Author Archives: Cindy

happy 4th

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I made an attempt at throwing a party last night for the 4th. The roof of my building has an amazing view of the fireworks over Puget Sound, so I thought I would take advantage of that and have a few folks over to take in the sights with me. It turned out to be a pretty low-key event – just me, Dave, Carl, and Krissy (who was so well-behaved that I almost didn’t recognize her) – but I think everyone had a reasonably good time. I personally had a lot of fun, it’s nice to just sit and talk about nothing in particular for hours. And I’ve never watched fireworks with a boyfriend before, I was surprised at just how romantic it is. (Who knew?) I also drank waaaaay beyond my limit, which I suppose is fine since I was at home, and if you can’t get sloppy drunk in the comfort of your own surroundings, where can you? Surprisingly, I feel fine today, which is probably due to all of the water and vitamins I downed before I fell asleep last night. I’m a bit sleepy, but no nausea or headache or anything. So that’s cool. I guess I’m a pretty efficient lush after all. (Ha!)

This afternoon, I’m heading out to Duvall with Teenie to get her settled in for another week at Dave’s house while I’m in California. I think she’s starting to like it there, she has much more space to run around than she does here. She seems to have a bit of cabin fever in this tiny apartment, there’s been lots of pacing and meowing over the weekend. Now if we can just get her to stop bitchslapping Dave’s cats whenever they come within 10 feet of her…

word, yo

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Happy 27th birthday to a guy who….

* is at least partially responsible for inspiring me to move downtown.
* gives girls flowers for no reason whatsoever.
* once tried to teach me how to salsa dance in my kitchen.
* has introduced me to a whole world of awesome people who regularly read/comment on my blog, and whose blogs I also love to read/comment on.
* can make a mean chocolate chip cookie.
* is just an overall sweetheart of a guy.

Happy birthday, Scott!

conflict of interest, anyone?

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Around this time tomorrow, I will be in Seattle. This makes me very happy. Originally my flight got bumped from Friday afternoon to Thursday night, but I wasn’t going to get home until almost midnight. Then it got bumped AGAIN, so now I’m leaving around lunchtime, and I’ll be home by 3:30 p.m. Hee!

This morning was strange. The project manager, who is kind of my boss for the next couple of months, asked if he could speak to me privately. This is one of my worst fears. My stomach clenched up and I was positive that I was about to be reprimanded or fired or something of that nature. Because after all, since I’ve been here, I haven’t done any work. Honestly, all I’ve done so far is create a SharePoint site (for all you non-techies: that’s an internal website where we geeks post all of our documentation in one central location so we can keep up with what each other is doing), and I’ve edited a bunch of documents. Apparently word has gotten out that I have a degree in journalism, so everyone is sending me their stuff to proofread. But that’s kind of fun for me, it’s not like real work.

So I go to the little cafeteria area with him, stomach totally knotted up in anxiety/terror, and he tells me that he just wants to let me know that he thinks I’m doing a fantastic job, and he’s going to make sure that both my career lead (the aforementioned Maurice/Mo), and the practice director who’s over all of the systems engineers in the region (!!) know that there is no way that I should be a level 1 systems engineer, I should be at least a level 2. Again, this is startling since I HAVEN’T DONE ANY WORK!!!

Then, he emails me a copy of his resume and wants to know if I’ll revise/format it for him. Supposedly this is a resume that he’ll submit to customers for potential future assignments. One problem with this logic is that our company has its own resume format that they want us to use, and we post them on the company intranet, and this resume definitely doesn’t follow that format. So I’m sort of wondering if all this praise is just his way of kissing my ass so I’ll help him land a new job. I suppose it doesn’t matter – if my higher-ups hear good things about me, or if (fingers crossed) I end up getting a promotion or a raise out of the deal, I’m certainly not going to complain. It’s just strange.

Meanwhile, I’m counting the hours until I board that plane tomorrow…

grrr…

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Ok, so Blogger sucks. I emailed them about my nuked template, and this is what they sent back to me:

“Hello Cindy,

I’m afraid you’ve fallen victim to a bug in our system which occasionally loses template data. Your posts are still safe, but unfortunately we were not able to recover your template for you. To use one of our default templates, you can click the Choose New Template tab on the Template page. This will let you publish your blog again while you recreate your old template. We apologize for the inconvenience and we are working on getting this problem fixed. However, it is always a good idea to save your own copy of a template if you make extensive customizations.

Sincerely, Steve
Blogger Support Team”

Needless to say, from here on out I will make sure to ALWAYS have a recent copy of my blog template saved somewhere. Silly me, I thought they might actually be able to recover data that’s hosted on their own damn servers.

Also, BlogBack – which used to provide my comments – doesn’t seem to work anymore, and I can’t log in to their web site to get the script again. I keep getting some kind of “invalid query” error. So I set up HaloScan (thanks, Carl!), and hopefully that’ll solve that. But that means that all of my old comments are gone, which makes me sad. Oh well.

Also, it looks like I get to leave CA on Thursday night this week, instead of Friday afternoon. Which would make me very happy, except that the only reason we’re getting an extra day off is because we’re going to have to work the weekend of the 17th. Which makes me very sad. Again.

Oh, and my sister’s kitty just had to have her leg amputated because she had a malignant tumor on it and they were afraid that the cancer had spread. That’s another thing to add to the list of sadness.

So there you have it. It’s just been a total crap day all the way around.

we are experiencing technical difficulties

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So, I don’t know how many of you noticed that my site went kerplooey yesterday. I don’t know what happened, but somehow Blogger nuked over 3/4 of my template when I saved my last post. I have no idea how/why, since it said that everything updated successfully. So I think I got it mostly fixed (and for someone who’s not an expert in HTML, believe me, that was no fun), but my comment section is still messed up. Hopefully I’ll have that back & working later today. Hang in there.