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.