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Today was a holiday at Nike for the End of Slavery Day.

Here is the image of the order from the USA National Archives.

We are working on the data conversions for a significant project for Nike and are working through the holiday and the weekend, our fourth weekend.

I made scones and a breakfast of eggs and kielbasa from Olympia Provisions.

Corwin made a dinner of Moroccan chicken with olives and lemon, which is my own recipe, and it was good.

I worked on and off all day on the data conversions. We also loaded more software enhancements to try to make it run faster. We have started a mass load that will run for as long as twenty hours. We will meet again at 9AM Saturday and see how it is going.

This weekend includes Father Day, and so I have posted on Facebook a few old pictures from the 80s and will put up more pictures of dad and others.

I wish I had something more inciteful to say on this my first 19June Holiday.  I can say that I am happy we are starting to work through issues on race now. I know that some of the purgings of the evils of the past are confusing people, removing statues, and banning flags, and correcting names, but it is how we reach the truth. I am learning so much these last few years about our institutions and I am so disappointed. I am saddened to learn I have on occasion participated unknowingly in failed institutions (i.e., the non-unanimous jury in Oregon).

We could have so much more if we would accept the failures of the past and talk about how to walk to the future with everyone. The only learning for me is that when someone is talking (posting) and they refer to how something impacts them or how it is something they don’t want, or they have rights that are being trampled on, or there is a conspiracy to rob them of liberty, I know that they have missed the point. The truth is that while I am safe and well off, other Americans are not safe or well off. For me, it seems that I am in the dark, but as MLK said, you can only see the stars in the dark! So I see stars and a future that will be brighter. I know it will be, and we will find a better future.

I ignore the stock market today; the stock market went down.

The reports are that there were more than seven-hundred deaths from the virus today in the USA. One of these deaths is from Oregon. The active infection rate is explosive as Texas, Arizona, California, and Floria show massive increases. Over 1.2 million people in the USA have an active infection. I went with this song: America the Beautiful.

The day was a mix of work with some breaks for sleeping and taking Susie out.

We were back at it again at 6ish and working on the data conversions. The servers ran all night and finished about the time we started. We then started up more work, but at a slower pace, so we would not run the servers so hard that they nearly stop.

At the same time, we had more fixes done to make everything go faster and better. More vendor patches (OSS notes to you SAP folks) and new programs with some better load balancing. All a rush.

We had more Zoom meetings about race. Nike has decided that we all need to do more. We are now having difficult conversations, and it included this video: Difficult Conversations with a Black Man. It is much like pulling off a bandage, and like a bandage, it has to be done, and the sooner, the better.

Tomorrow is the 19June2020 and Nike and many will remember this as the day to celebrate as it is the End Of Slavery. We have to continue the data loads all weekend, but I will try to honor it.

I watched when I had a break between crises of the moment the Martin Luther King speech I have been to the Mountaintop. I had not listened to this one before and I really liked it. Words to live by and I like, as a writer, the flow and how he makes his points.

I then took Susie to the Reedville Cafe to lunch late. I have found it a bit safer to be a bit later for lunch as the kids and folks who think a mask is a political statement are already done and gone. The staff was friendly, masked, and very supportive and safe.

Susie had a cheeseburger with bacon with coleslaw. I had a Pacific Northwest favorite of fish and chips but halibut.

I went back to work after taking a break. I ordered pizza and pasta and salad from Dominos delivered.

We finally finished at about 11:30PM. We start again at 9AM.

The stock market went up and down, not much to say about that.

Today the reports are that more than seven-hundred forty Americans died from the virus, including four people of Oregon. Here is a hymn I don’t know: Now the Silence (Methodist Hymn 619).

I am tired as I have had no sleep except for a few naps. We are running the data conversions, and I babysat them over the night. I have managed a few naps of a few hours.

I was up again at 5:30 after a short sleep to check everything. We have been running all day and all night, and we have three more days or so to go.

So my day is a blur and is still a blur.

I did watch a bit of the stock market, and I saw it going up and down. That looked like profit-taking and options impacts to me.

I am sorry, but I am so tired that I can only do a few more minutes.

Just over eight-hundred people are reported to have lost their lives to the virus in the USA today.

So I went with a prayer instead of a song today. John Paul 2 prayer from the Methodist Hymnal 556

I am working on an issue with my data conversions at the shoe company. I am waiting for the technical server and platform people in India and local to give me some options. The software is too slow. We have been chasing this all evening and likely will be all night.

I am doing this blog in between meetings tonight.

The day started at 6:25AM when I woke without my alarm, forgot to put it on, and then had to rush as I had a 7AM call with India and Nike’s folks on designing some data conversions. That was followed by more Zoom calls. We then move to Microsoft teams for calls and sharing of screens and documents. This has been running all day and into the evening with a few breaks.

I got lunch at Wendy’s. I love their chili. Susie had breakfast for lunch.

I made beef tacos and shells from a box for dinner. I made this while being in the meetings call. I almost burned the beef when I had the burner set to high, and the meeting required me for a few minutes.

I received from Seeed two 8G Raspberry Pi 4‘s direct from China in the middle of this emergency. These are the new super fast Linux with good Wifi speed version now with enough memory. Yesterday, I got a new keyboard and trackpad for the Raspberry Pi 4.

This hardware is about the same power as one of my original supercomputers to run Nike’s SAP software.

The stock market in the USA lit a fuse and took off like a rocket. The retail sales numbers were not as terrible as imagined. The Fed chairman and the Dallas Fed warned that it will be a painful recovery. The market shrugged that off.

The reports show that more than eight-hundred forty people lost their lives to the virus in the USA today, including two people from Oregon. The infection rate continues to climb in Oregon and appears to have explosive growth in Texas. I found this church video that reminds me of many church services I have been in God of Ages. It is from a church in Texas, think of them.

Today we would play online Dungeon and Dragons, but one of our players is in the hospital, not for the virus. So we are thinking of him and his family.

Work started at 6:30ish as I had trouble sleeping the night before. The Zoom meetings were spaced out about every other hour. Crisis of day happened in those open times. So it was a rushed day.

Susie had a busy day. She had Zerida for nails and a few items left at 9:45AM. Susie got back and then off to the dentist at 4PM. A busy schedule for Susie.

I had chicken soup from a can, Cambell’s chunky, for lunch. Susie picked up a Happy Meal on the way back from Zerida’s.

I made of dinner rigatoni and cheese and meatballs (sliced up, after being baked from a frozen state) with sauce from a jar. All this cooked together. It is all gone–must be good.

I was so tired. I fell asleep watching the news in a chair. Our software was approved, so I signed on to work about 7PM and moved in my part of the fixes into quality for testing. I then went to lay down and read. I woke-up at 9:00PM.

On the gaming front, Litko sent me some replacement parts I purchased for the new edition of the board game Dune and some add-on parts for the Cthulhu version of the Pandemic board game. Litko makes cut plastic replacement parts that are bright colored and laser etched. If you play board games, they have some colorful replacement counters for you.

The stock market fell and then went back-up. Volatility was the watchword on Bloomberg today. The Fed announced that it would buy corporate bonds, and this seemed to calm the markets. I also heard a few stories that bankruptcies are starting, and while bonds appear to be covered to some degree, equity inventors are not protected in bankruptcy.

I made no progress on the Titanic model as I was too tired to do anything on that scale: Tiny!

According to the reports, more than four-hundred people died from the virus in the USA include six who passed away in Oregon. The infection rate is increasing in Oregon, with more than two-hundred forty new infections reported today. Today’s hymn is one I believe I have sung before: For the Beauty of the Earth.