Work, home, family = life
I've come to accept the fact that my lack of journaling will simply be reflected here as a blank spot that will have to be covered by my biological gray matter storage instead. So on with it!
December:
December:
- Went to Memphis for my December trip. Great hotel at Marriott Downtown with the best bed ever! (sorry Westin). With touring Graceland - a full day occupation -, trying tout the two top recommended BBQ places and getting together with Memphis Doug for dinner etc both nights I never even made it to Beale Street or got to see the ducks at the Peabody. it was a great trip. The oddest thing was the impression of Memphis; very racial, cop covered (at least downtown), compact in a smaller city way and a shocking absence of Christmas lights or decorations be it on homes, city streetlamps or banners. Sad.
- Work has been humming along. I've gotten used to the balancing of work and days off so that by the time workdays come around again I am looking forward to the full day of focus. I'm truly in the sweet job zone and the boss keeps heaping praise to my ears and has mentioned that he recommended me for the highest available pay increase and bonus. We'll see even though I don't give a damn. Just going to change the number going into the savings accts etc that I'll never notice. The big change is that the boss wants to switch me and the other guy from Windows (Citrix) who's working the other team/shift. That means I'll have less contact with over 2/3 of my old team and there's the possibility that I'll have to carry more days because of the slow or non-workers. Currently my team has me and Prem who work very similarly i.e. monitoring the chat room notifications, working email pages and grabbing the bulk of the tickets that come in. Bill grabs tickets himself but isn't as active in ack'ing notifications but he handles larger issues being more of an expert. On a busy day Prem and I may have 15-19 tickets apiece, Bill a dozen each taking anywhere from 5 min to 5 hours with some bridgelines lasting 10 hours. On the other team if there is a busy day I won't have anyone like Prem to double team the inflow. Ah well, work is work; I just tell myself it's a new situation and there's no use in comparing how things were; after all what if I'd never been on that team at all?
- Home life has changed a bit. I was getting the urge to have a dog of my own and began a loose search for homes with a yard in the Mid-county area under $300k. Lots of options but nothing perfect since I truly don't want to leave my location now. But my condo cannot handle a Newfie or Bernese Mtn Dog, they're just too large for my tiny hovel. As the Dog-owning-masterhood call strengthened I got a call to foster an Eskie short term. So I now have Precious for a week-10 days only as she is recovering from a couple of bacterial diarrhea causing bugs after which she'll move to a house with a yard and other dogs so she can get some socializaion in. I'm doing some training (leash, crate, commands) and evaluating her health and behavior. Today is seeing how she does being crated while I'm out of the hours; I've been told to treat her like a puppy since we don't know whether she'll chew up my couch or pillows out of stress while I'm gone. Oops time to walk her, get her tired then in the crate so I can leave for lunch.
- Lunch - Indian buffet with the gang then a day date with Gaby seeing the Black Swan then happy hour at Haciends (thanks Groupon).