I’m sitting in a huge room full of nerds. Not that that’s really any different than my average workday, but today the nerds are all strangers. And most of them don’t speak English as their native language. Translation: this is Orientation Week. Which is funny, since I’ve worked for this company for almost 6 months and they’re just now getting around to sending me to orientation. So this morning was hell – go around the room, introduce yourself, talk about your previous work experience, why you joined this company, and your favorite hobby. Oh lordy. Have I mentioned how much I HATE talking about myself in front of large groups of people? If I had some assigned topic to talk about, I’d be fine, but not about my career and “fun facts” about my personal life. Ugh.

Interesting side note: there are actually more females in here than I was expecting; however, only 2 of us are non-Asians. And I don’t mean Asian-American, either – these girls work for my company’s branch offices in Singapore, Malaysia and Bangkok. However, I am the only female systems engineer in here, the Asian girls are all developers. And the sole other caucasian girl is one of our company’s internal lawyers. Once again, I’m the weirdo for being the girl with a guy’s job. I used to like having that distinction because it made me feel like some kind of pioneer feminist, but it’s starting to get kind of old. I wonder if I’d be a good developer. I met a guy this morning who switched fields and said it wasn’t that hard a transition. Hmmm. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about lately.

Anyway, this past weekend was pretty good, although poor Dave had to put up with an irrationally grouchy me for 2 days. I don’t know why I was in such a foul mood, but I couldn’t seem to snap myself out of it. I think it had something to do with my sinuses being all weird – I tend to get irritable when I have a sore throat & runny nose. But anyway, we got a lot done in the house. The living room is totally cleared out (the big-screen TV was the most daunting thing to move), and the plywood has all been laid down. There are some really funky angles in that room that allowed Dave to play with his new circular saw, which he thoroughly enjoyed. (Aside: the saw has a laser sight guide on it, and every time he mentioned something about it, I would have to repeat the world “laser” in my best Dr. Evil voice, complete with finger quotes.) We got the floor itself put down in most of the dining room, and we were going to do the rest on Sunday, but we were both tired and felt like taking a day off. Plus the fact that I was (and still am) sore as hell from spending most of Saturday on my hands and knees with a nail gun. I can’t imagine that it’ll take more than a day to get the rest done, so we’ll do it next Saturday. No worries. We should have enough time before the gorgeous new furniture shows up.

So yeah… Did I mention that I can’t wait for Orienation Week to be over?