moment.

A WIP limit in kanban is meant to allow just as many cars onto the highway as the highway can currently support. Without it, we just end up with traffic jams of in-progress items. It also limits a developer's context switching. It's been shown that switching between even similar tasks is wasteful. Switching contexts for a developer not only means getting in the right frame of mind to tackle an issue, but perhaps even switching IDE's, logging into various tools, perhaps even switching machines. Developers sometimes containerize complete work environments in Docker for the purpose of making switching contexts easier. We know that even small changes though are extremely wasteful. Limit the developers to working on one item, perhaps two at most, and a good deal of that waste is eliminated.

Then there are the explicit policies of how work flows through the system. These process policies are key to eliminating waste around confusion as to what should be worked on when. Going back to our traffic analogy: Imagine driving along roads with no traffic signals and no street signs. You will hopefully still get to where you are going, but needing to stop and assess the intentions of others at every single intersection will make the journey much more hazardous and take much longer. Kanban, being an Agile process, doesn't prescribe the rules of how work flows through, but allows for the development team to do this themselves. What kanban does say, however, is that the rules of the road must be explicit and transparent to the team. It does the team no good if someone needs to clarify the meaning of some policy in order to move work along just as it makes no sense for us as drivers to need to look up the meaning of different colored traffic lights each time we come to an intersection.

It is also important that each team decides for itself the policies that work best for the work they are doing and their interactions with each other. Agile practices acknowledge that each team is more or less different in what they work on and how they work. I believe that particularly as we move to doing more remote collaboration, make these policies explicit and visible to the team becomes more important as does allowing the team to tailor the policies to the way they wish to work.

Kanban can be a real benefit to development teams, but just as driving a car entails much more than just knowing that one pedal makes you go and the other makes you stop, there is much more to the kanban practice than simply a kanban board.

Ireland, Rewind to the Fecking Beginning

FUDGE! Only I don't mean fudge. I mean THE Word. The queen mother of dirty words... That's not really a bad way to start a post on Ireland as it is a fairly common word in the Irish vocabulary -- The real dirty word I mean, not "fudge". However, I didn't intend on scaring away those with sensitive ears right off the bat. The thing is, though, I lost my little notebook that I carried around hundreds  of miles around the Emerald Isle taking notes of the things we did that day and little observations. That's part of the reason that I am so late in getting around to finally writing more about Ireland than just the adventure that we had in getting back. Procrastination due to anxiety, stress, and depression play into it too. I'm clawing my way back to some normalcy just by starting on this. A friend sent me a quote about just getting started and then everything falls into place or some such thing. The quote's around here somewhere; I just can't find it at the moment.

Anyway, I figure I can piece together what we actually did each day based on the photos that I have and that my mom and Jen took. (My mother was a photo taking MACHINE... which i guess would make her a camera. Hm.) I will probably lose some of the little observations that I had written down, though what is going to stick with me are the little memories that I still have stuck with me. Maybe those will do. Or maybe the photos will evoke some little thoughts as well. I'm not sure. There were just little things, like thinking it was sort of funny how Trinity College had sweatshirts the sort that fans would wear to a football game. Maybe fans do stop in the university bookstore to buy some apparel before rugby matches or quidditch tournaments or whatever they play on a Saturday afternoon.

So I know that we landed in Dublin. Yeah, that much I am certain of.. but I need to rewind. Our flight from Orlando to Washington Dulles was delayed by almost an hour. We ate dinner at MCO. I had a hazy IPA, which was my first alcoholic drink in 171 days. I need to write a completely separate post on drinking during this vacation. It's a complicated feeling, even now after we are done and back home. Then I had a Sam Adams Hazy IPA NA (non-alcoholic), which was really pretty good. Less hoppy than the IPA I had just had (sorry, I didn't take notes on what brewery that first one was from).

Okay, so the flight from Orlando to Dulles was fairly uneventful. I don't remember what I did on the flight and don't have my scuzzy little notebook. Do people still use the word "scuzzy"? The plane got  to the gate in Dulles, though just as the flight from Dulles to Dublin was supposed to be taking off. They held that flight, though, as there were apparently enough of us trying to make that connection. Besides myself, Jen, Mom, and Mike, there was another couple that was in our group coming from Cape Canaveral. Plus I think there were three or four others. Also, I had Usain Bolt's brother pushing my wheelchair. I've never gotten through an airport so quickly. So thankfully we all made the flight to Ireland, plus Jen had worked it that we had a ton of extra leg room, you know, for my booted leg and all. (If you are just joining us, I made either the courageous or insane decision to have lapiplasty done to correct the bunion on my right foot a couple months before leaving for Ireland. The initial surgery got pushed out due to me getting Covid over the holidays, so at this point I was just six weeks out from surgery and had just been put into a walking boot rather than a full cast. I was still on crutches, though.)

I do remember what I did on the flight from the U.S. to Ireland. I slept. However, I really didn't even sleep all that much because the in-air entertainment had the show "What We Do in the Shadows". I honestly don't know what prompted me to decide to watch it. I think the one beer in Orlando must have gone to my head because I was laughing out loud at this ridiculous vampire comedy. Laughing out loud with headphones in on a full plane. I believe I binged the full season. And haven't watched another episode since.

I really thought that being away from work and doing a lot of travelling from place to place would afford me a lot of time to get caught up on all the reading that I've been meaning to do. If you plan on following my series of blog posts regarding this trip, notice just how often I mention reading a book. Compare this with the number of times I mention watching rugby or playing video games on my tablet or staring vacantly out a window. Compare the number of books I mention finishing to the number of bookstores I stop in and number of books I mention buying!

Anyway, we made it to Dublin without the plane crashing or even losing an engine. All the way across the Atlantic Ocean with zero engine failures. Tied a record.

Ireland, Arseways

This is going to be my first blog post of probably a number of them about our Ireland trip. I am doing this in a backwards fashion I suppose because I am starting off with how we got back home, which was its own adventure. It isn't exactly an adventure in the Robert Louis Stevenson novel kind of way, so this comes with no warranty on just how adventurous or entertaining you, dear reader, might find it. As always, I write these blog posts primarily to remind myself of what occurred in the past as my memory begins to play tricks on me and secondarily to amuse my mother and my wife. Hopefully there are enough little tidbits of information or amusement to satisfy the rest of you.

I should also add that I began this post on March 21st and then wrote the rest over the next week or so. It hasn't really been edited for consistency. You'll have to put up with that as well, but I believe in you, reader; you'll manage.

We got back from Ireland late last night. I have a lot of catching up to do, and not just with my writing here. There is so much to catch up on at work! I got through last week's emails just now. Honestly I can barely keep my eyes open at the moment. I think I may need to continue this tomorrow. Maybe I can see just how much of yesterday's travels I can get down here.

We started off by waking up at like 4:45 AM Dublin time. That is UTC time. Here in Florida we are on UTC -4 right now. So, that would have been 12:45AM here. Got the bus in front of the hotel at 5:30 AM and were at the airport just before 6. We were trying to make the same flight as Mom and Mike that was leaving around 9:30 AM I think. That one was through Newark. We were banking on people not making because of Covid, and I think that some people didn't but the flight was way oversold and there was a long standby list. So, we didn't make the flight. The thing is, there is a US Customs pre-approval in Dublin. You go through regular airport security, and then you wait to go through another security line to go through U.S. Customs on that side. That way you don't need to go through customs once you land in the U.S. Sounds great in theory

The problem occurs when you don't make the flight on standby. Then you are no longer cleared to be what is considered under U.S. control. Practically like being on U.S. soil once you've cleared Customs. You're only cleared for that one flight, though. Once you miss that flight you need to leave and go all the way back out to ticketing. Then you get new security documents to go back through regular security, back through double-secret security, and back through Customs again.

The interesting thing is Jen had "SSSS" on her document the first time through but not the second time through. Apparently 4 S's means you are flagged for extra security measures. So she got an extra pat down and had her luggage searched the first time going through security but not the second time. I don't know what she did to get the flag, but there is now probably an FBI file in Washington on my wife.

I am still in the walking boot and on crutches from my foot surgery. (Honestly, i really feel like at this point I could just lose the crutches, but it wasn't like I was going to leave them in Ireland anyway.) So I also had a wheelchair through the airport. That probably saved us, because by the time we went back out, the regular airport security was tremendously long, and security to Customs had at least doubled. I don't think we would have made the Aer Lingus flight we ended up taking to Boston.

Why Boston, you ask? Simply because it got us back into the States. There is still a Covid mandate that to return to the U.S. you need a negative Covid test administered no longer than a day before your flight. You could possibly do one the day of the flight because results are guaranteed inside an hour (Mine took a good 40 minutes.), but when you are getting the first flight out in the morning it really isn't possible. Plus you need to schedule the appointment ahead of time. It isn't something you can really leave to the last minute. Not to mention, what do you do if you test positive? And this is what happened to 4 of those 15 other people travelling with Jen and I on this tour. A fifth had tested positive earlier in the week, unbeknownst to the rest of us. That's an entirely different story. Anyway, Mom, Mike, Jen and I were all negative and getting the Hell out of Dodge.

That whole mandate is yet another thing working against travelling standby you see. There was a direct Aer Lingus flight to Orlando on Tuesday, but that would have meant having to retest on Monday. Even being bumped to a flight on Monday would have meant having to reschedule a test for that same day on Sunday. Then there was the fact that 5 of 17 of the group had tested positive meaning the rest of us probably had at least some of the virus swimming around, and Jen and I did NOT want to run the risk of coming up positive and being caught in Dublin for another week.

I would definitely fly Aer Lingus again. They, like everyone else in Ireland, were extremely friendly. We also bribed the crew with $5 Starbucks cards. I cannot recommend this approach enough. You do have to know just how many flight attendants are working a flight or just make sure that you have plenty of cards onhand. This will usually get you free drinks if you want them. It will at least get you the full can of Coke rather than the little glass of it. Anyway...

So we land in Boston in terminal C. There is a Southwest flight going to Baltimore in roughly an hour from when we landed. Why Baltimore, you ask? From Baltimore there is a Southwest flight to Orlando with seats available. You can't go from terminal C to terminals A or B in Boston's Logan Airport without going out of the secure zone. I again had a wheelchair pusher available when we deplaned, so that was fortunate again. This walking boot definitely proved to be a wise investment!

Let me say that while we definitely took as much advantage of me being in the wheelchair as possible, it wasn't like I could have easily managed getting through the airport without it. I can't go very far in the boot without crutches, and with the crutches I can't manage hauling my rollerbag. I was relying on Jen pulling both our bags when we couldn't put those on the wheelchair. And there were some very long distances through some of these airports including through Logan.

I'm trying to think of when and how we got cleared in Boston. We DID need to go back through security once we got to the B terminal. There was only a few seats open for the flight to Baltimore. I sat in my wheelchair for a bit, so that must have been when Jen got us cleared as well as saying we needed the extra leg room for my leg, so we got the bulkhead for the flight from Boston to Baltimore.

Well, at least we have made it to Baltimore now! But there are no seats available on this next flight. So we waited like you do when you are on standby like this.

A few minutes before the door was supposed to close on the flight, someone asked the operations agent (that person who scans your ticket as you board the flight) if she was set, as in were there any more to come. She said no she still was missing some people. (YAY) Just then two guys come running up. (BOO) One guy got on but the other got turned away, as it looks like he was sent over from a flight he missed, but didn't have a boarding pass yet. (YAY) Then 3 college-aged girls who had been sitting in the boarding area all along I think finally realize they are about to miss their plan and come hustling over in their sweats and bedroom slippers still looking at their phones (BOO) Then they start telling the ops agent that their friend is still coming and yelling, "Alicia, they're going to close the door!" Alicia comes shuffling over in her slippers with her backpack and pillow and enormous cup of what used to be Dunkin coffee before she dumped a pint of milk and six sugars into it. (BOOO!)

The ops agent closed the doors to the jet bridge with two open seats (YAY!) So I was cleared to get on. Jen had taken "fourth" for the flight (with the provision that I got on). Fourth means that she would fly in the jump seat and could act as needed as a fourth flight attendant on the flight. That also means no alcohol for her (not that we were having drinks coming back at this point) and no watching movies for her. There were only two seats open on the flight. One was in the first row at the bulkhead again. A middle seat, of course, wedged between a slightly larger than average woman in the aisle and a much larger than average man in the window seat. Jen informed me later that of the two seats, I got the better deal as the other was way at the back wedged next to an even larger man. One other man, well a boy really because he looked to be in his 20s and possibly could have been the young man who was originally turned back by the ops agent, boarded behind me. I guess he got that back seat.

I'm pretty much fine at this point being wedged into a middle seat. Hey, I'm flying for free! Anyway, it got me where I needed to be.

It was nice being back in Florida. It is really always nice being back in Florida. The weather in Ireland had been quintessentially Irish. In the upper 40s and lower 50s with wind and rain most days. So Orlando at 11 pm in the upper 60s felt fantastic.

I feel like that's about all that anyone cares to hear about and then some! So I've finally wrapped up getting back from Ireland. Now it's time to go back and actually get to the fun details of the trip itself. As they say in Ireland - I'm doing things arseways.