------------------------------------------------- Title: A long weird week. Date: 2022-05-10 Device: Desktop Mood: Sombre. ------------------------------------------------- Ugh. What a strange week. My grandfather is steadily declining. He has been frail for the last month or so, but it's a noticible drop in the last week. Yesterday I had a tearful phone call from my mum saying we should go and visit soon. I was kind of blindsided by this (at the time I didn't understand how quickly his cancer had progressed); so I went to pick up to boy from school, and I figured we could both visit him together. I named my son after my grandfather, and it's important for me that he has some memories of him to carry forward. When I arrived, my grandfather was sleeping. I didn't want to wake him, so I just sat with him for a while, holding his had. My son was sat with us, quietly. I think he understood the atmosphere rather than the circumstances. My wife went to visit him last night, and apparently he was beginning the cycle of morphine via a pump, so he could relax in the face of the pain. I don't know if he will wake up again. I hope that he will leave us without pain, or regret. I'm going to visit again this afternoon. ----- Work continues; we are steading draining the AWS swamp (ha!). Only about 20 application remain now, and then the costs will crater once we can take the RDS and ES instances offline. Lots of useful upside at the moment as the engineering team is beginning to recognise the benefits of Incredibly Simple Unix Hosting. There's even talk of moving some of the low traffic applications from traditional network-availabel RDBMS to something simpler like SQLite. This is good progress. --C