The general state of affairs

What follows is quite random. Don't be scared - this is actually how my mind normally works: like an ADD kid full of soda and pop rocks.

Lately I've been getting a lot of spam e-mails at work in German. I like to while away time attempting to translate the subject lines, using only my limited skills auf Deutsche, so that it's more of a challenge.

I've continued the informal book exchange I started at work, and as a result have managed to slowly whittle down the pile of books that I've judged as "non-keepers" that would normally be going off to charity. The downside is that I've given away a lot of books but not gotten that many back in return from the four different individuals that I've been practically throwing stacks of reading material at.

The rumor is circulating that in the midst of a hiring and wage freeze - and as the company is beginning to initiate layoffs in some cases, as well as having become so desperate as to have decreed a moritorium on all supply purchases - someone in our HR just very recently got a promotion and a 10% rate increase. This has raised a lot of eyebrows and a great deal of ire. Some are at a point of open revolt. I fully expect to see a horde of clerks and secretaries with torches and pitchforks storming the elevator in front of my office any day now.

I'm going to a painting convention with my mom on Saturday. But before that, I'll be attending the funeral of the long-time boyfriend of one of my aunts. I expect it to be a strange experience...I've been to several funerals over the course of my life, and they just haven't gotten any easier for me to deal with emotionally. I've been to the services of strangers, accquaintances and close family members, and I always melt down exactly the same. A lot of it is that I don't deal well with seeing other people in distress. Heck - my son gets a boo-boo or has his feelings hurt, and I run the risk of bawling right along with him.

Speaking of my son - he lost his first tooth on Wednesday. It had been loose for a couple of weeks now, and while he was eating lunch at school it more or less dislodged itself and was just kind of dangling. So after we got home, my husband just wiggled it right out. The tooth to cash exchange rate has become awfully inflated since I was little - it used to be a quarter. Now it's set at a dollar. And since my son loves pocket change more than paper currency, he asked if the tooth fairy could give him four quarters for his tooth, which she obliged. Should have seen the look of amazement on his face when he checked under his pillow the next morning...and he's very proud of his gappy new smile.


I'll be running around getting my husband's birthday gifts tonight (including the ingredients for a rum cake), and then feverishly trying to tidy the house.

Post Script: It's Monday. I have a new, fairly demanding and high-maintenance co-worker. I forsee challenges and much hilarity as the inevitable personality conflicts ensue. As for me...I have much work to attend to and time is most definitely not on my side, so my door will be closed a majority of the time.

The mildly disturbing and the just plain annoying

Pandora has not been working for days. I don't know what the issue is - be it my computer or the site itself - but the silence that has been the result kind of bothers me. I was told I could listen to music at a reasonable volume...

...and I like to keep it on the station that I programmed to play L7 and Liz Phair, at a noise level just out of the range of anyone not sitting in front of my speakers. That way, I can listen out for and revel in the barely-audible f-bombs. I'm such a rebel...

A friend of my husband has started her own work-from-home business on the side, and she constantly sends out bulletins and messages on MySpace advertising it. Which would be fine, if it wasn't home parties selling adult novelty items.

Can I have a:

And a little bit o':

I attended a meeting yesterday where you could cut the tension with a dull knife. Everyone is on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and the systems we have to work with as well as the ambiguous nature of the directives we're given are causing countless headaches and a level of disgruntled I didn't previously think possible. I was told yesterday that we need to get shirts for a program that is happening tomorrow. Tomorrow! My boss did not provide information on how he thinks this is going to get done and has yet to make an appearance today. I have work to do on various projects of significantly more importance, so I'm choosing to let the person who initiated this program figure out how to make it happen. And if they don't like it - tough crap. I've had enough of sacrificing my deadlines and the integrity of my work because too often the people around me are not thinking, not planning, not being proactive, not taking initiative, and just skating through like just by showing up they deserve a frakking medal.

:sigh: Don't mind me. I'm just a little disgruntled.

you're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older

This was the year that marked my transition into "thirty-something" territory. I had thought about letting it pass quietly, like last year. I did get flowers from my parents, delivered to my office on Friday, which was a really nice surprise. And my desire to drag my husband out against his will to do something geeky won out over wanting to let the day go uncelebrated, so we made plans with M to go to the zoo on Saturday. It was a nice day, if a little on the sweltery side. We got to do and see pretty much everything. Then again...it isn't a very big zoo. (Pictures will follow at some point.) Then we went out to dinner, and had a very enjoyable time. That night I watched Pride and Prejudice (twice), and went all swoony over Matthew Macfadyen.

M's present to me this year was a zombie-fiction anthology, for those dark nights when I really want to stay awake in the midst of paranoid insomnia until daylight. I had bought myself a couple of books earlier in the week, and decided to start with Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters. I didn't find out until after I started into it that this is considered his weakest novel. It's also vapid, gratuitous, meandering and surprisingly dull for something so in-your-face and graphic - full of pandering shock-value and little else. All in all, I found not a lot to redeem the book, so I doubt I'll be going out of my way to read anything else by Palahniuk anytime soon. (The best line came early on, three pages into chapter one: "Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism." - that was the highlight and it all went sour from there.) I was reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy earlier this evening, but I quickly realized that it may get a little...sad. So I've switched over the Dean Koontz's most recent continuation of his Odd Thomas character's story, Odd Hours. Nice and light and mindless popular fiction. Just what I need.


My husband's birthday is this weekend, and he'll join me in the ranks of the no-longer-in our-twenties. The plan is to have my husband's family over on Sunday for gift-giving and preparation of charred consumables. And alcohol. And cake.

Next week is my son's last in kindergarten. We think we'll take him to play putt-putt golf when school lets out on the last day, which is something he's been trying to talk us into for about a year. It's what we promised him if he mastered the 2nd grade sight-word (what we used to call "vocabulary") list, so it seems like the best time. The following week he starts summer camp (where the fees jump to almost double), and we have plans to go see Wall-e at the end of June and a family reunion to look forward to in July.

Backwarditude

For whatever reason, the filter at work has now blocked CNN's website. But MySpace, Facebook, Blogger and Fark are all loading with no problem. A couple weeks ago my boss was frustrated because he was trying to find a new dentist, and the directory site for our insurance was blocked by IT.

My office is freezing - again - and when that happens I find it very hard to concentrate and do work. Of course, that is exacerbated by the fact that there is hardly anyone here today, and days like this make it all too easy to ignore my "to-do" list. I should have brought a book...

Indecision, married with a lack of vision.

The week just keeps getting better and better. After deliberating for far too long, the insitution finally announced the details of the second wave of budget cuts, and over 400 positions will be lost - meaning about 70 people will actually lose their jobs. They've shifted over some personnel to other areas that had vacancies, in order to consolidate some functions and eliminate salary lines that apparently were considered extranious. Some of that was done on this branch a little bit prematurely, since we've have some resignations. We've also been told not to order office supplies from any other vendor but the one run by the company. The office supply budgets amount to insignificant spending compared to salaries, and minimal revenue for the company when you factor in the cost of procuring those supplies to sell back to the departments at markup. And when the holiday break comes around, we'll be closed for a week. Which is great - except that the days not considered "holiday/floating holiday" by the president of the institution will have to be covered by personal vacation time. Which is...bad. Madam president of course made a point of announcing that she asked the board not to approve a salary increase for her this year, like the 16% one she got last year, while the rest of the staff hasn't even had a cost of living bump in several years. She's too generous.


The good news is, I got my evaluation and it was overall a positive one. The criticisms were constructive, and I agreed with them (networking is not something I'm good at, but would help me immensely, and I need to learn to delegate, even if it means watching something go down in flames due to ineptitude). It was also revealed that "someone" had told my boss when he came on last year that I would be his biggest "problem" (he said he found the opposite to be true). I know who that "someone" is, and they caused more problems than they solved before their uncerimonious departure, and they may find it in their best interest to not ever allow their considerable shadow to darken my door again. I appreciated the encouragement and positive affirmations said in my favor, even if the meeting was very brief, and I appreciate the effort to have me shifted over to the other administrative area for my benefit. I do think there's probably an ulterior motive, but if it ends up being a win-win for everyone involved, then I won't concern myself with it. I'm just glad to have that process done and over with.

I got a china cabinet from a friend at work, and it's great. It's an older piece of furniture - just a year older than I am - but it fits in well enough with the rest of the living room pieces and I can display my glassware and collectibles that have been stored in the attic for almost ten years. The night my husband and I picked up the base we spent hours gossiping with my coworker. We picked up the actual cabinet peice last night and in the quest to reclaim my depression glass from the depths of my attic I also rediscovered a box of hockey collectibles, and I'll be going through my rather large card collection to see if e-bay offers a chance to make some extra coin. If I remember correctly, I had a Gretzky card that was worth about $50 back in the late 90s. I won't sell my signed pucks - those will go in my son's room if they're still in decent condition.

I have no bosses today. One is sick and the other is out of town for a wedding in the midwest. So my motivation is...well, all I'll say is you have as much luck locating that as you do of finding a singing leprechaun riding a unicorn having tea with Bigfoot. I spent part of the morning sort of playing hookey by browsing in the bookstore a couple blocks over from my office, where I bought myself some books as a birthday present to myself (a signed, first-edition hardcover by Douglas Preston that was half off (!!); Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk; The Road by Cormac McCarthy). Once I've worked my way through these, I'll be reading The Ruins and attempting to begin Terry Pratchett's Discworld series from the beginning. I'm really looking forward to my birthday this year. There are plans to celebrate it by doing something fun with some of my most loved people on the actual day (Saturday), and that is a perfect storm of awesome.

My husband met with my son's kindergarten teacher today. She said she has been very pleased by his progress, and that he is one of her best students. According to her, he excels academically, reading on probably a fourth-grade level and doing exceedingly well in math as well (she's sending the third grade word list home with him over the summer, but we're pretty sure he can already read all of the words and use them in context in a sentence). She suggested that we request a specific teacher for next year who will be able to offer him a little more challenge, and then see how he adjusts, but she recommended him for the gifted program. His exposure to the older kids in his after school program has also helped his social and emotional development. We'll think about it over the summer and see whether or not the gifted program is in his best interests - we don't want to push him too hard too early. He is only six.

When it rains -

- it pours.

I've seen more rain today than I have in the last three or four months. It should stay like this until the weekend. Hallelujah.

I sent out the final version of the first wave of budgets today yesterday. A week and a half off deadline, eff you very much. I've found myself wondering more and more how I got into the situation I'm in. Meaning - how is it that I landed a poorly defined position that has resulted in my covering multiple vacancies either continuously or for various periods of time over the course of the last year and a half, with immense responsibility and accountability, with an essentially absentee boss. I realized the other day, while I was attending a meeting at the main branch, that the longer I work here the less I understand our processes. Or, more likely, the more I learn about our processes, the more I realize that what we do is overly complex and makes very little sense. When even the people who are creating them have a difficult time articulating (and following) the policies and procedures, you're in serious trouble. It would also have helped me take the whole thing more seriously if they hadn't left the word "propaganda" written on the whiteboard from a previous activity held in the meeting room. Brilliant!

I've heard the rumors of three resignations between last Friday and today, with probably more to come. One of our competitors is intentionally scouting - and openly scalping - portions of the staff. I've become a little detatched lately, and I'm just going to sit back and watch as it all goes down. We have a new employee coming to the front reception desk from another department that has to downsize, which is great since there'll be little training involved, but is also at the same time more than a little frustrating because by taking the position, that person is technically getting a promotion (title and pay grade bump, but no salary increase - that I'm aware of). That's the second time I've seen that happen this year. But I've got to work six more years to get my title to match my current duties. And they wonder why people aren't waiting around to see what the management decides to do going into the new budget period. I have a review (re)scheduled for later this week, and the outcome will probably determine what I decide to do for the forseeable future. Am I being kind of vague? It's only because I'm feeling overwhelmingly noncommittal these days.

I'm like a leaf in a stream, randomly traveling at the whims of the current. And that was my little moment of zen for the day.

Oh, ha! Since I published this post two things have happened: 1) My boss came in and closed my door (he's never done that), and told me that he had recommended to the rest of the management group making my move upstairs a priority, to happen as soon as possible. He also said my review would be good, so no worries. Of course, being the gloomy gus that I am (and looking a gift-horse in the mouth), I have to wonder if he's in a hurry to offload me to another area, for some reason. Then, a minute later, the upstairs boss's assistant called me and excitedly whispered the same news. So now all I need is a date set in stone, and I can let the frantic panic feelings take hold. Seriously - I have a metric sh*t load of work to do before then. And 2) the mini-boss met with the person who will be taking on the admin assistant/reception position to clarify some of the details of the expecations and duties. There seem to be no problems there, but I forsee some minor personality scuffles along the way as the dynamic changes yet again.

Bright eyed and fuzzy brained

This morning I can smell the smoke from the wildfires all the way over on the other coast. The EPA says today's air quality forecast for my area is "moderate," which means "unusually sensitive people should consider reducing prolonged or heavy exertion outdoors." A good thing we did the yard work yesterday. And we discovered that it is not quite pool time yet - that water was still pretty frigid. We did buy a bug zapper, because I can already tell that this mosquito season is going to be painful.

My son woke up with a loose tooth (finally!). He said he had a dream where his tooth was wiggly, and when he woke up discovered that it really was. This is kind of exciting and also sad for me, so I don't know what to think. It means that my little boy really is growing up, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. But I did get to perpetuate a fairy-tale this morning, so that was kind of special.

Where are the bosses this morning? The temp has been in and out a few times already, and I think she's only been here for fifteen minutes.

Via Overheard in the Office, yesterday:

VP: This is not the correct math.
Director: But I'm applying it consistently.

Normal Avenue
Montclair, New Jersey
via Overheard in the Office, May 14, 2008

I find the above overheard simply adorable. Welcome to my world, people...

Because M's comment about "monees" reminded me that the ice cream truck will be at my son's school tomorrow (plus they're having a carnival in the evening - sweeet!), and I can never resist posting an obnoxious lolcat at every opportunity:

"I don't see what this has to do with...uh, do you have any kahlua?"

Lately, the solution to all of life's little problems is a bottle of kahlua and a container of half-and-half.

And life's little problems these days include missed deadlines, uncooperative managers, support staff with no initiative, temps with attitude, and people who aren't my boss wanting to act like they are. I've been staring at numbers for hours on end since last week, with no end in sight. I am part of a group scheduled to go to the main branch on Friday, so that work day is completely shot. (The mananger who planned this will be taking us all to lunch, though, so that might be nice) I had a review scheduled this week, but my supervisor didn't have the paperwork ready, so that's been pushed back to next week. I haven't been sleeping well, so I'm pretty much exhausted and suffering from a slight case of burn out.

BUT -

Generally speaking, life is good. I have plans for my birthday. And for the weekend after. The end of the budget year, although fast approaching and vaguely terrifying, means that there is an end in sight to my currently high stress levels. It will be a giant sigh of relief, come summertime - just in time for my little vacation. Yesterday I helped my husband dismantle the aluminum awning that has covered part of our pool deck since I've lived in my house. When it was all finished, and the sunlight was shining on the back porch and a breeze was actually blowing through a space that used to get hot and stuffy, we looked at each other and said "Why didn't we do this years ago?". It's really open now, and lets a lot more light into the kitchen. Plus, the upside is that we'll be scrapping a decent amount of aluminum for recycling. It's strange how one simple project can give you such a feeling of accomplishment and motivate you to get even more done. Too bad almost all of my "economic stimulus" money went to paying off my credit card, or we'd be planning some more projects. Of course, we have a bunch of almost-completed projects still in process, so I guess we should wrap those up first.

As promised, to M:

What smells like a funeral parlor in here?

This morning when I came in to work the maintenance crew was in the middle of diagnosing a huge ceiling leak that happened right outside my office door. This is the second leak this year, only this time it was from the cooling system instead of from the refrigerator in the break room upstairs malfunctioning. They had a guy come and fix the pipe and replace the acoustic tile that basically had disintegrated all over the furniture in the common reception area (what the temp e-mailed to the maintenance office as a "whole" in the ceiling...). Too bad the leak wasn't in my office. Right over my desk. And too bad I'm going to have to start buying the single serve creamers that you don't have to refrigerate, because someone used up all of the specialty creamer I brought in a couple weeks ago. Again. I don't mind sharing what I bring in, but this stuff went fast, and I didn't use that much of it. Plus, only two of us regularly bring in food and supplies for the office, and it's those who don't really reciprocate who use/eat the majority of what is brought in. I suppose it's a little shallow of me to get annoyed about this, but this is also the person who has used up all of our stock of Lysol wipes compulsively cleaning the top of the reception desk (my desk is usually too covered with papers for me to even attempt to clean it). This is also the person who puts on extremely strong perfumed lotions at her desk, and was miffed when I told her she should not be spraying air fresheners or deodorizers in the restroom since the restroom in this building is considered public, and we have a common circulation system. It's a courtesy to not spray things that are going to make their way through the vents into other departments - the smell of curry and burnt popcorn that I was subjected to when the door to this suite was being kept open made me appreciate that "Summer Rains" room spray may not appeal to everyone, either. This is not a personal residence, after all, and I don't look forward to getting a headache from someone else's need to be cloaked in obnoxious scent at all times.

For Mother's Day I received a really great gift: a new 4GB usb flash drive. I'm in the process of transferring the files from my old one over to the new device, since the old one seems to have become irrevocably corrupted. Considering the massive amounts of files I transport back and forth, it doesn't really surprise me. And my old drive is a couple years old, anyway. It's one of the best gifts I've gotten from my husband in a while, and I was quite surprised that he remembered that I'd mentioned the problems I was having transferring my files. Thoughtful and practical!

A wise man once said: Woo hooo...d'oh!

Because my family pretty much *is* The Simpsons (yes - seriously...my son is Bart, Lisa and Maggie combined), courtesy of The Laughing Squid blog, practically every opening credit couch gag from the show (in supah fast mode, so pay close attention - and yes, there probably are some missing):



(hint: the extended 19-minute normal speed version of this also exists...somewhere)

Little fish, little fish, swimming in the water

I have a new routine. Every morning, before the sun gets too high, I wander down to the seawall at the harbor next to the sandbar and watch very small fish being eaten by larger fish (mullet and the small sheepshead that hang out by the pylons). I do this for at least five minutes, and I think it's kind of cathartic and peaceful. It reminds me that the world around me keeps going in its own natural rhythms, no matter what else is happening during my nine-to-five. It's my little moment of zen. Of course, everyone I've told thinks it is more than a little strange, and my response has been to just shrug and figure it beats getting blotto at lunchtime to save my sanity. Orrr...maybe it doesn't.

Someone asked me yesterday if I'd seen the alligator lately, and I had to admit that it has been a while. Yes...we have had an alligator living in our harbor. And it was a great one-two punch back in the day when our old manager was here, because he had a deep abiding fear of both gators and hurricanes. So we tormented him more than a little every hurricane season with up to the minute tracking of projected landfall predictions. I used to post the NOAA images for the really big ones as my desktop background when I sat in the reception area, so that every time the boss walked past my desk he saw that giant spiral of ominous weather staring back at him. We also used to put pictures of alligators up in his office as a prank, and I secretly imagined that one day a storm would wash the alligator over the sea wall and it would end up in the first floor corridor for the boss to stumble over first thing in the morning (kind of like the alligator that recently showed up in a local woman's kitchen in the middle of the night). Oddly enough, that boss left to take a job even further south into the swampland.

"Oh hai...Candygram?" (photo: SP Times)

Oh - yesterday there was a courthouse shooting incident just a few blocks from where I'm sitting. I had no idea it had even happened until last night. Another summer in Florida - we have giant lustful reptiles...hordes of flying, stinging, biting insects...nuclear grade heat...and the unbalanced waking from their winter time stupors. But the beaches sure are beautiful! *smirk*

I'm trying to distract myself from the feelings of drudgery and despair that work currently inspire in me by focusing on upcoming plans and exciting goings-on. This weekend is Mother's Day. I'll spend tomorrow morning having "tea" with my son at school. Then I may play hookey for an hour to get a haircut (what - it's already submitted as part of my presonal leave request). I'm going to M's graduation party on Saturday and visiting my parents and sister that evening, too. Sunday is lunch with the in-law's. In a little over two weeks it will be my birthday, which will more than likely not be met with a whole lot of fanfare but will probably involve some drinking. By "some", of course I mean "a great deal". That will be a three-day holiday weekend and I'm trying to coordinate a trip to the zoo for that Sunday. Then at the end of the month is my husband's birthday (it's his turn to mark this year as the transition into being a "thirtysomething"), and a painting convention that my mom wants me to go to with her. And plans sometime this year to go to Universal maybe, the upcoming family reunion in Georgia, and a possible trip to Pennsylvania around Thanksgiving. So yeah - trying not to think about the quagmire of my "career", and focus on the things this job actually pays for (i.e. - following the philosophy "working to live, not living to work").

Why is the floor as low as I can go?

I woke up Sunday morning to get my son ready for church, and I knew something was wrong. I asked my husband to take over while I ran for the bathroom, and I spent the rest of the day alternating between near catatonic sleep in my bed and miserably cursing the misfortune of catching what my son had last week. As a result of the bug I was suffering from, I missed my friend's college graduation and dinner. Which I was looking forward to, so I'm pretty disappointed about that. I finally crawled out of bed at around ten last night, and went back to sleep at midnight. I woke up this morning with a backache, sore ribs, a stomach ache, and a sinus headache which has lasted all day. I decided to take the morning off from work to get a little bit more rest and make sure I'd passed the contageous phase of my illness. Once I went into work I got quite a lot of filing done that had been piling up, despite my headache. I have lost a couple of pounds over the last two days, from living off of toast and ginger ale, and one of my new co-workers said something to the effect that it's all coming off of my rear (so nice to know she was looking...). My stomach is still a little sensative, and the sausage my husband is cooking for dinner is not helping. And the tylenol with codein is calling my name...

Living life a quarter mile at a time

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people. ~W.C. Fields


I spent an hour earlier this afternoon watching the Kentucky Derby pre-race coverage that involved constant cut-ins to interviews with "celebrities" walking a press juncit. The interviews consisted mainly of some annoying, condescending interviewer that reminded me of a slightly less gay Ryan Seacrest clone asking clueless people of dubious levels of fame about their hats or their race picks. An amazing number couldn't even name a single horse running today. (I'm personally pulling for the filly, Eight Belles.) Precious little time was spent actually profiling the horses and jockeys that would be participating in the race. Instead, we had constant pandering to America's national cultural obsession with celebrities, which caused me to reflexively change the channel. You'd have thought this was a crappy movie premier, not one of America's most historic horse races.

I'm also annoyed that the Derby seems to be sponsored by the Yum Brands fast food company. During one of the advertising breaks, they aired a commercial stating that KFC was the fastest growing restaurant chain in China. So, the West has finally found the way to defeat Communism, and it's not military might. It's actually obesity and type 2 diabetes. A few more years of subversively introducing the best (worst?) that capitalism has to offer, and maybe that old joke about having "more Chins than China" will have to be changed to "less chins than the Chinese".

Update: What a sad ending to that race. Really tragic, actually. She ran a good race.

On a brighter note, my son is much better after suffering from a virus late Thursday night into Friday. I had a really stressful day scheduled for yesterday, and waking up at 3 am (to take care of the kid, as well as clean and sanitize the bathroom), then again at 5:30 am, and again at around 6 am really took its toll. But at least my husband was willing to stay home, so that I could pick up the coffee I'd ordered and deliver the food that I'd bought on Thursday to the morning meeting that had been planned for weeks. A manager had the group thank me for making sure they got fed (and had the meeting at all - I planned the whole damn thing), but my boss didn't even acknowledge any of it. But he sure did eat the pastries and drink the coffee...
(Update: My boss sent me a thank-you letter for my part in organizing the meeting. I think the other supervisor may have initiated it, but my boss's signature is on it, and that's what counts.)