Category Archives: Work

I am an idiot

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So, I have a new boss at work – and for the record, this has absolutely nothing to do with that person I was complaining about last week – my old boss was a nice enough guy, and the new boss seems cool too. But, I have already made one HUGE mistake with my new boss. During our first meeting with each other, he was asking me how I got from a journalism degree into the IT field and then into this sort of IT/writing mix that I’m doing now. I mentioned how I really enjoy writing, but I sort of kept it just as a hobby for a few years, and that I’m glad to get back into it professionally. He asked me what type of stuff I write for fun, and I apparently lost my damn mind for a minute, because I just blurted out, “Oh, I have a blog.” I have no idea what the hell I was thinking.

Now, if he googles my married name, he’ll probably never find this website because there’s like 63 bajillion people in the world with my new last name. But if he happens to know my maiden name (which he might, I don’t know) and looks me up that way… um, hi! This site is the first thing that google brings up when you look for my old name. I mean, I suppose it’s fine if he reads this because I generally stick to that “don’t blog about work” policy, particularly since I started this job (I know I whined about my old job a LOT here), so it’s probably not that big a deal. And it’s not like I write anything too terribly graphic or personal here, either. Even the language stays relatively PG-13. So I’m probably overreacting by worrying about it. I just can’t believe that I admitted to having a blog so carelessly.

Oh, and I got my first bit of comment spam today! I feel so special. I deleted it, but I debated keeping it around just to make me feel important. Ha. Nerdy much?

boundaries

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There is something that is driving me absolutely crazy – ok, actually it’s someone – and I am dying to write an angry ranting post about it, but unfortunately, it falls under my “don’t blog about work” policy, so I have to keep my mouth shut. But damn, I’m going nuts over here. I feel bad because Dave has to endure listening to me complain about this person a lot when we’re at home, because he’s my only outlet for venting about him/her. (See? I’m not even telling you what gender this person is. It’s all very vague and mysterious. Nothing worth firing me over.) It would be so much easier if I could write about it here, and this person is allegedly going to be leaving at some point in the near future, so maybe I can complain about him/her after the fact. For now, I just have to bang my head repeatedly on my desk and silently weep. Which I guess is working ok for me so far.

Happy news: tonight Dave and I are going to meet up with our wedding photographer to get all of the formal pictures from our wedding. She said that she has some really great black and white shots, so I’m excited to see those. I’ll try to get them scanned in as soon as possible, but it’ll probably be the weekend before I’ll have a chance to get it done.

another rainy Monday

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I tried to write something last week, but it appears that Blogger has been having problems. Hmm. Ok, the recap. My company’s Christmas party was on Wednesday night – it was at a bowling alley. Apparently our regional director is a bit of a bowling fanatic, which is why we seem to do this at most company functions. Kind of strange. After the last time I bowled with my co-workers and won the “Least Graceful Bowler” award, I decided to sit this one out. So Dave and I enjoyed our free drink tickets and mingled with a few of my co-workers. (The ones that I know, anyway.) Thursday night was Dave’s company Christmas party, which was quite a different scene. It was a sit-down dinner at a very posh seafood restaurant. Not quite the same vibe as the bowling alley. I had a lot more fun at Dave’s party. Plus, his company’s Redmond office is a lot smaller than mine, so he actually knew everyone there. (Unlike mine, where it was more like, “Umm, I think I met that guy once, but I can’t remember his name…”) And the food was a lot better.

The weekend was good, very relaxing. I can’t think of anything particularly notable that we did, except that yesterday we did some Christmas shopping. It appeared that Dave had no idea what to get me for Christmas, so I dragged him around Nordstrom’s and pointed out a hundred or so different things that I liked, so he can get one or two and know that I’ll be happy. I was all excited when I woke up this morning because I realized that I was done with all of my Christmas shopping, and then I realized that I forgot one person: myself. My mom sent me a check with which to buy my own Christmas presents, and I haven’t used it yet. We do this every year; she usually gets me one or two small surprise gifts, but as a general rule, she doesn’t try to pick out clothes for me because it always ends in disaster. (I’m not saying that my mom doesn’t have taste. It’s just that she doesn’t necessarily know what I like. At all.)

I’m in the process of changing and updating pictures, I know I’m long overdue. I’ve changed the name of the Newport Beach photos to just California 2004 because all of our vacation photos are in there now. I’ve also added the ones from the Humane Society Walk, and from Thanksgiving. (Actually, they’re all photos from the weekend before Thanksgiving. I haven’t gotten the actual Thanksgiving photos from my mom yet.)

what do you want to be when you grow up?

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My company has this kind of strange management policy. No one really has a “boss” in the traditional sense – you have a project lead for each individual project you work on, and you have a career manager for everything else. The career manager is kind of like a mentor, but it’s also the person that your project leads give feedback to, so he knows how you’re doing as an employee and can recommend you (or not) for promotions/advances. Anyway, my first career manager, Mo, left the company last month. So now I have a new one, a guy named Jeff. He emailed me and asked me to lunch, since we’ve never met before, and his current project is in my neighborhood. We met up at Racha’s, my favorite Thai place, and went over all of my career goals. That part was so incredibly difficult. Does anyone know what they want to be doing 10 years from now? I don’t have a clue. When I think about work/my career, I can’t see past the next 2 years. I never have been able to think that far ahead. Maybe that makes me weird, I don’t know. Anyway, Jeff seems like a nice guy overall, so I’m glad he’s my career manager – I just hope he doesn’t think I’m a flake for not knowing what I hope to aspire to by 2014.

And speaking of work, my company’s Christmas party is on Wednesday, and Dave’s is on Thursday, so we’re going to be double-whammied on holiday office parties this week. Fun! Mine is at a bowling alley. I think Dave’s is going to be a bit classier (or at least I hope so). Actually, nevermind classy – I just hope there’s free booze at both of them.

Other than that, not much is going on. The weekend was very relaxing. We got a Christmas tree for Dave’s house. We also grabbed some ornaments, but it’s kind of a sparse-looking tree – it probably needs three strings of lights, and we only got two. Also, I tend to think that ornaments are something that you should acquire over time, not buy in bulk at Target (which we did). I made him buy one ornament of a snowman and snowlady hugging with the words “Our First Christmas” under it. He said he’s going to hide it when people come over. I know it’s cheesy, but I love that ornament.

neurotic cat, once again

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Teenie does this same thing every fall: she scratches the spot in front of her right ear until it bleeds. Then, when it starts to heal (and I’m sure we all know how much scabs can itch), she scratches at it some more. Which makes it bleed more. So it never heals. I’ve never figured out why she does this – despite our 8 years of cohabitation, we’ve never quite taken up each other’s native language, so the whole thing is somewhat of a mystery. I have a theory that it has something to do with allergies, change of seasons, something like that. Who knows.

Typically when this has happened in the past, my vet gave me a special cream to put on that spot to make it not itch (and that won’t be harmful if she ingests it, because after all, she is a cat, and she’s going to lick off whatever I put on her). So this year, I dug the cream out of the back of my medicine cabinet, only to find that it is no longer cream. It’s way past its expiration date, and it’s now more of a liquid form. Hmmm. Not good. I called a vet down the street and asked if I could get more, and they said I need to make an appointment. So fine, we’ll go to the vet on Wednesday. I asked the nurse if there was anything I could put on there in the meantime. She told me I could use Neosporin, but that I shouldn’t use that “Neosporin with pain relief” stuff because it has lidocaine in it, and it will numb her tongue. The mental image of that was kind of amusing to me.

And that pretty much sums up the excitement of my week. In other news that may or may not be interesting to anyone:
* The headache is now just off and on, but it’s not nearly as bad as it was last week. So I’m back down to just taking the occasional Tylenol, nothing more hardcore than that.
* I got a new project at work: more writing/documentation, which will allow me to work from home. This is expected to last until January 30th. Pajamas all day, every day! Whee! Actually, it really is a good thing because writing = lots of downtime, which means I’ll have time to update my certifications (which I’ve been procrastinating about for months) and I won’t have a problem taking time off for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Hey Alphagal, Dave’s going to meet up with me in New Orleans after Christmas – are you & the hubby going to be around?
* My brother has been calling me every day to get work-related advice, because his boss is being accused of sexual harassment. Not by my brother, of course, but by other women in the office. (And no, he doesn’t work for Bill O’Reilly. Although I love that story, too.)
* Have I mentioned how much I love Jon Stewart and The Daily Show? This interview is short and sweet.
* Speaking of which, you know how O’Reilly said that all viewers of the Daily Show were stoned slackers? Turns out that people who watch the Daily Show are more likely to have college degrees than O’Reilly’s viewers. Take that!

are french fries a "vegetable"?

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My performance review on Friday went very well. I haven’t been with the company long enough to qualify for an actual promotion, but they do these evaluations at the end of every fiscal year (which is now). And despite the fact that I’ve only been there 5 months, I am getting a raise of $1,000 a year. The way it was explained to me is that it’s kind of an incentive, like they think I’m doing a good job and want me to keep it up. I figure that after taxes, I might see an extra $50 a month. So that’s 1/2 of one student loan payment. Or 1/6th of a car payment. Or some insanely small fraction of rent. Regardless, it’s extra money, so I’m certainly not going to complain about it.

Now for the weekend summary. Friday was my own private chill-out night. I needed to recover from my Thursday night out with my co-workers, and Dave was having a boys’ night with one of his friends, so I cleaned my apartment and did laundry. Very exciting. Saturday, Dave and I were supposed to go to a bonfire at his neighbor’s house, but the poor guy (Dave, not his neighbor) apparently gave himself food poisoning by eating way-too-old leftovers, so that sort of scrapped those plans. I decided to go to the supermarket because I was out of a lot of stuff, and I totally forgot about the Jesus show going on less than 2 blocks away at Key Arena. I’m not sure if it was just ending or just beginning when I headed out to the store, but the Christian ladies were *everywhere*. Honestly, I have never seen so many unattractive women in one place in my life. Everywhere I looked were overweight middle-aged women in ugly JC Penney’s clothes with bad haircuts and minimal make-up. It was scary as hell. I didn’t want to walk to Blockbuster and have to navigate myself through the Throngs of Ugliness, so I decided that I was going to stay in and watch HBO. I got home, turned on the TV, and…. nothing. My cable was out. I called the cable company, and the automated voice message told me that there was a “known outage” in my area. I had a suspicion that it had something to do with the Christian women’s rally (maybe my cable signal was scared of all of the cellulite clad in unnatural fibers), but of course I couldn’t prove it. So I called Krissy to see if she wanted to go out (sort of a last-ditch desparate effort), but she had a date. Damn. So instead, I watched old episodes of “Sex & the City” on tape, then played GameBoy for a few hours. Not exactly a rockin’ Saturday night, I must say.

Yesterday, Dave and I went shopping, which translates to: he shopped, I whined. I wasn’t feeling well, and I tried to be a good sport, but it just wasn’t working too well for me. I felt better after we ate, then we rented “Super-Size Me” and watched that. Good lord. I already knew the stuff about McDonald’s, but the part about the food that’s being served in school cafeterias was absolutely horrifying. It’s amazing that we don’t all die of coronaries before we turn 25. I’ve never really considered doing the whole organic diet thing, but that movie made me think about it. Maybe that’s the point.

Ooh, and tomorrow morning, Dave’s gorgeous new furniture arrives! Hooray!!

bike accidents, hangovers and volcanoes, oh my!

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First, a bit of local news for those of you who haven’t already heard this: Mount St. Helens is in the process of erupting again. So far, all that’s coming out is steam, so it shouldn’t be quite the disaster that it was when it blew in the 80’s. Still, though, it’s pretty scary, because no one really knows what it’s going to do next. I remember when it erupted when I was a kid, and I didn’t know where Washington or Oregon were, so it didn’t have quite the same impact. When I moved here and saw Mount St. Helens – or rather, the concave back-side of it – I had nightmares for weeks about Mount Rainier erupting (which is much closer to Seattle and is also a dormant volcano). So it’s all a little creepy.

And speaking of creepy, this is going to be going on for the next 2 nights at an arena that’s about a block and a half from my apartment. As many as 18,000 Jesus-loving, God-fearing women all in one place. I’m terrified. I don’t think I’m going to be leaving my apartment until all of their charter buses are safely on their way back out of town.

One thing I forgot to mention about the last day of Orientation Week: I got there yesterday and everyone was saying “hey, have you heard about Ben?”, “Yeah, that’s really awful, I hope he’s ok,” etc. Ben is one of the Aussie guys in our class, so I asked another Aussie what happened. Here’s the story: Ben borrowed a bicycle from the hotel so he could ride around downtown. I guess it was kind of a crappy bike, because the brakes locked when he was coming down a hill and he fell off the bike. Only that’s not the end of the story. Oh, no. When he fell, he happened to land right in the entrance to a parking garage. A car came out, didn’t see him on the ground, and RAN OVER HIM!! Literally, one of the 4 tires of the SUV went completely across his torso. Now, here’s the amazing part: the guy is totally fine. They rushed him to the ER and kept him overnight, but he had nothing broken, no internal injuries, na-da. A few bruises and scrapes, but that’s it. He was released yesterday afternoon, then went back to the hotel to sleep off the drugs they gave him. We joked that it was a pretty extreme method to get out of the videotaped team exercise, but apparently he’s ok to fly back to Australia this evening. Thus proving the theory that all Australians, even the little scrawny computer geek types, are total badasses. The hotel, meanwhile, sort of panicked over the fact that this happened on one of their bikes and he could potentially sue the poo out of them (which probably doesn’t even cross the mind of most non-Americans), so they upgraded his room, sent many free platters of food to his room, etc. Nice.

Anyway, last night I went out with a bunch of the guys from class because it was their last night in town. Many drinks were consumed at the hotel bar, then we walked to Axis for dinner and more drinks. On the way there, we passed the spot where Ben had his bike accident, and we stopped for a respectful moment of silence as we stood around the spot of blood that was still on the sidewalk. Many of our fellow drunken cohorts took photos. I’m sure Ben will appreciate that when they email them to him. Anyway, I ended up getting very tipsy and talking about politics and religion with a bunch of foreigners (and one or two Americans). Strange evening, but fun.

And this afternoon, I have my very first performance review – it’s end of the fiscal year, so this is when they do all that stuff. Everyone wish me luck!