Tuesday. SGL is way behind and falling behind more and more. I have been so busy with writing and posts and keeping up with stuff around the house, especially now that Dominica is not able to do very much so I get interrupted by the girls heavily throughout the day and really, there is very little to tell. Right now our lives in Greece have become rather mundane. We always have the risk of just staying home and never leaving the house, Dominica would happily be a hermit if she was allowed to be, and with her ankle being broken there is really no means for us to do anything. So our days are very much repetitious for the time being.
I have started writing a book, of sorts. I am doing it online and writing posts or articles instead of chapters to make a living book on learning Linux System Administration. I have several of the articles done as of today and I am getting a good reception and people seem to be very interested in the idea. This is something that I should have done long ago but there was just never time. Hopefully I can manage to keep working on this. It requires rather a lot of work but if I can get one article out per day, it will move along pretty quickly.
I got word from the job that I had a few months ago that things have gotten pretty bad there and that my decision to leave when I did was definitely the right one. The culture has been going downhill and the company is, as I had suspected from the bait and switch that got pulled on us while we were in Spain right after I had started, not what it had been meant to be and they are failing to be able to retain staff, are violating labour laws, not living up to basic obligations, etc. Not that things are “bad”, but a job like that where you voluntarily take a huge cut in pay over market average because the job is supposed to be amazing kind of needs to actually be amazing. I think it probably was amazing but the management failure right days before I started seems to have gone very badly and they have never managed to figure out how to remedy that and now it is starting to spiral down. The team I was on was supposed to have grown dramatically while I was there and they just kept talking about all the people that they were going to hire. Instead of hiring, they didn’t manage to fill my position after I left, another person left the team, another is leaving the team and now they are unable to hire at all and just attrictioning out. And even with all the extra people never managed to do the work that two of us were expecting to have done by last summer – but the internal politics made it all stagnate and nothing happen whatsoever.
So, I feel bad for them a little, but mostly I am very relieved to have made the decision to go separate ways. It never felt like a fully healthy environment, something was always wrong. And now, half a year later, the people who were most passionate about how good it was are sure it is not good enough to stay at either. I would have been incredibly unhappy had we moved to California for it, even if it had only stayed as good as it had been in the past!
I ended up working on writing and posting all day, late into the night. Did some grocery shopping today. Other than that, never took a break from attempting to be productive until quite late.
The girls beg every night to get to play Puzzler World now. So we played a little tonight and racked up a few achievements. The game has over eleven hundred puzzles in it, so we won’t be completely the game any time soon. It was a great investment. Each game was like one tenth of a penny! Good for our family game nights.