This weekend had a few more firsts for me.
I nearly had a sandwich with capsicum.
What is that? It's the British/Australian name for Bell Peppers.
That's a good one to know since bell peppers don't agree with me.
I'm constantly learning new words and phrases. Or learning new meanings for old words and phrases. Sometimes someone will blush when I say an innocent word in my American English. Other times, someone will say something that strikes me as rude. Sometimes it's a new application of a less used word.
But most of the time, I'm hearing words I don't understand but inside the context they make sense.
It makes conversation interesting, I enjoy the vocabulary expanding interaction.
The other first was that for the first time since I arrived, the power situation was such that we shut down all non-essential servers for the duration of the weekend, so that the technicians wouldn't have to live in the network room.
I liked that. We shut down the servers, so that we could have a weekend. WOW, how anti-silicon valley is that culture? I love it!
After spending much of Saturday battling the power failures, we said, "shut it all down!" and we did.
And we rested on Sunday and did not work. Today, Monday we came in, and turned it all back on, after they had repaired the generator...we hope.
I come from a line of work that says ... "always be up, always be online, 'five nines uptime!!!' (that means 99.999% uptime which means you can't have servers down for long).
I come from a world of pagers and cell phones, of all nighters and priority ones.
I come from a world of catastrophic failures and emergency phone calls.
In 1998 I slept with my pager on my chest in vibrate mode, so as not to wake up my wife when it went off.
In 2006, I made over 10% of my salary in after hour emergencies, that were billed to customers.
In 2007, there was talk of me not working during the day, and simply being on call for emergencies.
But, in 2008, I came to work for God. And He said, "remember the Sabbath and keep it holy." And He rested.
And so we rest. Even as I type this I feel my blood pressure lower than it's ever been. It's been a hard weekend, lots of work... but....
If you look for them, there are blessings. All around me things are difficult and down right hard for folks, but if you see them, there are reasons to be pretty excited about the blessings God gives.
I'm not saying life here is easier, but the stresses come in different forms then they used to, and for that, I'm thankful. I worked 24x7 for 5 years. I turned the car around while we were heading to family vacation, I've missed birthday parties, I left get togethers, and I woke up countless midnights to work. I do not miss that.
We have emergencies here, but I really appreciate the mentality that says, "we can get along without when we need to." And people do.
I believe it is because we have faith in God who provides.
I'm once again thankful for all of you who sustain us here.
For your gifts, for your prayers, for your emails and thoughts.
