Back from the last Shamrock

I did not pioneer.   Thinking back I probably would not have pioneered on Shade several years ago if I had not started riding with someone who helped me through the first day and I didn't want to bail on her and her horse she was trying to get to 5000 miles when day 3 rolled around and I was tired and figured Shade was too.  Well I did not have that mental crutch this year.  What I did have was a young horse that I have not done a lot of legging up on who was mentally tired and doing some stumbling on day 2.  Plus I was hot and tired and being a crabby beeyotch to my sister who was helping me some after finishing the fun rides with my dad.   So I decided I would drop down and do the fun ride with dad and sis on day 3 rather than enduring.   It WAS a lot of fun and I have a sound horse that is stronger than before the ride for the rest of the ride season.    The RM let us stay overnight on Monday after a bit of "well I don't know, no one does that" talk on Sunday.   So on Monday I pulled some flags (others had mostly pulled that loop so it was easy duty) and dad and sis rode on their own. I had skipped one section I thought the guy on the ATV would get and sis went back with me after their ride and we got that cleaned up and Monday night dad grilled bison steaks for supper and they came out yummy.

Tanza on day two early in the day.

And then on Tuesday after driving back from the lovely 5.5 day break, reality came crashing back.  I looked at work emails and one of our great younger SEs is quitting with short notice.  I had thought he might leave, but I had hoped he was going to stick out the year, give a longish notice and help train the new SE hire that was intended to relieve him of the routine, nuisance duties and let him expand his skills, while helping us for the future.   Oh well,  he has to put his health and family first and if staying here was still stressing his health and the relationship with his wife even after the very late in coming changes that had been made, we will survive.   I am reviewing resumes that came in after we closed the first position and the ones we passed on before to see if there are strong programming candidates.  If we have a good set, hopefully we can have only a short period for the announced new position and get a second someone interviewed and hired more quickly.   None of us that are still on the team want upper management suggesting we make the PITA, so not a team player, guy a real part of the team again.  He has tasks he is doing for us, writing codes for reading in and translating the binary satellite data we will get, but we need him out of the team so the smart folks can modernize the processing architecture.    I have *extra* job security the next couple of years now.  Before, I was filling the role of the debugger for that kludgey old system because J was burned out; now he will be gone so it will be Maggie for the legacy web stuff and mainly me for the other legacy stuff with whinging to the office of the PITA if I get stuck on debugging something.    Not hugely fun, but it will buy hay and fuel to go to rides. 

We had Mia euthanized the Monday before we left for the ride.  Her skin was recovering from the maggots but after the groomer clipped her it was clear that she was getting to be skin and bones.  I cooked up some old pork roast for her, but she was leaking fluid into her tummy area and couldn't eat much or she'd feel crappy and it was clear that her guts were just not working right anymore.   I dug her grave mostly over the weekend before we took her in and just went in very late to work that day.

Dad is probably going to bring home a Sharpei cross dog.  I was not enthused last night because it sounded like a good chance of it being a roamer like Ole was when he was younger but Dad likes it and since he is home all the time it will probably be OK.  I do know some tricks I learned with Ole if the dog will not stick around even with people outside with it.  I also showed dad a bio of a 5 yr old Rottie at a rescue in Evergreen that I like, at least on paper.  I said we could maybe get both dogs since they both like to play with other dogs but whatever will be will be.