Not dead.
But work and travel and sleeping and paperwork are taking up most of my hours. And days.
Little brother has secured a permanent university teaching position, and is stoked about it, although he'll have to move interstate.
In order to not dwell on the vast abyss of fucked-up-ness that is the current workplace and thus descend into raving insanity, I am assembling a way to fix it. Or at least large chunks of it. I think the only way to truly make it work properly would be to burn it and all its employees to the ground, salt the earth, and start over. This is probably part of why its major source of funding is being gradually whittled away. Eventually it will be a howling wasteland filled with the wrecks of failed attempts at building cheap knock-offs of actual business practices.
I should note at this point that I have taken previously learned lessons to heart, and my plan for fixing nearly dang everything includes a large "being personally paid a serious truckload for this" component built right into the fabric.
My creativity is starting to resurface in the office. As well as the repair plan, I designed a personalised ambigram for a co-worker, created a set of formulae today which knocked off 700 queries in a few minutes, and have waded in on learning VBA to the point where I now have a program at least capable of pulling and sorting data that was taking the boss horrible amounts of hours every month to collate manually. Deja vu on that last one, really. And I threw together a bit of reply-specific poetry on another forum which got some good responses.
Still having trouble with getting my hours up at the workplace. I'd finally worked off my time-debt from only spending a few hours there on my first day when I bombed out Monday afternoon, mainly from literally not having slept Sunday night. Stress, what stress? So I'm still around an hour or so behind par at the moment - hopefully I'll be able to make that up in the next couple of days.
On a last word, you know what's annoying? Being told by a government department that you can't pay a bill of theirs at any one of their own offices, you have to pay it at a post office. Despite actual personnel of the actual department being actually there in their actual office.
Little brother has secured a permanent university teaching position, and is stoked about it, although he'll have to move interstate.
In order to not dwell on the vast abyss of fucked-up-ness that is the current workplace and thus descend into raving insanity, I am assembling a way to fix it. Or at least large chunks of it. I think the only way to truly make it work properly would be to burn it and all its employees to the ground, salt the earth, and start over. This is probably part of why its major source of funding is being gradually whittled away. Eventually it will be a howling wasteland filled with the wrecks of failed attempts at building cheap knock-offs of actual business practices.
I should note at this point that I have taken previously learned lessons to heart, and my plan for fixing nearly dang everything includes a large "being personally paid a serious truckload for this" component built right into the fabric.
My creativity is starting to resurface in the office. As well as the repair plan, I designed a personalised ambigram for a co-worker, created a set of formulae today which knocked off 700 queries in a few minutes, and have waded in on learning VBA to the point where I now have a program at least capable of pulling and sorting data that was taking the boss horrible amounts of hours every month to collate manually. Deja vu on that last one, really. And I threw together a bit of reply-specific poetry on another forum which got some good responses.
Still having trouble with getting my hours up at the workplace. I'd finally worked off my time-debt from only spending a few hours there on my first day when I bombed out Monday afternoon, mainly from literally not having slept Sunday night. Stress, what stress? So I'm still around an hour or so behind par at the moment - hopefully I'll be able to make that up in the next couple of days.
On a last word, you know what's annoying? Being told by a government department that you can't pay a bill of theirs at any one of their own offices, you have to pay it at a post office. Despite actual personnel of the actual department being actually there in their actual office.