Life Update (with fic notes)
So, I started my new job on Tuesday.
This has been a really tiring week, not because the work has been hard, but because I've had so little to do, and the sitting around is really exhausting. I had a full day of orientation on Tuesday, and a half-day of IT orientation on Wednesday, followed by 4 hours of sitting around waiting for a computer and rereading the same 40 pages of documents over and over again. They finally said, "Just give up and go home" at 4PM.
Thursday, I spent the morning reading a book on Hibernate which I brought in, and my computer showed up at noonish. I did a lot of online training and got it set up with my dev environment by the end of the day.
Friday, I played around with the app and attended our sprint planning meeting. I also retested some bugs, and, at the very end of the day, wrote some real code to fix an issue. It was a very heartening process, because while I needed help to figure out what class to be looking in (new UI, still feeling my way around), I spotted the actual problem before the guy who was helping me, and figured out the solution all by myself. My skills are definitely transferable.
So far, other than the stultifying boredom of being unable to get started midweek, I really like it. The team is smart and dedicated. They have a fair number of meetings, but they are really skillfully run, without a lot of waste time (our project manager is off-site, so a certain degree of administrative overhead is really necessary). There's good communication between the team and upper management.
What's really bizarre to me is the way the team gets in between 8 at 9 every day and leaves in the range of 4 to 5:30. And no one brings their computers home. Coming from a place where it's just expected that people keep their email active through the evening, and pings on IM come all the time, this has been kind of a shock, though in a very, very good way. I left at 4:50 on Friday, after fixing my bug (hooray!), and I was the last person there from my team.
So far, the only negatives that I can find is that the office building is incredibly dry. INCREDIBLY. When I wash my hands and dry them and step out of the restroom, they are instantly freezing as the air wicks all remaining moisture out near-instantly. I've ordered a good 1L water bottle from Amazon, and will probably be emptying it several times a day.
Oh! Also, there's no soda machine on my floor, just a coffee machine, so I have to go down to the mini-caf (which also has soup, salad, sandwiches, pizza, yogurt, fruit, etc) if I want a drink. Or just bring them in, which is what I'll really do.
The commute has been better than I worried. Traffic is sometimes slow at the end of my highway commute in and the beginning of my highway commute out, but it hasn't added more than 10-15 minutes to my overall drive, which ranges from 25-40 minutes. Generally, it's faster in the mornings and slower at night, mainly, I suspect, because the evening commute is all left turns.
In non-work news, Wes is reading his first real kid novel, instead of the little chapter books which are intended as easy-read books. He received James and the Giant Peach for Christmas, and is reading it completely independently. He's around a third of the way through now, and is enjoying it greatly.
Lorraine is a bouncy pile of awesome. She loves music and dance, and spent a lot of the holiday season regaling us with Christmas carols. Her reading is progressing a lot more slowly than Wes's did: I suspect there's less urgency, because Wes is always willing to read to her.
Sebastian is growing up fast. We've started moving him out of his crib by putting him in Lorraine's bed with her, which both of them really like. We have to be pretty firm about proper bedtime protocols, and have been making it a rule that after a warning or two, if he keeps trying to play with Lorraine or get out of bed, it's back to the crib he goes.
I'm having a bit of a hard time finding energy for leisure activity, around work and kids. When I get home in the evening and get dinner done and the kids down, it's about all I can do to take a bath and spend a few hours reading or watching The Wonder Years on Amazon Prime video. This weekend, I want to make cupcakes with Lorraine and do science experiments with Wes and laugh with Sebastian. And sleep. I need to get my body used to the new reality here.
I AM continuing work on Emperor, which is trucking along steadily, but I think I've decided not to post anymore until I'm done with the entire fic, since I can't say whether there will be a week or two months between chapters. In a few weeks, I'll start bringing my netbook into work to do some writing over my lunch break, which will mean steadier progress, but since the action is going to start to heat up in the next chapters, I don't want to end up leaving a cliffhanger for months. I'll finish it, hopefully by sometime this summer, and post it all in one go (or maybe a chapter every day or two).
With this decision, I can also feel less guilty about writing non-Emperor stuff. I want to try my hand at writing Doctor Who, and possibly Downton Abbey, with which I have fallen in love, hard. And there are so MANY Vorkosigan stories I feel like I need to write. I want to write the epic secret romance between Princess Kareen and Lady Alys not-yet-Vorpatril, which has been lurking in my backbrain for ages, and I still want to go back to my Ahn and Metzov fic from ages ago, and I want to play with Nikki Vorsoisson growing up in Vorkosigan house as a non-child of that dynasty, similar to my Growing Up from years ago. There's so MUCH to write in Bujold's worlds.
Anyway. That is where I am and how I am. More updates to come later, I'm sure.
This entry was originally posted at http://glishara.dreamwidth.org/256382.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
This has been a really tiring week, not because the work has been hard, but because I've had so little to do, and the sitting around is really exhausting. I had a full day of orientation on Tuesday, and a half-day of IT orientation on Wednesday, followed by 4 hours of sitting around waiting for a computer and rereading the same 40 pages of documents over and over again. They finally said, "Just give up and go home" at 4PM.
Thursday, I spent the morning reading a book on Hibernate which I brought in, and my computer showed up at noonish. I did a lot of online training and got it set up with my dev environment by the end of the day.
Friday, I played around with the app and attended our sprint planning meeting. I also retested some bugs, and, at the very end of the day, wrote some real code to fix an issue. It was a very heartening process, because while I needed help to figure out what class to be looking in (new UI, still feeling my way around), I spotted the actual problem before the guy who was helping me, and figured out the solution all by myself. My skills are definitely transferable.
So far, other than the stultifying boredom of being unable to get started midweek, I really like it. The team is smart and dedicated. They have a fair number of meetings, but they are really skillfully run, without a lot of waste time (our project manager is off-site, so a certain degree of administrative overhead is really necessary). There's good communication between the team and upper management.
What's really bizarre to me is the way the team gets in between 8 at 9 every day and leaves in the range of 4 to 5:30. And no one brings their computers home. Coming from a place where it's just expected that people keep their email active through the evening, and pings on IM come all the time, this has been kind of a shock, though in a very, very good way. I left at 4:50 on Friday, after fixing my bug (hooray!), and I was the last person there from my team.
So far, the only negatives that I can find is that the office building is incredibly dry. INCREDIBLY. When I wash my hands and dry them and step out of the restroom, they are instantly freezing as the air wicks all remaining moisture out near-instantly. I've ordered a good 1L water bottle from Amazon, and will probably be emptying it several times a day.
Oh! Also, there's no soda machine on my floor, just a coffee machine, so I have to go down to the mini-caf (which also has soup, salad, sandwiches, pizza, yogurt, fruit, etc) if I want a drink. Or just bring them in, which is what I'll really do.
The commute has been better than I worried. Traffic is sometimes slow at the end of my highway commute in and the beginning of my highway commute out, but it hasn't added more than 10-15 minutes to my overall drive, which ranges from 25-40 minutes. Generally, it's faster in the mornings and slower at night, mainly, I suspect, because the evening commute is all left turns.
In non-work news, Wes is reading his first real kid novel, instead of the little chapter books which are intended as easy-read books. He received James and the Giant Peach for Christmas, and is reading it completely independently. He's around a third of the way through now, and is enjoying it greatly.
Lorraine is a bouncy pile of awesome. She loves music and dance, and spent a lot of the holiday season regaling us with Christmas carols. Her reading is progressing a lot more slowly than Wes's did: I suspect there's less urgency, because Wes is always willing to read to her.
Sebastian is growing up fast. We've started moving him out of his crib by putting him in Lorraine's bed with her, which both of them really like. We have to be pretty firm about proper bedtime protocols, and have been making it a rule that after a warning or two, if he keeps trying to play with Lorraine or get out of bed, it's back to the crib he goes.
I'm having a bit of a hard time finding energy for leisure activity, around work and kids. When I get home in the evening and get dinner done and the kids down, it's about all I can do to take a bath and spend a few hours reading or watching The Wonder Years on Amazon Prime video. This weekend, I want to make cupcakes with Lorraine and do science experiments with Wes and laugh with Sebastian. And sleep. I need to get my body used to the new reality here.
I AM continuing work on Emperor, which is trucking along steadily, but I think I've decided not to post anymore until I'm done with the entire fic, since I can't say whether there will be a week or two months between chapters. In a few weeks, I'll start bringing my netbook into work to do some writing over my lunch break, which will mean steadier progress, but since the action is going to start to heat up in the next chapters, I don't want to end up leaving a cliffhanger for months. I'll finish it, hopefully by sometime this summer, and post it all in one go (or maybe a chapter every day or two).
With this decision, I can also feel less guilty about writing non-Emperor stuff. I want to try my hand at writing Doctor Who, and possibly Downton Abbey, with which I have fallen in love, hard. And there are so MANY Vorkosigan stories I feel like I need to write. I want to write the epic secret romance between Princess Kareen and Lady Alys not-yet-Vorpatril, which has been lurking in my backbrain for ages, and I still want to go back to my Ahn and Metzov fic from ages ago, and I want to play with Nikki Vorsoisson growing up in Vorkosigan house as a non-child of that dynasty, similar to my Growing Up from years ago. There's so MUCH to write in Bujold's worlds.
Anyway. That is where I am and how I am. More updates to come later, I'm sure.
This entry was originally posted at http://glishara.dreamwidth.org/256382.html. Please comment there using OpenID.