So I'm officially a full employee with benefits at Maxim as of Monday! I went in for a presentation and to turn in some paperwork and get a new badge. It's great that for the first time in seven years, I have real health insurance. I guess that's one of the benefits of being with a gigantic company: They have the ability to do these things for ( Read more... )

I got the night of Thanksgiving off and as usual, the family threw a big dinner at home. This year, Ryan and his live-in girlfriend, Kim, along with Val and her live-in boyfriend, Chris, were in attendance. As is typical, there was way more than enough food and thankfully the evening wasn't as awkward as I had predicted. Kim had never met Chris and ( Read more... )

Last week was a short work week. Only Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. Every day at this job is getting better and as the people around me let the slack on my leash get longer and longer, I feel more and more encouraged. It's still a scary job and I don't really know anyone (The bunny suits only make it worse to get to know people) but there ( Read more... )

I hate myself for waiting so long to write these journal entries. I've been off work since Sunday morning and now, here I am, with two hours to go before my next work week begins and I'm finally sitting down to write an entry about last week. Hopefully in the future I'll do what I mean to and jot out entries closer to the times I'm talking about ( Read more... )

Last Thursday to Saturday was my third week at Maxim, and one of my short weeks as the Wednesday shift alternates every other week. It was my best week so far. Thankfully, most of our machines were finally working again and we were able to get to work. The backlog of work from my second week when those machines were down kept piling up but during ( Read more... )

I'm writing this on my new computer, a mid-2010-model Mac Mini. It finally arrived Wednesday morning and I've been tinkering with it all day; mostly moving over my old data from my old computer and updating everything. My previous computer was a 15-inch 1.33 GHz revision C Powerbook G4 laptop which I purchased shortly after graduating college in ( Read more... )

I started my new job at Maxim's Oregon fabrication installation last Friday night! It was a twelve-hour shift beginning at 6 PM. Yee haw. The big mystery up until then was where were they going to put me within the fab. During orientation last week, no one seemed to know and we could only speculate. It was only finally revealed when I arrived in ( Read more... )

What a crazy few days it's been. From Monday morning through Wednesday afternoon, I did orientation for my new job as a lab tech with Maxim. It was an odd experience as lots of things weren't normal and they bombarded me with so much information that it was nearly overwhelming. All three days, it was just me going through orientation alone. I met ( Read more... )

After about a month and a half of waiting, last week I finally received an official job offer from Maxim! I went in last Thursday and spent half the day filling out and reading all this paperwork to become official. It's happening and it's finally happening now! For the first time in almost a year, I can say I'm legitimately employed at a real ( Read more... )

I've been back from house sitting for a week and a half now and I'm relieved to have heard that the returning home owners approved greatly of the condition of the house and animals I was in charge of. Whenever I'm in charge of things that important for so long, I do get a little paranoid, so to hear everything is better than perfect is not only an ( Read more... )