One sticker right here / Colorful unexpected / I step on the plane
Found things
Haiku for another season
This citrus season / Flowering naroli fruit / Jasmine perfume air
Scope
One of the biggest ways to get a software development project to go sideways — or off the rails south bad to Hell to shit or however you describe it when something falls apart and absolutely does not go as planned — is by not solidifying the scope of the work and sticking to that scope.
The two other key areas that will send your shit into oblivion is to assume someone is an expert in their field by way of association with others without getting first-hand evidence. If the so-called expert resource is not able to deliver on their part of the work, you’ve wasted the last area that’ll make you want to fire yourself and that is time.
Time. Resources. Scope.
Manage all three or mediocrity is the best result you can hope for.
Broken planes, broken country
For the second time in a month, I’m stuck in a plane that cannot let passengers off because of equipment -and my gut feeling- human malfunction.
The jet bridge thing is 10 feet away, but whoever is driving it cannot get it to the plane so the planes door can open all the way and let us the fuck out. They made three attempts.
We’re already almost 3 hours late so driving around the fucking airport trying to find a place to park where the jet bridge can get to the plane is the plan.
How will this plan play out? Well. It’s 11:29pm and we landed almost a half hour ago. Looks to me like it’s not working so well. The pilot and copilot have to negotiate for another gate which means we’re here for at least another hour.
The domino effect continues. Late flights late crews lost crew rest late flights and over and over.
In Donald’s America, these kinds of things will only continue to get more frequent and more intense. You cannot have a functioning society while shredding the federal government. It’s just not possible.
I don’t know how long it’ll take but it will happen. Both the complete destruction of anything decent in the US and getting off this fucking plane.
Driving with Cats
I’ve driven across this big country several times, in both directions. I’ve done it with other humans in the vehicle and I’ve done it alone. I’ve also had the unpleasant experience of attempting to make the drive from Santa Barbara to Connecticut, with two cats.
One cat was a good rider, she always had been. The other; not a good traveler. At. All. He peed on me the first time he was ever in a car when we brought him home after he was found near a dumpster at a Motel 6 in Escondido, CA. Why my ex-husband thought a significantly longer trip would work is still beyond comprehension. (It literally breaks my fucking heart that later on in that poor cats life that same guy decided it would be ok to drive from San Francisco to Massachusetts after he’d left the poor cat mostly alone in a SF apartment for a couple of months.
Anyway. The earlier drive, the one where we were moving because I got a job that paid for our move, was the first time Al was made to suffer in the car as a big kitty.
We made it from SB to Ontario, CA. Stayed overnight then made it to Flagstaff, AZ before we couldn’t (I couldn’t) take the cat stress any longer. Al was so fucking stressed out that he smelled bad. It wasn’t cat pee, it was stress emanating from him. At that point, the easy going kitty, Kahuna, started getting extremely antsy and vocal. She was worried because he was so stressed and so, we ended up in a hotel with cats trying to figure out what the fuck to do.
Fortunately, the company I was working for was generous, took care of its employees at that time – what a novel concept – and made it fairly straightforward for us to shift our plans (what am I saying, I made it possible for us to shift our plans).
We staying a night or two at that hotel then traveled south by car to Phoenix where we were able to leave the vehicle to be picked up for shipping to our final destination. After that, we took the two cats, got a taxi to the airport and because it was before 9/11/2001, we made our way through security, to the gate and eventually, onto a plane.
No cats were harmed in that journey from California to Connecticut. Only some bruised human egos and one pissed off woman.