…so…boring…

One of the things I wanted to work on while between contracts was taming the paper monster that has begun to grow into this crazy, nine-headed beast with venom-tipped fangs and an unfathomable appetite for storage space.

For the past few years, I’ve tried (and largely failed) to go as paperless as I possibly could – I have most bills set up that way, and try to stay on top of scanning and electronically filing everything I can’t get sent to me electronically.

…but it gets away from me pretty easily, frankly…even with the relatively new printer that has the groovy document feeder, which speeds the whole thing up considerably and allows me a fair amount of multi-tasking ability while things are scanning (as they are right now – tax stuff from 1999, oooo, the EXCITEMENT, can you feel it?!).

…sigh…

This.
Takes.
FOREVER.
Plus.
Fifteen.
YEARS.

Plus also, it is boring. BOR-RING. It’s just babysitting a machine, really, splitting up very large piles of documentation and stuff into smaller piles so that it fits on the feeder, making sure each pile is all the same-sized paper and general paper weight so it doesn’t jam…clearing the inevitable jams that will happen anyway…hand-placing the ones that are weird sizes that won’t make it through the feeder…reviewing the {yawn!} scans to make sure they aren’t, you know, upside-down or hopelessly crooked or blank…and that all the mind-numbingly dull pages are actually there…and then confirming that the scanned document actually saved…blah blah blah {yawn yawn yawn} ugh…

I don’t dare do anything that would be more interesting while I do this, like try to play a video game or watch a show and knit while doing this – I know what happens next.

…hang on, I’ve hit the fiddly part with the weird-sized forms that I have to do one at a time by hand, be right back…

Ugh. I hate those. SO irritating. Anyway, where was I…oh yeah. I know what happens if I try to do something more interesting while I’m doing this, and it goes like this: One (1) stack of no more than 25 sheets of paper will get scanned per day.

I will notice that the scanning has stopped “at some point,” but will be caught up in the ‘one more row’ syndrome (here expanded to also include ‘one more level’, or ‘just until the end of this show’)…but rather than actually stopping at the end of $Whatever, I will move straight into the next Whatever, then wander off to make food for everybody or something, and then, when getting ready for bed and preparing to shut down the computer, will find myself confronted with the “add more pages or save to file” message and will then suffer some kind of mental collapse because I have only scanned 0.025% of the stack at that point.

And half of it is one-at-a-time hand-placed fiddly stuff.

And it is now 1:45 in the morning.

{sobs}

And as I’m sitting here…with approximately thirty-seven thousand more neatly organized stacks of crap that fall into that category of “probably will never-ever need to look at again, but, Lord Help You if you need it and can’t produce it”…I find that I’m suddenly remembering why I’ve never quite managed to get around to actually finishing this task before.

It’s because it’s really, really, really boring.

OK! Just wanted to share that!

Happy Easter to those who celebrate – may the returning warmth and light of spring bring hope and joy to one and all!




p.s. Seriously, how the heck many places did I work in 1999…there have to be over a dozen W2 slips in all this…!!!

This still counts as ‘working,’ right?

I have a ton of items on my “things it would be really awesome to deal with while I am between contracts and the Denizens are in school / we still have Vanessa the Great handling most of the Crazy” list. Naturally, I have therefore spent the last four days…um…well…I did bake bread yesterday. And cleaned the kitchen. Most of it. Except the parts I skipped.

And I spent almost the entire weekend watching Netflix and working on this.


Just in time for warm weather! Woo hoo!

I finished almost all of this in a single marathon burst on Sunday…which was not how I’d planned to spend the day, BUT…see, I had decided that I would do a little gardening first thing in the morning, while the nasal spray from the night before was still working and I felt more or less almost in the same ballpark as OK.

I had this passionate need to do this because…well…my empire has been under siege while I was away.


…yeah…those are ALL weeds…

These suckers exploded into being over about three weeks, fueled by rather copious rainfall and relatively warm weather. We literally couldn’t open the side gate, they were so big and strong.

Three weeks ago, that area was bare earth.

Amazing. Some of these were so big, I had to get a shovel to expose their tree-trunk-like roots, and the tree-trimming shears to clip them out.

I got most of the path you can’t see under all that cleared…and then I was leaning on my shovel wheezing and gasping and kind of fuzzy-headed and thinking, OK…I don’t think this is my best plan ever…I’d better give this up, go inside and siddown for a while here, before I fall over…

The husband came outside about that time with his silly gardening hat on, took one look at me and said, “OH no. Put that down and go in the house, right now. You shouldn’t be out here. Go sit down and knit for a while, you’re too sick to be doing this kind of work today.”

So naturally, I then said, “That is a very good idea, dear, I shall take your wise counsel, go inside forthwith and sit with a nice cup of herbal tea to knit while my body does battle with the disease that plagues it, forsooth. Do you know what day it is, do you? IT’S FRICKIN’ APRIL, and I don’t have onions in the ground yet and the whole place is one huge weed patch and furthermore I need to get those starts hardening off plus I have to drag all those mulch-chips off the squash area and GOSH ONLY KNOWS what’s wrong with that bed and I have never seen so many weeds in my whole life and furthermore there’s something wrong with the water over there and holy crap, Easter is next weekend do you hear me, there is way too much to do, AAAAAAAAAAH, I CAN’T SIT DOWN, THE WORLD WILL END!!!!!”

{face-palm}

Sometimes, I really wonder why that man puts up with me. So he just stood there and waited while I grumbled and ranted my way back to not saying anything, then said, “Yeah, no. Gimmie the shovel. And don’t make me hit you with it. House. Now. Sitting. Now.”

And I would have argued with him, but I wasn’t sure he was kidding about the shovel thing. So I went inside and sat down and ugh…you know how sometimes you know you don’t feel particularly good, but you’re moving so you kind of…keep moving? But then you sit down and it’s like, oh, wow, I’m…dying, over here…?

I spent about the next twelve hours sprawled in my chair in front of Netflix knitting, occasionally getting up thinking I was at least recovered enough to…ugh, no, no I’m not…{flop!}…

But boy, did I make progress on the sweater! Which totally counts as working, right?!

I had the bottom third of the body and one sleeve done and the other sleeve about five inches from done when I started…finished the sleeve, got everything back on one needle, around and around and around, straight up through the color chart and decreases and three inches of collar in a single weekend.

I still have a couple ends to run in (details!), but otherwise – it’s finally done: The “quick” pullover that I started back in November.

I have quite a few projects like that lying around here…things that got too big for the train, or where something had been not-quite-right with it, that I meant to figure out in good daylight here at home but never did.

All the other stuff is arguably more important…like finally getting all those IEP goodies scanned onto disk, and taming the paper-monster that has begun erupting out of my filing cabinet, sorting through all the ancient manuals for equipment we haven’t owned in eight years, filing the various tax forms, and figuring out where The Randomizer™ has put everything while I was away. (Not Me and Ida Know have been real busy around here lately…I’ve got more missing kitchen tools than you’d believe, a few of them a bit on the scary side, like the missing mandolin insert that will slice the tip of your finger clean off if you grope blindly into a drawer and it is lurking around in there.)

But there’s still something deeply satisfying about being able to put away the leftover yarn, fold up the project bag that I’ve been tripping over for months now, and mutter, “Done!” to myself.

One down…couple dozen to go…

Strange new world

It has been a very strange couple days so far this week; I feel as though I’m playing hooky or something. Like, any second now, my cell phone will ring and my manager will be going, “Yeah, hi, so…where the hell ARE you?!”

Oh, will you look at the time, heh heh…yeah, I was, um, sleeping in…a bit…?

I am very slowly beginning to understand that I am not simply having a long weekend, or taking a few sick days to get over this cold – which would have been a good idea were I not between contracts, because dudes…seriously.nasty.bug.

My last day was downright surreal, and I’m honestly not sure how much of it was the fact that Fridays are always a little surreal because of the Friday Is Congressionally Mandated Work From Home Day We’re Pretty Sure And If It Isn’t Actually Mandated, Well, It Totally Should Be™ thing…and how much of it was Wait, But I Have Fifteen More Things To Do It Can’t Be My Last Day Syndrome…and how much of it was due to the possibly unwise amounts of cold medicine I was tossing back throughout the day.

Layering, baby: It ain’t just for cold weather.

I ended up working an hour longer than I meant to, because a bunch of functions I hadn’t even glanced at suddenly jumped up in front of me going, “Ha ha, never looked at us!” and I didn’t want to leave potential land mines behind me – there’s this (faulty) assumption among the current tech team that I never miss ANYTHING, which can lead to a certain blithe I’m sure she looked at that, because, after all…NEVER MISSES ANYTHING…that could become a rather large problem if I actually did miss something.

So I went looking. And I found two things we’d need to deal with pertaining to the project actually at hand, and one “oh, so that’s what causes that!!” answer to a long standing, very frustrating problem.

…item three, function 39 of 40 is overwriting current data with data from 2007. Somebody should tie the table tft_emps_override_assign to a stake and throw lit matches at it until it catches.

I sent the items off to the tech team, double checked that I’d actually moved everything I had meant to move, sent that last “hey guys, been swell, I’m outta here” email, set up an out of office to let people to know to bug my boss instead…and shut it down.

And packed it in.

And handed it over.

And walked out the door.

And freaked out, twice, on the way home when I picked up my stuff and it was too light…ohmygah, I left the laptop on the…oh…no, no I didn’t…

I’m sure I’ll get used to this feeling of no-corporate-responsibilities eventually…probably right before I get back to work…in a little while…after the onions are planted, and the paperwork tamed, and the taxes filed, and the spring break accomplished…

It’s been a long time since I didn’t have to leave the Den while darkness still covered it. I’m kind of enjoying watching the sun come up through my own windows for a change, and hearing the Denizens pelting into the house after school yelling, “What’s that yummy smell, did you make bread?!” again.

I’m going to enjoy it, however long it lasts…the only constant I ever have is change, after all, so change it will, and probably before I know it.

Onward and upward and onward again…

…really…?

Dudes. I’m just…have you ever had…and then you’re, like…I mean…you know…really?!

SO YESTERDAY, I was in the office – a place I was actually looking forward to being this week because I have an awful lot of favorite food places to hit up one last time, because WHO KNOWS IF MAYBE San Francisco is going to split off from the rest of California and sink into the SEA after I’ve left this job I have an awful lot of people I still need to either hand things to, explain things to, or both.

Because of course, that would come first, NAY, BE THE ONLY CONSIDERATION, REALLY! for me this week.

Gyros? Pffft, who cares…I am there for the team…(and if you need me, send a text or something because…eeeeeeyeah…totally at the gyros walk-up…)

Shortly after lunch, I started to develop a headache, which I attributed to falafel deprivation tension. Or possibly allergies, because my sinuses were acting out, too.

By 2:00, it was becoming all-consuming. I was having a terrible time thinking about anything other than my headache.

About the only thing bothering me more than the headache (which was definitely of the ‘sinus pressure’ variety) was this weird tickling in my throat. Stupid allergies…but I understand honey is some kind of Miracle Cure for allergies, and AS IT JUST SO HAPPENS, baklava has honey in it…(aside: see, this is why I have to keep myself on a short leash most of the time when it comes to Such Things…I could blow throw an astonishing amount of my paycheck on eating out, if I let myself…)

By the time I got home, my throat wasn’t “tickling,” it was “scratching.” Hmmmm…

My alarm went off this morning, and I was starting to think about doing something about that…and then I swallowed.

Apparently, I attempted to swallow a whale in my sleep last night. A whale wearing a sandpaper jacket.

And when I let out this groan of disbelief and anger, I woke up the headache.

Who called his friend, the fever.

Who invited the body ache over.

I mean…really?! REALLY?!

Right now?

This week?!

REALLY?!?!

…ugh…

I ended up working from home today…which was probably a good thing, because every time I start trying to move around I get kind of blech.

If I’d gone in, I probably would have needed to leave early.

Like, before lunch.

Which would be a criminal waste of a rather long commute, because I still have a few eateries on my mental checklist of places I’d like to go one last time before I leave the City by the Bay for an undetermined stretch of time.

Not that I could right now anyway…sore throats and eating don’t exactly play nicely together.

Argh.

I have to say: I do get a lot more done when I work from home.

Even if there isn’t any baklava in the joint.

(Seriously, can you believe this?! I’m going to get a humdinger of a cold/flu thing NOW?! REALLY?!?!)

(But I’ve got news for it: I’m one extremely stubborn little code-jockey over here. I am finishing these last couple things, and I will go into the office tomorrow and Friday, and that’s all there is to it!)

(…but, geez louise…I don’t think I’m going to be feeling like going out to lunch, is the thing…waaaaaah, my life is haaaaaard…!)

Why I will miss these people, #341

OMG...just got back on the corporate wire and what is in my inbox?

A "meeting" on my last day...to be held at Artfibers. (Yarn store, people - a YARN STORE!)

YOU SEE WHY I WEEP TO LEAVE THEM?!?!?!

[weeps]

I don't wanna goooooooooo!!!!!!

(ALSO, where HAVE I been?! When did Artfibers move back to San Francisco, and why didn't they TELL me?!?! [more weeping] alas, the wasted hours...!)

(sent from my HTC)

It’s really VERY simple…

My manager asked me a simple question yesterday: Do you have any documentation on the OTHER stuff you handle?

I swear by my hopes of retirement – my brain locked up in a blind panic. This is such a simple question. What do you actually DO all day? should be something with a simple answer, easily outlined as a one-page document. With a few bullet-points.

But when it comes to what I’ve been doing for lo these many moons…um…well…some of it is like that, but then some of it…isn’t…

Well shoot, I thought gamely, I’m working on one of those things right immediately now, right? I’ll just go ahead and document what I’m doing here as I go! How hard could it be?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

{weeps}

YA KNOW…I don’t generally think of my job as “hard.” I really don’t. I mean, granted, it is hardly “entry level.” It’s complex, and does require a certain level of expertise / finesse.

I ain’t no rookie, and I ain’t no slouch. If I do say so myself, which you will note, I totally do.

(The previous paragraph should be pronounced: “Dear Universe, obviously I need some humbling in my life, so please send me something that I will use to make a really big, juicy, stupid, highly visible rookie-move mistake – and then have somebody else find it for me and announce it through a ‘reply all’ to an email, k-thx.”)

But for folks who don’t have that “I just sorta ‘get’ how these things work” under their belts…sure, it starts off easy. First check this. If it isn’t that, then look at this. Those are your two Easy Button answers…and they will be the case anywhere from 20 to 80% of the time, depending on the question and the system.

The rest of the time, well, then what you do is {star-burst of seemingly schizophrenic troubleshooting}

Whenever I’m called upon to attempt to do this kind of explanation of What I Do Around Here Anyway to somebody who is, say, a business analyst or manager, I am uncomfortably aware that they are either starting to panic because they feel completely lost…or that they are looking at me suspiciously, like they are just sure I’m intentionally trying to make this all sound very complicated and hard so that they will feel stupid, to give me some kind of intellectual leg up on them or something.

Which makes me cranky, because to me…this isn’t hard. Dude. We haven’t even gotten to the hard stuff yet! Just pay attention! {claps hands} Focus, people, FOCUS! Here we go again, one-two-three AND…you put de lime in de coconut…

But, when I’m not being frustrated by my own inability to explain things well, I have to admit…there’s a reason not everybody flocks to this particular niche occupation.

I really don’t think it’s hard, exactly…but it is extreeeeeeeemly detail-oriented, and the sheer volume of details to keep track of can be a little staggering at first.

Plus there’s the slight wrinkle that it isn’t necessarily as linear as most people think it is.

I mean, you probably think of “computer stuff” as being linear, right? A simple progression of steps happening in a certain order, A => B => C => D.

A database system both is, and is not, actually like that. Sure, processes will fire in a certain order. This calls that, that calls this. One, then two, then three. Code executes from top to bottom most of the time. You read it just like you would a book – start at the top left, and work your way down to the bottom right.

But the whole system is more like…a fancy Swiss watch. Dozens, hundreds, even thousands if you’re in a really-big one, of tiny little gears, spinning and whirling at different rates, regulating each other into a cohesive whole…and each tab of every gear its own name and purpose, fits into one and only one slot correctly…each tab is likewise the walls of another slot, meaning that another tab will be slipping into place as it passes to get its push from it…

…touch, push, part, touch, push, part…all day and night, the systems are coming together, exchanging pushes and pulls…we take in from you and you and you…compile, process, transform…give back this and that and this…now you all compile, process, transform…and our tab comes along again to fit neatly into that slot at precisely 12:00:00 0.38 each morning…

That’s the part that is always hard for me to explain to folks who aren’t database analysts; that’s where I start to flounder when trying to document how to do what-all I do; that’s where I start to sound like somebody who is just trying to confuse the @*^&@ out of people.

How do I do what I do? Well, it’s very simple, really…when I see this, I start looking over here in Gear 1. Gear 1 touches gears 2 through 36, each of which in turn touch a different set of 36 gears…one of those tabs is my culprit…

And when I figure out which gear the gum got into, I have to figure out how to tease it outta there…without bending the gears, this is the important bit!, do NOT bend the gears while you’re tinkering around in there…!!!!

I love it. It’s fascinating. It’s like doing logic puzzles all day. My job is full of things that fall into the “ten hours to find, ten minutes to fix” category – but that thrill of victory at the end of It All is more than worth it.

To me.

But as I sat there today, with an almost blank Word document mocking me as I tried to document what I was doing right that moment, trying to track down why we had selected the patently WRONG account as the “primary” account for a customer relationship…I had to admit…for most people…? This would be confusing, and complex, and crazy, and about as much fun as digging your eyeballs out with a grapefruit spoon.

And also, there’s simply no way I can document this process for somebody else.

All I can really tell them to set them on their way is this magnificently unhelpful gem: Learn your system. Know every gear. Know every tab, and every slot, by name…and time of day…and other-gears-touched. Know what’s “right,” and what’s “weird,” and what’s “wrong.” Understand where it’s going, with all this whirling and whirring…understand what happens when Tab 32 on Gear 7 misses its appointment with Tab 5 of Gear 9.

Once you’ve done that, my son…it will all become very, very simple indeed…except for the parts that aren’t, but won’t you feel like the clever one when you figure it out anyway…?!

Money Monday: March 26, 2012

This is probably going to be the shortest of these posts ever. This is the last week of this contract, and I’m probably going to be AWOL yet again all this week. There’s just way too much to do, and I’m way too agitated / tired / cranky / etc. to write much.

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering What’s Next over these last several weeks…but to be honest? I’ve been trying not to do that.

My brain is overloaded with all the work-related chatter going on inside it; all the shoulda-woulda-coulda crap that insists on playing through no matter how often I shout, “NO TIME! TOO LATE! QUIT IT, THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT THAT NOW!”

It keeps me up at night, which leads to exhaustion (go figure), which leads to crankiness and more brain-chatter.

This is not a good time to attempt to make balanced, reasonable decisions about what I want to do once this contract is over; history has shown me, again and again, that decisions I make when I’m emotionally or physically off-balance – and I’m a bit of both right now, frankly – tend to be bad ones.

Not to digress, but I feel like I need to say this: I’m not being abused by anybody but myself on this deal. Nobody is being “mean” to me, or anything like that. What has got me so worked up isn’t my situation, but that of the people I’m leaving behind – who are damned good people that I like an awful lot. I don’t like what I’m seeing ahead for them, which is taking a whole lot of blame for a whole lot of stuff that they are not being equipped to defend themselves against.

And that’s got me irritable and upset, because it hits my ‘that ain’t fair’ button.

ANYWAY…I’ve been spending a lot more time playing video games than looking at spreadsheets or doing feasibility studies. Which I feel is a much better use of my time than coming up with “great” ideas that start off like, First, we buy a really big used motor home…

The one thing I’m pretty sure of is, I won’t want to stay home for long, if at all. We still have way too much that we want to get done, the husband’s pay is still a good 15% below what it was five years ago and there’s a lot more coming out off the top – the health insurance premiums alone are almost triple what they were five years ago. Combined with the cost of Everything Else going nowhere but up, retirement funds that are deflated like flat tires, woefully inadequate college funds for the Denizens and still being upside-down on the Den – which essentially hamstrings us when opportunities that would require relocation come up – we’d just really like to keep the double-income power-lifting going for a while yet.

But for right immediately now…I’m not going to worry about it. I’m going to get this last week done, and get as much put to bed as I possibly can before I go.

And then I’m going to take a week off from Everything.

And then, I should be ready to actually get moving on something…something that doesn’t involve motor homes and a live-off-the-land lifestyle.

(…which has seemed a lot more tempting than you’d think lately…except I still haven’t come up with a good solution for the Yarn Stash Storage Issue yet…hmmmmm…)

In the midst of Chaos

I met with some friends for lunch yesterday; as seems to be somehow required for me lately, what should have been a very, very simple, normal, usual-and-customary break in the middle of a working day turned into some kind of 27,000-page epic odyssey, in which our heroes had to battle twelve-headed monsters, spear-throwing natives, a couple gods and a sea monster.

Because there must always be a sea monster.

I had two different people at work trying to spackle meetings over other meetings. I had one person freaking out because I wasn’t in this meeting while another one was telling me to stop, um, doing my job. And then another person told that person to go climb a pole because if I didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done, period. (Meanwhile, I’m telling both of them to go climb a pole because neither of them was the boss of me or what I did or didn’t do, work-wise.)

And this person is having a panic attack because she needs me to do her job for her or it won’t get done. And another person is waiting for me to approve his work so that he can move on to the next step. And this guy is sitting there staring at me, waiting for me to…wait…well, actually, I can’t remember what it was he wanted, but, somehow, it was waiting on me.

AND THEN, I get a weird call that would neither connect, nor disconnect. AND THEN another one from Eldest, who had snuck outside to make the call from her (illegal during school hours) cell phone to tell me she was being sent home sick. Hilarity ensues, because we can’t get hold of Vanessa the Great and both the husband and I are in the city, soooo, nobody can come get her…so for the first time ever, a Denizen walked home sick from school alone.

Yeah. I was fine with it. Uh-huh. Noooooo problem. (Except that I was screaming and clawing up the walls the whole time.)

About the only thing in my life yesterday that wasn’t being all high-maintenance were my friends, who were even gracious enough to pretend I wasn’t fiddling around with my phone at lunch like some kind of class-impaired twit.

That afternoon, as Thing 327 was going up in flames, my phone practically vibrating itself off the car seat while I was driving back to the Den from the second pharmacy (…yeah…that kinda day yesterday, naturally the first pharmacy was out of TheraFlu…), I found myself wondering how it was that I had managed to grow less wise in my adult years than I was as a kid.

See, when I was a kid, I was a classic underachiever. I frustrated my parents no end with my stubborn refusal to excel at stuff; they knew I had the wherewithal, but they couldn’t ever seem to get anything higher than a C average out of me.

And, true confessions: it was actually on purpose. Just like they thought.

I remember learning, very early on, that the reward one got for being spectacular at pretty much anything was…more, and harder, work.

And more frequent scoldings for not continuing to excel, no matter how much harder work was dumped on you.

This is not hard math to do, folks. I believe it was second grade when I realized that being patted on the head and given a cold slice of pizza during an awkward luncheon with the principal (because what kid doesn’t live for that, am I right?!) was the benefit, but mountains of additional homework and my parents constantly circling around me demanding to know in what reality I thought an A- was acceptable, I MEAN, REALLY, YOU ARE CAPABLE OF SO MUCH BETTER…eeeeeyeah.

Keep it.

So I didn’t really try. I’d sit around waiting for the bell to ring, and whenever I was in danger of going too far the other way – where lay things like detention and summer school – I would pull off some “miraculous” save (read: I would actually answer more things correctly on the tests and/or turn in a few pages of homework here and there) and get myself back to the ultra-average place that was so comfortable.

When did I forget this crucial information?! Why do I not spend more time just sitting there with some blank, idiotic expression on my face, so that people go, “Ya know, on second thought, let’s have so-and-so take that, shall we…?”

I should so totally start taking longer to do stuff. And while I’m at it, do less stuff.

That would solve everything, don’t you think?!

Today, I finally got the main account loading process – the Really Big Ugly part of the last thing I’m working on so frantically – to actually work.

Against the, um, like, 2% sample of data that was actually successfully loaded into the new testing environment…so, I know it works functionally, but whether or not it will continue to work well when we’re back up to 100% data, whether it will be faster or slower, all that kind of stuff…no idea, really.

Only theories, probably and maybe, should and ought to and I’d expects.

Eh, well. Nothing I can do about it – their delays aren’t anything I could have done a thing about, really.

In a lot of ways, we’re just lucky we finally got enough together for me to get these initial passes working again.

I wonder what I’ll be doing next.

I’m kind of looking forward to finding out.

And also to getting a little more sleep.

Yeah.

That…will be awfully nice…

Stick a fork in me…

…cause I am done.

With the backlog of bills, that is.

…that’s right, my life? Never ending rollercoaster of excitement, wooooooo!

I spent over nine hours today – nine! – catching up with the backlog of crap that required a signature, a read-and-understand, a bellowing up and down the stairs about planned course of action, scanning, filing, shredding or otherwise dealing with.

But on the bright side, it was a wretched day outside. Cold, rainy, windy, dark, blech.

Which made it easier to be cooped up inside doing the Dreaded Paperwork stuff, even though my garden is SO not ready for spring.

Except that I kept stopping to stare out the window in amazement as weather kept happening. I MEAN, REALLY…does it not know this is California? Aren’t we supposed to be, like, a sunny-blue-day vacation wish-you-were-here postcard all the time?!

…geez…

In unrelated news, I am so damned tired of Drama. Now with more Drama. PLUS, AS AN ADDED BONUS? Drama.

Seriously. Enough, now.

I think one of the not-exactly-downsides of being a person who ordinarily resists stress pretty well is, once it does get to me…man, I am not equipped to deal with it particularly well.

It got to me about two weeks ago. On Tuesday. When it was like, all the leaving that has been going on – coworkers to new jobs, or being laid off, our own Vanessa the Great finding another job, and why am I still here, again?!, combined with the “sudden” realization by Everybody that I was not going to be there that much longer OHMYGAH, if you ever had a question, about anything, be it how to do “that thing” in SQL, or how this application does that or that application does this, or how come this other thing isn’t blue while that other thing is orange…NOW IS THE TIME!

…I suddenly became verrrrrrrry popular, and a job that was already normally fairly go-go-go became GO-GO-GO…but now with more official meetings and less actually working.

Which, when combined with “my” developer leaving for another job and the subsequent need for me to train up a new developer…made for some interesting “time management” issues for me.

SPEAKING OF…ohmygah, you guys…get this. I got home Thursday night and started to basically go straight to bed. Which is kind of what I’ve been doing for the last Forever and a Half (hence the enormous pile of bills and other Official Things that I spent – I kid you not – nearly nine hours dealing with today, oy vey!), but then I said to myself, tiredly…

“Dude…you’d better at least open your email and clear out the server, before they lock you down.”

I try to keep up on my phone when I’m meeting myself coming and going. I try to deal with it while I’m loitering around on the train platforms, you know, at least delete out the spam and Extremely! Exciting! Offers! for 0.008% off if I buy between 10:00 and 10:08 a.m. on a Saturday and like that.

But I’d gotten way behind. WAY behind. And there was something wrong with my automatic sync that I hadn’t figured out, and, well, just, you know.

I needed to put in the massive effort to turn on the computer and open my email client.

PING! PING! PING! PING! HI! HI! HI! HI! REMINDER! REMINDER! HEY, YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE? YOU KNOW WHAT? YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE? OVERDUE! PING! PING!

I had about eleventy mazillion reminders pop up for appointments on Friday, Saturday, [pause over Sunday], Monday AND Tuesday.

For a split second I was all, whaa? because for heaven’s sake, in what reality would I have put whackity-majillion appointments all packed together over three…

…days…

…aw, @^*&@...

YA KNOW how I was getting all sniffy about others not being particularly aware of how a calendar works? And was all like, shoulda been doing this six weeks ago, morons! and other haughty and superior sorts of stuff?

…ya know that old saying about how whenever you’re pointing a finger at somebody else, there are three fingers pointing back at yourself…?

Yeah. I sort of forgot I had planned time off Friday, Monday and Tuesday.

{head-desk}

When am I going to learn – the instant I start feeling superior about anything? Put a pillow under my arse, because I’m about to fall on it…geesh…

I was tired and irritable at that exact moment, so my first thought was, well…there you are then. It’s been on the team calendar for a Sunth of Mondays. It’s been called out in our weekly meetings, over and over again. Sure, yeah, I “always” send out a reminder email a week before, and then the day before, but you know – hey.

I’m sick of them, and they’re sick of me. And I’m tired. And not working tomorrow (read: talking to any of them, about anything)? Is sounding real good right about now…

But, after I’d gotten my 2.5 hours of actual sleep (and 1.5 hours of lying awake wishing I could get to sleep) (insomnia thanks to excessive brain activity that likes to respond to me trying to go to bed by going “whirrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRR!” instead of “zzzzzzzzz,” and yeah, it sucks) (stupid brain!) and was feeling a little less childish, I spent some time in the morning shuffling things around until I’d gotten anything that wouldn’t involve standing another human being up pushed off until early April.

So I’m taking partial time off. By which I mean, I’m working as usual, only with a few very long breaks midday so I can meet with people here and there for exciting things like spinal adjustments, crown installing (tooth not jeweled headwear, unfortunately) and to discuss their database needs.

And to have lunch with some friends. Which is a very important part of any given time not-exactly-off.

I only have two weeks left, and a lot to do…for people I’ve grown to care about rather a lot. I still feel as though I’m leaving a newborn on a bus depot bench and walking away, leaving this project as it currently stands…there’s just still so much that should get done, that probably won’t get done after I’ve gone.

There just isn’t anybody to do it…and it would take too long for anybody to train up into it.

…sigh…

Well…it’ll be OK, one way or another. The worst that can possibly happen still doesn’t result in any actual, physical death.

Or dismemberment.

So, onward. We’ll do the best we can with what time we have left, and after that, well…I’ll just have to trust that those I’m leaving behind can figure things out.

I’m pretty sure they can…and I won’t be, you know, moving…so the new developer can totally find me if he has any questions.

(Hi, honey. You will so owe me a whack of yard work if you take too much advantage of that.)

(Yet another fringe benefit of the two of us working together: Losing one of us doesn’t actually mean losing that one.)

(Heh. He’s so totally going to be driving me nuts with the ‘quick question’ thing for about two months after I’ve technically left, I can practically guarantee it…)

(OH, and? Vanessa the Great didn’t end up leaving us. Her new job fell through after a great many near-misses and miscommunications. Yay! Um, I mean, and I’m terribly sorry about that, dear me, tsk-tsk, simply dreadful, nobody regrets more than I do…)

(p.s. yay!)

(p.p.s. I am a bad, bad person…)

I’m not REALLY dead

All appearances to the contrary aside, I haven’t died. Yet. But I have started getting pretty worked up about things that ordinarily I would just shrug about, so it is actually possible that the End Times are upon us and we should all either repent, or go out and get really drunk.

Or possibly, if there’s time, we could do both. But not in that order. Because then, we’d probably have to repeat the repenting step and, well, there’s almost definitely not enough time for that.

I am now officially in the “fish or cut bait” trap. And I think everybody is irritated with me for not doing the OTHER thing more diligently / better / whatever. And I…am becoming…ahem…slightly short tempered…about it.

I’d love to make everybody happy. But…I can’t. I just can’t. There are not enough hours in the day or enough days between Now and Then for me to do that. A lot of these conversations should have started taking place in January, to be brutally honest about it. But of course, they didn’t, because back then the fact that I was ‘rolling off’ at the end of March wasn’t “in your face” news.

Everybody, including myself by the way, would rumble and sputter about it from time to time. Oh ya-ya-ya, uh-huh, we need to start thinking VERY SERIOUSLY INDEED about that…!

…and then we would be “absolutely hammered” by this-n-that-n-the-other (unlike every other business day, of course) and “swamped” and “overwhelmed” so that we then neglected to “action” the “learnings” enough to “reach out” to “anybody” “about” “anything” “really” “wait” “what’s” “with” “all” “the” “quotes?!”

Help, I have fallen into too many business meetings, I can’t action my learnings of English anymore…! (<= alas, this is almost like a ‘real’ sort of sentence that could be used in some of these meetings…and yes, sometimes, I want to reach across the table and slap somebody for saying they want to ‘action’ a ‘learning’ when what they mean is, ‘do it more betterer, like we should-oughta have done it from the git-go.’ I MEAN, REALLY, PEOPLE…let’s use proper American grammar, IF you please!) (this digression is otherwise entitled, How Tama amuses herself in meetings so that she is not paying a LICK of attention to whatever-all is being said, and is thus later surprised to learn that she was supposed to action something but didn’t even hear that learning because she was too busy coming up alternative phrases for ‘action the learnings.’)

Heh. Corporate America, baby. Gotta love her!

ACTUALLY, you know what’s weird? The other day I was stomping around the house in a bit of a temper because blah blah blah and they were all yak yak yak and I was all LOOK, IT’S SIMPLE, IT’S JUST blah blah blah and they were all {blank stare} and then…

…wait…

And I looked at my tech-husband, who was sitting there waiting for me to shut up listening intently to my every faaaascinating word, and I said…

“…ohmygah…”

He started chuckling.

“Shut up,” I snapped at him.

He started laughing.

“DUDE, SERIOUSLY, this is not funny…”

He proceeded on to howling and slapping his knee.

“ARGH!!!!!!!!”

I very much fear…I have migrated over the line. I can no longer seem to find that middle ground, where I can give Business the information they need without making their heads explode, and translate for Tech what on earth that weirdo was on about, with his ‘actioning’ and ‘learnings’ and ‘reaching out.’ He isn’t going to, like, HUG me or anything, right…? No, dude, don’t be scared…he’s just a project manager, they talk like that…

Instead I’m stuck in this place where my high level stuff is too high level, so they’re demanding more detail. But then my detail is too detailed and they’re just…looking at me…like, I don’t get it. Or worse, they want to argue with me about all these nitty-gritty details, like arguing is going to, um, solve something.

Bonus points if their “simple” solution to a perceived problem or omission would involve umpity-majillion man-hours to implement. Work to be done by…{glances around at empty floor}…hmmmm…

And then? I get frustrated with them. Which has got to be the number one symptom of having gone a step too far.

LOOK. We both know you can’t understand this. How about if you stick with actioning the learnings in meetings, and I’ll just get my MacGyver on over here, hmmmm…? (<= yet another symptom of having crossed over: arrogance, tinged with smugness)

Of course, it’s also a symptom of just being tired. I’ve been go-go-go for five weeks straight. I have gotten very little sleep since mid-February because I have had so many things dumped on me as non-optional.

I have been working my arse off.

And then, it has suddenly been discovered – and this may come as a great surprise – that I’m leaving, in, like a couple weeks.

I KNOW. It’s not like this was, you know, on the calendar for months or anything…{eye-roll}

Soooooo, suddenly I’m just incredibly popular. I’ve got tech howling for me to finish…well, almost every open QC item. I’ve got business whining about not understanding how they are going to action the learnings and that they need more documentation and so forth and so on. I’ve got partners desperately trying to get one last mystery solved. I’ve got users asking if I can pretty please figure out just one real quick issue they’ve got. I’ve got QA hounding me to analyze their test plans, to confirm that they’re doing the right testing.

Which is one of those “Tama can’t win this one” propositions, really. If I meddle, I will end up having to write all the tests. If I don’t meddle, we will probably end up with “eh” testing because the poor tester has no idea what he’s doing – he’s new to the application, too, and it’s always been a black box for everybody.

@^*&@.

Well – life in the fast lane, huh?

And only a little over two weeks left to go before the next rest stop…Lord, but am I ready for it…

So many people have charged up (or sidled up) to ask me what, you know, I’m going to be doing, you know, WITH THE REST OF MY LIFE lately…that I’m beginning to develop something of a nervous tic on the subject.

Mind you, it’s not just me; pretty much our entire team is being dismantled. We’re talking about dozens of people who are…ahem…exploring other avenues right now.

“What are you doing? Who are you networking with? What are the job boards looking like where you’re looking? Thoughts? Opinions? Do you happen to know a guy who knows a guy who needs a {project manager, business analyst, requirements writer, QA analyst}?”

It’s kind of the topic of the day right now.

But still. I was asked this question, I kid you not, eight (8) times today. EIGHT. One person asked twice (so, obviously, the first answer didn’t work out for them).

The last person who asked it got this long, long moment of silence. And then he was all, “Oh, uh, sorry, was that, I didn’t mean, I mean, um…are you…er…okay…?”

Which made me laugh, because ohmygah, he sounded like a boyfriend who is suddenly afraid that what you’re not telling him is something like I’m pregnant.

I think what makes this a bit awkward for me is precisely the fact that everybody asking is so…completely engrossed in asking themselves the same question.

It’s a very large and important question. This is your life you’re talking about here. The question of what you’re going to do next when a job is coming to an abrupt end in a meh economy is something that should be carefully thought out, with as good a roadmap as you can reasonably get, and goals and maybe a ten-step order of events involved and all like that.

Which makes it a little hard for me to answer that question honestly…because honestly, the answer is kind of like this: Eh, I’m just going to wait and see what presents itself.

I’m not committing to much of anything. I’m not actively looking for a new gig, and I’m not actively avoiding one, either. I’m keeping my ears open, but I’m not putting out an aggressive “hire me!” campaign, either.

I’m just…open. To whatever is going to come along next.

See…something always does, is the thing.

And it’s just about always something good.

It would be good to keep on working where I am. I know this business and these systems really well – I’m a power lifter, and I like being that kind of worker.

It would also be good to switch things up and learn something new. I like learning new stuff, and let’s face it – nothing builds your skills faster than being shoved into something you haven’t done before and having to figure it out.

It would be good to take the summer off and come back at it after a six month sabbatical – I could focus on the garden and the Den, not have to deal with summertime daycare (ugh), and have us beautifully positioned for a transition back to me being unavailable a lot for a while.

It would be good financially to keep the paychecks coming. It would be good emotionally/spiritually for me to be home again.

See? It’s all good, really.

Or, it is if you choose to see it that way, maybe.

Because there are downsides to both, too; everything that is a “pro” of the one can also be seen as the “con” for the other, I suppose.

But…I don’t know. I can’t explain it.

I’m not particularly worried. I’m just…watchful. And waiting. And ready to pluck whatever manifests out of thin air – which I know it will – and just…enjoy it.

Which isn’t an answer I feel comfortable giving to people who aren’t able to be so…zen? dense? childish?

I really don’t know what to call it.

I certainly wouldn’t call it particularly smart; it’s not exactly a “take charge of your life” kind of attitude, for sure.

And I can’t explain how somebody like me – who is so big on lists and goals and execution plans and let’s break this down, let’s keep our eyes on the prize, let’s be ORGANIZED about the APPROACH, here! – can be so irritatingly laid back on something like this.

Which leaves me with little to say to someone asking that question except something lame like, “Oh, I haven’t fully decided yet…I’m just staying open to the possibilities, you know…” and then listen while they try to teach me how to network, how to lobby, how to go about getting the Next Big Thing going.

And all I can think is…I wish I knew how to teach you to pray not for any specific thing, but just for something good, for that thing you need most, whatever it may be.

With your chin up, and your eyes and hands open.

Blessings will fall around us, like cherry blossoms in a warm May breeze. But we won’t see them if our eyes are squeezed tight with effort, and we can’t catch them if our hands are cramped into fists.

I wish, how I wish, that was a thing I could teach to someone asking what to do by asking what I am going to do; but, the only thing closed harder than their eyes and hands are their ears at such a time.

Don’t give me philosophy, dammit, give me action…

So I guess all I can do there, too, is wait…until the time comes when they open again. And hope it can be said in such a time, and such a place, that it can be heard.

And in the meantime, add to my own prayers a footnote…may blessings be, to all who seek…amen, amen, amen.

Random and Rambling

So, last week was Hell Week for most of us at work. The husband and I played tag-team all week, staying up all night handing the baton back and forth. Your turn!...your turn!...yours!...allllll yours, buddy…pssst, hey, you awake? Ya, you need to do that next thing now…

There are actually distinct advantages to the two of us working together like this – both of us slept easier when it was time to sleep, because we didn’t have to worry that the next guy wouldn’t get in touch with us the instant things were ready for our next step. And we never had the problem of “crap, I’ve called, texted, emailed, paged and still nothing…guess I have to escalate up the food chain to get somebody to start that next thing!”

The person we needed was, like, four feet away, the whole time.

Which is kinda cool. And not something you’re going to get…you know, outside the military or a snow-bunker research facility in the arctic. Or possibly the space station.

But I digress.

Around midnight Tuesday, I was starting to feel a little less than fresh. I left the house four and a half hours later, on about three hours of sleep and knowing that, after putting in a ten hour day in the office, I was going to rush home, grab something to eat, and plop back down in my increasingly uncomfortable office chair so that I could combine the mind-numbingly dull task of watching jobs run (ooo, row counts! fascinating!) with frantic spurts of activity (done! OK! I have twenty-seven minutes to completely validate that, which gives me fifteen minutes to insert any changes that need to happen before the next step fires!) until about 1:00 a.m.

I had more than a few moments, from midnight Tuesday through about, oh, 4;30 p.m. Friday, when I found myself counting to ten.

Repeatedly.

Also, I would like to pause a moment in order to bless the name of the guy who invented the delete key. FOR LO, I have been spared having to issue many apologies last week by this most miraculous of inventions…which hath permitted me to undo snarky commentary regarding the intelligence, education, and even ancestry of others and replace them with milder responses.

…sigh…Yeah. It was a long week.

But, it went well. Nothing blew up. I jumped into my crummy not-even-an-hour window three times to massage some things back where they actually belonged; one of the applications I’m supporting right now is a little bit…ahem…delicate (pronounced: buggy as @*^&@).

It can get confused if you hit it, rapid fire, with changes over consecutive nights. It also wasn’t built with an eye toward data conversions…it expects things to remain the same pretty much always, and has to be carefully taught what each new thing is and how to handle it.

So when you hit it with multiple waves of converting data over a four night period (followed by a fifth night when you add unrelated new things to it), well.

Best that somebody who knows about its tricky little ways is sitting up to handle anything…unwanted.

In related news, it hit me, really hard, that I’m the only such person still around right now. And that there is no way in @*^&@ I’m going to be able to train somebody new to do, um, any of it.

Whenever I try to think about how I would go about teaching somebody brand-spankin’-new All This…my brain locks up.

I got nothin’.

And when I then add in trying to train somebody to do this stuff while also finishing up the whackity-majillion things I absolutely, positively, without fail MUST finish up…ohmygah.

I almost feel a little sick to my stomach.

And then I sit back and try to envision a way by which we can circumnavigate the multiple policies that are standing firmly in the way of either another contract extension or a conversion to full time employee for myself so that I don’t have to deal with All This Crazy…and I ask myself, I ask, …wait, WHY did you WANT that, again…?

And I have no answer for myself. I really don’t. I don’t know why I want to stay so much; it’s not all that rational, come right down to it.

It’s just that I look around at this team of people and I think…they not only need protecting, they deserve it. Which I know makes no damned sense. They’re grownups. They can take care of themselves. They did so before I arrived, they will do so long after I’m gone. They will be fine.

But…{kicks at dirt}…it’s just…this system is so…high visibility. It does stuff that does stuff, you know? And then people, hard-working, diligent people who care deeply about their work quality but who had no reasonable way to see this ugly thing coming…get yelled at.

And that’s so damned unfair, it half kills me.

But, not a whole lot anybody can do about it. Corporate policy exists to protect the corporation from lawsuits and other unpleasantries, and should not be “always, unless of course you’d really rather not in which case, do as you please,” you know?

So, I’m just going to have to do the best I can to finish “everything” (knowing full damned well I won’t in a million years be able to), and then have faith that everything will turn out fine regardless. Because it will. That’s kind of how these things tend to go.

Meanwhile in other news, I (finally) went to the dentist this morning. Where I was promptly informed that a) yes, I have indeed broken one of my back molars, b) wow, AWESOME decay patterns, and c) eeeeeeyeah, no, we can’t just fill that sucker, you’re gonna need a new crown on that bad boy.

Wooooo, how awesome is my life?!

And then his assistant informed me that the reason one of my other teeth was reacting (ahem) negatively to the acid cold water she was spraying all over it was because, QUOTE, “well, he just removed some tartar build up in that area.” END_QUOTE

Now, friends…I really should have argued with her. Because you know what? That was not the first time that dumb tooth has reacted (ahem) negatively to hot and/or cold. Or pressure. Say, the pressure of drinking oatmeal.

That tooth…is on the fast-track to a root canal, y’all.

But I did not argue with her. Or point any of this out. Partially because she was just so smugly convinced that I was an ignorant buffoon who had no idea what the difference would be between recently-un-tartar-build-up-ed tooth sensitivity and impending-root-canal sensitivity…and partially because this would undoubtedly have resulted in the nice dentist being summoned back into the room to “investigate” what was going on there, which would have involved more pain, and you now what? @^*&@ it, I’m OUTTA here!

…yeah, I…um…don’t really…enjoy my trips to the dentist too terribly much…

…but, now that I’m home and the Motrin is wearing off…eeeeeyeah, I…am probably…going to have to…mention…this stupid tooth…when I go back…Friday…for that OTHER thing that isn’t going to be fun plus will also be rather expensive…

…ugh…

In happier news, I went to Stitches Saturday! And I will do a better report later, but for now the highlights:

There was yarn. Lots of yarn. I didn’t actually buy a whole lot of it because I haven’t used a whole lot of it since last year and, you know, at some point one does have to say one has enough of something.

There were also books. And I showed a lot of restraint there, too. Which is miraculous and not at all related to my current stash of knitting books, which consists merely of three of every knitting book published in the last fifteen years of so. (Kidding! It’s not that extensive! I only have a couple…hundred…of them…)

And there were all kinds of tools. And I bought a couple of them. Like a new Knit Kit, because my old one got played with by the Denizens, and they yanked the tape measure out past its breaking point and broke the counter while trying to fix the tape measure (what, with a rock or something?!) and then ‘somehow’ the little door on the back cracked off plus, where is the little crochet hook? Um…oh, there was something there…?

And I also bought some itty-bitty circular needles, which I’ve been wanting to try about forever for sock and sleeve knitting, but hadn’t actually bought yet. And I started a sock with a set of 9” 3 mm needles, and you know what?

I like it. It’s a little awkward to get used to, because the ‘needle’ part is so much smaller in length, but the smooth and switch ‘just keep knitting around and around’ is triple awesome. Plus – zero jog.

I like.

The other thing I like is, I brought Boo Bug with me. So far of all the kids, she’s the only one for whom knitting “stuck” enough to get past about three rows of garter stitch. She’s been making a scarf for quite a while now, and while it is something that she puts down far more than she picks up…well, you know what? The scarf has been growing, and she really-really wanted to come with me this year.

I was expecting a lot of whining and complaining within an hour of arriving, but she gamely trudged through the whole market – half of it twice – and stood around while I went “blah blah blah! Blah blah blah! OHMYGAH, I KNOW, RIGHT? BLAH BLAH BLAH!!” with other knitters.

And then she tried a drop spindle, and she liked it, and bwahahaha.

I WIN.

It was awesome to have her with me, exploring all the different stuff in the marketplace. She even bought some yarn for herself, and a couple books.

I may not be able to teach somebody how to work our relationship-ownership-application at work, but by Gah, I can teach a ten year old to appreciate hand-dyed wool.

I’m not completely hopeless, y’all.

I think that’s about all the catching up for one week. (Good grief, really? What is up with that lately? It’s like I hit Monday night and vroom! It’s Monday morning again!)

Only five more weeks before I’m cut loose from this contract. I wonder if I’ll have more time then…or less…?

An idle moment between storms

Yesterday, I pretty much worked from 7:30 a.m. right around the clock to 4:00 a.m. Then I slept in until 9:00 (well…stayed in bed until 9:00…I was awakened by a non-work text message at 5:30, and then by the nanny [pause to bless her and all her descendent unto the end of time, amen] getting the Denizens off to school, and then by a work text message to the husband at 8:00 [note that he too was up until about 3:30 in the morning for this same exercise], and then my hip decided to be angry and poke-poke-poke at me…but by golly, I stayed in bed until 9:00!).

And then I had a very slow breakfast. And lots of coffee. Lots of coffee. And then I logged in to work at 11:30. And then I worked until 4:30. And took a couple hours away to do other stuff. And then I started checking stuff. And now I have a few hours to catch some shut eye before the next round of checking stuff.

And then, after I’ve dotted the last ‘i’ and crossed the last ‘t’ for tonight (tomorrow morning?), guess what?! I have to immediately hit the road for the office. BECAUSE (ohmygah, get this) (it only gets funnier the more I think about it), I have an in-person interview.

Oh, no, not for me in re: a new job…no-no-no, for my replacement in this one.

I KNOW, RIGHT?!?!

…there must be triple the irony points that I will be interviewing this poor sap candidate after pulling two all-nighters in a row, and with the third all-nighter staring me right in the eye as I’m doing it…

…I only hope I don’t scare him off by being any combination of excessively tired, distracted, being pinged every eight seconds for one real quick thing or appearing extra hag-like…which I have to admit, I rather do right now.

Ugh. Bleary eyes. Not attractive. My eyeballs look like canned cherries that are way past their use-by date. Nice.

Anyway! Needless to say…we are in the throes of the last big data migration for the overall project this week. And in the way of Such Things, most of the action is taking place in the wee hours of the night because, inexplicably, users get a little testy when we ask if we can, you know, close down their relationship management tools for, I dunno, 2-3 days.

Picky, picky, picky.

The prolonged drama is courtesy of the President’s Day Weekend, which was a fantastic weekend to pick for this, doancha think?!

Half of the systems were closed…the other half were not. This stuff ran, that stuff didn’t. This is coming in Monday, that is coming in Tuesday, and the other won’t saunter by until Wednesday.

And for every single new inflow…Your Faithful Correspondent over here has to babysit all night. I have this one (1) tiny window of opportunity to actually intervene if something is going wrong.

And…I am literally the only person around with the know-how to actually do it right now. Which both scares the @^*&@ out of me, and stiffens my resolve that nothing, nothing, is going to get by me this week.

I will be damned – that’s right! actual cuss-word damned! – if we are going to trip over our own shoelaces right at the finish line here…there will be NO freakin’ emergency wee-hours calls with 47 people dragged out of bed to discuss the massacre and jab Fingers of Blame™ at my boss and/or my team on MY WATCH.

Thus have I spoken…thus shall it be. Hail Pharaoh!!! {clashing of cymbals, waving of palm fronds, drinking of fruity beverages}

Sigh.

It’s going to be a looooooong week.

Wake me when it’s over, ‘kay?…yawn…oh hey!...my schema finished snapping…gtg, ttyl!

The Garden Report: February 19, 2012

The next few weeks are the part of this whole “I’m going to grow things!” exercise that I have to admit I like the least: The part where I emerge from my cozy little den, blinking in the crisp light of late winter / almost spring, to find that, for the most part, my empire looks something like this.

Aw, @^*&@.

This, friends, is the finest crop of organic weeds in the entire San Joaquin county. Yessir. We knows how to grow’em, we does.

…sigh…

Now to be honest…this is nothing new. I have had this annual groan-fest every year since we bought the Den. Every year, somewhere between February and March, I start dealing with the weeds and make all kinds of sweeping vows. This year (I will declare, solemnly, with the air of a knight pledging to do something all heroic and some junk) I am going to stay on TOP of this, even in the winter!

And then, well, it starts getting cold…and rainy…and there aren’t that many weeds anyway…aaaaaaaaaaand so I kind of…you know…whatever.

A few weeks ago, there were, eh, a handful of tiny weeds out here. But then we had a couple warm-ish days. And some rain. And then I looked out here the other day and went, “HOLY @*^&@ ARE YOU EVEN KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW?!?!”

…and then I thought of a few thousand other things that were way more important right now…

…and then I spent some time hoping they would, I dunno, feed the cutworms and die off…

…and then I finally motivated myself this weekend to get out there and deal with mah issues.

Pretty much ready for duty.

And this is what my city yard waste tote looks like now.

…again…

I still need to finish fixing the drip system along this row. We had a blow-out back there last year that we never fixed, so the manifold (the sticky-up-y bit where the tubing joins) needs to be replaced and then, of course, somebody has to sit around for, like, a hundred hours, clipping tubing, doing battle with the inline drippers, capping and then installing All That onto the new manifold.

I got the manifold done today, and about a quarter of the tubing. And then the husband said, “Hey, are you going to help me with the lemons?” …ugh…

I’d been leaving them on the tree until the last second, because, well, um, because…well, officially, because I wanted to extend the season.

Unofficially? Between you and me? Because…it’s a bumper crop this year. We had counted to 400-something before our minds shut down and we stopped counting.

…just…shoot…me…

Lemons don’t last well off the tree. I now have to do something with all this. The vast majority of them will be zested and juiced. Which is hard on my hands. I seem to recall a couple years ago when we had this level of crazy-awesome gifting from this amazing little tree, my hands didn’t bend right for a week after I’d done that. I am looking forward to it in almost the exact same way I look forward to seeing the dentist.

But, darned if I’m going to waste them. I go through a lot of lemon juice with all the canning I do (aside: if you’re planning to do the same, using home-grown lemon juice instead of ‘Real Lemon’ or what-have-you, invest in some pH strips to make sure you’ve got the right acidity…it matters a lot, and varies wildly in “fresh” lemons and their juice…you need it to be between 2.4 and 2.6 pH to be ‘right’ for home canning!), and the kids are very into lemonade and so forth.

But still…sigh…maybe if I ignore them for a while, they will process themselves…?

Oh well. Worth a shot. Moving on.

Something new this year (or, newly finished) is my compost system. The husband started building this for me last season, and then it sort of sat there more or less half done-ish, and then, the poor fool made the mistake of a) noticing that I was taking some time off around our anniversary and b) thinking this would mean we would/could go somewhere fancy and romantic.

Hahahahahahahahaha! I know, right? We’ve been married fifteen years, you’d think he’d know better! So instead of going somewhere expensive and sophisticated and so forth…we went into the backyard and he finished this.

Awwwww! Best. Anniversary. Present. EVER.

It has three bins with removable fronts on them – those slats lift out so that short people like me can get in there without a whole lot of drama.

The first bin is where the ‘fresh’ stuff goes.

After it has cooked down about halfway or so, I turn it into the second bin.

Eventually, the stuff in the second bin looks a bit like this – at which point, it goes into the third bin to finish up.

When I need “more dirt and/or compost” somewhere, this will go through the wire mesh sieve – what falls through is finished compost / dirt, and what won’t go through trots back to the first bin for a second ride through the whole process.

Most of the beds are empty right now, waiting for it to get just a little warmer, a little more reliably. Right now we’re in the unchancy bit; our “average” last frost happens around February 9 or so, and it has started getting warmer and warmer during the day…but, funny thing about California (which is, after all, a bit of a ‘dessert’ state). We will be nice and warm during the day, but then overnight we plummet. It got up to almost 60 degrees out here today, but will probably drop down to around 34 overnight, and if you dig your hand into the soil, even at the warmest time of the day…it’s still pretty cold underground.

Seeds don’t like to germinate when it’s cold. It’s kind of a thing with them.

So instead…I’m starting them in the bathroom. Because nothing says “country chic like turning your master bathroom into a greenhouse! Am I right?!

Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart!!

Now mind you, this is actually inconvenient. I like having a few plants around the bathtub – not the entire bathtub area including the bathtub itself covered in the things. BUT, it is also hands-down the single best place to get seeds started…it is sunny during the day, and gets nice and warm in there even when it’s not so warm in the rest of the house. It’s also a relatively high-Tama-traffic-area, so the plants have a much better shot at not dying from neglect.

Which is a thing that can happen to just about any living thing in this house that doesn’t make me trip over it regularly.

So I’ve got…a bunch of Roma tomatoes in some of the flats, and about five each of Cherokee Purples, yellow Jubilee, and Homestead (smaller beefsteak-type) tomatoes. I’ve got watermelons, butternut squash and pumpkins. There’s a ton of red onions, too. Jalapeno and bell peppers. Broccoli, cantaloupe and cucumbers. And brussel sprouts, which I’ve tried to grow three times now, only to lose all of them to one stupid thing or other. (Rampaging kids, a falling tree (!!) and Bug Attack of Doom + 10.)

A lot of these things could technically be direct-sown right now, but I am having a helluva time with Something chewing them down to the root out there. (I’m strongly suspecting it is slugs or snails…it might be earwigs, but frankly their numbers are way down this year, soooooo, I’m really thinking snails and/or slugs.)

And, I have had abysmal results with direct-sowing broccoli since the beginning of my gardening days. So I’m going to grow them inside until they are nice, big, hardy little transplants, and then I’m going to give them an extra-long hardening off, and I’m not putting them outside until everything is just right for them.

And then they’ll probably die anyway. But I will have given it my best effort.

Meanwhile, things are starting to slowly pick up. The artichokes are taking off – I had cut them right down to the ground to overwinter. You wouldn’t know it, looking at them today.

Some of the onions I thought had failed are actually doing just fine now.

The “dead” blackberries are also starting to look alive.

And then, there’s this.

The little 5-in-1 stone fruit tree has thrown out a couple of these showy pink blossoms – I looked out my kitchen window the other evening as the light was fading, and could see them from clear “over there.”

Those are the moments when I know there is hope for me yet. Sometimes I wonder if I’m losing my ability to believe in magic; I wonder if I’ve become, you know…a grownup.

And then, while up to my eyebrows in Very Important Adult Things, looking up from rinsing the dregs of my third or fourth cup of Certified Grownup Coffee© (now with extra bitter nastiness!) (sometimes I suspect it is the bitterness of coffee that actually wakes me up, not the caffeine), I see a tiny flash of pink – the first flash of color on sticks that played dead all winter.

And I feel like a kid on Christmas morning, when magically there are a thousand boxes – no, a million boxes!! – under the tree.

The magic is coming again. My empire will be fruitful. And vegetableful. Living, and giving life…rewarding my work with food.

The same old magic trick that we’ve seen since our kind crawled onto land.

Amazing that something as old as time…never gets old, for some of us.

Abracadabra!

Seedlings, SQL and Strange Dreams

Man. I feel as though time is just – telescoping. The days are passing in such a blur, it’s hard for me to fix the passage of them.

Did that happen last weekend? Or the one before? Surely I still have enough time to get this or that done, wait! What day is it again? How can it be February already?!?!

And then somebody sends me an email saying, “Dude, are you sick or something? Where are you?” and I go…huh?…

I don’t know that I have ever had quite this…frenetic…a pace, at the end of a contract. Usually when a longer-term contract is coming to a known end, there’s a long, slow ramping down…more and more tasks get finished, or handed off to other people…and I have less and less to do, or be responsible for…until by the time I get to the end, well, I’m usually working rather short weeks and most of my daily grind consists of sitting around knowing stuff. Others do the work, I’m just there to advise when they get stuck.

But this time…whoa nelly, it ain’t like that. Nossir. Instead of ramping down, as Dawg is my witness, things are heating up. I’m not doing less and less, I’m doing more and more.

And then I look at everything that I absolutely, positively, no matter WHAT must get done before that fast-approaching date of March 30, and I find myself torn between being grumpy as hell about having to go, and halfway to desperate to not have to go.

Can’t I just get, say, another 90 days? I think I could get ALL of this finished, if I had 90 more days… (<= this would be a lie…because in 90 days, I would probably find / be gifted with another 900 days worth of work…this is how these things always go…)

Probably in large part because I’m working myself into a tizzy about how All This is going to a) get done by me before I have to go and b) continue being done by somebody else – somebody new, GAH HELP US, I’m having a lot of trouble in my “free” time with disengaging.

And also sleeping.

A lot of trouble with that, lately. Too many thinks, not enough off button.

And then, of course, because I’m working up a fine case of sleep deprivation, I’m starting to become various combinations of grouchy, incoherent, irrational, and other fancy terms that boil down to a real pain in the arse.

Sigh.

Well…anyway…I have beets starting to come up!

And one (1) pea plant!

Plus, when I was moving the blueberry bushes to a sunnier spot, there were some surprise Blue Nile potatoes to be had. I’d thought I’d seen a potato plant in that bed a while ago, but then I’d thought I must have been wrong because it had “vanished.” Well, it didn’t “vanish,” it died off – and the potatoes kept just fine in the ground.

Last weekend I planted ten sweet potato slips (not sure how well they’re going to do, but, we’ll see). I moved the blueberries, pulled up a million more pounds of weeds, watched my husband drop five tons of tree branches right onto my onions (!!), pruned the fruit trees, and walked around my little empire just touching, touching, touching.

Feeling the dirt between my fingers, cold in some places, warm in others. Clay here, sand there. This bed, perfect. This bed, hmm.

And then it was getting dark and cold, and it was time to come in, wash up, and get ready for the week to start again.

Sometimes, my life feels like a very strange dream; like I’m moving between two different worlds that know nothing of each other.

One moving at a crazy and artificial pace, where my mind is constantly revving and racing, where I’m expected to just know, well, everything. It’s exhilarating and exhausting and wonderful and awful.

And the other, well. It moves at a languid, unhurried and unrushable pace. It will be what it will be, and it will be that when it will. Even if I apply my human cunning to the problem and make all conditions ideal…a seed will become a carrot at its own pace. It will not germinate even one day sooner no matter how much I want it to…it will not reach its full size an hour before its time. It’s awe-inspiring and humbling and frustrating and satisfying.

I dreamed today that, having gotten a really weird result from a coalesce statement and wanting to know, uh, why it had done that…I learned about data type precedence, coalesce and isnull statements, and how those three things actually function, in the dark and secret underpinnings of SQL Server. I dreamed then that I shared this with the tiny, tiny fraction of the developer team that shares my curiosity about Such Things. And that we spent about half an hour animatedly talking about it, and that it led to wondering how similar things played out in Oracle, and then there was Googling. It was awesome, and it felt incredibly good to have that interaction, to use my mind in that way, to learn something cool and useful and kinda secret, too…the dream chooses to ignore that it’s only ‘secret’ in that most people really could not care less, and therefore they don’t know and don’t wanna know.

I dreamed today that I dug my hands into soft earth, my skin analyzing how moist it was, how it held together, how it crumbled – I need to adjust the drip system here, and here and here, probably need a higher-flow bubbler at this end, too. I dreamed that I noticed my nails were, once again, ruined, and that I had a hopeless amount of dirt under them, and also that I had thoughtlessly rubbed mud on my favorite vest. And that I didn’t really care. That I stood and looked around this whispering, hope-filled place and breathed in the smells – of dirt, finished compost, the neighbor’s horses. It was cold, there in the dusk, and my nose was running…but the dirt sang promises of spring and I felt slow and timeless, like an oak tree that stands and watches for countless unmoving years.

Such strange and disparate dreams…but I suppose, they balance each other. Either one on its own could be in danger of plunging into a world that was sharply skewed, and completely unreal.

Perhaps that’s where my balance actually is – in the center-point between the two dreams, each pulling the other back from its height or depth. Without either one, I could be left too high or too low, lost and unable to find my way back down to where real, or reasonable, is.

Or perhaps…I think too darned much, about very random and esoteric things. And should really just go to bed and try to sleep all this philosophy-stuff off.

{yawn!}

Blueberry of happiness

This is my dehydrator in action! Blueberries from last season I had dried were rehydrated in boiling water for about half an hour before being folded into muffin batter...which was then topped with a brown sugar struedel before being baked and if you'll excuse me...I have something I really need to get back to right now...

NOM!

Wherein I definitely need a keeper, and possibly a chauffeur

I took Thursday, Friday and Monday off work – you know, “vacation” days? So naturally, I am now thoroughly exhausted.

Instead of spending my time away from the daily grind sipping tea with my pinkie in the air and perhaps nibbling a scone or two while pouring over books about fancy lace knitting, Your Faithful Correspondent was doing things like…yanking up so many weeds that she literally couldn’t budge the wheeled yard waste tote to the curb.

Plus some cleaning. And a lot of stuffing the remaining freezer space with things to eat. With a side serving of doing the initial run at the 2011 taxes (there’s some fun times, let-me-tell-you) and also trying to get on top of the pile of papers I’m told I’m supposed to read and understand and (here’s the corker) respond to in some way.

…ugh…

Naturally, I was still dashing around like a crazy person Sunday night trying to do just one more thing. I didn’t get to sleep until almost 1:00 in the morning.

Then, when the alarm went off at 3:30…for some unknown reason…I found it incredibly hard to, you know, get up.

In fact, I found it impossible. I didn’t pry myself out of bed until 6:00, when I had to because it was time to start motivating the children.

At 6:30, Vanessa the Great (our nanny) arrived to take over the child-motivating, and I sat down at my corporate laptop to sheepishly admit that I would be working from home that day – because one of the awesome things about my commute is that it is extremely time-of-day sensitive.

If I leave by 4:30 a.m., I will be in the office by 6:00. If I leave at 5:00, it will be around 7:30. If I leave at 5:30, we’re looking at 8:30. And if I leave at 6:30 in the morning…eeeeeyeah. Um. I will be there…eventually. Probably. (But I do always make sure pack a lunch, dinner, a change of clothes, plenty of water, signal flares, a portable toilet…just in case…)

And then…well. See, the downside of working from home for me is that it is entirely too easy for me to just kind of keep going. Which I did. From 6:30 a.m. until 10:00 p.m., with one (1) dash downstairs between meetings to make another coffee and microwave a bowl of Spanish rice. And frankly, at 10:00, it was a bit of a struggle for me to disengage, already.

I’m kind of between a rock and a hard place right now; somehow I’ve become that person for a couple of our applications – the “only one” who knows how to figure out why something is happening, and whether we should do anything about it, and what to do about it. So when things start going wrong somewhere, wellllllll…there’s only one person who can set it right and dammit, that’s ME.

The minute I opened my email, I was already in trouble. I was in Email Jail and it wasn’t only successful batch reports and cute pictures of kittens. Curses.

We have a Big Visible Thing coming up next weekend (which may cause “my” applications to do all kinds of bizarre, unexpected things), and there were questions around that from the testers.

PLUS there’s this other Big Visible Thing (which “my” applications have the most amazing ability to completely screw up due to such ‘unexpected’ things as it being a Monday) (Dawg mah witness, sometimes I think I’m just dreaming some of the crazy-arsed crap that goes down in this so-called system of mine…it’s like I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole or something!).

And I’ve got a whack of questions in my inbox from folks about why this is that and that is this and where did that go and I can’t know whether it’s something scary or something eh, whatever until I’ve looked at it…which takes time and speaking of time…holy crap, now it’s almost 11:00 and I’m still sitting here staring at the wall visualizing the data lifecycle in my head trying to figure out where and why as we go through this huge Magic Loop of ours we would have dropped that override because honestly, it makes no sense no matter how I look at it…GAH, STOP, DISENGAGE, REPEAT! DISENGAGE!!!!!

(You know what would help me a lot? Not caring. If I could just not care about people on my team looking bad and/or our data being Total Crap and/or screwing up downstream systems and having them look bad [followed of course by us looking bad, AGAIN], I’d get so much more sleep. Curse you, sense of honor and responsibility!)

But eventually I wandered to bed and fell into it.

And then we come to this morning.

My alarm went off and I – having sworn on a stack of holy writs in front of about forty witnesses that I would so do, amen – rolled out of bed with what might be called a hint of resentment and proceeded to perform my morning dressing ritual.

Which consisted first of standing in the middle of my closet with a blank expression on my face going, “Duuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh…” while staring at all the clean, pressed, ready-to-wear garments all around me because wait, what do I do with these again…?

Having finally selected something that didn’t really go together but who would notice anyway and pulled half of it on, I realized that my armpits were an offense to God and Man and that really, for the good of humanity, I needed to remove that layer of clothing and apply some deodorant.

So then I…wait. I must preface the next scene of this farce with the following: At the time this took place, I swore myself to secrecy. I will NEVER tell a living soul this happened, I promised myself. This is because I take myself way more seriously in the first hour or so of being-awake than I do the rest of the time, and felt it might damage my image if I revealed what had happened.

A few hours later, I remembered that I really don’t even have an image, so, what the hell – this is kinda funny, I oughta share it.

So I yanked off the first layer of shirt-stuff, opened the cupboard, grabbed the deodorant out of it and rubbed it vigorously on my stinky armpits.

It felt weird, like I had forgotten to take the cap off it or something. Gah danged stupid why can’t they make these things easier to…wait…that’s…oh…

Yeah.

It wasn’t deodorant.

It was a bottle of prescription medication. A bottle which is a) maybe a quarter the diameter of the deodorant and b) a circle, whereas the deodorant is an oval and c) so not gonna help with my stinky problem.

{head-desk}

And then I finished dressing, made coffee, got in the car and drove myself to the train station. And the whole time I was driving, I was nervously aware that if any of the police officers I was undoubtedly passing along the way knew that they were looking at a car driven by a woman who had attempted to de-stink her armpits with a bottle of prescription anti-inflammatory medication…well, they would have Just Cause for pulling me over, don’t you think?

Now, I told you all of that so I could tell you this: I’m pretty sure I need a keeper. And probably also a chauffeur. Plus also to go to bed about, um, now-ish.

G’night!

Happy feet, a favorite thing

Y'all know how I am in the kitchen, right? During the work week, I probably spend less than 30 minutes altogether in there, but on most weekends?

I practically have a cot under the kitchen table to sleep on. I try to remember to SIT! DOWN! whenever I can - while peeling or slicing or whatever - but usually the angle ends up being awkward or something...so I pretty much end up logging anywhere from 10 to 14 hours on my feet in the kitchen at least ONE of my precious, fleeting two days of glorious, catch-up-on-everything weekend. Sometimes BOTH days, when I've got enormous quantities of garden output to process or something.

And then I wonder why my hip and back hurt so $&#%*#ing much on Monday. GEE I WONDER WHY.

I had been looking at those "professional gel mats" that suddenly started showing up everywhere, but had shied away from the $70 - $149 price tags. (Go figure.)

How much could it REALLY help, anyway? Maybe some nice $5-10 gel inserts would be just as good. (They are not. Mind you they don't HURT [for the most part, except when the fit is so bad in the shoes that they throw my entire body off], but they are NOT a cure for being on my feet way too long at one go.)

A while back, Costco had these mats for (if memory serves) $15. I circled them about three times before finally deciding that for $15, it was worth a try.

Oh.
My.
GAWD.

When this wears out (which it will, all too soon - it really wasn't designed for the heavy use I'm putting it through), I am SO investing in the biggest, most industrial gel mat I can find.

I'm already watching for sales, yo.

My Monday Morning joint pain is so much better (well, with a little seasonal adjustment for the cold / damp weather, which tends to add some Owie Points regardless), and even better, my weekend use of pain killers (aside: I only WISH they ACTUALLY killed it...not to whine or anything [warning: whining ahead!] but I am HEARTILY tired of the achy-joint thing!) use is way, way, WAY down.

Which makes me happy in a hundred ways.

Thank you, Cheap Little Floor Mat. You are one of my favorite little things. I will mourn when you go to the Great Floor Mat Hereafter.