Tag: old man

The year-end post, circa 2025

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[Originally written on December 9th, but held off until end of year due to personal neuroticism]

Today, I took a half day off work.  I originally wanted to take a full day off on account of the fact that I’m sitting on nearly six days’ worth of PTO hours that I haven’t used, and my company has a use it or lose it policy, and I’m more than likely going to take an L on some hours.  But the way I see it, or at least the way I try to rationalize it to myself is that it’s a little bit of give and take on the sick hours, since there’s probably been several days in which I should’ve just taken the day, but I “worked from home” on those days but whatever, I took a half day off when I wanted to take a full day off, primarily because there was a big monthly meeting at 8 fucking AM that I felt that I needed to attend because I had several projects being shown and it was probably for the best that I be there.

So, as far as the rest of my day went, instead of punting and logging on from home after the 8 AM meeting, I decided to just head into the office since I tend to be more productive there.  And yes, I was pretty productive in the two hours that I was there, determined to hard stop at 11:45, but the dearth of work I’ve had throughout the year has been pretty mundane and often aggravating in nature, mostly because most all the work is like that at my company because of project management that can’t ever seem to stabilize due to rapid employee churn and turnover.

Plus, there were some concerning layoffs that happened a week prior, and naturally everyone at the office is on high-alert and on their best behavior, lest they become victims of another spontaneous workforce reduction initiative.

Anyway, I left the office and headed down toward the vicinity of the airport because I have to pick mythical wife up, and everyone knows just how much fun a trip to Atlanta Hartsfield Latoya Jackson Intergalactic Spaceport, Nail Salon and Hot Wing Express is, even for a pick-up job, but I saw it as an opportunity to at least treat myself to some Willy’s and loaf in the parking lot to do my daily Duolingo.

But by the time I get back from the airport, any chance at any sort of personal endeavors are pretty much gone, since my kids are just getting off school, and despite being off the clock, there’s another meeting that I felt that I should at least listen in on because again, tryna be indispensable.

So, I try to be productive with my day, since I’m a weird fuck who finds satisfaction in productivity, despite it being completely counter-culture to the notion of taking PTO in order to relax.  But since I’m off the clock, I take the time to set up some outdoor Christmas decorating that fell to the wayside because of all the babysitting I’ve had to do for my dad, being under the weather a week ago, and that I just generally never have any fucking time.

I get the lights set up, and then I come inside and set up the second Christmas tree, which sounds like a complete waste of time setting up a second one, but y’all need to understand that this is my tree, aptly called the jihad tree, because it is cheap and small, but it houses all of the tacky and fun and ridiculous and mostly broken and unwanted Christmas ornaments that I’ve been accumulating over the years.  I love this tree and what it represents, and it’s important to me that it goes up and gets its time to shine and display as much as the show tree does.

And then it’s time to get dinner prepped for the kids, and the point of all this is that despite the fact that I took a half day off, absolutely zero minutes of my entire day were really spent in any sort of blow off, fuck responsibility kind of way that PTO should be spent on, and such is kind of a snapshot of just about every day of my life, in 2025, as well as god knows how much longer since.

I had to actually stop and think about it, how I felt about how the year has gone, because I really don’t always have the time to stop and think about things unless they’re usually critical, but I think it’s safe to say that as a whole, 2025 really has stunk.  Yes, I know how curmudgeon and pessimistic that sounds, which is probably what most people think of my personal brand being, but when I stop and think about the general day-to-day and minutiae of living in 2025, and very little of it is notably good.

I’m stressed out and depressed more often than I’m not, and every single day I feel taken for granted, ignored, taken for granted, deprioritized and of course, taken for granted.  I always feel as I have to hard carry the vast majority of aspects of my life, nobody helps out, everyone takes but nobody gives.  I have to take care of everyone, and nobody ever seems to be available to take care of me.

A tremendous amount of angst stems from my financial position, and I genuinely can’t remember ever being in as much debt in my entire life as I am now.  Absolutely nothing I do can dig out of the holes that I’m falling deeper and deeper into, and just when I manage to feel like I get a win somewhere in my finances, something inevitably always shows up and I end up in a worse position than I was previously.  Again, nobody is helping me, and everyone around me is making things worse, and I know it sounds shitty to say, but families are fucking expensive, and I feel like nobody is willing to make any sacrifices or changes in my world except for me, and it shows, because I’m living paycheck to paycheck right now and not doing a very good job of keeping my head above water and this has a massive bearing to my general state of being.

In fact, it was just a few days ago in which I was having a completely normal day without incident, but then I got that ticket in the mail that was a $1,000 fine.  Something I didn’t do, but still something that I am responsible for rectifying.  And then to add insult to injury, there was a $6,500 expense that I was not expecting to show up, just the following day.

I’m not suicidal, but it was definitely one of those moments where I wanted to say that I wanted to just blow my head off, because this shit is fucking ridiculous.

But this really was the pivotal moment in which I realized, man, 2025 really has fucking blew.  And usually I end up writing my year-end post closer to the New Year, but honestly I don’t think three fucking weeks left in the month is going to change anything because I basically have had to cancel Christmas because of $7,500 out the window that I have no earthly idea how I’m going to pay it.

On top of feeling like one of the world’s biggest punching bags is the babysitting I’ve been doing for my dad, in trying to get him to move down to Georgia.  If it’s not clear, I live a tremendously high-stress life as it is, but adding him and all of his resistant to change bullshit and communication issues because he never learned any fucking English and my parents never pushed me to learn more Korean, has really done a number to my health this year.

I’m 43, but for the first time in my life, I’ve really felt old, with my hereditary blood pressure issues seemingly escalating, presumably from all the increases in stress, leading to signs of feeling old like deteriorating eyesight, increased bathroom usage, and tension headaches.  And again, I know what all my stressors are, but nobody in my world seems to give a fuck about remotely helping me, so I’m just left feeling like I’m on an island, getting worse on a daily basis.

Needless to say, I know how dismal and insufferable this post must come off, if any of my zero readers has managed to make it this far.  I know I’m not alone in the world in feeling depression, despair and a general dissatisfaction with life.  I love my family and my kids, and they still manage to bring occasional moments of peace and happiness, handfuls they can all be at times.  But on an overall aggregate state of being scorecard, I’ve been pretty miserable all throughout 2025, and what really sucks is that I’m not sure how much better things are really going to get in the ensuing year, because a lot of the things that are killing me now, probably aren’t going to be going away any time soon in the future either.

One day at a time, I guess.  Try and enjoy little things, and try to not drag too many people down with my actual sourness and hide it behind a mask and keep more of my true thinking to the brog that nobody fucking reads.

Good lord, man.  I just want everything to get better, but I just don’t know if, when or how that’s ever going to happen sometimes.

Real talk: my head hurts

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know why I feel like I should write about this, especially since it’s coming from a place of fear and apprehension of the worst, but I guess that if things do go tits up in regards to this, there’s a part of me that I guess wants to chronicle it for the sake of chronicling all of the things in my life that might be a big deal, whether or not they’re bad or good.

But for the last few days, I’ve had a pain in my head, and not the metaphorical kind that comes from a lifestyle of being stressed all the time, compounded with varying degrees of depression and anxiety.  Like an actual dull rolling ache that pulses along the back left part of my skull.  It’s not the worst pain in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but because it kind of throbs and rolls through when it happens, it sometimes catches me off guard and causes me to really wince or if I’m in the midst of doing something, causing an interruption.

It kind of hurts to the touch, but only the first time, and subsequent rubbings of the area don’t really hurt, so I’m not entirely sure if it’s a topical thing or if it’s something going on underneath the skin.

I’m aware that this could be many different things, many of which are no real big deal at all, but me being me, my mind tends to go towards the worst possible scenarios, and given what my family has been through over the last few years as far as people having to deal with different things, I have to ask myself, and hope that it’s not my turn for something bad to happen to.

Needless to say, old single childless me would have just continued to gut it out longer and waited for it to get worse before acting on it, but the married dad me of today doesn’t want to run the risk of it being something that could’ve been prevented from getting worse if it’s something that I can get in front of.  It’s only been a few days, where I had just hoped it was maybe daylight savings-related old man body adjusting to the time change, or just the elevated level of stress in which I’ve been running on, on account of the issues I’m dealing with, with my own dad, as well as a high workload at work, on top of being an active and hands-on dad dealing with my own kids on the regular. 

Unfortunately, the occurrences of the occasional pulsing aches has not really subsided, so I reached out to my doctor for their opinion, and we’ll go from there.  What I’m hoping is that I’m just dealing with excessive stress, compounded with likely blood pressure elevation that I’ve learned runs in my family, and that I just need to chill the fuck out more often than I do, and that it’s not like some aneurism or blood clot or tumor risk I’m running and that I need immediate surgery and utilization of shitty American health care insurance to fuck my family over for the next few years.

However, the point remains that it does have me a little nervous about what it could be, and I’m eagerly awaiting response from my doctor, so I can have some piece of mind of what needs to come next.  It’s the waiting and the unknowns that truly are the killers, but in spite of it all, I do pat myself on the back for breaking old habits and mentalities and just trying to gut things out and hope they go away.  Having one’s own family definitely helps with that, and understanding that my life isn’t just my life, so much as it belongs to others whom I wish to be around for as long as I can.

The year-end post, circa 2025

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s that time of the year in which I begin to look back on a year as a whole, and determine whether or not it was a “bad year” or just another year.  Not to sound too pessimistic and nihilistic than I already to and serve as just a reminder, but the idea and fantasy of “good years” seems a bit outlandish and not really within the realms of reality, at least when you look at the type of person I am and the state of the world currently.

So when I try and reflect on 2024 as a whole, I don’t have much good to say about it.  Frankly, with a few exceptions and caveats to coming unsurprisingly overarching blanket statement, 2024 was not a particularly great year.  Other than the obvious results of the presidential election and the inane bullshit that led up to it, there weren’t any epic catastrophes that I was really aware of, but the rest of the year just felt like a death by a thousand cuts kind of year, where there was just way more negative bullshit that nicked and jabbed all year long to lead to where I’m feeling beaten and exasperated with life and the state of existence now at the end of it, than had there been a lot less.

The thing is, above all else, I’ve been pondering on whether this was just a down year, or rather just symptoms of being in my 40s, where it seems like the difficulty of life jumped exponentially, from where it was in my 20s and 30s.  There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t think to myself, when did life become so difficult to where it feels like every single task in every single day begins to feel like pulling teeth?

I have this conversation occasionally with my sister and some of my similar-aged friends, but I’m curious to whether or not this is just a rough patch in all our lives collectively, or if this is something of a rite of passage for all people who hit their 40s, and things just start taking a turn for the worst more often than not.

Being in your 40s means everyone’s parents are now well into their twilight years, and in the landscapes of our lives, death’s presence grows and occupies a larger space than in our younger years.  I think about if every generation goes through this, which they most undoubtedly do, however, the generations of now and tomorrow live in a way more connected world where information is immediate and accessible, so the news, usually bad news, travels quicker, and it’s way easier now to be exposed and be aware of it all, more than it’s ever been in generations past.

Continue reading “The year-end post, circa 2025” →

Let’s talk about how much mobile-first development sucks

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is a topic that has been sitting in my living document of potential writing topics for a while, but never seemed to make it out of the queue, because of well, life.  But the other day, I saw a meme that I’d seen a few times before, but for whatever reason, it bubbled up this topic, and then I found myself in a position and headspace to where I might be able to write about this, finally.

But basically the meme was about how, [paraphrased] my most millennial trait is that large purchases must be done on an actual computer, or whatever equivalent to that general message that exists.  And being a millennial, I wholeheartedly agree, for a myriad of reasons, that large purchases really should be done on an actual computer and not on my phone or any other mobile device that I have.

Flights, vacations, experiences, large expenses, yeah, I don’t want do any of that shit over my phone, because I’ll never fully trust mobile data security as much as I would my own home’s personal wi-fi, not that that’s any better, but it just gives me peace of mind that it is.  Additionally, checking out on my phone leads to all sorts of room for error when pecking in on a mobile keyboard any sort of PII, billing and shipping information, and the last thing I’d want is a critical purchase to fail or bounce, because I entered in something incorrectly on account of being on a little-ass phone.

And then there’s stuff like Rakuten and other shopping plugins that I have installed in my personal computer’s browsers that I don’t have on my mobile devices, that might get me a little bit of cashback here and there; sure, earning 1% back on a $100 purchase might not seem like a lot, but all those nickels and dimes can eventually amount to something in the future, especially if you’re not paying them any attention and they just continue to accumulate quietly.

And finally, I’m old and paranoid, and I like to have records of the things I spend my money on, so I have a penchant to take screen grabs and print to PDF confirmation screens and purchase confirmations, because at some point everyone goes through that paranoia of when a confirmation email doesn’t come immediately, and you’re left wondering if your purchase actually went through, and if you’re actually going to get what you ordered, and that your money wasn’t going to be tossed into the aether, to have to be fought and disputed for in order to retrieve.

So yes, I do believe that big purchases are best done on personal computers, even at the risk of sounding old and dated to a bunch of young shitheads whom I don’t give a fuck what their opinions of me are in the first place.

However the problem is that in this ever-changing and ever-evolving world, is something that I’ve had varying amounts of objection throughout the years, which is mobile-first development – the practice of developing websites and e-commerce platforms that are designed to be optimally used by those on phones and tablets, with the conversely resulting secondary and B-tier performance for those on personal computers.

I’d wager that most people I know have been in situations where they’re trying to do something on the internet, like visit a site, make a purchase or do something at their laptop or their computer, to little success, and then whether it’s themselves or someone within proximity goes “hey, let me try it on my phone,” to where they have instant and easy success – this is a prime example of mobile-first development.

Well anyway, it’s bullshit, and I hate it, that the internet is becoming more and more in favor of mobile-first development, and little by little alienating those people who still use laptops and computers, and gradually phasing out those of us olds who actually like to make purchases of any size on devices that aren’t the same things that we play games on and doom scroll while we’re sitting on the crapper.

Phones are great for making purchases like food orders, or quick rage purchases on Amazon Prime when the store you’re in is out of what you’re looking for.  Tickets, or social media sales platform transactions that aren’t really that big of a deal.  That’s the extent of mobile shopping that I’m interested in.  To each their own, and I’m sure the generations after me are fine with shelling out thousands of dollars worth of travel, electronics and experiences on their phones while sitting in traffic or dicking around on their phone while at work, but my old ass likes the ceremony and ritual of making large impactful purchases from the comfort of my own computer, preferably at home.

Welp, this wasn’t as great of a post as I thought it could’ve been, but whatever.  Mobile-first is bullshit, and it annoys me whenever I identify when companies are obviously putting mobile device commerce at the top of their food chains over all other means of completing transactions.  *coughDELTA

Thanksgiving musings and perspectives

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the Thanksgiving holiday this year, my house trekked north back up to Virginia to spend some time with my side of the family.  Such was always something I was pretty ambivalent about in the past, but ever since I had kids, I do feel that there is some importance in having them have connection with my side of the family, not to mention try to build relationships with the litany of cousins they have, as I did growing up.

Overall, it was a very good trip, and I’m happy to have spent a good bit of time with my sister, cousins and parents, but most of all, I was happiest that my kids got to spend time with their cousins and my family members and be able to build relationships and connections with family that they don’t get to see too often.  My happiest memories looking back on the trip were seeing my kids playing exuberantly with their cousins, and I’m thankful for my niece, nephew and the kids of my cousins all being so good to my children, and I’m optimistic that they can have a similar upbringing to my own, where the cousins all were pretty tightly knit growing up.

However, an introduction like this doesn’t happen if there weren’t some things that weren’t positive, and unfortunately for this holiday there were some bad things that definitely put a damper on things.

Firstly, to cut to the chase, I hit a deer while driving, and my car suffered a nasty crack on the bumper as well as the headlight assembly.  I was driving along a road that I’d driven thousands of times in my life while living there, and I’d never seen deer on this stretch of road before.  I was probably going no faster than 25-28 mph while accelerating when the deer popped out of a grassy median and it was so bang-bang fast that I was a good 200 feet past and continuing before it really registered what had happened.

The thing is, while on the drive up, I distinctly remembered having a thought about just how many dead deer I had seen on the shoulders all over I-85 in southern Virginia, and how I really should keep my guard up while driving at night on this trip.  But as I said, this was a stretch of road that was long developed, not very close to any real wooded areas where deer might like to reside in, and where I’d never seen deer before in my life.  So my guard was definitely not up at this moment in time, and it just figures that would be when my premonition came to fruition, and I plastered the poor animal.

I replayed the moment in my head countless times at this point and the thing is, I’m not mad at the deer or the species as a whole, like I might’ve been in the past for putting me in this situation.  Northern Virginia is an endlessly developing area, and it’s a no brainer that the constant sprawl and development in Fairfax county and surrounding areas are displacing the wildlife all over, and next thing I know I’m hitting deer in a place where I’d never seen deer before in my life.

What I am thankful for is the fact that nobody in my car was hurt, and to my knowledge nobody behind me appeared to be hurt, as I was the first car in the line of cars turning onto the road, and it looked like there were plenty of braking going on behind me.  My kids were little zombies watching the iPad, so they didn’t notice anything but the sound of impact and the bump of me running it over, and didn’t seem to care because they were too busy watching Little Einsteins.  This wasn’t a conversation that I would’ve wanted to have had, so I take it as a win, on all accounts.

Additionally, despite looking pretty nasty when I originally did stop, when I got to my cousin’s place, we were able to pop the initial dent back out, which was a big victory, as it was pushing the wheel liner into contact with the tire, and there was initial talk about cutting it off in order to remain drivable.  A little duct tape and a few zip ties, and my car was safe enough to have made the return trip to Georgia, to where its repair is now on the table in coming weeks.

Here’s the thing though-as much as something like this probably would have tanked the entire trip for me in the past, I realized that there were so many other victories to be had given the circumstances, that the main L taken that will cost actual money and likely aggravation of playing car Tetris or a rental didn’t seem so bad.  Plus, when I got back to my cousin’s place, dinner was ready, two beers, a fire pit, reminiscing with my cousins while hearing the sound of my kids having a blast with their cousins really rescued the night and I like to think that this was all one of those, you know you’re maturing, kind of scenarios.

Also, waking up to the worst news possible of hearing of a passing of a loved one to my brother’s family really does knock everything else into a genuinely thankful perspective, on Thanksgiving.  Pretty much nothing can top that as far as bad news is concerned, but again, trying to find the silver lining in bad situations, given the circumstances of the departed’s final days, there’s probably a modicum of relief in knowing that they’re no longer in any pain or having to fight the good fight any longer.

As sad and heartbroken I felt for my brother’s family, it really did help put everything else into perspective about the things that myself and everyone else could genuinely be thankful for.  My kids were safe and unaware of the deer situation, most everyone in my family was in good health.  I got to spend some time with my parents with my kids, and I’m glad that my kids have interactions and memories with them, because I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen a grandfather in my life.

Even the whole car debacle afforded me a bonus good memory, because when I took the car on a shakedown ride to make sure it was safe at highway speeds and cornering, I took the opportunity while I was alone to pop by a close friend’s house to say hi and wish them a happy Thanksgiving.

The drive back was long, and doing Richmond to Atlanta was the longest stretch that my kids had ever had to endure in the car, but equipped with a lot of snacks and an iPad full of downloaded shows, they did great.  My only gripe is the feeling of being a glorified Uber driver, since I have to focus on driving, and none of my adult passengers can get their heads off of their phones to actually converse or be remotely the types of passengers to help a ride not feel so long.

But as a whole, I still look back at Thanksgiving positively.  My kids had a great time with my family, and I was happy to catch up with everyone who came to dinner, and I can only hope that future family gatherings in the future will be as good as this one was, but hopefully with no more deer incidents.

The perils of getting younger in the workforce

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I seldom feel as old whenever I stop and take a few steps back and look at my job, and ponder how many of the aggravations and gripes I have stem from the fact that my company hires a lot of younger people, as opposed to older professionals with actual work experience.

Sure, there’s merit to hiring young from a corporate standpoint, they lack the leverages of experience and work history to where companies feel like they hold the advantage when it comes to negotiating salary and benefits.  Younger workers are often believed to be malleable to fit into existing cultures, and the theory is that they still have enthusiasm and energy, and hope that they can inject such into workforces that are tired and jaded by a history of Office Space.

However on the flipside, younger workers lack the work ethic the generations before them have, and their overlap with older workforces often creates a culture clash that companies are still trying to figure out the calculus on how to combat and work through in order to have a harmonious environment.  You can’t push younger workers too hard, lest they immediately start updating their LinkedIn profiles and start looking for an exit.

If it isn’t obvious, the impetus of this post stems not just from a recent resignation of a colleague under the age of 28, but of months and months of being a part of a company that has demonstrated the tendency to hire on the younger side of the spectrum as opposed to possibly more professional candidates, and I feel like it’s leading to a lot of the day-by-day issues that are emerging and compounding as time progresses.

The recent resignation sucks, because this person was basically the point person of this retail campaign that my company is in the midst of trying to launch.  Their departure creates a noticeable hole in the workflow of the project, and until their successor can be identified, implemented and brought up to speed, the project is effectively on pause, because despite them still being present for their two-week notice, they’ve already basically stopped working on anything, instead of you know, trying to leave on good terms and tie up as many loose ends as they can.

But just in general, I work with a bunch of kids on certain teams, and them being kids means they’re all flaky and terrible communicators and spam up our internal Teams channels with gifs as a means of communication as opposed to actual fucking words.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m trying to not be nearly as age-ist as I’ve heard some of them be, they’re rather pleasant and easy to chat with on a personal level, but when the temperature at work starts to rise from time to time, very few of them have the fortitude or tenacity to keep their shit together, and their bad habits tend to come out when things heat up.

But the biggest thing is though, like I said before, you can’t push them without chasing them away.  The turnover at my company in the three years that I’ve been here has felt pretty absurd, and I feel like it’s this downward spiral where young workers are hired, crumble under the pressure of real-world work, bolt after 6-8 months, creating a shitshow for the teams they abandoned; their backfills are also young workers, but entering a worse environment than their predecessors, crumble under the pressure and then bolt, and the cycle has been repeating itself, but with things continuously getting worse, rather than showing any signs of stabilization or recovery.

I get that the workplace in general is changing and loyalty and longevity mean dick and butt these days, and it’s not necessarily age-related when it comes to people bouncing in short order, but it doesn’t help the narrative and reputation that it is, when it’s mostly the younger workers of the workforce, that are exorcising this right the most frequently.

Seeing as how this is a thing that more of a cultural shift as opposed to something that can be fixed, it’s times like these where I wish I could just work for myself, but the reality is that I don’t know what I’d do for a living, let alone make ends meet and support my family.

If only I could get paid, generously, to brog about inane bullshit and the happenings in my life, that would be the ultimate dream come true.  But since that’ll never happen, it’s remaining in the downward spiral vortex, and just simply holding onto my butt and hope one day improvements occur.  At least I’m not under the draconian thumb of my old boss, but frankly, it’s not okay to constantly keep that comparison in my back pocket to justify other bad workplace behavior.

Dad Brog (#140): Disney Trip 2024

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Being both passholders as well as Disney Vacation Club, it goes without saying that my family spends a good bit of time going to Disney World.  Personally, I’m pretty long past over most anything in regards to The Mouse, but my wife and kids still enjoy it a lot, and there’s not much I won’t do for them, especially when I have little idea what to do with my vacation time in the first place.

However, the big story of this last extended Disney trip was Hurricane Helene, which I didn’t even know was bubbling up in the Gulf of Mexico until two days into the trip, when suddenly everyone in person and on social media are talking about this megastorm that’s forming, and how it’s not only going to wreak havoc on Florida where we were, but appeared to have Atlanta firmly in its crosshairs, leading me to feel all sorts of anxiety about shit happening to my home while I wasn’t there.

Fortunately for us, the storm conditions didn’t really come into play until the last day of our trip, to which at that point we were pretty bushed and fairly content to spend more time at the resort than more time at the parks, and it didn’t really affect our trip.

In fact, other than watching some serious winds from the safety and comfort of our resort, not only did we avoid the storm in Florida, much to my relief, Helene kind of banked hard east, which we all know by now, really fucked the western parts of Appalachian North Carolina, but as far as Atlanta was concerned, really managed to avert disaster.

It was interesting driving back, because as we traversed from Orlando back to Georgia, there was plenty of evidence of the carnage that Helene brough, even as far central as I was coming from, with trees down all over the shoulders and sides of the road, and pretty much every billboard in the state was stripped and barren.  Piles of sawdust on the shoulders indicated where trees actually affected the highways themselves, and this was the case all the way up into Georgia, and right before getting to Macon, it all kind of stopped, and this was presumably where the storm banked hard east, and miraculously swerved past Atlanta.

Insert ironic joke about how not even category-4 storms don’t want to visit Atlanta.

As for the rest of the trip, I wouldn’t exactly call it a vacation; I knew this was most likely going to be the circumstances going into it.  It was a trip, and there was a tremendous amount of work involved, wrangling the little monsters of mine, who are bursting with excitement and curiosity and the want to run around and explore the vast World of Disney, and as is often times the case, the lion’s share of labor falls to me to do, and I don’t really get to have the same sense of vacation, relaxation, recuperation and entertainment as everyone else does.

There were really only two things that I wanted to do that would have been self-serving and when the trip was done, I didn’t get to do either of them.  Between kid wrangling, the time it takes to do absolutely anything at all, and the weather coming into play, there simply wasn’t any space for anything for me to happen, and the fact of the matter is that as much as I love my kids, if there’s any chance at all for me to not go completely sour on Disney World and the Disney brand, there have got to be some kid-free trips lined up in my future where I can actually relax, unwind and not be a dad for a fucking minute.

I kind of knew what had happened was going to happen, and that it really wasn’t going to be that much of a vacation for me personally.  But my kids and their safety always come first, and trying to keep them in a modicum of line is also high priority, and it’s often times frustrating when trying to stick to good habits while on the road is challenging, and even more so when I don’t really have anyone but myself to rely upon to handle the load of keeping an eye on my kids.

But the girls seemed to have a good time in spite of the weather and some of the challenges experienced while there.  They got to ride a lot of rides, eat a lot of junk food, spend some time with me at the pool, see a lot of characters, eat more snacks, and watch a whole lot of television at the resort and while in the car, so as long as they’re happy, I can take victory from that.

I just wish that I didn’t have to feel like I have to be the one who constantly has to sacrifice everything, because I already feel like I’ve sacrificed just about everything that makes me, me, and there’s really nothing left for me to sacrifice left, except for whatever it is that prevents me from being a complete husk of a living organism.