✌ Victory! ✌

general topics
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Continuing the discussion from Fuck Today:

This is the companion thread to the Fuck Today thread. It is the polar opposite. No whinging or whining allowed. This is for your victories, small or large. Got that great job? Post it here. Won the lottery? Send me money (then post it here.) Pull off a daring heist involving five of your friends, each with a special talent or ability? Post it here.

And when all else fails, remember kiddos, you’re pretty awesome:

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For me personally, I got through the semester with a solid line of Bs out the door. I was hoping for better, but considering how bad things were at one point, I’m content to do better this coming semester.

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i had shoulder surgery tuesday and despite doctors and nurses saying to expect the first 2-4 days to be flat on my back incapable of doing little besides going back and forth between bed and bathroom, i have been active-- cooking, shopping for christmas dinner, and a little light housework with no more soreness than the occasional 20 mg dose of hydrocodone can’t ameliorate. and now i think it’s naptime. take care!

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Geez, new shoulder, new knee… You are getting younger on average.

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I can’t go into too many details…

Yesterday morning during a live product demo hosted by my boss, without warning or planning I launched a barrage of cyber attacks. Which the product detected. And my boss was confused, then super happy when I unmuted and quietly said, “that was me”.

Everyone was both excited and impressed. The bummer is now my boss knows about some of my other… Tricks… And may expect me to use them again :smiley:

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I hate making flat pack stuff.

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dude, that is gorgeous

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Nice. I’m sure you didn’t show ALL your cards… I know you’ve got a few hidden up a sleeve somewhere.

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I just checked my grades for fall semester (my first semester of upper-division classes), and ended up doing better than I thought! I earned three As, and ended up with a B+ in the class that I totally hated. Hurray!

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I’ve only had my license for a couple of weeks and my boss finally asked me to do something with it, so I gave Tableau a new feature…little graphs in the hover text! :smile:

That’ll teach it to waste my real estate and not have the bits I wanted!

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And no, that’s not a complete dashboard or even a useful chunk of a viz (much grouping must be done), that chart was just for my eyeball analysis

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We made it home on one of the last redirected planes, a few hours late (into the next day) but at least we got home before the still-ongoing ice storm shut everything down for real. I was not responsible for this small family victory, but I’m happy about it anyway!

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Accepting translation projects generally involves quite a bit of guesswork - how complex is the language? If it’s a technical text in German, how many complex or compound words are there? (A simple text could be 10% longer in English, while a more complex one could be 25% longer). Is it quite similar to previous texts I’ve worked on, and how much internal similarity is there (which would affect the amount of research I have to do)? Does it start off deceptively straightforward, with an annoyingly complex section that I hadn’t seen in the 10 minutes I had to confirm the project? Will I have a good or bad week with my ADHD? Are the kids going to be sick, and will other appointments come up? In any case, the last two months have been really quiet and I’d really been hoping for some more work soon. On Monday the dam broke and everyone started giving me projects again, so I accepted enough work that I would have to have five great days in a row. The deadline for the last project was 2 pm today, and I submitted the completed file at 1:59! Everything else was submitted well within the deadline, so this was the one that could have been late if I had overestimated my abilities.

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That is ONE HELL of an easy-bake oven. When did they get so big and complexified?

My victory? you ask, tapping toe and preparing to leave…

I found my birth mother.

Well, technically, Ancestry.com did the heavy DNA-lifting, and on Christmas Eve, my birth mother emailed me to say the same because I’d been ignoring the website for a a few months. Well over thirty five years later, after exhausting plenty of traditional avenues (state and local government, local lawyers and their records), and having dreamed and daydreamed visions of who/what/where my biological parents were/are, and on Christmas Eve, riding down the Blue Ridge Parkway with my mom to see “Trumbo” (highly recommended), and absently checking my phone for notifications because I don’t get service at mom’s house, the first email I check is one from Ancestry that begins something like, “If you were born [here] on [this particular date], then I think I’m your biological mother.”

Flabbergasted is a word I like for many reasons, but that’s pretty much been my state of mind since 12/24.

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Congratulations! I’m so happy for you!! Any plans to meet up, or are you sticking to email right now?

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Pedro and I removed the ancient, rusting steel tank partially full of ancient, polluted fuel oil from my basement over the weekend.

There is no spilled oil on the floor, and no scent of petroleum in the air. We recycled slightly over a hundred gallons of 30-year-old reeking, stale fuel and there is no spilled oil or fumes in the family minivan, either.

The fill and vent pipes have been wrenched (literally, with a 24" stillson and a cheater pipe) from the 18+ inch thick rubblestone basement wall, so my basement doesn’t end up full of oil (like this or this) The holes are stuffed with seal-cell foam wrapped in vapor barrier to wait for warmer months, when I will fill them with soft mortar and rocks from the stream and parge the entire wall section with cement.

Pedro’s going to use two of the sections of the chopped-up tank to form the bucket for his garden-tractor-based miniature front-end loader, and the rest will be used for other metalwork projects (Ned Kelly, represent!) or recycled.

:v: VICTORY IS MINE :v:

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I made a split pea soup using a modified version of @Clifton’s recipe, and it came out very tasty. I’ve never made split pea soup before. Wasn’t all that difficult. Thanks, Clifton!

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Thank you, kindly, and especially so, given your help!!! If I hadn’t done the DNA tests, I’d still be looking. I meant to write you a whole separate “You’re Awesome” message, but…hey @anon67050589

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We’ve been communicating via email at the moment, and I’ve been staying in that vein since we’re both new to this whole…thing. I expect we’ll be speaking in the future, but email allows me time to sit and gape at the thought of this coming to pass.

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Awesome! Get the medical records, as far back as she can.

This may well be the best BB thread ever. “Wonderful Things” indeed, kudos to @ActionAbe.

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True, and something I’ll definitely take up when we reach that point. And FWIW, the DNA tests I took (Ancestry.com and 23andme.com) do offer some help in that regard, but I think that strain of science needs more data and time to become entirely useful/actionable.

Oh, I also learned I have a sister that’s two years older than me. Not sure if she knows about me or our mom…the info is flowing, but in more of a “cool honey” drip, as opposed to “freakin deluge”.

Lessons learned: Don’t assume the worst, even though it’s the easiest assumption to make about what happened and why. At my worst moments in life, retelling myself the worst of those notions to underline and enhance my guilt/fear/sadness/self-loathing was far too easy and far too regular. And at least in this case, both of us performed that particular feat of self-destruction. Seems a little stupid now that I write it down. That shit is an emotional boat anchor–either use it creatively to good effect, or recognize it and then let it drop, out of sight and mind, to the bottom of the sea.

Also, if finding that biological parent/child/sibling is important, don’t give up. Holy fucken shit don’t give up. Between DNA testing, various government record sets coming online, and the ubiquity of the internet, the wisps of information that will break a particular case are floating around out there, somewhere, and with enough time, it will come to light. I think the hardest part comes after that info is found.

Which leads me to: For those doing a DNA test or family research, be prepared for interesting results (something I recall you writing to me, @anon67050589, but something I didn’t understand until I started getting details). If one were to gaze a wandering eye across my big beautiful frame, they’d likely think, “OMFG SO AWESOME”…ahem…in addition to, “Caucasian dude; whitebread; blanca; privileged; really tall; does he play basketball (NO!); yawn”. Which means they’d miss my Senegalese heritage (itself one of the high points of my DNA test). Some current family members found that to be neat, others, not so much. Brothers thinking they’re cousins, moms and daughters who aren’t really related, and that sort of thing. If anything, it’s been a crash course in family relations.

To sum up: [shitload of insane emoticons] Emotional and scary, but thrilling beyond words.

And did I say thanks to @anon67050589? I did, right? Because, wow. Wow.

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Awesome - so glad you liked it!

Through sheer coincidence, I made a batch Sunday so we’ve also been eating it the last couple nights.

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@Stynx (who asked in the Fuck Today thread, but of course the answer belongs here)…

Victory, once again, to modern medicine and the astonishing curative powers of antibiotics!! It’ll take into next week for me to feel fully human again, but there’s no question the tide has turned on the pneumonia. And my kids didn’t catch it, so it looks like we’re through the worst of it. (knock on wood!)

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