Months without music: a divorce story
I didn’t get covid until December 2023. I didn’t get healthy again until March, three months later. I thoroughly enjoyed scheduling an appointment for the Long Covid clinic in February only to learn they didn’t have any openings until May. My doctor told me I was lucky to get in so early. I told him I didn’t plan to stay bedridden for the next three months.
I got healthier when I finally, truly, stopped working. So then I adopted a dog and went back to work. I love Wynonna: she was my parents’ dog, but she had started fighting with her older sister, Amber, and my parents had to rehome her. I had been looking for a dog and was nervous I wouldn’t be healthy enough, but Wynonna and I had known each other since she was our covid puppy in June 2020, and I was going to be home in March anyway, so I cancelled my flight back and planned a road trip with my dad.
Amber died a few weeks later. She was 12, I think, but it was pretty sudden.
A couple days after that was April 1. That was the day I learned my parents were separating. Boy, did I feel like a fool.
My parents were married for about thirty years. We’re a Catholic family. Divorce wasn’t ever really an option, in my mind. But I’ve never been married for about thirty years, so who am I to judge?
Ha! If only I got over it that easily. But this isn’t about that.
On the day one parent served the other papers, Wynonna ate about nine square inches of a silicone playmat at day care. The other thought I knew that the divorce was official, and had called to check in, accidentally breaking the news and leaving me in tears in the office. I picked up my dog half an hour later and learned she had some silicone inside her. She had an emergency endoscopy the next day. So I was kinda hesitant to go back to that day care.
For the next month I was on self-imposed house arrest with my dog as I didn’t really have anyone to drop her off with. She was in a cone for the first week or so, then back to training, then she was behaving pretty well. I reached out to the day care and they were eager to make things right. I gave them a shot. I now take Wynonna back there on a regular basis and haven’t had a problem since.
I returned to work in March to the highest severity incident my team had ever been assigned. Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative had begun. Our work was derailed, reprioritized, and lots was cut. But we learned a lot about security procedures that we hadn’t enabled by default, and helped other teams follow in our footsteps, and our team has consistently been ahead of the curve. I just wish it wasn’t so darn stressful.
And so the months went by. The house we’d lived in for nearly 20 years was sold to a new family. One parent got a new phone carrier, so all my “Mark + parents” chats were broken, never to be remade. I even have to track my Netflix history across two different accounts.
Security came and security went and security came again. I’m not sure it’ll ever really leave, but I also don’t want it to.
Wynonna got a UTI, severe diarrhea, an allergic reaction to the special food I gave her to treat her severe diarrhea, and had a few vomiting fits, but is otherwise the cutest darn dog you’ve ever seen. And she’s just been so dang happy this whole time. She really loves me, and I really love her.
When we finished a batch of security work, I did find time to work on AI, and we now have a tool that answers in seconds what used to take hours. And because I was on the team that built it, I can say with great confidence that it’s actually accurate and not some showy demo that fails or hallucinates with the first wonky question thrown at it. I made sure of that!
And I reduced our page load time by 80%, that was fun. And I started an initiative to modernize kind of everything about our website, because we weren’t experts when we started in 2020 and we hadn’t made significant upgrades to our tooling, well, ever. It’s been a blast learning about everything that’s changed in the JavaScript ecosystem in the last 10 years. Things are almost stable! 🤓
I realized the clouds had started to lift. I hadn’t been sick in months. Wynonna could stay in her crate for seconds, even minutes at a time without going crazy. Security became part of our workflow, not a disruption to it. So I doubled down on my big coding project: AHK++.
I’ve been working on it on and off since November 2020. I didn’t start it, I just took over maintenance when the other guy decided he didn’t want to do it anymore. I had never managed an open-source project of any size, but AHK++ provides AutoHotkey language support for Visual Studio Code. I had always wanted to learn AutoHotkey. I researched language support with a professor in college. And Visual Studio Code is my favorite editor. It was a triplicate of matches made in software heaven!
The problem is that AutoHotkey released a major upgrade back in 2023, and AHK++ didn’t support it. This feature was sorely lacking and highly requested, but it wouldn’t be easy.
A few weeks of coding later I had merged my project with a different one, turning it into a true Wiemenstein’s monster of code completions and syntax highlighting. But it worked: I had extracted the global config (not easy!), reorganized the user settings for readability, and hand-tested every feature (don’t get me started on automated testing support for VS Code extensions!!). And it worked! AHK++ 6 was published on September 1, 2024, only one day after my self-imposed deadline.
I danced a lot during my week of vacation last month. Friends from college got married on September 7, and a friend from high school got married on September 14. I met a girl on the dance floor and we danced the night away, it’s been a blast ever since. My parents’ divorce was finalized on September 26.
I took off work yesterday thinking I had to fast for an MRI, and who wants to work while fasting? Turns out I had things a bit twisted and that’s not until Halloween, so I ended up giving myself a free day. Well, a free day to finish my 72-hour coding marathon that was reconfiguring AHK++ in a way that was less Wiemenstein, more Wiemer Inc: Automated tests, fully extracted config variables, more documentation, more features! 🤓 I even reduced the download size by ~100x.
But yesterday morning was also when my oldest brother recommended to me my new favorite song, Hi Ren. So I added it to my 2024 playlist.
I hadn’t added any music to my playlist since February. I didn’t even remember the last time I had listened to it.
Six months without music is a pretty long time. I’m sure I listened to a song or two here or there, right? Probably. Hopefully.
But my life was work. Lie down to avoid getting dizzy. Set up for the new dog. Cope with death. Cope with the divorce. Support the siblings. Secure the code. Improve the infrastructure. Train the dog. Fix the bugs. Don’t go crazy.
But I can divorce myself from that. I don’t have to be attached to the way things are or the way things ought to be. I’ll be grounded, I’ll be realistic, but I don’t have to identify every situation as a problem and grade every reaction by its potential as a solution. I can relax. I can soften.
I can listen to music!
🕺