I'm back! After a fairly uneventful weekend that was nevertheless filled with good conversation and the joy of seeing friends I see only too rarely. And good sushi, I should add. Always at least one good sushi blow-out with this crowd. :)
This morning I was met with: 186 junk emails, two whiny emails, three wilting plants, and a totally trashed-out office. (Looks like Buehler really did motivate to start packing and moving, now that our deadline is only four days away.) I came back from my weekend in a really good mood. Tired, but very cheerful. All of this is harshing my vibe fast.
The whiny emails were, of course, from Bernie. One was a list of things he believes desperately need to be done today (none of which I will be doing since I have actual work to do for clients and bookkeeping that needs to be done) and the other was complaints about how much time the database guy is spending on the database project. Which comes under the heading of "not my problem" because I didn't do the negotiations with the guy, I didn't lay out how many hours we were willing to pay him for, and I had no control over at least 75% of the time he spent because he was doing things on Bernie's orders.
Among the things I discovered this morning is the news that Bernie changed the scheduled move from Tuesday morning to Tuesday evening, which suggests he's decided that my participation and/or presence are not required. I hope he has fun but I can't say I'm sorry to be off the hook for that one.
How was your weekend?
I'm going to admit freely that I don't understand the cycle sp*mmers use for sending sp*m. I read, or at least saw mention of, an article a couple of weeks ago suggesting that there are really only four main sp*mmers in the world, and that they're responsible for 90% of all electronic sp*m.
I don't doubt it. One week it's all sexual potency drugs to enhance my male performance. The next week it's a cure for my bald pate that's guaranteed to attract coeds and starlets. On week three, it's about my heart disease (probably cause-and-effect from week two) and then the final cycle is all about how I'm financially set now that my mortgage refinancing has been approved. (I probably should have done that before I started chasing starlets.)
Maybe the four of them are taking turns, that's all I'm suggesting. Work one week, then take the next three off?
Every now and then, just to prove that women aren't the only ones worried about tubby tummies and droopy derrieres, comes a cycle of diet offers, targeted toward both male and female readers. I look on that sp*mmer as a relief pitcher. (S)He shows up when one of the others needs an extra day off unexpectedly.
And then there are the articles, of course. Not just about the sp*mmers, but about how the internet is killing us all and besides that, making us fat and lazy.
When I was young, television made us fat. Also, it gave us eye strain from constantly following moving figures and we were all going to get cancer if we sat too close to a color set.
Now they say we're all more obese than ever and I find myself randomly wondering if it's because we're burning fewer calories now that not even our eyes are moving.
For the record? In case any of you were wondering? I have a thick head of hair, no heart disease, and my biggest financial problem at the moment is the need to get to a bank and change a $20 before the weekend so I have some small bills for tipping with. My weight is not out of control and my sex life is noneofyerbusiness.
Also I need to get some snacks. Because snacks make me happy. But only allowable snacks, because a 3-1/2 lb weight loss in 30 days is not to be squandered recklessly.
Snacks were better in the olden days, you know. Did you ever notice that? Ritz crackers were butteryer. Popcorn was fluffier. Oranges were sweeter. Candy bars were creamier and twice as big. Gumballs weren't more empty center than gum. Animal crackers tasted more like crackers and less like dust. Ice cream was creamier.
Snacks were better in the olden days. Lots of things were better in the olden days.
I'm sure I've already waxed romantically geriatric over the wonders of television shows that lasted as long as they lasted and where commercial breaks were placed where they'd least disrupt the show, instead of today's regimented 12-minute program intervals that interrupt the incessant product hawking.
Shopping was better in the olden days. When you went to a different city, they had different stores. You didn't find the same, cookie-cutter mall in every city of any size across the country. When you went someplace new, you found different things to look at or even to buy.
When you went to "amusement parks" or "theme parks," every souvenir you saw wasn't stamped "Made In China/Japan/Korea/Other-place-not-here" either. Some things used to be made here in the olden days.
Happily, some things haven't changed. You still get New Book Smell when you open a new book up, although I notice that different genres have different smells these days and what's up with that? I sort of miss the days when you'd buy a new book and find that the page-cutting machine had missed a bit and you had to cut the corner of a page or two yourself. That's as new as a new book can feel, isn't it? (Yeah, yeah--I'm the only one here who has been alive that long. Bite me.)
There are days (more than you know) when I can't think of anything sensible or interesting to write about.
Unless you'd like to hear that the company I finally got my resume sent to yesterday already hired someone for the position--yesterday.
My own fault for dinking around. Concept-wise, I wasn't in love with the company anyhow, so it's not entirely a heart-breaker.
They offered me the sop of "telesales" which was nice and shows that DiamondGirl's reference meant something to them, but I think not. Their sales manager was the first person I talked to (last night) and he said their people cycle 80-90 calls/day. That's not "sales." That's a churn-and-burn cycle, built on the premise that there will always be an unlimited pool of fools to employ, so it doesn't matter how fast you go through them. Real sales departments consider 30-40 calls in a day to be a heavy call load. All this group is doing is dialing phone numbers, looking for someone who won't hang up on them, which means their "cold" calls are probably just randomly acquired lists. People who have to do that work have my sympathy but I don't intend to be one of them.
You know what drives me bonkers? Callers who are too good to use voicemail. I try to make allowances for the fact that they don't know I'm not a receptionist, but when I offer to put you through to someone's voicemail, do not say, "no, I'll leave a message with you." (And you need to know that not even the good manners that eventually force me to agree to this absurd suggestion are enough to prompt me to actually write down your information and your ridiculously wordy message. If you want to leave someone a 2,000-word message, leave it on their voicemail. I wasn't hired to write your book.)
Little cranky moment there, sorry.
Anyhow. Now that the Job Weirdness Post is out of the way, what else has been going on in Anne's life in the long, almost 24-hour interval since her last uninteresting post?
Not much.
I'm happy to report that skies continue blue, sunshine continues to pour down on Denver, temperatures continue to be temperate, and the storm that was supposed to move in on us yesterday seems to have bypassed us altogether.
The next storm forecast is for Friday night, when they're predicting a "significant" storm. Ugh.
The resume, as previously mentioned, it into almost-final draft status. I had an offer (in comments) to help with the rewrite if I wanted to post what I could remember of my employment history on the blog, but I opted against it. As much as I enjoy walking down memory lane, back to the days of Alvin & the Chipmunk, Tuffy the Tank, and other previous employers, I think it's best that the complete incoherence of my first draft remain relatively private.
Last night I did major laundry. Four loads. Laundry is an endless task. By the time I went to bed last night, I realized that I still need to do the bathroom rugs, I have more towels that need to be done, the quilt on the bed is overdue for cleaning, and all of yesterday's clothes were being tossed into my empty-for-one-hour laundry basket.
We don't cook much, so at least when I clean the kitchen, a little counter-wiping keeps it pretty clean for the next week. We're not dirty people, so vacuuming and dusting once a week is about all that's needed. Only laundry (okay, and keeping the bathroom clean) is never-ending.
Remember those science fiction stories where we'd all wear paper clothes once and then toss them into the recycler to be remade into new clothes? I mean, what happened to the No Laundry Future? I was really looking forward to that.
Last night I also watched DVDs. I'm re-watching Kyo Kara Maoh!, an absurdly adorable anime series recommended to me by Rapunzel. I had my doubts at first. (The premise of the first episode? A boy is flushed down a toilet into another dimension, inhabited by demons. That's an ick factor right up front.) Because I trust her recommendations, I bought the first DVD and was absolutely charmed. Now I have eleven or twelve volumes (all that's been released so far) and the other day I found myself in the mood to re-watch the series from the beginning. I'm enjoying myself enormously.
The only other anime series I've watched (again, at her recommendation) is Yami No Matseui. I didn't expect to enjoy that one as much because I'd read the books and expected the anime ("Cartoons," as I thought contemptuously, before I'd ever seen any. Cartoons are to anime as Family Circus is to Doonesbury.) to be repetitive but again I was enthralled.
Also, Regenesis, Season two. I'm eking it out at (a randomly selected) four episodes a week, but it's not going to last me until Season three starts. I'm still feeling the BobLove, too. And still enthralled by the premise and the cases. I don't often find new television shows that I really enjoy.
I probably didn't mention it before today, but I'll be off-line at the end of this week until Monday morning. Visiting with rarely seen friends takes precedence over doing internet stuff. I'm even taking time off work. (Well, at the time I scheduled this, I was under the impression I might be unemployed already. Since I'm not, I'm taking a day.)
Sorting through my recent book purchases, I find I have a wealth of new reading available to me. At least seven new books. I still need new books, in all of the series I'm reading, but maybe not until I get caught up.
The R.C. was reading some lunatic's solution to "organizing your home" the other day and the half-witted, probably illiterate and television-addicted author of the piece said that if you have more books than shelves, the answer is not to get more shelves, it's to get rid of the books.
There's a huge gulf in the world between those really "get" reading and those who read the online blurbs for the NYTimes bestseller list and fake it from there.
Inevitable I Hate Yarn Digression
I finished the ghastly cream-and-pastel-mess scarf last night, right down to the fringe. Shudder. Soon, it will be Goodwill's problem. I will say that, if you're standing 10 or 20 feet away, it doesn't look that bad.
I'm not impressed with how the funky gray-and-black yarn is working when knitted. I might give it up.
I need more metal knitting needles. The metal ones are easier to use. I think the yarn moves on them better. (Okay, I just like them better.) (This is the sort of irrational preference I tend to develop. At one time, back when I was still writing, I was completely unable to write unless I had a blue or purple Espresso Gel pen. The tactile feel of that particular gel point against a specific brand of paper was--inspiring.) (Considering how much I loathe transcribing, I used to hate it when I got into moods when I couldn't compose on the keyboard, but that's a different topic, isn't it?)
During my get-together coming up this weekend, I'm going to need plenty of projects to work on, to keep me from snacking while I chat. I have the fabuloso variegated (dark blue through light purple) yarn that I'm knitting into a scarf, but I don't think it's going to take me all weekend to finish it, so I need a second project. Preferably something in a lighter color, which rules out the black crochet I'm working on. The latest afghan is too bulky to carry around.
I do have a skein of cherry red left. And some white. I'm thinking--those could be fabulous together. 20 rows of cherry, then three of white, so the white is just an accent, and then fringe it in cherry and white. Or maybe three rows of white at irregular intervals (because I hate counting rows). Whaddya think?
The expensive cobalt blue, vivid purple, and matching black skeins I bought a couple of weeks ago are still begin reserved for a Special Project. I'm not sure what it's going to be, but such great colors really deserve special treatment.
At one point, the R.C. wanted me to make her a scarf of the cobalt, but I think she's gone off that idea. She owns a lot of scarves already. I'd like a cobalt scarf, though. How come everyone gets a scarf but me," she wondered one day.)
That leaves only the purple and black, and I could combine those and inflict the result on the L-i-K-S. I really do think they'd be fabulous together. I need to choose colors for Pippi and Rapunzel but I remain under a yarn-buying moratorium until my pile of finished projects is larger than my pile of unused yarns. It may be next winter before that happens....
/end I Hate Yarn
Job applicants for this position are now being interviewed. I was a tad underwhelmed by today's applicant. She wasn't pro-active enough, didn't ask enough questions, and her resume was strong in working with a team. (When you are the entire team, being at your best when working in a group isn't really a big asset.)
Anne's resume recreation process is nearly complete. The R.C. took my lameoid draft and bled red ink all over it last night. I did those rewrites and others today and while I'd like for her to take another pass at it, I think I'll go ahead and apply today for the job DiamondGirl is nudging me towards. She's been waiting almost two weeks for me to send in a resume. They're hiring for two positions but I'd hate to lose my window of opportunity.
Deep breath....
Resume sent! I hope to heck I didn't make any typos in my email. I checked it over but you never know....
Sixty, I sweartogod, sixty seconds later--
Bernie just came dancing in. A giant new project, with a big new client, just said "yes!" I mean, a big project, too. A medium-sized contract came through late last week and a big summer job is about to make a commitment. Looks like things are finally breaking for the company.
He wants me to reconsider leaving. :) There's going to be work for a while to come. (I might even be able to get the $10k I told him I'd have to have in order to consider commuting to Boulder.)
Sigh.
Today I'm working on database clean-up. My database and Scooby's which appeared to be about 500 records apart based on pure numbers last week, are entirely incompatible today.
He has 7,300 records I don't have. Subtracting the 3,200 records he included that I asked him to remove before he did this pull and that he did not remove, he has 4,100 records I don't have.
My database was originally created from a pull from his database. I have identified 63 records that were added to mine after that time. And yet, I have 5,800 records he doesn't have.
This makes no sense at all. It's just gibberish.
I blame the process, mostly. Bernie has been telling the client for years that this database existed, but it never really did. The client requested a pull in September, we spent two weeks (you'll remember my complaints at the time, since I was 50% overbooked with work before this project reared its ugly head) throwing everything and the kitchen sink (twice) into a database, doing a rough clean, and sending out numbers to the client.
Ever since then we've been trying to go back and clean up the mess we created. In fact, I'd estimate we've spent three times the amount of time cleaning up that it would have taken to just do the project right in the first place.
Now my job is to figure out what we really have and why my data and Scooby's data bear no relation to each other. This means going back to some of the original files we tossed into the database salad, which were in no small way contributories to the problem.
The lunatic people who had this job before me had a few quirks. For instance, I seem to be the only person in the world who thinks including the client's name or a project in a file of otherwise unidentified data might be useful. No one but me ever seems to have thought of the idea of identifying the source of data. I seem to the be only person in the world who tracks annually occurring projects by the simple expedient of creating a new folder for each new year. I seem to be the only person in history who, if she has to keep four versions of the same project, identifies how they differ so that those who follow after me have at least a 50-50 chance of picking the file they need.
Trying to figure out where the problems happened is, at this late date, just impossible. I'm going insane just trying, but it's Today's Big Project, so I'm plugging away.
And, no I didn't find the resume this weekend. I tore my room apart, sorted all the piles and papers, threw away what wasn't needed (after going through it all a second time, paper by paper, to make certain nothing important was being tossed out), organized the Papers To Be Kept, and generally tidied the living heck out of my bedroom/study. I found many strange and interesting things.
(Must contact that 401k person at that former company and see if they took my money back when I forgot to respond to that letter requesting me to roll it over....) (Must respond to Nestle and see if the offer to roll over my Ralston Purina pension money from the early 80s is still good.....) (If I'd just gather up all the bits of money owed to me by various former employers, I might be better off for retirement than I think. At least by $5k or so.)
Anyhow. My room hasn't been this neat in two years or more. I have a stack of paper eight inches high of story drafts, stories I might have finished, and stories I once thought might go somewhere interesting--all of which need to be reviewed carefully. But no resume.
I rewrote it but it's as lame as my efforts in that direction usually are. Horn-tooting isn't my forte, I'm afraid. I spend far too much time talking about what the companies I've worked for did and not enough about what I did to contribute to their success. (That last is a bit tricky anyhow, when you have to report that three of your last five employers are out of business.) (It wasn't my fault!)
I'm going to work on it more today, at intervals, and then whine at the R.C. tonight until she takes it in hand and makes me sound a little more impressive. (Personally, I think it's a triumph that I managed to reconstruct years of employment, salary ranges, supervisor names, and job titles, all from my faulty memory.)
Anyhow. I emailed her a copy of what I have so far.That way I can also download it from my Sent Mail tonight, and store it on both computers and on a CD. I'm not going through this again.
Brace yourself.
It's time for today's I Hate Yarn digression!
The ghastly cream-and-pastel-mess yarn does not, when knitted instead of being crocheted, transform itself into a poem of subtle beauty. About the best I can say is that I'm almost done with it and then I can drop it in a Goodwill box or whatever and be rid of it.
I had a chunk of funky gray-and-black leftover from that crochet scarf, so now I'm trying it with knitting to see what it looks like. (It looked good with crochet. Just idle curiosity on my part.) If I like, I'll have to go get another skein or two. I don't have anything like enough left to do another whole scarf.
I tried inventing a number of new things this weekend, mostly around ways of keeping two colors going at once when crocheting.
I had some success with a dark-light combination, working the dark yarn into what I think of as the "bottom" of the stitch and the light into the "top." I'm going to have to think about it, though. "Some" success doesn't mean I was struck into a heap by the beauty of it all.
Also, although I'm only working one yarn at a time, it got bulky. A larger size crochet hook helped but, again, I wasn't overwhelmed. I may have to work a full fifteen or twenty rows to really get the effect. Maybe it was just that the 3" x 3" sample I was making was too small for me to really make a decision.
Working the opposite, with the light into the bottom and the dark into the top was ugly. I tried alternating dark to light on bottom to top, but that was also an ugly mess. Different stitch combinations failed to provide the missing link.
Oh, well. They can't all be gems and I wasn't hired for creativity.
I was using black & white this weekend, for maximum effect, but now it occurs to me that the subtler color differences between the vivid blue and the black might make all the difference.
I can see it now. I'm going to spend all of my free time over the next week with crochet hook in hand, fifteen skeins of yarn dangling from the other arm, busily trying different combinations of unlikely things. Or, you know, I could be just about ready to give up on "creativity" and just look up how to do it online.
/end I Hate Yarn
"It's 11:40 a.m.," she said indignantly. "Why am I the only person in the office? If no one else was coming in today, shouldn't I have been informed?"
(Okay. Bernie just called to apologize for not telling me he wasn't coming in. His excuse? He came in on Friday. Considering the way he bitches about coming down in rush hour traffic, you'd think he'd have jumped at the chance to come down on Presidents' Day, when traffic is light.) (Why am I complaining? It's not like having him around improves my day. Especially when I'm wrestling with stupid databases.)
It's snowing.
Granted, it's a measly effort, but still. We weren't supposed to be having any storms between now and next week.
I am so offended!
Posted by AnneZook at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)The new contacts arrived last night and the world is once again crisp and clear.
Except--not so much. The computer monitor is still fuzzy. It cleans up when I put on my reading glasses, of course. Worryingly, I don't really remember having this much trouble reading it a week ago.
I guess there's always a possibility they got my prescription wrong, but everything else looks pretty good.
Sigh. I'm going to have to get better-looking reading glasses if I'm going to start having to wear them every time I use the computer at the office. It really sucks to get old. (Okay, I always figured my eyes would be the first to go. I've been wearing glasses since I was in the fourth or fifth grade. But still.)
This morning when I arrived at the office, I was feeling chirpy and cheerful and ready for a leisurely day of doing whatever came up that could be done without actually over-exerting myself. (I have an ugly, suicide-looking scratch on my right wrist and two nasty paper cuts from cardboard boxes on my hands. I want to heal up a bit before I dive back into massive packing duties. On the off chance that I get a job interview in the next week or so, I'd rather not be sporting a dozen band-aids, you know?)
This morning's commute was sunny and bright with roads mostly dry and clean. Traffic was whizzing along at speeds I've rarely seen in the last two months. Now, though, clouds have moved back in and there's a strong (although not particularly cold) wind blowing outside.
Later....
Breakfast (vanilla yogurt. Ugh.) is safely behind me and I had a banana this morning. I'm still hungry, though. (This food update brought to you by the color puce, the number 37, and my current diet.)
I Hate Yarn Interval Approaching!
I was recently dissed by someone because most of my recent entries have been talking about yarn. This person seems to be under the opinion that I maintain (and pay for) this blog for the benefit of whatever readers might wander by and not for my own amusement. This person is incorrect.
You want interesting, educational, and informative? Read something else.
I Hate Yarn Interval Arrives!
I've finished seven scarves (in addition to the two made for the R.C. and the first lame effort foisted off on a friend as a Christmas gift). Three are for friends, four for charity. I need to get by Goodwill one of these days.
When I got to the end of the first one, I just sat there looking at it. I knew there was probably some kind of technique or stitch for finishing off that last row, but I had no idea what it was. Googling was of limited use because I didn't know the name of the technique I was looking for, but eventually I discovered that I needed to "bind off" my last row.
The ugly cream-and-brown thing knitted up into a decent scarf. It's not to my tastes, but if you like those colors, it's nice enough. Very straight stitches, pattern is interesting without being "busy."
The bright red one was a disappointment. It was my first knitting effort and one side went a bit whompus a couple of times. I should have ripped it out and redone it but knitting, unlike crochet, takes forever to redo. The medium blue and gray ones, both crocheted, look very nice.
I started two more last night.
I'm trying that ghastly cream-and-pastel-mess yarn again. I have some size 10 knitting needles and they just might allow me to turn this wad of yuck into a marginally acceptable scarf. If not, maybe a dishmop or a floor scrubber.
I bought some fabuloso variegated (dark blue through light purple) yarn last week. It's almost a bouclé, so a bit tricky to work with, but I loved the colors. It's soft and has a sort of satin-shine to it. I'm working it with size eight needles (I tried it with nines, but it just looked sloppy) and it will either work up to be gorgeous or boring. It's always an adventure!
Got quite a bit done on my latest afghan (medium blue) last night, but now I'm unhappy with it. It really needs to be 6"-8" wider. I'm about half done and before I do any more, I need to decide whether or not I care enough to want to rip it out and begin again. (Sigh. It's three feet long. That's a lot of stitches to redo.) I might have to redo it, though. This yarn is so soft that I need to change the stitch I'm using as well, so it will keep its shape better. (I feel it coming out. I'm going to have to rip it out.)
And I still have the expensive cobalt blue, vivid purple, and matching black skeins I bought at the little yarn store in Boulder a week or so ago. I want to work at least two of those colors into one scarf. I've been experimenting with using more than one color but so far without a lot of success. I had some ideas for doing it that involved keeping multiple skeins of yarn working at a time. One I used for the R.C.'s Christmas Present scarf and it worked reasonably well but it's not an elegant solution. My other ideas haven't worked in practice.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I could Google around and find instructions for how to do it, but that's not nearly as much fun as figuring it out on my own. Or at least trying to figure it out, before I admit defeat.
For instance, my current experimentation gave me some ideas for how I could work two colors of a much lighter weight yarn into one scarf. I'll have to buy some lighter weight yarn now and try it. I have a notion that I could work a darker color into the "bottom" of the crochet stitch and a lighter one into the "top" to give the project a layered look. It looks great in my mind, anyhow.
/End I Hate Yarn
So, what else is up with me right now?
Last night we hit the grocery store after work and I never did get around to searching for my resume. I'm a bit discouraged by my failure to find it so far. I can see it clearly in my mind. It was a draft I'd printed out and handed to the R.C. to turn my lame job descriptions into resume-ese. (I'm not good at self-promotion.) I have an idea that it was in December that I ran across it somewhere and laid it aside to be kept safely. I have the impression it was in the bedroom. So far, I have many things but an actual resume isn't one of them.
A couple of major clients moved closer to signing actual agreements with the company and now Bernie talking about how I'll have to change my mind, stay with the company, and commute to Boulder. (No mention of the $10k salary rise I told him would be a minimum requirement to make me even consider such a thing.)
This week's Ridiculous Task? To learn enough about a primitive version of a software program that Bernie doesn't want to spend the money to upgrade to use it occasionally.
The key turned out to be that while it says it accepts .xls, .dbf, .db, .wk3, etc., files, that apparently only held true for the versions that existed in 1995 or so, when this program was written. As long as I save my new database records down to .csv for MS-DOS, it will recognize them.)
I am so unappreciated in my time. A ten year-old software program. Do you even remember back that far? This is antique software, written in an era when being compatible with Windows 3.1 was important. It was written for a 386 processor with 4 MB of RAM. It has floppies! (I whine at you because I know Bernie will never understand.)
And then I had to write a User Manual for the stupid thing so that whoever gets my job won't have to go through this again.
I wonder if Bernie really appreciates the range of skills I bring to this place?
Temperatures still cold, snow on the ground and the roads, but the sun is shining. The next storm isn't moving in until tonight.
The eye doctor people called and my new contacts are in. I put in a request today to get them mailed to me (it's a 45 minute drive from my office to there, even in good weather) so hopefully I'll have them by Friday.
Blah, blah, blah.
Why do I have no trouble churning out 1,000+ words a day on the idiocy of co-workers but I find myself stalling and thinking of other things when I sit down in front of my novel?
Passion, I guess. Aggravating people inspire a certain heated passion in me that compels me to abuse them. I need to go back to my novel, and the world I built for it, and reread my notes. See if I still have any passion around those ideas. I've been talking with a friend, Mallory, about it just recently and I'm sort of inspired to at least look at what I was doing.
Work-wise today, I was fashionably late. I wandered in around 9:00, after stopping at Starbucks. (If you're already late, no reason not to have good coffee.)
Bernie showed up today, too. His big project at the moment? He found a pile of unloved, unlabeled keys. He's trying them in all of the filing cabinets so he can throw away the ones that don't go with anything we own.
I'm sure, in his mind, he's being amazingly productive but since I'm blogging, I shouldn't really be throwing stones. (I'm also backing up the files on this PC to the network server, so I have 22 minutes to kill.)
Later, I will be working on the Tiny, Little Book Of Company Information. I already made a Big Book Of Useful Information and a Smaller Book Of Client Information. This one is largely duplicates of information in the other two books and some other miscellaneous stuff but no one will be able to say that I walked out of here deliberately carrying off all of the information someone would need to have in order to do my job.
Websites, user names, passwords, program names, I have them all. Now I need a quick, one-page introduction that describes each of the proprietary software programs we use frequently and whoever takes this job after me will have 300% more information than I had when I started. Everything isn't in there, but a total core dump really isn't feasible. I know I could pretty much have done this job with the stuff in these notebooks, so that's something.
Granted, Bernie has now decided to bail on the most complicated of the proprietary programs (along with handing a lot of my job responsibilities back to the people who used to do them) but I'm making the effort. (I'm still at a loss how he thinks he can get clients to pay him for the privilege of using a commercial, easily recognizable alternative to our own survey program but whatever.)
I'm beginning to wonder if he really thinks he has me doing a ridiculous amount of work, or if his plan is to free up some of the time of my replacement so he can get the personal assistant and secretarial duties I refuse to provide? If he was the kind of person I could talk to about these things, I'd advise him against that. While I know it materially damages the quality of his life or something to have to send his own faxes and stamp his own envelopes, the person who could really make a success of this position is someone with the experience and abilities that aren't really appropriate to waste on dialing someone's phone calls for them.
Because, let's face it, I'm sure Bernie keeps himself busy, busy, busy being busy a lot of the time (I've never met anyone who worked so many hours with so little to show for it) and he wastes endless hours on projects that are clearly going nowhere, but he does very little of the actual work around here. Whoever he hires will have 95% of the work of keeping all current clients happy, all current projects moving ahead, and most of the business of running the business besides.
Okay, I really am in a better mood today. So why am I whining like this?
Maybe because I've spent two hours over the last two or three days trying to find that copy of my resume, without success. I know I saw it recently. Not more than a couple of months ago. And I put it away safely (always the kiss of death) so that it would be handy when I needed it.
Now I can't find it anywhere. I have a lead on a possible job but I need my resume before I can apply.
I also have a meeting with Bernie in 10 minutes. I sweartogod, if he asks me again what I plan to work on right now where there's no actual client work to be done, I'll slay him. I really get sick of him acting like he's doing me a favor by paying me when he's not bringing any business in the door. I'm also going to ask him what he's planning to do to correct the "no billable work to be done" situation. He should have to justify that $90k salary to someone at a time when he's threatening to close the doors once a week because of lack of business.
You know, if someone asked me what Bernie actually does around here, I'd be at a loss to tell them.
Posted by AnneZook at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)Gonna be a golden day, what with the snow, the sleet, the ice, and the idiots.
I arrive at the office at 8:31. The phone is already ringing. It's Bernie. He's checking in. Do we have internet access at the office?
No.
I checked my email at home before I came in, so I tell him to go check his web-mail. A client needs a change in a .pdf file Bernie sent them. He needs to do that while he still has internet access at home.
It's a typo, okay? He spelled a word wrong. It's a two-second fix. But, no. He objects to making this change. He wants me to do it and then email him the new Word document to convert into a pdf.
I remind him that I have no internet access. He says he'll "try" to make the correction but it might have to wait.
I am completely at a loss as to why he would not be able to fix a typo in a Word document and then select the menu option that converts the file to a .pdf (he's done it a hundred times before) but I can clearly see that whenever the time comes when we have internet access again, the first thing I'm going to wind up doing is fixing this typo and then emailing the document to him.
As clearly as if he'd said it, I can tell that he has decided is hard and complicated and he doesn't want to be involved. He also as much as said that since the client's original email came to me and he wasn't copied, it wasn't his job to fix the mistake.
He has the necessary Word document since he's the one who emailed it to me originally. He has the only computer that will do the conversion. He has experience doing it. Why, suddenly, is this all just too traumatic for him to deal with?
Apparently his internet access at home is slow. I refrain from mentioning that it's not as slow as at the office where it's stopped.
Next up:
Considering that I had a 15-minute conversation about his responsibilities with Buehler yesterday, before he left the office at noon, I guess I should be impressed that it took him clear up until 3:30 yesterday afternoon to start calling Bernie and asking if "we" have fixed the internet access yet.
I talked with Bernie about this yesterday afternoon, when he called to ask why I had not gotten the internet access fixed. At that time I explained to him how no one but Buehler can provide the information required.
This morning, Bernie called to say that Buehler was inquiring about the access. Is it fixed? When I said, "no," he asked me to "call her" about it.
Her? Who her? The Access Goddess?
I explain, again, very slowly, that I need an account number or the primary phone number the account was set up under in order to call Qwest and get any assistance. This information has to come from Buehler and/or Moe.
I explain that it's completely ridiculous for Buehler to say that he has never gotten a bill from Qwest and that I told him, Buehler, quite plainly, what I needed yesterday, so it's no good him calling us today and wondering why I haven't done anything about it.
Bernie hangs up, calls Buehler and then calls me back. Buehler did talk to Moe, but he did not understand that he needed to get information from him so he didn't ask him the questions. I guess he just made a general inquiry after his health or something.
Now Bernie demands to know why Qwest cannot help us by tracking down our account by our address. I have no answer for this, not being in charge of how Qwest or any other company stores their own data. I assume, as I told him yesterday, that Qwest, being primarily a phone company, tends to use phone numbers to track accounts.
Bernie objects that we have lots of phones and surely one of those numbers will work. I point out that it's hardly reasonable to expect Her to sit on the phone with me for an hour while I rattle off the 20 "active" phone numbers into this office and have Her try them in combination with three different company names in an attempt to find our account.
Bernie decides to call Qwest himself. I wish him luck, decline to provide the phone number (he can do the same thing I did, look it up in the phone book) and actually do hope he can get this fixed. I miss my internet access.
Before he hangs up, Bernie asks if I've asked DiamondGirl about this.
No, I have not. She doesn't work here any more.
She hasn't worked here for over six months, and when she was doing contract work for us, you bitched her out for the number of hours she was charging, so she doesn't love you any more and is highly unlikely to offer you any free tech support on a system that someone else contracted to have installed in the office. (What I actually say is, "I don't have internet access." He says since I can't email her, can I send her an IM. I say, "no, I do not have internet access.")
In the end, he decides to work from home today (thank goodness) and instructs me to finish packing up the office.
Being, as I am, and as I told him on Friday, at the point where I can't really pack anything else (And since when did moving the office become solely my problem? Bernie acts like he's doing the world a favor by announcing that he'll pack his own office--a fact that's even less-impressive when you hear that three months ago, he "cleaned" it by dumping all the stuff he didn't want in the main area.) until Buehler and Bernie decide who owns what of the piles of stuff that's left, I object to this plan. He gets pissy. I say, "fine" and wait for him to hang up. (Actually, having anticipated this, I wore jeans into the office today.)
I left my desk to go to the little girl's room. I was gone for just over two minutes. He called five times in that interval. Now I'm trying to decide whether or not to call him back now or wait a few minutes.
He's been pretty annoying already this morning, you know?
Also, I've spoken to him in the past about sitting there dialing my number over and over and over when I don't answer. I'm either on the phone or away from my desk and it does no good to sit there and work himself into a frenzy over my failure to instantly pick up the phone when he calls. I am the only person in the office most of the time. A certain percentage of my job cannot be done from my desk.
Today, if he wants me to be working in the other half of the office, packing stuff up, then I'm not going to be at my desk to pick up the phone instantly when he calls. He needs to realize this.
Also? He needs to stop calling my cell phone. My personal cell phone is not available for him to call and abuse me on. He can use the telephone he pays for, for the purpose.
(Note: For those wondering, I actually did call him back as soon as I got to my desk. His line was busy.)
Twenty minutes later, we're talking again. He has been on the phone with Qwest and has a question. What do the lights on the modem look like?
Just like yesterday, I tell him. All "green for go" and solid, except the "internet" light which is not on at all.
A minute later, he calls back. All of the phone lines are tied together where they come into the building Qwest shares with our VOIP phone provider! It's probably the VOIP system!
I remind him that we have phones. It's not the VOIP. It's the internet access.
He garbles out something about the fax machine "proving" that he's right and it's all--I don't know. Tied together or something. I have no idea how the fax machine suddenly came into it except that he believes that since we get the fax through Qwest and the phones through VOIP, it proves they're all connected.
The situation teeters on the brink of disaster as I fight back the urge to scream at him.
The memory of my near-daily complaints about my battle with the VOIP company as I tried to get them to send us a converter so our analog fax machine would work with their digital system, a six-month war, flickers through my mind. Clearly it's entirely escaped his, as has the day two months ago when I triumphed and wrested the necessary converter from their grubby little mitts, giving us the ability to send and receive faxes for the first time in months.
Forget it, I tell him. The fax, like all of our phone lines is VOIP. The internet is Qwest. They are separate. Any line-sharing arrangement that the two companies have come to is not our problem.
Call them anyhow, he says. Just ask them if they're having a problem.
I take a deep breath. I can call them, I agree. But they'll just think I'm insane. They do not provide our internet access and the services they do provide are working flawlessly.
He calls back two minutes later with a brilliant new suggestion.
Reboot!
All of the energy drains from my body, leaving me exhausted, discouraged, and disinclined to giveashit.
I've been here for two hours. So far, we've established that we have no internet access, we have phone access, and that rebooting doesn't fix the problem.
This is exactly what we knew 24 hours ago and, had either Buehler or Bernie actually listened to my answer when they asked me yesterday why we had no internet access, that's two hours of frustration I could have avoided. (Not to mention that we'd be 24 hours closer to a solution, instead of stuck re-running yesterday.)
Sigh. Going off to pack the office up now.
45 minutes later.... I came back to my desk for a drink of water and find that Bernie has called me five times. He desperately, urgently needs the answer to a question from the property managers here. Clearly he has no memory of telling me to spend the rest of the day away from my desk. Just as clearly, the idea of dialing them up himself never occurred to him.
Let us pause for a moment while I try to figure out how, "I'm not going to be a secretary or your personal assistant" turned into, "You'll never have do to a thing or think for yourself because I'm here to hold your hand and do everything that needs to be done every second of every work day."
"I know you're not my secretary," he says, "but put a stamp on this envelope for me." "I know you're not my personal assistant," he says, "but call these people and schedule a conference call and I'm available from 1-2 on Tuesday unless they're not available until 1:30 in which case we have to do it on Wednesday but if they want to do it on Thursday, tell them you'll have to call them back and then call me and check with my schedule first."
I should point out, in Bernie's favor, that he did actually get two contracts signed in the last 30 days.
In the year I've been here, these are the only bits of new business he's brought in, so this is the only time in the last year he's even remotely resembled a "salesman." Our two current largest clients have not officially renewed for 2007, and these two new contracts will replace their revenue for about two months, but whatever. (Oh. No, I tell a lie. He also got a contract signed this fall for project we delivered free "for the advertising" and a $1k contract signed last summer.
Later that same day
These entries get long when I work on them off and on for hours on end. Sorry. (Okay, no, not really. No one's making you read it.)
Bernie called back to ask what the checking account number is and to say Buehler's on the way over and he and I and Moe will be "solving" the internet access problem.
Moe, who was supposedly out of touch all day today until 4:00. Buehler, who is pretty much as clueless about technology as Bernie, although not as annoying with it. And me, the person whose every idea has already been tried without success.
I'm pretty excited about the potential there.
Later
Buehler wandered in and brought lunch. I bit into my half of the sandwich quite happily the instant before I noticed that rather than the standard "turkey lite" (acceptable on my diet) it was some new thing called a "chicken cabo" full of a mayonnaise-based sauce and bits of bacon. I ate it (very tasty), but I'm going to be on starvation rations for dinner tonight.
Buehler, contrary to Bernie's information, did not come in armed and ready to work on the internet access problem.
He asked me vaguely what we should do.
I said, "I don't know."
He looked for a Qwest bill for about 15 seconds and that was the end of it. After that, we ate lunch and now he's reading magazines.
Later
In the course of yet another phone call, Bernie casually mentioned that "if you have time, I left some boxes in my office and you can pack up that bookcase there."
I said, "Yeah. If I have time." When youknowhere freezes over was clearly implied and he clearly got it.
Anyhow. I'm home now. Five seconds after I logged on to my email here at home, I got an IM from Buehler saying the office access is fixed.
There are days, when I just can't deal with it.
Saturday, as I was tooling back from Boulder with a couple of friends, Buehler called complaining because the VPN was out. He'd gone to the office and wanted me to walk him through fixing it.
I know, in a vague sort of way, that we have a VPN. I even know what a VPN is (a Virtual Private Network) and what it does (it lets people access the hardware here in the office, even when they're somewhere else) but those basic concepts are pretty much where my knowledge about, and interest in, our VPN stops.
If there's some physical thing in the server closet, amid that wilderness of tangled wires and stacked boxes, that is an actual VPN Controller, it's a surprise to me. If there's a button you can push or a thingy you can reboot to make it work when it gets stubborn, the location of said magic gizmos is a mystery to me.
Anyhow. I like Buehler, so I walked him through rebooting the Exchange server (the only thing I know how to explain over the phone and "a case of the blind leading the blind" doesn't even begin to explain how scary that idea is), including managing to explain to him how to change the "channel" on the weird black box that controls whether you're looking at the Exchange server or one of three other computers there in the closet. I waited for and took the inevitable second phone call because he'd forgotten to ask for the password, and then I forgot about the whole mess.
I mean, when he didn't call back I assumed all was well, but I come in today to find out that he was calling and IMing Bernie all weekend about the problem. (If calling me for network tech support constitutes "desperate" then calling Bernie has to qualify as " apocalypse imminent." The man can't even change the "view" on his documents in Word.)
And, yes, today, the entire office's internet access is out. It wasn't the VPN at all.
Ninety minutes later, I've rebooted everything in sight (including the box labeled "do not turn off"), most things three times, with no success.
When the Magic Of Reboot fails me, I'm pretty much stuck.
I have a vague idea that we have our internet access through Qwest. A close examination of the little modem box reveals that it does, in fact, have a Qwest label. Aha!
(At this point, Buehler asks if Bernie's "tech guy" isn't coming in this morning. I have no idea. If the two of them arranged for this over the weekend, that information wasn't passed to me. Besides, while I have much faith in TechBoy's abilities, I doubt that he's going to be able to fix a Qwest outage, you know? It has to be a Qwest outage. All of the little boxes are hooked up and all of the little lights are a happy green.)
(I should mention that Bernie called and said that their dog died last night so he's taking a sick day.)
After explaining all of this to Buehler, I am reduced to the primitive expedient of paging through a hard-copy phone book. I find a number. I call Qwest, fight my way through the debris of voicemail options to get to a Real Person and--get stuck.
I don't have our account number. I don't know which of the three companies sharing this suite the account was set up under. I don't even know the "main" phone number the account would have been set up under.
Moe, the guy who used to do freelance and contract software coding work for us, set the whole Qwest thing up two or three years ago and of course he's long gone. Also, while Moe's a great guy, documentation and information-sharing weren't really his strong points.
Eventually I bully the truly kind and helpful woman on the phone into admitting they're having an outage. I cannot force her to tell me if it includes this building or not though. Also, we're not the only Qwest customers in the building, but apparently it's possible that some of us are having an outage and some of us are not.
(During the time I'm trying to talk on the phone to Qwest, Buehler is interrupting me with questions of such earth-shattering importance as, "what is today's date," and "did you get the weekend mail yet.")
In the end, Qwest-Lady says the outage, if that's our problem, could last for up to 24 hours and if we still don’t have internet access tomorrow, the problem could be with our modem, so find our account number or something that she can track in her system and they'll help us trouble-shoot it.
I hang up and search the office. There are no bills from Qwest. It seems that in some peculiar fashion, we've managed to have Qwest DSL service for the last two years without ever receiving a bill. I can understand that it might have been set up for auto-pay to a credit card or something, but I cannot understand how a mailing-happy, paper-obsessed company like Qwest failed to send us any kind of paper bill/reminder/notification in all of that time.
I've been in the office for 2-1/2 hours by this point, and the only work-related (as in "actually my job") thing I've done all day was the two-second interval when I completely failed to send an email to a client because the internet access was out.
Also, I'm facing the knowledge that if it's the modem, it's just going to be out until Bernie moves the office, because I have no information and no documentation that will get us any kind of technical support to fix it.
In the meantime, I'm still wearing an antique contact lens in my left eye, so the world is half-hazy and entirely off-balance, making me just slightly queasy if I try to focus on anything smaller than a school bus. The pharmacy is calling to complain because I ordered prescription refills and never picked them up. The bookkeeper is calling to complain because I haven't deposited the expense reimbursement check that was written to me two weeks ago.
If I were a drinker, this is the moment I'd be reaching for the nearest bottle. But I'm not, so I'm munching morosely on today's "approved" diet snack (soy nuts), doing the bookkeeping, and looking forward to the moment half an hour from now when I need to get up, go home, and check my email.
(Posted from home, later that same day.)
Yes, it's snowing.
It's not supposed to amount to much over the next couple of days. Less than an inch total, they say. The fog draped over the city like tufts of discarded batting is a bigger problem right now.
I'm chipper today. Nice change, huh?
The Great Eye Plague turns out to be some kind of thing on my lower eyelid. It was already getting humongously better before I went to the eye doctor's but it doesn't pay to take chances with your vision so I'm glad I went.
Turns out the only "treatment is for me to put hot compresses (read: washcloth wetted and nuked for 30 seconds) on my lower lid 5-6 times a day and massage the area gently. The eye was getting better and maybe it still is, but soaking it in hot water 6 times a day and rubbing the fragile skin there is reddening it back up fast.
This office never has visitors. We go to the clients or do our meetings by conference call. Naturally this is the week we're having people in every day and twice on some days. Because I look like I got smacked in the eye by someone.
Warning: I Hate Yarn discussion approaching!
A friend of mine, Meghan, suggested that if I'm frustrated by the slowness of knitting, I try learning to knit "continental style" which is apparently also called "left-handed knitting." For the first time, I found a real use for YouTube because they had a very interesting video there.
But it was all a lie.
It wasn't "left-handed" at all and I had to keep stopping the video to mentally translate everything the woman was doing into left-handed terms.
Then I realized that I don't actually "knit" because it's awkward for me (I purl), so I had to spend ten minutes knitting (the "regular" way) to fix in my mind how it worked. After that, when I tried out the "continental" method, it produced the nastiest mess even I've ever produced, and I've produced some ghastly first attempts at things.
I watched more videos, becoming ever-more puzzled. I accept that all of those people were knitting. Who'd lie about something like that? But I couldn't find anyone who was doing anything that looks like what I do, not even in the videos of people ostensibly doing "left-handed knitting."
I tried many different things with my own little yarn and needles. Eventually I realized that I was getting half the "continental" method mixed up with "regular" knitting and forgetting that I actually purl anyhow.
That's a weird and complicated way to say that I didn't find the "continental" method successful for me.
It was fun to play with, though. I learned to knit (my way) and I learned what combining rows of knitting and rows of purling produce (a very "flat" product). I got bored before I started switching stitches in the middle of the row, though. I can't spend all evening sitting there messing around with yarn.
/end I Hate Yarn
Eventually I sat up too late reading (Sharpe's Eagle) but I managed to wake up this morning anyhow. If I didn't have this compulsion to finish every book I start, usually at one sitting, books would last me longer. :(
Workwise? I'm snickering evilly today. Or at least meanly. The tech expert evaluated the infamous servers and recommended e-Bay. He says we can expect to get $300-$400 each for them. I can't wait until Bernie lays eyes on that information. Hee hee hee.
Did I mention that DiamondGirl emailed and passed me a job opportunity on Tuesday? It looks like my kind of thing except for the salary range (it tops out at the measly salary I accept from Bernie) but maybe I can negotiate them upwards. I started digging around for that paper resume copy last night. I saw it recently, so I know it can't be too deeply buried, but I can't put my hands on it at the moment. (Mem. In the future? Keep copies of stuff on both computers. And maybe a CD as well.)
___________________
P.S. On the plus side, the eye doctor's office replaced the screw missing from my glasses and tightened up the rest of the screws and assured me I won't have to replace them for another year or two!
Posted by AnneZook at 09:28 AM | Comments (5)Okay, it's going to be a weird day when having dribbled coffee down your front before 8:00 a.m. isn't the worst thing that's happened to you all day.
Yes, when I woke up this morning, the Great Eye Plague had not magically evaporated. I don't understand that.
I don’t know what's up with my body these days. For decades we had an agreement. It kept running along smoothly without my intervention and I gave it an unlimited supply of potato chips. A few years ago, and thanks to the R.C., I decided to get all healthy and stuff. I lost 22 lbs (still working on that last 5), exercised at least occasionally, and started eating things like, well, broccoli. Now my body is disintegrating. (Mind you, I look fabulous.) (In the "looks healthily thin and fit" category.) (Not so much in the eyeball category.) (At the moment.)
Anyhow. Digressions aside, my eye is even more sort of red and feeble looking today than it was yesterday, and it wasn't that pretty yesterday. I called the eye doc and I have an appointment for tomorrow afternoon.
I also had to have them order me a new contact lens for that eye. In some kind of suspicious and highly unlikely coincidence, when I was cleaning my left lens last night, it fell into two pieces. That's never happened before.
Now, of course, I suspect that I have some rapidly mutating plague that will eventually decimate the functions of my body and cause me to expire in a pool of goo.
Be honest. It's all going to end in tears, isn't it?
It's entirely possible that it wasn't wise of me to have watched the entire first season of ReGenesis in two days.
Me being me, I guess it was natural that I'd immediately start developing symptoms of weird biological infestations. (Still. It was an excellent show and I thank my friend for loaning me his tapes. I hope it airs in the USofA some day. Or maybe that they offer DVDs we can buy.)
Ugh. I look so ghastly. And since I don't know what's wrong with my eye, I don't know if sitting here staring at a computer monitor all day is going to do it any harm or not, you know?
I suspect that my only other project, packing up stuff around the office and kicking up pounds of decades-old dust in the process, wouldn't be the smartest thing I could do today either.
I don't even know if I should have left the contacts out this morning. I had to wear them, though. My glasses lost a screw and I can't wear them at the moment. (I had an old left one that I was keeping "for an emergency.")
Sigh. Maintenance. What a bore.
Bernie is now threatening to rent me my own office, hire me an assistant, and keep me forever.
Silly man.
Posted by AnneZook at 04:24 PM | Comments (4)Whassup? Are you having a nice Monday?
It's sunny and warm here in Denver, which is such a pleasant change! The temperature is at 38 and it feels warmer.
The R.C. made it back to town safely after her recent business trip and she has the entire week off, to frolic in the newly arrived sun and heat. She deserves it.
Me? Glad you asked. I got out of a 1 hour+ meeting with Bernie at which we both agreed it's time to make some solid decisions.
Then we spent 30 minutes talking about how he really won't know what the future holds until this company or that company comes to a solid decision themselves by the end of this month. SOSDD*.
I showed him the Big Book Of Useful Information I finished last week and the Smaller Book of Client Information that I've started but not yet completed. In addition to those, we decided I should make a list of everything I do that a new person will need to know how to do.
We discussed and agreed on wording for an ad for my replacement (or, you know, someone to work with me, depending on how all of the Big Decisions go).
He's decided--wait for it--that he doesn't really need to hire someone else who can do everything I can do, because maybe there just aren't that many people out there who can pick up and learn just about anything that needs to be done. It's nice to be appreciated (although I think he's selling the employee pool short). Anyhow, he says he can farm some of that stuff back out to the people who used to do it before he figured out that I could do it all.
Then we discussed how maybe I could work with Buehler in his new office for a month or maybe we could rent a tiny space somewhere in my neighborhood for three months, etc., etc., etc., in order to keep me on until June which is some other kind of Big Decision Date that the investors in our company have their hearts set on.
It was all very definite and concrete.
Definitely vague and concretely undecided.
Mostly we talked about June 1 as a potential date, but around the sidelines there was something else going on. In an unspoken kind of way, we were both agreeing March 15 or April 1. But, you know, with options.
I guess it's time to stop dinking around and start finding a new job.
Otherwise, in my life:
Possibly I have an eye infection. When I woke up this morning, my left eye was weird. It still feels a little weird now.
The weekend was a vast wasteland as far as productive activity goes. I actually spent quite a lot of time contemplating my future. When that palled, I watched new DVDs or cleaned house. (On the positive side, I didn't spend a dime!)
The next two Sharpe books arrived in the office this morning, so I have some good reading in front of me. (Except. I can't! Must job-hunt! Where is that stupid resume?)
Alert! I Hate Yarn Discussion:
In a burst of effort fueled by a sense of shame at shortchanging my friends, I redid The Crochet Scarf Projects this weekend. The red one is larger, the funky gray-and-black one is now straighter, and the blue one has a kicky new stitch I figured out. All are fringed and ready to be washed, blocked, dried, and mailed!
The Knitted Scarf Projects are wending their ways casually toward completions. Knitting is pretty but slow. I thought the cherry red would carry the one scarf, in spite of the plainness of the stitch, but now that I have a couple of feet done, I'm having my doubts. Maybe when it's done and I get the fringe on? The weirdly "dirty" looking yarn I bought remains strange and ugly but I'm turning it into a scarf anyhow. Somewhere out there is someone for whom cream-and-brown is an attractive color combination.
The Shell Pattern Afghan is history. Not only did I misplace the crochet hook and I have no idea what size it was so I can't replace it, but contemplation of the product so far has convinced me that this would be much better as a border, to "finish" a project than it is as a whole afghan in itself. I'm going to rip out what I've done so far and use the yarn for something else.
The Traditional Afghan Pattern project is fine. I've done that one so often I could almost do it in my sleep. I wish I hadn't chosen "country blue" for this time around. It's such a bland color. But someone will like it, right?
The various other things I'm working on all got their moments in the sun this weekend, but in retrospect, I think the discovery of at least two new patterns was the most fun.
/End I Hate Yarn
Drawing? I got almost nothing done this weekend. A friend loaned me copies of ReGenesis and I got lost in a marathon viewing stint. If you get the chance, you really should watch this one. Excellent.
Also, there was Doctor Who.... Sigh. I really liked Christopher Eccleston. Tennant is good, though. He's better than I anticipated him being when they first introduced him. But I really enjoyed Eccleston's doctor.
The Dresden Files was a repeat. I'm still on the fence about this show. I haven't read any of the books but that's hasn't hampered me so far.
__________________________________
* Same ol' stuff, different day
18 below zero last night. I ask you. Is that even rational?
It is not. I must protest most strongly against this new fad of having cold and snow in the winter time.
As I understand it, they had some significant tornadoes in Florida last night and the news says the wind is so strong up by the Divide that it's blowing windows out of cars.
I think Mother Nature is really annoyed with us these days.
I was pondering MOPT last night and this morning. I mean, now, these days, while Mother Nature is throwing tantrums, these are the times that make you think it's about time you started doing your bit to clean up the planet and stop spewing pollutants into the air and stuff.
But! 18 below zero! I have to wait ten minutes for my morning bus and five minutes for my morning train. In the evening, I have to wait ten minutes for my return bus, five to ten minutes for my train, and then twenty-five minutes for my last bus. If I use MOPT, I'm going to lose a finger or two or maybe a toe, to frostbite. (Yes, okay, I have gloves and hats and scarves. To be honest, what I'm most worried about is my eyes. I just can't think that contact lenses and extended exposure to sub-zero temperatures would do my already aging eyes any good.)
(Based on how my car sounded when I started it up this morning, I think it might vote in favor of me taking MOPT.)
Also, the circus is back in town. More accurately, the Spanish Circus is returning to Texas. I'm getting hang-ups, voicemails in Spanish, and people who don't speak English calling to ask for tickets. Seems to me I just went through this a few months ago. How often does that stupid circus go to Texas, anyhow? And why can't they advertise their phone number(s) correctly?
What else am I grumpy about?
Not much. I had a nice, peaceful evening yesterday. I got into the Amazon Box O'Joy and started wallowing in a major Doctor Who Season Two festival.
Under the heading of, "Scarves, misc." I finished the funky black/gray scarf. It's not beautiful and it's a little shorter than I'd originally planned, but I won! Or, did I? In the end, I was reduced to actually counting stitches (Oh, the shame! I haven't had to count stitches since--since I don't know when.) and I'm always going to be ashamed of not having ripped the entire thing out and done it over properly, but I decided that if I didn't get it done and mailed, winter was going to be over.
I had a bit of that yarn left. Just out of idle curiosity, I'm trying to knit a block with the leftovers. It may be that this yarn will work better with knitting.
Or, you know, it could just have been The Skein Of Satan.
I'm starting to accumulate quite a few leftover bits of skeins. I have no idea what to do with them. There's too much of each of them to just toss out and not enough to actually do anything with.
I did not go to the grocery store, but a closer inspection of my cabinets revealed that I had enough food in there for a week.
I talked to the R.C. last night. She called up to ask whatheheck was going on, since they'd gotten an email from the Denver office saying they were closing because of the snow. I told her that the accumulation (at that time) was minor but that for some reason the storm had Denver tied in knots.
My commute? I made it to the interstate (about a mile) in under ten minutes and then spent 25 minutes going the next mile because the highway was almost at a stop. I bailed off on the first exit that would get me home, only to spend ten minutes moving 50 feet because so many people were bailing off there and trying to go south, just like me. Eventually I'd inched up enough to give up on going south and to be able to get to the northbound exit lane. I took it down to my favorite back road, one that's very flat and a good choice in bad weather, and had no more trouble.
But I marveled at the traffic nightmare around me. My car is unusually light for its size (and is, technically, a subcompact) because of not having the weight of the automatic transmission in it, but I don't think I slid at all on the way home. And yet, the radio kept talking about spinouts and fender-benders and accidents littering every road of the city.
This morning, on the way in, I saw three abandoned cars by the side of the highway. I can only assume these people ran out of gas because of sitting in traffic too long. I mean, total snow accumulation was less than 2" and none of them looked as though they'd been in accidents.
It's just pouring down snow out there. Again. This storm wasn't supposed to really hit until later and then only for about 4" - 6".
After we got off with almost nothing yesterday, I was hoping that our snow-cycle was ending.
I don't have any food. I have to stop at the grocery store on the way home or be reduced to eating--well, what do I have? A can of soup and four hotdogs. None of which are permitted on my diet.
Posted by AnneZook at 03:37 PM | Comments (0)What is it with the 16k+ hits on Peevish last month? What does it take to get rid of hits on a site?
I'm resigned to the weirdness of Yahoo and Google constantly sending "bot" and "slurp" visits my way. (How do people make sites that get "lost" on the internet? Seems to me that the second you post something anywhere online, you get hounded by search engines.)
I've been fighting back at what I can only assume are spammers for the last two weeks. (I'm hoping that if I ban "hosts" it will shut down the random, bandwidth-sucking hits.) I've shut down access to sites from a number of spam-spawning countries. I've eyed a number of other URLs suspiciously but have left them active (although I'm wondering if legit WEBTV really needs that much bandwidth).
I know it's irresponsible of me to leave the site up and unattended. I should be checking for spammers at least weekly and banning hosts and IP addresses, but I have thousands of URLs, site names, and keywords banned already and the hits just keep on coming. I can't just keep banning indiscriminately or I'm going to start accidentally locking actual human beings and friends out of this site as well as that one. (The same blacklist controls access to both.)
I also know there's no way hundreds of actual people are checking that site daily. What else can I do to lower the number of "visits" the site gets in a day?
The assumption has to be that none of those "visits" are real people. (Consequently, the assumption has to be that even back when I was posting, I should have been mentally subtracting around 500 "visits" each day to see how many actual readers I had) How do I get rid of them?
I've banned about 175 sites and/or hosts in the last two weeks. I'm waiting in breathless anticipation (at least until I forget) to see if this month's stats are any more reasonable.
I'm leaving early. I missed lunch today, and I have half an hour of being yelled at by my boss to make up for from yesterday.
I don't want to go into boring details, but yesterday evening was just icky. I didn't get to bed until 11:30 again, but this time it was because I was upset and having to calm down.
How did it begin? Well, typically, Bernie promised a client something last week and then never thought about it again. At least, not until 4:55 yesterday evening, when he got an email saying they needed it today.
Skipping the ranty bits, let's just say it involved pulling me out of my meeting with TechBoy and wasting my one chance to get the tech part of the office move set up to run smoothly, keeping me in the office until I was late for my 6:00 get-together with a friend (and for which I realized I didn't have directions anyhow), discovering that Bernie saying he was "working with Scooby on the database" over the last couple of months meant nothing of the kind, the discovery that Scooby himself has actually been doing nothing with the information I've been sending him for the last two months, and all climaxed with Bernie calling me at 10:06 last night to yell at me for sending the client too much information when I got home, got online, and tried to finish up the project at 8:00 last night.
Today Bernie's inventing new complications and telling unnecessary lies that are going to bite him in the butt in a few days, all so he doesn't have to say, "your name was not on the mailing list" to the new head of the Board of Directors.
I'm not good at lies, okay? They make me tense. You have to be smarter than me or something to keep track of what lies you've told what people. I don't want to live that kind of a complicated life.