codecowboy

Microsoft keeps screwing with Templates. The button is now missing from my view and I can find no way to access them at all when creating a new email. Right after the "New Mail" or "Send" button this is likely my most used feature in email. I do a lot of repetitive form responses to our end users and this is a life saver. Several times over the past few years Templates has disappeared for a few weeks only to return. Any suggestions?

One year for me was 2:26am Saturday morning. Everybody has been telling me that I just need to make it through my year of firsts. Great. Now what? Because 366 days still feels exactly like 365 or 200, or even day 1. I feel that emotionally I'm worse off now than I was 10 to 12 months back.

So my friends are a bunch of old guys. That's over 40 to you kids. Some of us are almost 50. We get together on Friday nights remotely, drink beer, talk shit, and play PUBG. We've done this for a few years now. The inconsistencies are making us nuts. It's either 80% bots or less than 10%.

To be honest we only fair players. So we don't mind the high bot content. The game has really started sucking for us lately. We seem to be playing matches where everyone we run into is either John Wick, Bob Lee Swagger, or is just out and out cheating. I'm sorry...I'm not buying that you are so good that you can lean out the window of a moving UAZ, point randomly at the building I'm in, not e

I'm 20 days out from my 1 year anniversary of her death. But it was at this point last year it was starting to get real. In the coming week she started needing a walker to get around. By July 1st she was on oxygen all the time. She was gone July 10th. But in the middle of all that is her birthday this coming Tuesday and our anniversary the Tuesday after that. All of these memories keep coming up.

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I keep telling people I'm okay and that with time it's getting better. That's a damn lie. Because I think I miss her more now 11 months out than I did then.

I just had to make a tough phone call. After nine and a half months I still have not turned off my wife's phone. Good thing too because I needed it last month to receive a text to unlock one of her accounts. Anyway...I don't look at it often, but I found a text on it from two weeks ago. It was from one of her very old friends. They text a few times a year or call every once in a while. He had no idea she passed. So I called him and left a message for him to call me. I've not seen him since our wedding. We talked for an hour. He was upset, but took it well. I thought I got this all out of the way by the 3rd month?

Well...it's Groundhog Day....again. I used to think of this as a quaint, if not silly day on the calendar. I loved the movie. But five years ago on February 2nd 2016 it cemented itself as the 2nd worst day of my life. Today is the 5th anniversary of my wife's terminal diagnosis and obviously the first one without her. Every year I dreaded this day because it marked one more year closer to some very scary numbers. Women with my wife's kind of cancer only had a 27% chance on average living 5 years. Armed with that information every year on February 2nd became a grim countdown for me. She lasted four and a half years which is impressive.

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In terms of ranking....obviously t

201 days with out her. I've been struggling with it, but doing fair. Today I'm home sick. I got my usual winter sinus infection when the weather changed. I'm achey and tired and my right sinus is plugged despite doing Airbornes and using the Neti pot. But what really sucks is realizing I'm in this alone. No backup. No one to feed the dogs for me. No one to run errands, or pick up meds from the supermarket. It's just me. My options are do without or suck it up.

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Not my usual winter sinus infection. I tested positive for Covid19 this morning. The damn virus that we spent all last year avoiding so she wouldn't get it. And I got it working one of her ministry e

Backstory: Some of my late wife's dear friends are driving through my town on the way to visit family. They live two states away, so we rarely saw them, but she kept in touch, Since they were coming this way they wanted to have dinner with me and my mother-in-law. I adore these people and consider them family despite only meeting them in person a handful of times over the last 20 years.

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So for some reason my anxiety is through the roof. A ton of memories just keep swamping me about our last trip out to see them. It was really the turning point of when her health was starting to decline. I know I'll be fine and have a great time when I get there, but a big part of me wan

My wife passed on July 10th after a long battle with breast cancer. Since then I've learned that it's not the big events that get you. It tends to be the little things that trigger that memory which triggers your grief. Mine tends to be seeing things I bought for her regularly.

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So last night I'm walking through our local grocery store and there it is. Pumpkin Spice Latte from Starbucks. My wife lived for this time of year. She loved the pumpkin spice stuff. So this is like the 4th time since July I found myself crying in the grocery store. Management is going to get tired of that I think.

So my brother works overseas. For the first time in years he's coming home for Thanksgiving. The whole family is meeting at his ranch that is about 14 hours travel from where I live. His wife and kids will be there. My other brother will have his wife and kids there. My dad and step-mom will be there. Great right?

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Except my wife just died 3 months ago. So I do not want to leave my step-son, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law for Thanksgiving. If I went, the first Thanksgiving I missed in nearly a quarter century would be the one less than 5 months after she died. I'm catching a ration of shit for this. I'm being told I should go to the ranch. But I just can't. I t

I attended a wedding today. The young man getting married is my adopted (not really) son. He was my step-son's best friends when they were in 5th grade. There were two of them and they are all 30 now. I basically call them all "Son of another mother" and would do anything for them. So J got married today. I'm six weeks and a day out from losing my wife. J lost his Dad in March. He also took it hard when my wife died because she was basically his "other mother."

I sat with him and his groomsmen this morning. I gave him all the fatherly advice I could. I was doing fine. But during the ceremony the pastor (another young man I watched grow up) started talking about the vows you make

I intentionally scheduled a trip today with my brother. We drove 13 hours round trip and picked up a 800lb piece of heavy equipment for my business. It was a good day because I kept very busy and didn't think about that it was a month ago today. I just finished unloading it into my garage with only two and a half hours in the day. I'm going to have to find another way to deal with these anniversaries. I can't spend $3k on the 10th of every month.

I'm back at work after a two week hiatus. Coming back to work and trying to establish the new normal after losing my wife has proven challenging. I've come to realize that grief is a fickle beast. Everybody warned me about the "firsts" and the big milestones. Nobody warned me that the little stuff is oh so much worse. I've come to find that it's the silly stuff that gets me. Holding the memorial? Nope...got through that only with a few tears. Instinctively grabbing that cup of fruit you always buy for her in HEB? Yup...crying like a baby in the fruits and veggies. Picking up her ashes from the funeral home? Nope....handled that shockingly well. Calling AAA and removing her as t