no cake, but new reading material
thank you for the birthday wishes! i got a bunch on facebook, which always baffles me because i never spend any time on facebook. i also learned that the receptionist at work is a month younger than me. she looks younger than that.
i spent way more time today than i wanted trying to fix a weird expense report issue. you have to itemize everything on a hotel bill - actual lodging, food, laundry, etc - and when the final cost of the room was charged in dollars and all the itemization is in rupees? and everything in an expense report has to be reported in the same currency? you have a problem. and when you have a strange and unsolveable problem with the expense reports, you email the expenses team. and if you're lucky, you get a very nice and very helpful person who figures everything out for you, by which i mean she figured out the right conversion rate and converted all the rupees into dollars so i could resubmit the expenses so the managing director i was doing it for could be accurately reimbursed. expense reports usually aren't hard! but expenses for three weeks of india are kind of a pain.
(we have a center of some kind in bangalore. every so often one of the managing directors in tax has to go out there for three weeks. and then when he gets home i have to submit his expenses.)
my parents called me at work to sing happy birthday to me, and then my mom wanted to talk politics. after about fifteen or twenty minutes i was done, and when i told her i didn't want to talk about it any more, she kind of huffed and went "well i'm sorry i brought it up". to which i said "i'm not, but i'm at work and i have things to do". and y'know, i didn't want to spend half an hour listening to my mom tell me how people should react to the cheeto-elect and what they should be doing to mitigate the damage and keep themselves from going crazy with anxiety. everyone's different, and everyone's coping mechanisms are going to be different, and different people will have different ideas about what they want to (and can) do to try and keep the country from going down the crapper. except if you're my mom, everyone should be worried about [issue 1] much more than [issue 2], and they should be doing this, this, and this, because that's what she's doing. whatever. i was still fighting with the expense report and that was more important to me.
on the other hand! i totally forgot to mention this, but on the plane up from florida, my mom sat next to a woman with a safety pin on her shirt, and by the time the plane landed my mom knew all about this woman and what the safety pin means. and then the woman gave her the pin, so mom was wearing it on her sweater on sunday. she got to tell everyone at brunch what it stood for. (i allowed as how i already knew. sometimes tumblr is actually useful. :D ) (i mean aside from the nice boost you get from pics of puppies and kittens and bunnies and pretty men and cute ladies and outer space.)
i did not celebrate my birthday with cake (will do tomorrow, because i know where to get a single slice of carrot cake) but i did celebrate by going to a book reading! flying without a net, by e m ben shaul, which is a pseudonym but i don't know if the author wants to be outed on lj - the book's about two nice jewish boys falling in love in boston, and it couldn't be more in my wheelhouse unless it was set in the 30s or involved cars. e m read, people asked questions, she signed books - and i discovered i'm in the acknowledgements, which makes the second book in like a year - i came home. and now i have a new book to help fill some of the empty spaces on my fabulous new bookshelves.
so there was no wincon this year, because it was rebranded into... confabulation! the inaugural con is may 25-28 in pittsburgh. registration is now open. you should come. :D
also my tiny show is updating with good updates. not quite the updates i want, but they're still good.
i spent way more time today than i wanted trying to fix a weird expense report issue. you have to itemize everything on a hotel bill - actual lodging, food, laundry, etc - and when the final cost of the room was charged in dollars and all the itemization is in rupees? and everything in an expense report has to be reported in the same currency? you have a problem. and when you have a strange and unsolveable problem with the expense reports, you email the expenses team. and if you're lucky, you get a very nice and very helpful person who figures everything out for you, by which i mean she figured out the right conversion rate and converted all the rupees into dollars so i could resubmit the expenses so the managing director i was doing it for could be accurately reimbursed. expense reports usually aren't hard! but expenses for three weeks of india are kind of a pain.
(we have a center of some kind in bangalore. every so often one of the managing directors in tax has to go out there for three weeks. and then when he gets home i have to submit his expenses.)
my parents called me at work to sing happy birthday to me, and then my mom wanted to talk politics. after about fifteen or twenty minutes i was done, and when i told her i didn't want to talk about it any more, she kind of huffed and went "well i'm sorry i brought it up". to which i said "i'm not, but i'm at work and i have things to do". and y'know, i didn't want to spend half an hour listening to my mom tell me how people should react to the cheeto-elect and what they should be doing to mitigate the damage and keep themselves from going crazy with anxiety. everyone's different, and everyone's coping mechanisms are going to be different, and different people will have different ideas about what they want to (and can) do to try and keep the country from going down the crapper. except if you're my mom, everyone should be worried about [issue 1] much more than [issue 2], and they should be doing this, this, and this, because that's what she's doing. whatever. i was still fighting with the expense report and that was more important to me.
on the other hand! i totally forgot to mention this, but on the plane up from florida, my mom sat next to a woman with a safety pin on her shirt, and by the time the plane landed my mom knew all about this woman and what the safety pin means. and then the woman gave her the pin, so mom was wearing it on her sweater on sunday. she got to tell everyone at brunch what it stood for. (i allowed as how i already knew. sometimes tumblr is actually useful. :D ) (i mean aside from the nice boost you get from pics of puppies and kittens and bunnies and pretty men and cute ladies and outer space.)
i did not celebrate my birthday with cake (will do tomorrow, because i know where to get a single slice of carrot cake) but i did celebrate by going to a book reading! flying without a net, by e m ben shaul, which is a pseudonym but i don't know if the author wants to be outed on lj - the book's about two nice jewish boys falling in love in boston, and it couldn't be more in my wheelhouse unless it was set in the 30s or involved cars. e m read, people asked questions, she signed books - and i discovered i'm in the acknowledgements, which makes the second book in like a year - i came home. and now i have a new book to help fill some of the empty spaces on my fabulous new bookshelves.
so there was no wincon this year, because it was rebranded into... confabulation! the inaugural con is may 25-28 in pittsburgh. registration is now open. you should come. :D
also my tiny show is updating with good updates. not quite the updates i want, but they're still good.