I got new drawing supplies! Now I desperately want time to sit down and practice sketching. A lovely new pad (there's nothing quite like a pristine pad of paper, is there?) and some colored pencils from a friend tempted me on Christmas day and have been calling to me softly ever since.
(If you don't know me, please be aware that I cannot draw. I just like trying to.)
(Also? New hobby, new shopping. The year I took up drawing, I spend endless hours and not a little money buying myself dozens of incredibly necessary and exciting gadgets, most of which I've no idea how to use.)
Should I feel like practicing "on the go", I can, thanks to the R.C., who gave me a purse-sized sketch pad and some colored markers.
Books! I got books! I got gift certificates to buy more books!
My mother and the R.C. gave me a gift certificate specifically earmarked to buy the new Doctor Who when it's out in January. I got Yes, Prime Minister, a Britcom series that I've been coveting.
Food! Little cheeses and crackers and bad-for-you-but-so-delicious processed meats! English chocolates! US chocolates! Lots of chocolates! A Whole Foods gift certificate! Coffee cards! (Two!)
I got warm gloves! Two pair, to replace the three pair I already own but haven't been able to find for the last six moths. I got fuzzy red socks! And a new pedicure kit, so I can make my toes lovely before I put the new socks on them!
I got things to look at, things to play with, and things to shop for. I got things to make me look good, to make me smell good, and to make me feel good. I got things to write on, things to draw on, and things to put on.
I made out like a bandit. It's very exciting. I love an occasion when my nearest and dearest feel obligated to buy me presents.
I hope your holiday joy was equally bountiful!
I really don't like that moment during the day when I realize I've essentially done everything except the stupid bookkeeping and that I no longer have any excuse to ignore it. Today I even filed first, which is pretty much a sign of desperation.
The end of the fiscal year (as I well know) comes on Friday. Much of what I am able to do is done. I just have a handful of those time-consuming bits and pieces that always fall to the bottom of the pile because they sound like they're going to be annoying all out of proportion to any results you might get. Fight with the insurance agent about the premium doubling for no reason, ask a client to pay a bill past-due since 12/2005, try to make the phone service provider sell us a part we need, etc.
I actually do have enough of those kinds of things to keep me busy for at least the next two days. Which is probably why I'm in a bit of a snit with Bernie for sending me a snippy email telling me I had, essentially, three "free, paid" days off last week and I should be working harder this week. (Yes, I was out of the office for three days, but at his heavy-handed 'suggestion' I wound up taking vacation or sick time for half of that. Because, you know, it is so my fault he hasn't brought any new business in all year and I didn't have anything to do.)
Considering he took yesterday off, he's leaving at 3:30 today, and he's not coming back until Friday, when he's scheduled to work for another, whole three hours? I think he has a fair amount of nerve implying that someone sitting in my office isn't giving their all.
That was completely uncalled for. He only sort of suggested that in his email and when I went in to talk to him it turned out, as usual, that we were on separate wavelengths and he was talking about "wasted" time because we weren't busy and could have done the year-end stuff if we'd been in the office.
Also, he gave me a Christmas bonus and now I feel bad about the way I so frequently exaggerate his misdemeanors to give myself better material for blog entries.
Not bad enough to stop doing it because nothing should get in the way of a good story. But, you know. Kind of bad.
Posted by AnneZook at 03:12 PM | Comments (0)Okay, so, we had snow. From 4:00 a.m. Wednesday morning (12/20) until very late Thursday evening (12/21). We had snow and we had wind and we had poor visibility and we had a lot of crazy people getting stuck all over the city. (On our little side road alone, there were at least nine cars abandoned by Thursday afternoon.)
Context is tricky with snow pictures. I have a few of the massive drifts of snow, but unless you can get something next to them to show scale, they don't look that impressive. Since the cars were all buried, that means that if the R.C. or I couldn't wade through to the middle of the drifts, all you see is a sea of white.
Like this one. If you don't know that that sea of white down in the parking lot, just above the red ribbon, is actually a row of seven cars, it just looks like snow on the balcony. But there are seven cars buried there.
Walking is fun in two feet of snow. You feel quite like an arctic explorer, wading thigh-deep through soft drifts of white, never quite sure what you're going to put your foot down on.
Here, I'd just given up on trying to find pavement and I was going "cross-country" under the trees, but since my boots only6 went halfway up my calves, that didn't turn out to be very smart.
It wasn't hard to find piles of plowed snow six or seven feet high. (I'm standing on five or six inches of packed snow, there.)
I didn't manage to take any that really showed just how deep some of the unplowed drifts were, but this one comes close.
The R.C. (in a coat that's far too big for her, but leaves room for three sweaters underneath) shows us the latest in automobile fashion, a sixteen-inch cap of snow.
The first time we actually made it out of our parking lot was Saturday afternoon, when we took our courage, and our lives, in our hands and walked over to the drugstore.
There are seven exits from our apartment complex parking lots, not one of which was really passable, so we just took the one nearest our building. The sidewalks were invisible, so we (and a couple of other hardy pedestrians) had to share a narrow lane in the middle of the unplowed road with the cars.
There was no chance of getting to the "walk" signal button, so once we got to the intersection, we waited for a green light, then infuriated the waiting cars by scampering with great care across the snow-packed roads to the even more snow-packed mall parking lot and down to the next light where someone had thankfully beaten a path to the "walk" signal button.
During which time, I should mention, we stood and watched one totally moronic driver who, with plenty of room to spare, insisted on tailgating an oblivious, head-phoned pedestrian. By the time the pedestrian noticed the car, it was squeezing past him with a bare couple of inches to spare.
I never did figure that one out. There were four feet of empty pavement on the other side of the car the driver didn't seem to want to drive on. It was a divided drive, so he was free to use the entire space but for some reason I'll never fathom, he felt that driving on the snow-packed verge, virtually aiming at the back of a pedestrian who clearly couldn't hear him coming, was a better choice.
The driver also, for the record, looked massively pissed off that someone who had their back turned to him and who was wearing headphones (a really stupid move on the part of the pedestrian, by the way), couldn’t hear a car rolling up behind him over the snow. The driver just kept rolling closer and closer to the guy, and looking more and more pissed off when the pedestrian continued to walk along.
Had the pedestrian heard the car, he wouldn't have had many options anyhow. The only place for him to try and go was over the four-foot mountain of snow to his left. While the driver, let me repeat, had four feet of empty pavement to the right that he was free to use.
People? Are insane.
After that, we had to thread our way through an icy and slushy parking lot filled with irate drivers angry that they weren't the only people in town who had thought of going to Whole Foods.
In retrospect, deciding to walk over to the store wasn't our brightest idea all weekend, but it was nice to get out.
We had a bit more snow Sunday evening, but just a skiff. Not worth noticing, except for the way it covered the dirty piles of plowed ice with a fresh, clean covering of pristine white. On Monday the sky was blue and the sun was shining, so we had a white Christmas and a beautiful day.
By all accounts, public transportation, which ground to a halt as buses bogged down all over town last Wednesday and Thursday, is almost back to normal. The bus drivers are trying, but not all roads have really been plowed (in spite of the city's claims) and even the plowed ones are sometimes only a single traffic lane wide, making it tough for buses to stop. Also, yesterday's sunshine resulted in a fair amount of melt-off so that roads that were clear yesterday were solidly iced-over by this morning.
Me, I drove to work today. Turns out that you can't take public transportation if there's so much snow you can't walk to the bus stop.
It turned into a gorgeous day, though. Sunny and warm, with a lovely, balmy feel to the air. And we have another one tomorrow, before the nexgt storm blows in. The weatherman can't decide if we're geting four inches or 16 inches.
It's an adventure!
Posted by AnneZook at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)It's a bit sad, really. I just had six straight days off and today, after working for two hours, I'm ready to go home and rest up. I've sorted the papers (there's a lot of bookkeeping stuff to be done - ugh), cleaned out the spam accounts, picked up and distributed the snail mail, and cleared out my voicemail.
I also got a message from my boss (who did not feel the roads were good enough for him to come in last Friday but who was annoyed that I did not come in last Friday) saying he won't be in today, but wanting to make sure I came in.
That cleaning up of accumulated debris seems to be about as far as my ambition goes. Having checked my personal email four times and found nothing, I'm going to blog for a while.
They're predicting another 6" - 8" for tomorrow or Thursday, which might mean I lose another day later this week.
We're going to the grocery store tonight, just in case. I've been having thoughts about pot roast lately and we need milk. We went to the store on Sunday only to find that they were out of milk and other things that require to be delivered fresh daily, but supplies should be replenished by now.
Oh, and before I forget, there will be pictures of the recent blizzard. I'll grab them off the PC at home tonight and post them up for the benefit of those of you who don't see much, or any, of the white stuff.
I hope y'all had a great holiday. I, myself, got some fabulous loot, did plenty of lounging around, watched a few DVDs, waded through the snow a few times, did a little laundry and housecleaning one day, and generally acted like a (caged) lady of leisure for six days.
I really should be focusing today. Just in case I don't make it in every day for the rest of the week. (But it's so nice, having the office all to myself! I can ease myself back in to "work" mode.) On the other hand, I'm not excited about most of the stuff (Bookkeeping. Ugh.) littering my desk, and some of it I'm not sure what to do with.
For instance, how do I convince Bernie that something that's happened once is not necessarily a "trend" and that he should not refer to it as such?
In the long run, do I even care?
I'm eating gingerbread cookies that I got from MountainMike on his last visit. Had I noticed before the holidays that each of the little gingerbread men and women and stars and trees had holes in them, I might have realized they were meant to be edible ornaments.
They're pretty good as cookies, though. Especially with a cup of Celestial Seasonings' decal Chai tea.
We're still digging out, here in Denver.
Thanks to the foresight and all-around sensibleness of the R.C., she actually had a small, collapsible shovel, something we haven't had for any of our previous two-footers.
We did a bit of digging out yesterday, just around the cars, and then, just as she'd predicted, a young man came by, desirous of freeing his own car but lacking any of the necessary implements. He volunteered to finish cleaning out our cars if we'd loan him the shovel to clean himself out.
This is what I like to see. The young and fit stepping up to help out the aged (or at least the lazy) in a time of emergency.
She also loaned the shovel to a couple digging out a van. There was some thought of loaning it to another woman after that, but she looked at us funny, so no go.
We also foraged up to the Sideways Car, an abandoned vehicle that's been blocking half the road since Wednesday night. Maybe I should have thought of it earlier, but I didn't, so Friday we made our way up there so I could wipe part of a window clean and make sure no one was inside.
I'd like to walk across the street to Whole Foods and the drugstore, but I swear the pavement is so bad that it would be more sensible to drive the entire 1,000 feet. The sidewalks are still over knee-deep and our apartment crew, never famed for cleaning sidewalks before, has actually been hard at work cleaning them, but they're starting with the ones inside the complex, not the ones that go along the road. We can make it to the edge of our parking lot but after that, it's a snowy wilderness.
I tried walking to the corner yesterday but I found myself stumping along with one foot on the sidewalk and one on the street. Our street hasn’t been plowed and I was foolishly assuming that the sidewalk was in a straight line up from the intersection. Turns out it was a couple of feet to the right.
The only place to walk where you can see where you're putting your feet is in the narrow strip of packed now that's currently being shared by two-way vehicle traffic. Since half of them are coming down a hill and the other half are revving up to get up it, I'm not comfortable walking there.
And, of course, getting to the intersection is only half the battle. Even if we could make it to the stoplight pole to push the button to get a "walk" signal (danger--somewhere under that snow is a storm drain that sits a good six to eight inches lower than the rest of the pavement), we'd have to wait for the cross-traffic to manage to stop, and then make sure none of the bewildering stream of cars coming down our unplowed road were aiming for us, before we could make it across the street.
And then across the mall parking lot and another no-doubt unplowed sidewalk to wade down, and then another, even busier intersection to cross.
And then, you know, back again.
The R.C. is suffering from a bit of cabin fever, in spite of going out and walking around the parking lot for a couple of hours a day. She's one of those people who doesn't think they're doing anything if they're not moving from place to place. Me, I'm a much more peaceful person who is almost always happiest curled up with a book, moving nothing but my brain, but even I'm feeling that three days of staring at the apartment walls is pretty much enough.
Fortunately, today's storm has been downgraded from "accumulation" to "partly-cloudy." The sun is high in the sky and in an hour or so, it's going to be time to begin the Wilderness Trek to food. (We have food, I hasten to add. We're in no danger of starving. We just want different food.)
If I don't return, know that I will rest peacefully, secure in the knowledge that it was all in pursuit of champagne truffles and that it was worth it.
P.S. We returned safely, but deciding to go for a walk in these conditions might not been our wisest move ever. (Also? No truffles.)
Except, you know, we're pretty much full up of snow. It can stop any time now.
I'm guessing we have 22 inches, maybe? Just at our place. Some Denver metro areas are reporting 27 or so. It's difficult to know for sure since we had so much wind that our light power snow is drifted into 30 inches in places, and there's a scant 4" covering in others.
Most roads are still closed. They have the major arteries open but are asking that we all stay home unless we really need to be out. CDOT and the National Guard are roaming the highways, digging out buried cars, and they don't need us in their way. The airport won't be open until tomorrow afternoon, at the earliest.
I'm getting a stream of emails from Bernie who seems concerned that I won't be working while I'm snowed in. He's also talking about what I should check into tomorrow when I'm at the office, and I'm thinking, "you really expect that me and my little Toyota are going to be able to fight our way in tomorrow?"
It's still snowing here, but I understand the storm is moving out. If I can actually get out of our parking lot tomorrow, I might go in for three or four hours in the middle of the day.
Also, very unusually for Denver, we don't have much sunshine in the forecast for the next four days. We might have a very cold, very white Christmas.
How're your holidays going so far?
Posted by AnneZook at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)Not as cold as it was yesterday, but chilly.
I'm sure it saves a lot of money for building management to turn the heat off (or at least 'way down) over the weekends, but they're killing my cactus and I've had to run hot water over hand hands six times yesterday to thaw them out enough to type. (It takes forever for an old steel-and-glass building to heat back up.) I've only had to resort to that once so far today.
For the fourth time, we were threatened with snow last night that didn't materialize. I am entirely okay with that. I have tomorrow afternoon off to run a couple of errands and I'm just fine with the roads being clean and dry. I'm sure there are thousands of people out there who haven't yet finished making all of their holiday preparations and I'm sure they're all very happy to have decent weather.
I mean, I like a white Christmas, but we rarely have snow in Denver in December, so I'm used to using my imagination.
"What errands," you might ask suspiciously, remembering my smug declaration of holiday preparedness.
I have to get an emissions test on my car. For the second year in a row, I left the little card laying on the coffee table for so long that I now have to go get my emissions test and then fight my way northeast of downtown to stand in line for my license plate renewal stickers.
Colorado makes it easy for you. You can get your emissions test, put the "pass" sticker on your little card, and mail it in. They send you your new license stickers by return mail. Sadly, that only works if you're not working on your renewal eight days before your license stickers expire.
I really am lame.
Notes for the future:
#1 - Music played on tinny PC speakers is gross. I'm sure the person singing on the second-hand CD Bernie gave you (Celine Dion) has a lovely voice. But not on your computer.
#2 - You're not really a "music in the office" person anyhow. It's distracting. Shut the racket off.
/end notes
Today I have made MOPT to work, for the first time in a week. I think it will be easier to get on a regular schedule after the holidays. Seems like at this time of the year, there are always things I need to do on the way to or from work.
That was lame, too.
It's possible that I just don't have anything to say today.
How amazingly smug I feel. I didn't shop for Christmas gifts once this weekend, so I avoided the last-minute frenzy entirely. (Okay, maybe once. But I didn't buy anything.) Aside from one teeny-tiny purchase I need to make on the way home this evening, I am done!
Don't run away with the idea that it was a weekend of sloth and idleness, though. The R.C. had to work most of the weekend (that's what you get for having major project deadlines that fall in January every year) and I had to work for 3-4 hours on Sunday morning.
Aside from that, I finished the vast majority of my wrapping, worked on my latest Project Afghan (I can't wait to finish this one so I can work with some better yarn next time), finished my cards and got them mailed out, wound up my Jeeves & Wooster festival (which was so entertaining I may start all over again immediately), and took a certain amount of heat from the R.C. over how many gifts under the tree have her name on them. I may have gotten just a little carried away this year, but I was unemployed at the holidays last year and wasn't able to do much, so I don't feel at all guilty.
Items in my brain:
Cards. Every year, I send out 15-30 cards. Every year I get fewer and fewer cards in return. This year strikes a new low. To-date, I've received one card. Apparently holiday cards are no longer "the thing to do" and if that's the case, I think I was entitled to know.
Now, granted, I only mailed mine out this morning, but I sent seven out inside of shipments with gifts and the ten I mailed this morning...well, those people know they're getting cards, because they do every year and mostly they're family. Either none of them have me on their card list, or the people I know just don't send cards.
I've been pondering this. I'm on this quasi-ecological kick these days, after all. I could certainly save a lot of landfill space and cut down on the general state of pollutedness of the planet if I didn't buy card blanks and make cards every year.
On the other hand, I really enjoy messing around with scissors and paste and I'd be sad to lose an excuse to do so. I had so much fun making cards this year that it's been a struggle to stop myself from starting on next year's cards already.
Gifts. Gifts for co-workers/bosses are tricky, especially at a small company. Especially, I've decided if you work only with men.
In the four years I've worked here, I don't think I've ever had the same boss two years in a row, so I don't exactly have any "history" to go on. The company itself is too small (especially now that there are only three of us) to have a "policy" around gifts.
If I were working with women, I'd just have brought it up - hey are we doing office gifts or not? But working with two guys, I never really found the right moment for the conversation.
I mean, what with me and Bernie having our moments of friction three or four times a week, not to mention him only coming in two or three days a week and Buehler pretty much on mental sabbatical all fall, even on those rare occasions when he showed up at the office on two consecutive days, and stuff like that, you know?
All of that, added to Bernie threatening to quit and/or close the company down every ninety days since I started and I think you can see how there just never seemed to be a moment to discuss holiday plans.
One day last week, Bernie sent us an email asking about a holiday lunch this Friday. That was pretty much the first mention of the upcoming festivities I've heard in the office.
I thought of many things, from trying to do some last-minute shopping for each of them to sending fruit baskets, to buying cookies, but Bernie's only going to be in on Monday-Wednesday-Friday this week and Buehler's only going to be in on Friday, so none of those seemed right.
In the end, I decided to go the no gifts route. I just hope they didn't get me anything. (It feels bad-mannered to receive a gift and have nothing to offer the giver.)
Office "decorations" consist, so far, of the few business cards we've received taped to the window of the conference room and a little glass "tree." It's glass and when plugged into your USB port, it lights up and cycles through colors. It's not amazingly festive, but it gives me something to look at when, as now, the website I'm trying to work on is taking 30 seconds or more for every page refresh.
Okay, I got those last two packages shipped, I blatantly goofed off for an hour while I wrote a short list of my favorite Golden Age British mystery authors, I had a nice ham sandwich for lunch, I got the coolest superheroes stamps at the post office, I ate two cookies, the R.C. promised to bring home one of the Chocolate Surprise treats for me so I could taste it, a Mystery Box arrived with today's UPS shipment and contained the second-to-last gift I've been waiting for, and I've eaten a lot of chocolate. And whatever it was that was floating around in my left eye has finally been banished by a fourth washing of that contact lens.
Note the food theme. In a week where the press of urgent projects has often caused me to forget breakfast until 2:00 p.m., it's nice to be well-fed. (Granted, this morning's unscheduled crisis meant I had breakfast at 1:05 p.m. and lunch at 1:15 p.m., but it's an improvement.)
It's a lesson to me to persevere, in the face of workplace wig-outs.
And not to overreact to seeming provocation. As the R.C. says, the men I work with are a terrible bunch of little, old women, along with being flaky, and I need to just deal with that. (I'm just saying. Any group where I'm the "adult" is in trouble.)
Today's timecard might have a four-hour block of time where I mention half a dozen projects vaguely without itemizing precisely how much time each of them took me, but I doubt if the world will end on that account.
All in all, today has been a pretty good day.
Bernie's at home having a little wig-out because the report he needed today won't be here today.
And I'm thinking...if you wanted PoodleBoy working on Client P's report this week, why have you been emailing him all week about Client I's data? But when I suggested the same in an email, he went ballistic and said he hadn't been communicating deadlines, or at all, with PoodleBoy (he tends to tell transparent and ridiculous lies).
Then he as much as said that a job I've never worked on (and that he's been responsible for, for eight years) and for which no written specifications exist was my responsibility to psychically divine and manage.
Boggles the mind sometimes.
I've lost an hour composing mental hate notes to him today, pointing out that as I'm already doing the work of at least two full-time employees plus bits of work previously done by free-lancers and "managing" two new free-lancers, it's a bit much for him to unilaterally decide that he no longer needs to be involved in fulfilling our responsibilities to the clients who are paying both our salaries and that he can just turn his back and walk off.
Especially since he didn't see fit to inform me of this decision, but just let it sort of dawn on me as he failed, time and again, to step up to the plate on deadlines and project specifications over the last three months.
I just have to feel that as long as he's paying himself $90k a year from the money these clients pay us? He's in no position to just abdicate all interest in and responsibility for the work.
Also? Tech problems again today. The whateveritwas in the server closet has quit beeping (thank goodness), but now the machine we use as a spam filter and to catch messages sent to invalid email addresses is giving me fits. I've been swapping out peripherals (Bad mouse! No cheese!) this morning, trying to find a combination that works.
The server with the expensive, proprietary software on it that Bernie wants us use for "occasional" client mailings still considers keyboards the devil's playthings and refuses to acknowledge their existence. It's a little hard to code newsletters and mailings without access to a keyboard, so right now it's just a useless lump of plastic and metal.
The free-lance network tech guy has not proven able to solve all of our network and email issues in the 1-1/2 hour a week he has to spare for us right now (color me so surprised), although one assumes that after he graduates on Saturday, he'll have more time (until he finds a full-time job, anyhow).
You know, I come into the office every day cheerful and willing to do whatever comes up. (I know, it doesn't sound that way, but I really do.) And mostly (especially this week, as things have slowed down considerably), I get it done. Parts of the job are even sort of interesting.
Sigh.
Still. I was repaid for my restraint in not sending a hate note to Bernie. He called and we talked and it's all better now. (Okay, it's largely all better because I did not address with him my frustration that he feels he needs to do nothing but sit and wait for client checks to be handed to him, but I decided that isn't really the kind of conversation that should be had on the phone.)
Another reward for my restraint is that today's morning cheer, is back with me again. My head is all full of P. G. Wodehouse because I've been re-watching the Jeeves & Wooster DVDs for the last two weeks and that's not a world that can survive the bruising of the 21st century work-day. I'm willing to pay the price for being allowed to live there mentally.
Next Tuesday's Chocolate Surprise was delivered to the R.C.'s office today, but that's okay. She seems delighted. (Sort of cake-truffle things. I discovered the company when I was in California last month.)
Buehler took off for a lunch meeting. That will make it easier for me to slide out to the post office and send the parcel to the L-i-K-S and Rapunzel and Pippi. I'm late with packages this year, but at least I'm getting them sent, right? This is the last one that has to go.
You see? I little self-restraint, a little effort, and it's turning out to be a good day!
You should let me double-check things before you send them out. You really should.
When I started working here, you were charging Client P $1650/month as a retainer for the stuff we did all year-round, plus $10k and $4k respectively for extra work we did at their large annual and small annual conferences.
I badgered you because we were doing twice as much work as we were being reimbursed for and you bitched about it constantly. You were afraid to ask for more money from the client, but you weren't afraid to make my life and DiamondGirl's a living hell with your constant complaints because we couldn’t do 10/hours worth of work in a week in 2 hours.
I badgered you until you changed the monthly retainer to $3300 and bumped the upcoming small annual conference to $5k.
When I had my back turned, the client decided to cut out of the monthly jobs we did for them, about 50% of the monthly work, and you changed the agreement to...wait for it people...a $1575/month retainer that quotes such an absurdly large ceiling for monthly work volume that they can run us ragged without touching it.
You cut your monthly fees by 53%, regardless of the fact that the client has made up for the work they cut by doubling the amount of work on the projects remaining.
You didn't cover everything that will need to cost extra, and you made no mention of the things you have verbally agreed that we will not do any longer - and you know you need to formalize things with this client.
And you did all of this without telling me until two months later--when you bitched me out because the invoices I've sent out for the last two months are at the "old" price.
And that was right after you said it was working out really well for you to have me doing the reporting on Client W and Client S (and client Sc, if they return to us), because you didn't have to pay PoodleBoy, the expert, to do what he does and so I should plan to spend four more hours for each job for each of those clients to do my own reporting.
Which was right after you said that you didn't want to pay PoodleBoy for the actual hours it takes him to do the reporting for the larger clients, P, C, and I, and that I need to mentally "book" about ten extra hours in each job we do for each of them in the future so I can clean up the data so that PoodleBoy, the supposed "statistician," doesn't have to actually think about the data.
And then you said yesterday that in your ideal world, I would do all of the work for Client P, Client C, Client I, Client W, and Client S, along with whatever else comes up in the same line, and that you'd never see or hear of any of it.
So, you know. Less money, more work, and just me doing on it all where there used to be 3-1/2 people sharing the load, proof-reading each other's stuff, and pitching in to help when deadlines got tight.
Thank you. So very much.
All of which was shortly before you said that we were going to move the office in February (was there a point when I agreed to stay after 12/31? Because I don't remember it, if there was.) and that I should plan to spend my spare time cleaning out files, throwing things away, and figuring out how to get rid of the excess office equipment, furniture, and unidentifiable electronics bits and pieces over the next two weeks.
For the detritus of 10 departed employees, I also thank you.
I do not love you, Bernie.
I cannot tell why, but the spirit of the season ebbs from my heart when I see your little face.
Me
P.S. I got a call from Sassy today. She's found a new job and she's leaving. Even though we didn't get to talk often, I'm going to miss her.
P.P.S. I am planning to start job-hunting after Jan 1. If Bernie feels free to extend my commitment to suit himself, then he's entitled to his reality. I'm going to take advantage of the situation just enough to stay employed while I start the job search. (This decision came about partly because something Sassy said made me think she has info I don't have about actual definite plans to close the place March 1.)
The R.C. thinks Denver should take today and tomorrow off, when the weather is supposed to be gorgeous, and work Saturday and Sunday, when it's supposed to be cold and snowy. I agree.
I still have a tiny handful of shopping to do but by-and-large, I am done! Not only that, but I brought all but one of my to-be-shipped packages with me today. Assuming I can find time in my busy goofing-off schedule, I'll get those addressed and to the post office at lunch and then sit back with a sigh and enjoy the remainder of the holiday season.
(And chew my nails, waiting on various online order to arrive....)
The aforementioned tiny handful of shopping--I still have four hours of my "birthday holiday" owing to me. I'm going to take an afternoon off next week to get that stuff done.
You know what drives me bonkers? What drives me bonkers is automatic "update" programs for Windows that won't let you set the time of day you want updates searched for. Every freaking day I come in and after I boot up in the morning, the stupid computer pulls down updates and wants me to reboot immediately. I've checked the program a dozen times and there's no way to tell it to check for updates at 4:30 in the afternoon or something, when I'm going to be closing the computer down anyhow.
Also, it drives me bonkers that you can't "install updates and restart." No, your only option is to "install and shut down" so you can't even let it update and go work on something else for a while without having to come back and reboot your computer for the second time. Very, very annoying.
But I'm not cranky today.
I finished one Holiday Project last night (aside from the wrapping and boxes mentioned earlier) and one of my long-awaited packages arrived five minutes ago. After running to the post office to do shipping at lunch, I'll be in good shape!
Someone explain to me how to explain to Bernie that just because he paid $3500 for a rack server three years ago, does not mean it's still worth at least $1500 today. Three years is a long time in computer technology.
Nor is there any point in yanking out the extra memory we put in if he can't get that much. (It's not like we have rack servers here onsite that we can put that memory into.) Being spiteful at the buyer isn't going to make the market for used three year-0ld servers any stronger.
Also, ask him to stop being schizophrenic. Last night, as he was leaving, he said he'd be happy to sell them for enough to cover the shipping we had to pay to get them back from the hosting company. Today he wants $1500 for each of them.
I can't keep up.
He said, "we need to sell them." I found someone here in the building interested in buying them.
He said, "we just need to get them off our hands." I told this someone we probably weren't going to ask that much for them.
Now he wants me to ask them to buy all four for a total of $6k? You can buy a brand-new rack server for a small business for $800. Or even $1700, if you want a huge amount of computing power.
I've been Brooding Over Yarn.
My Crochet For Charity project is still moving along. I have one afghan waiting and another one about 2/3 done. Not sure when the group's next trip out to a site is scheduled for, but I hope to have both of these ready by the first of the year.
I've been using standard commercial (Def. The cheap stuff.) yarn because it takes 7-8 skeins to make an afghan and I don't want to break the bank with this project, but I'm growing very dissatisfied with how coarse and rough it is. There are nicer yarns out there. Softer, plusher yarns, even without going for the hand-made, limited-edition sort of thing.
One drawback with the silky stuff is that you don't get the same color selection. I've been using variegated, which isn't available in the swankier yarns, and the brand I found that I really liked touching seems to run to single-color pastels. (No, it's not "baby" yarn.) I kind of had my heart set on something in fire-engine red, or even a nice maroon, next time.
I may have to spend some time searching different stores.
That's a painful thought. I tend to pick up my yarn at Hobby Lobby or Michaels, because the prices make those the sensible choices for someone buying eight skeins a month. If it's all the same to everyone, I'd rather not spend $100/month on yarn.
The task I've set for myself is to give more than money--I'm trying to donate some of my time. (Trust me to find a way to donate time that doesn't involve leaving the warmth of my easy chair.) If I'm going to spend $100/month, I should probably find something more worthwhile than hand-made afghans to spend it on. (People need food.) (Okay, people need warmth, too, right?)
Of course, when and if Bernie and I come to terms on my increased salary, I could go back to donating money and keep my precious time for myself, but the point is to do something that touches someone's life even more than a nice turkey dinner the third week of November can. From all accounts, the first afghan I sent along to this group was received with much appreciation. It made me feel, to be honest, very selfish indeed. I learned to crochet many years ago but it never occurred to me that it was a skill of any value to anyone. I could have made fifty afghans in the last twenty years, if I'd thought anyone would want them.
Why am I not allowed to just sit here at my desk and write blogs and post entries all day long? I feel amazingly chatty today (five shots of espresso), but I'm also well-aware of the fact that it's 10:19 and today's timecard is still a virgin blank.
It had to happen sooner or later, right? Last night, due to full buses, full trains, and lots of meandering stops, I missed the bus that is the last leg of my journey homeward. Sighing and turning up the collar of my coat, wrapping my scarf securely around my neck and pulling on my gloves, I started the long, three mile trudge home.
(Okay, three miles isn't that long. During the day, or on well-lit streets with wide, clean sidewalks, it's nothing.)
"Were there no other buses," you ask.
Yes, of course, in 30 minutes, but there was a bitter wind blowing and I thought that, all else being equal, I'd be better off moving than standing like a human popsicle at the bus stop. I wasn't the only one who felt that way. Two other mass-transit passengers turned up their own collars and joined me on the trek. Although, due to some odd protocol I'm unacquainted with, it seemed to be necessary for us all to pretend we couldn't see each other.
Anyhow, they gradually wandered off into side roads, and I was alone, except for the endless streams of cars flashing by.
Had it not been dark and cold, it might have been quite a pleasant walk. As it was, the treacherous sidewalks (courtesy of those businesses and householders who couldn't be bothered to clean the snow off their property two weeks ago, the residue of which is now compacted with dirt and gravel into a sort of min-glacial ledge) and the roar of the traffic coming up behind me (making me remember all of those, "pedestrian hit by a car" stories I've read" combined to make the whole experience less than idyllic.
(Although I did get to walk by the fire station and admire the little holly wreaths the firemen had hung from the grilles of their trucks.)
I didn't walk that far. A mile, maybe a little more. I stopped at the grocery store, dialed up the R.C. on my phone, and demanded that she pull herself together and come and get me.
My dedication to conserving fossil fuels goes only so far.
So, this morning PoodleBoy went on strike. He wants 40% more for the jobs he does for us, and he wants to do 60% less of the work on those jobs.
I ask you. Is it my fault he's been undercharging Bernie for the number of hours these things take for the last five years? It is not. But, as so often happens, I was here at the time, so I get to pay the price.
Today I had to spend 5-1/2 hours of time I'd really intended to spend on other projects cleaning up data.
Also I found out that our two biggest clients are having their annual meetings within two weeks of each other next fall. Which should make next fall a nice little slice of heck for me or whomever is here at the time. (Whomever? Whoever? I never know about those two. I think it has something to do with being the object of a preposition? Whatever.)
The thing is, I don't mind doing the work associated with this job. I can even live with having to do some of DiamondGirl's and some of PoodleBoy's jobs. It's not easy, but I can fit it all in most of the time.
Where I really find myself getting annoyed is with the secretarial stuff. Bernie and I have talked about this and he knows how I feel about being treated as a secretary. And yet, that doesn't stop him from asking me to email people documents instead of emailing them himself, or from making phone calls that would be better coming from him (like to the bank about the company's account) , or from sending me explicit instructions on conversations he feels need to be had with clients but that he won't pick up the phone and just have.
There are valid times when you ask someone else have a conversation with someone. I accept that. I'm a big believer in that. But emailing me to ask me to email Scooby and ask him if he's done a certain report, then having to Scooby's answer back to Bernie? Would it not be a lot less schizophrenic if Bernie just emailed Scooby and asked him the question?
Bernie sending me three emails telling me to email a document from last year to PoodleBoy? Bernie worked here last year. I did not. Bernie has the document on his computer. I'm going to have to spend 20 minutes searching the Tweenybopper's files to find it. What is his issue with just emailing the stupid document himself?
I talked with the R.C. about this and she says if I don't know what Bernie is doing all day every day, I should just ask him. Of course, I should put it diplomatically, not just blurt out, "it feels to me like I'm doing 90% of everything that needs to be done to keep your stupid company going and just what are you bringing to the table, anyhow?" at him. I should say something about scheduling tasks or making sure we have everything covered and say that I want to make sure I'm supporting him how he needs (hah) and then ask him what projects he's working on and where his time is going.
It's a good plan. I know that, Bernie being Bernie, he's going to take that as an invitation to try and offload yet more of the tedium of running a business off on me, but I have no doubts about my ability to push back on any such suggestions.
Also? The raise Bernie and I were supposed to discuss at the end of July that I let slide until we talked in Septemberand then told him two weeks ago I'd want at the end of December if he wanted me to stay?
Now he's trying to slide it past me that all of the big client decisions should be "in place" by the first of March. I suspect that in his fevered imagination, I won't have any problem waiting for another two months for a raise that was supposed to be forthcoming four months ago.
But you shouldn't bluff these things. If I tell him I need the money January 1 or I'm going to walk? I need to be prepared to walk.
I'm not really sure why I'm so cranky all of a sudden. I got the insurance thing straightened out and I'm all legal again. I had a nice lunch and a cookie. I have chocolates I can eat in case of emergency hunger or just boredom. Only 45 minutes until I get to go home.
I'm just...well, I'm having a little Cranky Interlude.
When I was young, I was bone-lazy. I had to be tossed out of bed every morning and forced into getting dressed to haul myself off to the Hell of Tedium that was school. When I got older, we discovered circadian clocks and it turned out that I was a "night person" and not bone-lazy at all.
When I was young, I was irresponsible. I had to be forced to put down my latest book and do my chores or, really, anything else and even when so forced, I wandered through the world in an unconnected daze. Now, of course, we know I have some kind of slight psychological disorder, the fancy term for which I don't know, that makes the world(s) inside my head more "real" to me than the physical world around me.
When I was young, I was stubborn as a pig. While rarely resorting to verbal rebellion, I was a champion at refusing to do anything I didn't feel like doing. Like eating stuffed green peppers. I'd sit at the dinner table for an hour or more after everyone else had gone on to other things, refusing to acknowledge the existence of the congealing mass on my plate. "One bite," my mother would coax. Gandhi had nothing on me when it came to passive resistance.
When I was young, I was stupid. I never did my homework and paid no attention at all in class. How I managed to get through school without failing was a mystery to us all. Nowadays we know that instead of skipping ahead one grade, I should have been skipped two or three. I would be "gifted" in today's world, not a disaster waiting to happen.
When I was young, I was shy. I found it difficult to make friends or to respond to overtures from others. In these more enlightened times, I have a social disorder.
So, you know. It's all very pretty and euphemistic today, but I'm still bone-lazy, irresponsible, stupid, shy, and stubborn as a pig.
Yesterday, in email, a friend related to me the story of her sister's friend.
"She lives in Present Time. It's a new age concept which means you live 100% in the present, so you're not thinking about the past or the future at all, ever."
This, you see explains why said sister's friend's electricity stopped working. She opened her bills, looked at them, and never remembered to pay them.
That really sounds like me. I generally have a huge stack of "papers to be dealt with" sitting on my desk at home. I sort through them and throw away the trash or file the "important stuff" a couple of times a year. In between times, I never think about what might be in the pile.
I've arranged to have most of my bills paid automatically, online, so I don't have to think about them. (My auto insurance doesn't offer that, so I have to remember to write them checks. When I don't, I have trouble like I'm having now. Which, I should say, has never happened in quite this fashion before.)
But, like my friend's sister's friend, bills tend to disappear from my consciousness as soon as I see them.
This is largely why all of the Mutual Bills the R.C. and I get in the apartment? Come directly to her and are paid by her. I write her checks once or twice a month to cover my share. (Forgetting to write her checks is also how I've gotten in debt to her.)
I mean well. I mean to be organized and conscientious and responsible and stuff. It's just that--bills and financial papers and bank statements and those types of matters don't make a big impression on my brain.
I'd like to blame it on Present Time Disorder, but when I realize that the things I care about, the things that matter to me, rarely disappear from my brain that way, it reveals that I don't have PTD.
I'm irresponsible. I'm not saying I'm happy with it, or that it doesn't sometimes cause me problems. It's just that, to-date, the costs of ignoring reality have been worth it.
At least they were, until Monday. Monday's cost alone was $100. Now it turns out that this little lapse in insurance coverage is also going to cost me an additional $132/year for my policy.
It's getting a little expensive to be me.
You know how there's never a cop around when you need one? When some idiot makes an illegal U-turn or hits the gas to make it through a changing light, or just one too many cars slide through the left-hand turn lane after the light turns red or someone is clearly doing anything but paying attention to their driving as they barrel down the road at 60 MPH, constantly wandering onto the verge, then making sharp course corrections, in the middle of heavy traffic?
That's not always the case. There was a cop around when some drivers needed one this morning.
The third car that turned left from the side street when the traffic light was yellow-no-it's-red before they hit the intersection? There just happened to be a cop sitting there, the first guy in the left-hand turn lane on the main street. I guess he was annoyed that he had to wait or something, because he made a U-turn and nabbed the last left-turner.
As someone who has frequently been annoyed by having half a dozen cars ram through an intersection in front of me, in defiance of the traffic light telling them firmly to Stop? I was delighted.
As someone who was on their way to work after an early morning doctor's appointment and frustrated because I'd been hitting every, single light just as it turned yellow? I regret my impatience.
Yes, I am now the proud possessor of a hundred-dollar traffic ticket and two points on my license.
In retrospect, it would have been simpler to wait for the light.
It's not like I have some hard-and-fast time when I have to be at the office.
Of course, had I done that, I wouldn't have been given the knowledge that I've been driving without insurance since September. And what that's all about, I don't know. My insurance doesn't renew in September. It renews in December. How can it have expired in September?*
Fortunately, this morning's police officer was cheerful and not inclined to lock me up (yes, they do put you in jail for driving without insurance or even proof of insurance in Colorado), so I got a lecture and the ticket and sent on my way.
I drove home (very carefully), got my insurance information, drove myself (very carefully) to the light rail station, and took mass transit the rest of the way in. I called my insurance agent to ask him whattheheck is up, but I reached VM, so I have to wait for a callback.
Also? As I'm sitting there, waiting for the Nicest Possible Policeman to give me a ticket much less serious than I deserved? I'm thinking that my car looks like the car of a criminal type who should not be let off lightly. So now I'm determined to have that cracked windshield replaced and also the missing hubcap.
* I mean, how is it possible? I am an adult. Of sorts. There are some things I am casual about and some things I am not casual about, and my auto insurance comes under the totally not category.
One of our local rags, the Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle, is usually an interesting read and a good way to hear about smaller local events and issues that the larger papers don't cover. (Also it's interesting because Glendale and Cherry Creek are completely dissimilar parts of Denver. Cherry Creek prides itself on being upscale and wealthy and Glendale has a reputation for being...so not.)
But this month's issue is a little on the schizophrenic side.
Page 1 - Two big stories: Feds Bush Sex Slave Ring Based In Cherry Creek Valley sits right next to: Pin-Up Calendars Being Flown To Troops In Time For Holidays
Apparently you can only sell sex if you're selling it on paper. To soldiers. In another country. Where racy pictures of women are illegal.
Page 2 - We get to meet the "Bachelor and Bachelorette" for the month. Eyeballing these pictures, I've decided that whatever they were selling, sex wasn't involved, but there's contact information for both of them for those who disagree.
Page 3 - Is clean and wholesome. (It's the Op-Ed page)
Pages 4-5 - Full of the sex slave story again with details, for those who care, on the complexes where the apartments were rented that the girls worked out of, and how the overseas contacts were worked. A veritable How-To guide, in fact.
Page 6 - Crime prevention tips
Page 7 - More on the "pin-ups for troops" story, including a sample picture (very tasteful) and a shot of one of Glendale's more famous strip club signs.
Page 8 - Police blotter page. (Actually, it's more like anecdotes about local crimes. If you see a Tom Cruise-alike around town, he's wanted for stealing prescription meds. If you get calls from an anonymous stalker, don't agree to a date with him. He might be crazy. Here's how you can rip a store off. Etc., etc., etc.)
Gotta love the placement of the "Bull and Bush" pub ad on this page. Including the logo that features a couple of two year-olds checking and comparing what they're keeping inside their diapers.
I really do enjoy this publication. It's funny.
Okay, so Bernie sent one of his emails a few minutes ago, asking for "updates" on the things he talked to me about yesterday.
As usual, 25% of these are things he could get the answers to himself if he'd just send the person responsible an email instead of telling me to send it (along with detailed instructions on exactly how he wants everything worded and I am not an idiot and I am not his secretary), 25% of them are banking/financial things I can't do because I'm not an officer of the company, 25% require me to wait for someone else to take action first, and the remaining 25% are incoherent, in that I can't even figure out what client he's talking about, much less what it is he wants me to do.
I thought I'd cured him of that.
Maybe I'm just cranky because I know I haven't been that productive today and I feel guilty and defensive, and it's warm and sunny outside and I'd rather be out there?
I dunno. Basically, his idea of my job duties seems to be "running the company" which isn't really how I understood it. I wouldn't have signed on for that job description even nine months ago, when DiamondGirl was still here and Buehler had Sassy still around to help him, we had PoodleBoy doing reports, and Moe was around for high-level tech stuff.
Now that Bernie has decided that PoodleBoy is too expensive so I should do all of the reporting and Buehler has let Sassy go so I'm doing the occasional project for him and Moe has joined the ranks of people who won't work with Bernie any more and DiamondGirl was let go because "we don't have any tech work" (which turned out to be code for, "let Anne do it!"), and Bernie has gone from coming in four days a week to coming in two days a wee and we have three free-lancers that Bernie has specific expectations from but he won't talk to them directly but tries to funnel everything through me?
I'm finding that being office manager / bookkeeper /email blast provider / free-lance worker supervisor / account executive / customer support / mail clerk / network troubleshooter / technical support / receptionist / collections agent / housekeeper / HR department is getting to be a little more than I can actually keep organized from week to week.
Later Update: His expense account is out of balance, so he spent the day going back through all of his expense reports for the year and changing and "correcting" things. He just resent all of his forms--and no, he did not mark any of the changes. So now I have to go back through his expenses for thow whole year, line-by-line, to see what he changed.
TGIF
We're now up to three in the list of wimmin who have Looked At Me Funny while I was riding public transportation. I'm not sure I understand what their problem is. One of them had to crane her neck to glare at me over the head of a rather tall man sitting next to her.
I'm not doing anything. I'm just sitting (or, as the case may be, standing) there quietly. Why are they Lookin' At Me Funny? They always look so cranky. As if just the sight of me gives them a pain.
Hmph. I bathe you know. And comb my hair and put on clean clothes and make-up and everything.
And last night there were other bus-related adventures.
We had a new bus. It even smelled new, which was lovely. And the heat worked, which was equally delightful. But.
When I hopped on the 27 bus, I and the other embarking passengers were informed that the driver was also new. In fact, he'd been relying upon the kindness of the riders (and their desire to get to their own stops) to guide him through the route, since he'd never been in that part of town before and wasn't quite clear on where he was supposed to be going. We had to tell him when stops were coming, where the lanes required him to merge, and when to turn.
I was a bit worried about him when I got off. The only passengers left were two kids sitting far to the back of the bus. I'm not sure they understood their responsibility.
I hope he didn't get lost.
There have been winos and stoners! (At least, there have been drunks.) So my Public Transportation Experience is complete.
There are gorgeous displays of holiday lights that I can now take the time to enjoy. It's nice to ride high above the traffic. You can really see things.
(Today, we also have things going beeeeeep in the server closet here at the office, but I'm pretending I don't hear them.)
Yesterday Buehler needed a power adaptor run over to Alvin at a client's office. Fortunately for me it was within walking distance (only four blocks), otherwise I'd have had to decline. There are drawbacks to not having a car during the day.
After I got home, we walked over to the drugstore so I could pick up prescription refills, then detoured through Whole Foods to grab something for dinner.
I'm becoming quite the experienced pedestrian, aren't I? Saving the planet and hopefully shrinking my butt a tad at the same time.
Sadly, being on foot does leave you open to being abused by passers-by. Last night, for instance, as we crossed a parking lot, a guy stopped his car and hollered out the window at us, wanting to know if we knew that our shirts were blinking.
Dork. Of course we knew. When we're out walking after dark, we wear flashers--the kind you can get to put on your bicycle. We've been mocked for it before (although we also met one young man who informed us that they were "tight"--an expression we chose to interpret as a compliment) but people rarely actually pull over and park to pass remarks.
The point is that they can see us. We're not going to be run over, walking along in our black coats and sometimes dark-colored scarves and hats, because no one sees us coming.
I think it's a good idea. I have no idea why it causes so much hilarity when people see it.
No, I cannot change how the internet works for you.
No, I will not call the vendor and ask them to change how the internet works for you.
No love,
Me
It's 50 degrees and sunny today and seems positively summery after last week's wintry winds.
Although I didn't distinguish myself in the matter of getting out of bed this morning (I hit the snooze button six times), once I finally got to the office, I plunged right in and started getting things crossed off my list. Now I'm just exhausted from the effort of all that productivity, so I guess that means it's time to blog!
I dunno, though. If I've sworn to stop complaining about my job/employer, I haven't taken public transportation in the last couple of days and everyone's tired of hearing about that anyhow, and I'm not getting out much in the evenings, what does that leave me to blog about? Not much, I'm afraid.
Counting on my ink-stained little fingers, I find that I'm 80% done with my holiday shopping. Some evening this week, I need to finish my cards, writing notes inside and addressing envelopes.
Why is it that the effort of making the cards seems like less work than thinking of a personal note to write inside? I love the people I send cards to. I like talking to all of them. I'm chatty by nature. Why, then, are holiday cards such work for me? (Possibly because I'm not allowed to talk about myself?)
The R.C.'s career counselor has informed her that she (the CC) thinks that she (the R.C.) has a "gift" for writing and should consider something related, career-wise. Without in any way diminishing the R.C.'s talent, let me offer the thought that such suggestions make me tired. Many people have a talent for writing but that isn't, in our society, a path to gainful employment. Nor is the ability to piffle on about the minutiae of one's life necessarily a meaningful skill to exhibit to someone interested in hiring a copy-writer or a research assistant or even a newsletter editor.
As the R.C. herself has pointed out, the world already has one Dave Barry and that pretty much fills the need for people who want to read about the insanity of the minutiae of life. Those who like the same with a corporate bent can read Dilbert and get the same, with pictures.
When I was last job-hunting, I found several people eager to hire "bloggers" to add content to their sites/newsletters/whatever. On the average, these people were offering around $200/month for an unspecified number of posts daily. At a conservative estimate, you'd have to sign up 20 or 30 such accounts to make a half-decent living blogging that way.
Other than that, what are the options for "writer" in our society?
If you have an inclination and the required knowledge, you can pick a field (cooking, crocheting, gardening, auto repair, travel, whatever) and write magazine articles. If you don't starve to death first, you might make a name for yourself and find yourself eking out a precarious living selling piece-work that way. (Hint for those of you so-inclined. Start by becoming a regular contributor to the "letters to the editor" page(s). Get your name known before you start trying to submit something for payment.) (A degree or years or work experience in whatever your field is will help a lot.) (And don't quit your day job.)
Once I had a job where part of what I was required to do was write. I wrote sales scripts, in fact. Product descriptions for a catalogue and entire sales presentations for the sale people to use, or pick-and-choose from, for three new product lines each year. I'm not lying--it was fun, but what eventually brought me down in that job was the difficulty I had getting pricing sheets done accurately. I was one of three people in the building able to write a decent sales script. There were twelve people in the building dedicated to punching numbers, and yet my "writing" skills were considered less important than hiring yet another person who could add, even though adding was not what I was hired for.
They say, "everyone has one novel in them." That's a dirty lie, if you mean a novel that anyone would want to read. To people who can't do it, writing looks easy. It's just not valued.
Nevertheless. I support the R.C.'s quest for a new career path, and I'll support her no matter where it takes her. If she decides to strike out as a writer, more power to her.
Mostly, and I apologize for dragging her into the conversation, I just didn't have anything to say today.
This weekend I did not clean house to any astonishing degree, I did not ride public transportation, and I did not do laundry. This weekend, I ate and shopped.
Mostly for me (regardless of the season, cleaning supplies, paper towels, and shampoo must be bought) but a little bit for others.
Saturday, after taking public transportation all week to avoid driving on bad roads, I hopped in my little car and drove ten miles northwest in a snowstorm, on already-icy roads, to have lunch with a dear friend and a couple of strangers who are now by way of being acquaintances and who may someday, who knows, become friends. Really nice people, both of them.
As if to reward me for this feat of derring-do, the food and conversation were excellent, the skies cleared, the roads dried off, and three hours later I puttered home again to scoop up the R.C. and go on the long-planned shopping expedition.
The R.C.'s office "adopts" needy families every year and they employees draw to see which kids they're going to buy presents for. This year, she got a teenage boy so we got him a basketball (my contribution) and a CD player. (I hope I got the right basketball. Who knew there were different types of basketballs?)
Yesterday we tried a different store. I bought moisturizer for me and no gifts.
I dug around in my Gift Closet to see what I've accumulated for others for this holiday season so far. The pile was less-impressive than I might have hoped, owing to a few critical items being on order, but I'm doing pretty well. Mom's pretty much taken care of, and she's one of the tough ones, so that's a relief.
The R.C., overachiever that she is, already has things wrapped and under the tree but, me being me, I think it's amazing enough that I have almost everything purchased at this point.
Okay, not almost everything. But about half the stuff I need. And I pretty much know what I'm getting everyone, it's just a matter of getting to the right stores.
It was not an eventful weekend, but it was a very enjoyable one.
MOPT update, whether you wanted to know or not.
Yesterday evening's commute was enlivened by two men at the bus stop who wanted to be my friends (in an entirely non-creepy way, I mean) and an odd little woman on the bus who kept Looking At Me Funny. I don't think I have to put up with being Looked At Funny by a woman who's wearing a red-and-black coat, a blue scarf, and a pink hat, okay? Who's she to talk?
I'm here to testify that bus passengers do, indeed, get weirder after dark.
Yesterday's evening commute was punctuated, at the end, by a bus running 20 minutes late. I'm given to understand that in good weather, RTD runs largely like clockwork; (I know there should be some kind of punctuation there, but I'm not certain which bit. I haven't semi-coloned in a while, so I'm putting one in. Feel free to mentally substitute whatever should have appeared.) but in bad weather the schedule instantly falls apart.
This, not surprisingly, annoys the riders, but it makes perfect sense to me. When the weather is bad and people are having accidents or getting stuck or just generally driving like idiots all over the roads, that's going to slow down the buses.
This morning's commute was notable for nothing at all. The bus arrived on time, got me to the station three minutes before a train appeared, a bus was waiting for me at the terminal, and I got off in exactly the right spot to swing through Starbucks and arrive at my desk at 8:25.
In other non-news, I'm alone in the office today (as I frequently am) and am not behind on or buried in any deadline-pressed projects, which is unusual for me. I'm not quite sure what to do with myself.
I have no bookkeeping to do, no reports to write or review, no surveys to format or code, no filing that needs to be done, no mass mailings to send, and no tech problems going on that I need to worry about.
Today's task list includes: Address an envelope, send an email, put 12 products in a box and ship them (already done), and proof someone else's report.
Possibly more will come to mind as I review my notes from the last couple of weeks, but I really do think I'm finally winning the battle!
When I created this category, I honestly meant to blog all of the cool and interesting restaurants I've eaten at in Denver. Because, while the Rocky Mountain region isn't famed for food, if you know where you go you can eat some fabulous food in Colorado's metropolitan areas.
There was the place on Boulder where I first tried and loved sushi. What was the name of that place again?
And that fabulous tapas place just off the mall that I still fantasize about. Also in Boulder. Someone, quick! Tell me the name of that place! I must go back there!
There's the place that used to be my favorite Denver restaurant, a little corner place called Saffron's where they served a saffron chicken dish that made my taste buds sit up, bed, and offer cash prizes. The sort of dish that you wake up in the middle of the night hallucinating about, if you go too long in between tastings. Sadly, no longer in business. The chef is at a new restaurant and serving a different menu, so my taste buds and I will never again taste the creamy tart butteriness of that saffron sauce. (It's been years, and I can still taste it....)
There's Samurai, thankfully still in business. It's a little hole-in-a-corner, "you have to know it's there to find it" Japanese restaurant that offers the best tempura I've ever eaten, bar none. And sushi! Lunch boxes to drool for. A Chicken Katsu sauce that has to be tasted to be believed. A teriyaki sauce with the perfect blend of tart and sweet.
There's the new place (the name will come back to me in a minute, I'm sure), Land Of Sushi, that just has to be a sister restaurant to Samurai. It serves the same fabulous Chicken Katsu and also offers an Oyster Roll that I gorge myself on every time I walk in the door.
There's Tokoyo Joe, which is a chain, but a purely local one I think. Good teriyaki chicken but what's really fabulous is their peanut sauce. They serve a chicken skewer in peanut sauce appetizer that's almost a meal (for me, anyhow). You can get the same peanuttier-than-peanut sauce in one of their bowl dishes, but I don't find white rice a particularly interesting addition to the flavor. (And it makes a dreadful presentation.) Also, since the sauce is very thick with bits of peanut in it, it's almost cloying if you eat too much. The appetizer size is perfect. Leaves you wanting more.
Maggiano's. I don't know if it's a chain or not, but there are two in Denver. One tucked into a nook on the 16th Street Mall and another in a castle-like building out south, by the Tech Center. Exceptionally good Italian Food. I've never had a meal there I didn't love.
We are gathered here today to listen to me babble on about my latest find. Thanks to Bernie, who insisted on taking me out for lunch yesterday to celebrate my 40th (shaddup) birthday last month, I can now add Le Central to the list.
Again, it's one of those only the cognoscenti know places. (Which, in this case, seems to mean, 'everyone but me' since everyone I've mentioned it to had already heard of it.)
Located in a garishly painted corner-block of older buildings on Lincoln, a bit north of 6th Street with the entrance tucked away on the north side, you probably wouldn't give it a second look unless you were wishing there were more zoning restrictions around tasteful paint choices for building exteriors.
The restaurant has the charm of two separate indoor dining areas and a closed-in atrium area that's drenched with sunlight during the day but protected from the winter winds. Simply and cleanly decorated, taking advantage of the building's structure but declining to participate in the shell of bad taste that houses it, it's a tiny, affordable French restaurant.
I selected a cup of the French Onion Soup and the Omelette du Jour, a "traditional French omelette with house smoked salmon, fresh basil and Brie cheese".
The soup was delightful. They used chicken broth instead of the more traditional beef, and it created a light but flavorful variation of the soup that was really delicious. The omelette was really too much of a good thing. Three eggs, four or five ounces of salmon, and a liberal melting of Brie. I managed about two-thirds of it before I gave up in despair. ($8, total)
Bernie chose the Panini du Jour, which was "Canadian bacon, basil and pine-nut pesto, tomato, red onion and fresh mozzarella within our house made fougasse bread." Vagaries of menu punctuation aside, he was very impressed. ($7)
Affordable, indeed.
There were many other items that tempted me. Paillard de Poulet (Pounded chicken breast, pan-seared, and flavored with basil and pine nut pesto, served over house salad tossed with tarragon vinaigrette. $7) Sandwich Jambon Fromage (Ham and Brie with tomatoes and pesto served on a grilled baguette. $7)
Among the starters that tempted my taste buds were two in particular. Escargots à l'Ail (Six escargots sautéed in butter and garlic and flambéed with Pernod served on baby red potatoes.) and L'Ail, et le Brie, et les Croutons (Baked whole garlic head, Brie cheese, and toast) ($7 each)
Filet of sole, grilled pork loin, numerous other salads, trout, there were so many choices! All of which looked fabulous.
But what the restaurant is famous for (and what I'll have to go back to try) is mussels. Les Moules et Frites
Basilic - White wine, shallots, garlic, fresh basil, and diced tomatoes
Provençale - Garlic, butter, parsley, Pernod; topped with bread crumbs
Petits Lardons - Shallots, white wine, butter finished with warm bacon and tomato vinaigrette
Safran - Shallots, cream, saffron, onion, garlic, and chopped tomatoes
And so many more....
The waiter explained that it's hard to say what will be on the menu - it changes twice daily. I look forward to going back (they're open for brunch from 11-2 on both Saturday and Sunday) to see what else they have to offer.
And, at $9 for a "bucket" of mussels (and I can't wait to see that presentation) I just gotta give them a try.
So. You know. In case you're ever wondering if I can talk about anything but drains and trains?
Yes, I can.