Tales from the Den of Chaos

And this will make no more sense than the other one did!

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Thu, 31 May 2012 01:50:00 +0000

So, first: My insanely fancy bean trellis!

There is, of course, a story here, and it goes like this. Last year, I planted just a couple of Stueben yellow-eyed beans on something of a whim. I got about seven pods out of the two plants, which turned out to be (I thought) pole-bean type. (There are both pole and bush types of these, so, planting store-bought beans really was a crap-shoot that way.)

I harvested those pods, carefully and gently dried the beans, and put them into my seed box. There were exactly twenty beans-worth-saving. And then this year, I stuck my bean towers in the ground, planted the beans and waited.

They grew, and grew, and grew…and did not show the slightest sign of wanting to vine. Instead, they were acting extremely bush-like. They were spreading out instead of striving up. Every other day, I would inspect them closely, looking for the telltale tendrils that say, “Hi. I’m a vine, and I’m looking for something I can climb!”

Nada.

Eventually, as my midget not-pole beans began crowding around the base of the coveted bean towers and still not reaching, you know, up, I thought I had to be suffering some form of memory loss and that these had actually been bush-type beans.

And thus it was that I yanked the bean towers out, patted the beans fondly on their collective little blossoms and moved the towers over to become cucumber towers instead.

…about, oh, two days after the cucumbers were coming up? Vines.

On the one hand, I’m a bit relieved that they are, indeed, pole beans. Because I had such vivid memories on that front, and was frankly a bit perturbed by the fact that I had been so thoroughly wrong. I mean, what else am I not remembering quite right? I might be rich, famous and glamorous right now! Only I don’t remember it that way!

On the other hand, now I’m a bit perturbed by the fact that I was so willing to talk myself out of what I knew was the case. I remember the vines. I remember dealing with the vines. I was growing them on this little oddball patch of dirt, just to see what would happen. And they grew into these insanely long vines.

But I talked myself out of that pretty easily, all things considered. Which worries me. Because, seriously: What if I am actually filthy rich, but talked myself out of it because I thought I had conclusive evidence to the contrary, but I was wrong?!

These are the things that keep me up at night. Along with low back pain and, thanks to Recent Developments, a rollicking case of nausea and really vivid dreams that make even less sense than my usual rather…cough-cough…quirky subconscious offerings. (Y’all can imagine, right?)

In related news, today was my first work from home day. I worked from home today because yesterday I was pretty sure I was going to barf or something. Plus I almost just sort of randomly fell over backwards on an escalator because my inner ear got into a fist-fight with my other senses and kept insisting I had to lean back! further! further! QUICK, YOU’RE GOING TO FALL FORWARD OFF THIS THING, IT’S MOVING WAY FASTER THAN YOU THINK IT IS!

YA KNOW…I’d forgotten just how badly birth control messes with my system.

But it is coming back to me – oh yes, it is definitely coming back to me.

Last night, I was awake an irritatingly large chunk of the night because of stomach cramping and other complaints – like my stomach insisting I was going to throw up any second and then going, “Ha ha, fooled you!!” after I’d clawed my way out of bed to crouch obediently in the bathroom for a while.

This morning, I looked at the package of birth control pills, thought about yesterday’s middle-of-day smackdown (which felt like somebody had punched me in the gut with a syringe full of stomach flu virus or something), and decided that in my considered opinion, I could not support the given instructions to take one of the blasted things twice daily for the first week because said instructions violate my Personal Code, which includes among many other things the fact I will not turn a blind eye to human arrogance.

BECAUSE I MEAN, YOU KNOW…what is a week? It’s just a meaningless human construct we’ve erected in a pathetic attempt to declare ourselves the masters of the world we inhabit by inflicting our own rules on its nature; thus we divide a cycle of dark-follows-light into blocks that only make sense to someone who has lost three of their fingers in a tragic gardening accident (ooo, I so can relate!) and call it “a week.”

Because that person also couldn’t spell and was trying to describe how they felt after the accident, see? It’s all just made up, people! And I refuse to support such hubris by obeying instructions such as, “Take one pill twice daily for one week.”

{cue vaguely patriotic music}

We must face our uncertainties, embrace our own smallness, and not continue to double-down on chemicals which are making us almost fall over backwards on a BART escalator due to a sudden wave of vertigo. Word.

(Yes. I am the queen of rationalization and amplification.)

(Also, someday I fully expect that I will drop dead of something completely preventable because of logic very similar to this.)

(But, not this time. My hormones just got lost while trying to navigate through a normal menstrual cycle a few months ago. And then my body got all confused about whether or not it was pregnant, decided it totally was, and hilarity ensued.)

(Said hilarity being even worse than side effects of the hormones? I guess I’ll put up with it.)

(But not twice daily for an arbitrary duration set by human beings on a power trip. Because I have SOME standards.)

But other than THAT…

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Wed, 30 May 2012 02:35:00 +0000

So, last week was…eventful. Although I suppose technically, it wasn’t so much last week being eventual as last week being when a whack of existing Crazy all decided to come together in a tsunami of scurrying around like a demented hamster on Red Bull.

I started my new job last week Wednesday, which of course has resulted in a complete and utter breakdown of my entire life. I can’t find anything. I have no idea where I’m going. I can’t remember what forms I’ve filled out, and which ones I haven’t. I know I’ve forgotten something, but have no idea what category to look in to figure out what I’ve forgotten.

Meanwhile in other news…Skyrim. Oh yes, it has bitten me. For those who are not crazy people suffering from a serious case of arrested development, this is a video game. A deeply immersive video game. One that should possibly be investigated as possibly being way too addictive.

I strongly suspect it should be available only by prescription. Or possibly put on the…whatever that list is called for drugs that are highly addictive and have no medicinal purposes whatsoever. It is the sort of game that makes time do strange things – like, get this, I literally thought I was playing for “just” a couple hours while the boys were watching their UFC.

And then, like, six hours had gone by. I didn’t realize how much time had actually passed until I suddenly became aware that the light was changing outside. (And of course, the husband didn’t march in to admit that his show was over because that would have meant I would have been all, “OK! Let’s go take care of that yardwork, woo hoo!” so instead he put on another show, and then another one, and pretty much kept that up so that every time I would pause the game to listen for “his show” still going on, by golly, I heard something that sounded like his show still going on…)

I have to actually set a timer for myself whenever I play this stupid game. It’s ridiculous. It also doesn’t help that the husband thinks it is “cute” when I disappear into this realm of Advanced Geekdom (where I am a Level 42 Dork, thank you very much). He actually encourages this behavior! (Because ~~it gets him out of doing work himself, see digression above for example~~ that’s how swell a guy he is, always looking out for my R&R needs and such.)

PLUS, I have been having…well…girl-issues. And while I think we’re on the way to resolved there, we are also…not EXACTLY resolved.

And the treatment is making me extremely nauseous. (Birth control pills. Hated them then, still hate them now. Also, blech!)

WHICH REMINDS ME…guess what happened yesterday?

SO, one of the Denizens decided that it was necessary for her to have the reading light on over her seat. And since it was broad frickin’ daylight at the time (don’t start me), whoever was driving at the time didn’t notice it was on. (We shall also ignore that I have on numerous occasions informed the Other Parties Old Enough To Be Driving that the master kill-switch for said lights should always be in the ‘off’ position, because of exactly this, which has now happened at least three times and I thought I said ‘don’t start me’ so why am I starting me…?)

Thus it was left on, until Homer the Odyssey’s battery was completely dead – so dead that the remote entry system wouldn’t unlock anything. So dead that there wasn’t even a click-click-click when we tried to start him.

So we come to Monday morning at 9:00, when we were piling into him to head to a friend’s house. We knew the van was dead, so we got out the jumper cables, hooked Homer up to Albert the Civic and vroom! - Homer roared back to life.

And by “roared” I mean “honked and flashed his lights.”

For.
Ten.
Straight.
Minutes.

(Which is a lot longer when you’re sitting in a noisily-honking vehicle than it is while watching your favorite show or something. Trust me on this.)

SEE, the battery was so dead that Homer couldn’t tell that what had started him up was an authorized key. AS AN ADDED BENEFIT TO US, Honda has added this thing where the key itself has a microchip that tells the van that the key in the ignition is a “real” key. If he doesn’t “see” that microchip, he assumes he is being stolen.

Yeah. It was awesome. I had to sit there like an idiot in that noisy vehicle, waiting for it to have just enough charge that I could use the remote entry system again – thus reassuring Homer that yeah, it really IS me, Stupid!!

{rubs temples}

Have you ever suspected that the Universe was just messin’ with you?

Yeah, so I wasn’t all that surprised when I got the message from the lab that my blood work was in and, well, there was a THING there.

Sometimes, I rather dislike the super-informed world that we live in. Because I suspect I saw these results before the doctor who ordered the tests did, and thus I have been groaning and grimacing to myself all day, waiting for the phone call from his office.

Mind you, I’m not a doctor or anything, but when I cast my mind over the last about two months and am tallying up at least five separate infections I’ve had from my sinuses to my…well, let’s gloss over that…call me crazy, but I’d say that me having rather elevated white blood cell counts right now would be perfectly normal and even expected, really.

If I were a doctor (which again, I’m not, but, let’s pretend), I would say, “OK, given All That, how about if we wait x-many weeks and do another test to see if they’ve gone down in the meantime.”

This is because I ~~can think of a thousand and five other things I’d rather be doing with my time than going in for endless tests and other expensive and/or painful and/or embarrassing and/or pointless things~~ am rather conservative when it comes to Such Things.

It’s like the old least said, soonest mended thing. Only it’s more like least irritated, soonest healed up.

And I know, I know in my heart of hearts, that this yahoo is going to jump all over this and rush me around for full-body scans and whackity-majillion tests and after everybody and his uncle has fondled every last one of your parts, let’s throw fifteen medications at it and after many annoyances it will transpire that I just hadn’t actually taken the infections to the mat the way I thought I had. Or that I did, but, my white blood cells are still preening and posing in front of mirrors, bristling their muscles at each other and saying, “I’ll be back!” in accents thicker than any of the Terminator iterations. And possibly writing their names in the snow before pounding back a few beers and then attempting to use a popcorn maker to heat the whirlpool they just built in the back of somebody’s pickup truck using a whole lot of yard waste bags and duct tape.

That’s how bright I suspect my white blood cells are. Plug’er in, Joe, see what she does! {ZZZZZZZOT!} Woooooo, free perm! Looks good on ya, buddy! Har-dee-har-har-har!!!

I have no idea where I’m going with all this. But I do know that right now, I am not defeating the minions of darkness with my bad archery skills. Coupled with rather impressive ~~thieving~~ wealth redistribution talents.

(Dudes…I can sneak up on a fox and grab it with my bare hands. That is how bad I am.)

(You know, in…uh…the…video…yeah, um, never mind…)

(I totally owe you pictures of the garden. I built a bean trellis yesterday, but it is too dark to take a picture of it right now. It is so “country chic” it looks like it should have cost a lot of money or something. Determinedly Rustic Bean Trellis, $280. But it’s actually just random scrap wood from the tree removal and some recycled twine from some other thing I did at some point. Is it a vegetable garden, or is it art? All depends on the eye of the beholder, oui…?)

Well...here's something I did not know about me

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:44:00 +0000

"Hi! My name is Lisa, and I am a gynecology student at Medical University - is it all right if I do your exam today under the supervision of Dr. Dude?"

Me: "That's fine by me!"

"Hi! My name is Lisa and I am a certified hair stylist, here is my state-issued license! This is my orientation week here at Discount Cuts R Us - would you mind if I did your trim today under the supervision of That Stylist Who Has Been Here Longer Than Forever?"

Me: "Ummmmmmm...errrrrrrrrrr...wellllllllllll..."

To sum up: Apparently I have no problem with a student using my cervix as a hands-on learning experience...but have CONCERNS about a fully graduated hair stylist nicking a quarter-inch of fur off my head under supervision at a DISCOUNT HAIR-CHOP SHOP.

...I don't think I want to know what this probably says about me...

Sweet!!

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Wed, 16 May 2012 22:24:00 +0000

Heh-heh-heh-heh…check THIS out (alternative phrasing: “Hey – hold my beer and watch this!”):

MWA-HAHAHAHAHAHA! That’s right, cute little birds! This year, we got the netting up the instant there was a tiny, faint little blush on the cherries.

And all the birdies say, OoooOOOOoooOOOOoooooh, SNAP!!!! We don’t get ANY of those this year?!

No. No you do not, birds!

Well. You might get one or two that is poking out of the netting if you’re particularly bold and some junk, but the vast majority of these little beauties?

Mine, yo.

(OHMYGAH, isn’t that just the most…Valentines-day-ish photo ever? Leaving aside the fact that my kitchen table looks like something from a biker bar in the middle of the desert that is also a truck stop and orphanage, of course. Which it totally does. Also we’re down to five ‘actual’ chairs plus my spinning chair because of course they broke a chair. And the husband told me he couldn’t fix it. Which broke my brain and upset my trust in the whole universe, because in my mind, broken stuff + husband = fixed stuff, no exceptions.)

(Also, there is a slight chance that I have not quite recovered from the emotional trauma of The Great Cherry Debacle of 2011, wherein I looked out my kitchen window one morning and said, thoughtfully and with the air of a scholar, “Oh, hey, lookit that, I do believe those cherries are thinking about getting ripe…we probably better get those nets over the trees before the birds get started on them!” – and by 4:30 that afternoon, there was not even ONE lousy semi-pink cherry left. {sobs} Sure, OK, fine, granted, it was only going to be, eh, maybe half a cup of the things altogether…but they were my lousy half-cup of ~~rubies~~ cherries, and I wanted them. STUPID BIRDS.)

This is not exactly how I envisioned it

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:57:00 +0000

YA KNOW…I thought that this period of between-contract-ness would be filled with all sorts of practi-creative endeavors.

Things like, I dunno, posting to this blog more than once a month or so?!

Things like…blowing the dust off my poor, neglected rigid heddle loom and cracking through some of my yarn stash. Dyeing up the t-shirt blanks out in the garage. Starting some good hard soaps curing. Filling the house with potted edible plants (it has always bugged me how we don’t have much greenery in here!). Putting up more recent pictures of the Denizens in the frames scattered around the house. Actual Decorating As Such, in other words.

The clean, folded laundry wouldn’t sit on the dining room table for weeks on end. The kitchen would always be clean. Or in the process of getting that way. I would cure the annual ant invasion before it even got started by keeping the crumbs off the floor. (HAHAHAHAHA, good one!) I would apply some oil to the kitchen cupboards. And shampoo the car’s seats so that I no longer had to drape napkins strategically to prevent getting sticky something all over my work clothes. (Sadly, I am totally not lying right now.)

There would be so many things finished by now. I would be a frickin’ Martha Stewart, with a hefty serving of Awesome Mother on the side and also there would be music and pies would be baked and it would be just so gaw-dam-ed PERFECT around here that we would make headlines around the world.

That was the plan, anyway.

Instead, I’ve been spending my days dealing with other stuff. Job searching. Paperwork. Testing for various job positions. Researching companies I’m planning to interview with so I have at least some idea what they actually do. Doing interviews that seemed to last for hours, for positions that ultimately went nowhere – either because they never called back, or I thought I would find them almost as enjoyable as trying to get sand out of my eyes using a toothpick.

I’ve got something lined up now and am in that holding pattern where everything is racked up and ready to go…but we need somebody at the client to actually sign off on it. {twiddles thumbs} Should happen…any time now…

I’d have to say, though, the one thing that is really eating up my time is all around brushing up on the stuff I haven’t been using lately in SQL Server.

I love my whole industry rather madly, but I have to admit: It’s awfully…big. The sheer volume of stuff I should at least be aware of (if not “expert” in using) is massive. And if I ever get to a point where I start thinking, …yeah…I’ve GOT this…, well, they’ll go and release a new version with a thumping huge list of new features. ARGH!

I had 2000 pretty well down. Then they went to 2005, which is what I’ve been working on the last three years at MegaBank. I’ve gotten most of the new analytic and engine features down now…but, the new stuff in 2008 and 2012 are new pages for me. Dammit.

I don’t think I fully realized when I got into this business that I would never, ever be completely out of school, you know? Every day, there’s something new to learn, some new feature, or some new use for an existing one, being published out there.

It’s a double-edged sword, really. On the one hand, if it wasn’t that way, I’m sure I’d get bored and wander off. That’s kind of how I am: If I’ve “mastered” something, I lose interest in it and want to do something else now.

So something that is constantly shifting and changing, adding new things, getting rid of old things, and evolving…is a good fit for my overall temperament.

But at the same time…gee whiz. I’m probably working more hours now getting caught up on whatever-all else has been going on out there in SQL Server Land while I was playing with “just” this set of features in 2005 than I worked while I was trying to finish up my project at MegaBank.

I want to learn it. I want to keep getting better and better at this. And this is one of the ways I’ll do it – by keeping up as best I can with the new stuff as it comes in, and refusing to cling to my old ways of doing things until the last possible second.

I don’t want to end up somebody for whom “twenty years experience” means “I have experienced the same year twenty times.”

That’s lame.

Still.

At times like these…

…I have to admit…

…I do rather wish these young pups would slow down a little, and quit releasing new things into the world every eight seconds that somebody like me then has to read up on, and puzzle through, and figure out if, and where, and how I can apply them to the sorts of things I’m doing.

Because there is a huge stack of folded laundry on the dining room table right now. And seriously, those car seats…they need shampooing.

…sigh…

This is not how I envisioned this “break” between contracts going down.

Oh well. I guess whining about it doesn’t help much either, does it…also, I think I’m going to take a break from NTILE functions and MERGE statements and take care of that car.

Because it is bugging me, something fierce.

I hope everybody else is having a less dry and pragmatic sort of week…I’m starting to suspect my life ranks pretty high on the “most boring person alive” list right now…

Never has not working involved so much work

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:47:00 +0000

I had forgotten how days begin to blur together when I’m not working; also, I had forgotten about That Thing I do when I don’t have actual obligations-as-such to be in such-and-so a place and this-or-that a time, when there are no specific due dates to speak of, or (at least sorta) clear tasks laid out before me to accomplish.

Which is that I promptly invent enough work to keep six people busy for three months, and then naively expect that I can totally churn through All That in, what, half a day?

{rubs temples}

I really need Whatever’s Next to…um…get started. I had a start date of Monday, but then it turned out that somebody hadn’t actually put a full blessing on the scope of work sooooo actually, I’m still kind of pending having a start-date, but PROBABLY soon, except that I’m not sure what the definition of “soon” is in this particular usage.

Could be a couple days.

Could be a couple weeks.

The people having to sign things don’t have the same sense of urgency I do. Probably because they are not the ones facing down a huge list of such faaaaascinating tasks as “doing something with all those damned school pictures that have been piling up everywhere since the dawn of time” or “try to figure out where The Randomizer has put most of my cookware.”

One major downside of having “help” with the cleaning: It now takes an extra half hour for me to do anything because first? I have to find the tools I need to do it. SEARCH EVERY DRAWER, MEN, THAT ROLLING PIN HAS GOT TO BE HERE SOMEWHERE…!!!!

But going back to the pictures thing…am I the only person who finds it almost physically painful to throw out duplicate pictures of their kids? Duplicate pictures, mind you. We’re not talking about “this is the ONLY such picture in existence.” We’re talking about “I have 20 wallet-sized, four 4x6, and one 8x10 of this same exact picture of a sulky-looking Eldest who probably didn’t want to be wearing that shirt or something.”

And yet, whenever I try to toss all but one or maybe two of the extras that nobody wanted…it’s like they stick to my fingers or something.

It feels a lot like throwing away their artwork. Which is another thing I have trouble doing, although I’ve had to get over that one because otherwise we would have been forced to start living in the van by now due to the overwhelming volume of artwork those kids can produce.

My scanner is my best friend, y’all.

OK, so, going back to the whole start-date thing…it also turned out that somebody’s minion in the contractor management system realms noticed that the ‘has taken SQL test’ box hadn’t been checked, and thus requested that I present myself for one.

To which the folks handling the corp-to-corp billing went, “…seriously?!...”

And then they called me about it and I went, “…are you even being serious right now…?” – because I’m not coming in as some unknown person who just wandered in off the streets looking for a job. I’m only there because I know a guy who is in charge of some things, and he knows me, and we have worked together, and he has seen my code and knows my (ahem) quirky personality and (somewhat obsessive-compulsive) work ethic and yet when I asked if he had anything going I’d be a good fit for, still thought that hell yes, he had some things I could do for him.

Which is about the best way for me to find a new gig, you know? This guy is super-sharp, very good at what he does, and won’t think the easy stuff is hard and the hard stuff is easy; plus, he won’t be giving me stupid things to do, or, expecting me to do stuff that is so beyond my current skill set and then being all, “Ohmygah, I totally thought you could do that!” when I tell him so.

If I know him at all (and I think I do), this gig will be interesting, fun, challenging enough for me to grow my skills but not so hard that I want to cry a lot.

(Because I despise crying. I do not resemble a Victorian-era heroine when I cry, swooning delicately into a lace hankie or something…I look like something out of a B horror movie about zombie alien swamp creatures from the high school next to the nuclear waste pond.)

BUT…how would the contracting-system minion know that there is this connection? And if they have their set of hoops that one is supposed to dance through, well, I’ve generally found that it’s usually going to be better to just do it.

And besides…I’m not afraid of a SQL test. (Now, a .NET test? Or anything dealing with XML, which is looking like the next thing I’m going to be forced to figure out how to play with in database-speak whether I like it or not? Those. Would. Scare. Me. A. Bit.)

Fortunately, even though it was timed and all, I was able to take it from here at home. Yay, not having to commute just to take a stupid test!

Unfortunately, I was also given a rather long block of time for it – up to two hours. Uh-oh…that’s too long…how detailed / long IS this thing, anyway…?

The test itself wasn’t bad. I had a first draft of answers done in about thirty minutes.

Which meant I only used up a quarter of my available time.

Which meant that I had plenty of time to go back over it to just kind of double check real quick that I hadn’t done something painfully silly.

Now, most of the time – especially on tests like these, which by nature can’t generally get too crazy in terms of table structures and what conditions are wanted – the answers they’re looking for are very, very simple. The “obvious” answer is usually the “right” answer…although frankly just about every question you’re going to answer in SQL has at least two ways you could get that same answer.

This leads me to the Pitfall of Being Experienced which is over-frickin-thinking things.

Which is why I started going, “Wellllllllllllll, sure, you could just join the table back to itself and that works and all…buuuuuuuut, you could also do this, which would tighten the whole thing up and is just kind of cooler and usually runs a little faster…and frankly, who on earth would just want straight-up just-those-fields, that would be kind of lame and meaningless, sooooooooo, what I’d probably do is add in variables so that you could customize on the fly to isolate the individual buckets…ACTUALLY, YOU KNOW WHAT? This whole damned thing should be meta-data driven…so, we start with CREATE TABLE store_variable AS…

{three hours later}

“…and that’s how you build yourself a customized reporting system, son! Enjoy!”

{face-palm}

Seriously, Tama, all you needed was a left self-join to the blasted table…or a simple CTE so that you could do a recursive query to do the same thing…speaking of, you know what else could be cool…?

{another three hours later}

“…and THAT’S a really clever way that you COULD use DENSE_RANK to do the same thing but with more robust sort-by capabilities!!”

{head-desk}

People…I wrote almost two pages of essay on the “new” ranking functions (new as of SQL Server 2005, not “new” as in “just came out”). Geez.

AND THEN…I moved on to the PIVOT / UNPIVOT functions.

I seriously need a hobby. OH LOOK, THERE’S ONE NOW!

This is the Oceanspray shawl I cast on a couple weeks ago. I expect I will finish it just in time to wear it when I move into the old folks home, because it is now taking me about twenty minutes to finish each row and I’m only on row 50 of 128 for the main section. And then there’s the garter stitch and then there’s that beautiful Elm Leaf border to go.

Dear Me: What do you have against simple things?

(By the way, all of this is just a con…I’m totally trying to avoid dealing with those pictures. I can feel them sitting on the table behind me right now. Glaring at me. We are not just going away, you know, they are saying. You can write FIFTY blog pages about absolutely nothing, we will STILL be here…waiting for you to woman-up and DO something with us… It’s like being haunted by glossy scraps of paper, y’all. Seriously.)

(OK, fine. I’m going to deal with the pictures now. Before they do any breeding. Gads. That would explain a lot, actually, if pictures could do that…)

That it all may be

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Thu, 03 May 2012 05:19:00 +0000

Today, I made dirt.

I know. My life is exactly that exciting. Wooooo! It’s better than Pay Day! It’s Dirt Day!

Oh hai! We’re your new beds made up of masonry you got off Freecycle, that you wanted to put watermelons, okra, peppers and a Denizen-managed Gosh Knows What They’re Going To Do With It in today! BUT FIRST…you’re gonna need some fresh PLANTIN’ DIRT…

…which you get from here…

…by way of this doohickey…

…which sifts out all of THIS kind of stuff…

…and leaves you – TA DA! – dirt! Yay, dirt!...now, just do that about 62,781 times and you’ll be SET…

In related news, this is some of the most tiring, tedious and otherwise not my favorite jobs I inflict upon myself out there in the garden.

It’s downright monotonous, really.

Four shovels of Composty Matter…shake, stir, sift, shake, stir, sift…bang-bang-bang against the edge of the wheelbarrow…shake, stir, sift, shake, stir, sift…carry sifter to first compost bin so Composty Matter that didn’t, uh, compost enough can go to summer school…wheel the wheelbarrow wherever the dirt is wanted…lather, rinse, repeat…

It takes an awful lot of wheelbarrows to fill up new beds. It also takes an awful lot of them to refresh existing beds. And the other various containers.

Like these, for the Cherokee Purple tomatoes.

Or these, for the container zucchini.

…you seek to CONTAIN us…? hahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!

It’s an excellent task for those times when thinking has become a kind of hell, the onslaught of ideas and memories and remember-this and forgot-that and what if and how about turn into a murder of crows inside my head – a party of one making enough noise for a party of a thousand, and I just really wish I’d shut the hell up for five seconds.

So much of life today is so intangible, really; I’m up to my eyebrows in things like insurance, pondering cash base versus accrual, dealing with various esteemed personages who regret to inform me that the form they told me to send was not the form I should have sent and required two more signatures anyway…fees and summer camps and music lessons and whether or not it is more or less economically/ecologically viable to use paper or plastic…

All these Very Grownup Things frequently strike me as being…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. A pathetic attempt on the part of an increasingly spoiled race who, having largely removed the fear of being eaten by tigers or starving to death from their existence, needs must create new, equally-urgent and horrifying things to worry and pace themselves into an early grave over.

Sometimes, I think we were better off with the tigers and famine…they were quicker and more humane killers than our current poisons of obesity, inactivity, endless worry over ultimately nothing and constant striving to achieve amorphous somethings that never seem to be finished but always remain ever so SLIGHTLY out of our reach.

Do you have ANY IDEA how many carbon tennis shoes it took to print that receipt? Well, DO YOU?!?! You are worse than ten nuclear bombs, sixteen thousand vehicles AND all the cow farts of the Central Valley COMBINED, Mr. Yes I Would Like A Receipt…!!!!!

AND YET, however much I know that all these things are made up of nothing, that these weighty decisions are all equally likely to succeed or fail and that really…at the end of the day…it matters more that I simply do my best than make myself crazy(er) looking for the best decision…even so…I do it. I strut and fret my hour, my dismal hour, upon the stage…whining and worrying and turning the same phrases over and over and over again.

Making dirt, though…it’s very real. There isn’t a whole lot of thought in it; no weighty decisions; no carbon footprints or denuded rain forests; no political upheaval or tax implications.

Nobody’s God approves or disapproves.

It’s the sort of task that rather puts things into perspective for me – all those civilized things fall silent as what was a hodgepodge of weeds, trimmings, kitchen waste and ripped up paper becomes, one shovel after another, dirt.

Rich, life-bearing dirt.

It’s a humble sort of miracle, really, that looks all that huff and bother we call “important grownup stuff” these days and just…waits, for us to realize how silly it all is.

Not much gets more humble than dirt, after all…and yet…and yet…without it?

…not a lemon would grow…

…let alone an onion…

…or little green apples…

…or impudent horseradish bushes…

…no pak choi…

…or peas…

…let alone potatoes! not inside…

…or out!

…and blackberry blossoms could never, ever be.

And what have we learned today…?

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:02:00 +0000

Last night as I was settling into an evening plan that featured a shower, knitting and something martial arts-y on Netflix, someone came upstairs and said the husband wanted me out in front of the house.

For something that wasn’t good.

I was expecting something like a broken tool in the garage, or a fallen-over fence part, or even a stolen lawnmower.

I was not expecting that one of the Denizens had thrown a toy gemstone toward the neighbor’s lawn, instead pitching it into the back window of another neighbor’s Explorer – shattering it in a glorious shower of safety glass nuggets.

Holy Crap, Child!

(And right here I have to own up to a peculiarly bizarre form of pride, because one of my first coherent thoughts upon witnessing this and hefting the Implement of Destruction in my hand, was Wow…I had no idea she had that good an arm on her! Not bad, kiddo! – and then I was all, No! No, Tama! BAD THINKING! You are supposed to be all angry and saddened and SERIOUS right now, not thinking that maybe what this kid needs most is to do time on a baseball time to learn how to AIM a little better…!)

(I am dying to get the girls into some form of sports. They don’t “do” sports. They do chess club and book club and art club, but nothing that involves running / kicking / throwing / sweating. This is called “being exactly like their father at that age.” Whereas I was one of those kids who had to have the {volley, base, basket, foot} ball pried out of her claw-like hands at night and be dragged home kicking and screaming the whole way about how unfair it all was. STUPID DINNER, WHO NEEDS IT, I WAS GONNA WIN!!!)

So I put on Serious Face and made Serious Noises. And I felt bad for Danger Mouse, because she’s crying and embarrassed as all @*^&@, and has that look that clearly says, “Why won’t the earth just open up and swallow me right now?!”

I finally sent her into the house to have a little witness-free panic attack while we grownups stood around and talked about kids today and how they all do that and making arrangement with the neighbors to take ownership of their out of pocket costs for replacing it, and so on and so on.

These neighbors, by the way, are a “no kids” household. Which was part of the reason the kids were all terrified about having broken out one of their windows. We have told them approximately 32 million times to stay the heck away from that house. Right now, there is a (guesstimate) 30-foot boat (not theirs, but parked right there nonetheless because of course it is!), an equally enormous RV, two Corvettes, the Explorer, a vintage VW bug and a very new Civic hybrid in and around that driveway.

It’s just not a good place for a pack of children to be getting all wild and crazy, you know?

They are not “kid people,” either. They’re nice folks and don’t have any active dislike for children, but they’re also not people who are like, um, well, me.

I dote and fawn and forgive just about anything kids get into, really. They’re going to be messy and noisy and obnoxious, they break things and eat stuff you were saving for something else. It’s sometimes really hard for me to act like The Mom©, too; I mean, how do I look them in the eye and be all, “That was wrong, girls, very wrong indeed…!” about something I did about eight thousand times myself at their ages?

They’re more of the “I guess we’ll just have to tolerate this for a while, until they all grow up and leave” variety. And we try to keep the kids from frolicking around their stuff, but at the same time…kids are like cats that way.

Have you ever noticed that if there is one person in an entire crowd of people who has a dislike for cats that borders on a phobia, and there is a cat anywhere in the vicinity, the varmint will hone in on that one person and begin making all kinds of love at them?

Kids do that with people who don’t really like kids, too. My youngsters had to be watched like hawks whenever they had sidewalk chalk, because the little Rembrandts would migrate themselves to the one driveway in the court that was acid-washed annually to keep it in like-new gray glory (whereas the rest of us go with the mottled “interesting patterns created by ~~allowing crap to Just Sit on your driveway, like, FOREVER, instead of sweeping it regularly~~ strategically allowing certain natural elements to imprint random dyes into the concrete over time” look).

Sigh.

Well…it’s probably going to be a rather pricy way to learn a lesson about thinking about what is going to happen before the object has left your hand – which is, frankly, not one of Danger Mouse’s stronger points. She will still do the darnedest things, only realizing it was a terrible idea after the goats are running around downtown eating the petunias and pooping on the sidewalks.

And I think an excellent way to reinforce that lesson would be to sign her up for a season of baseball. If you wanna be throwing things, here’s a few pointers, honey…

Never a dull moment...more's the pity...

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:35:00 +0000

OK, OK, I admit it: I was kind of looking forward to a protracted period of “puttering around.” With the job market still on the “meh” side overall, and with my last week (my first week of actually contacting people about job possibilities instead of merely thinking about doing so) ending with only one interview actually scheduled, I had even held a small celebration inside my head. Lookin’ good for a couple MONTHS of this sleeping-in, puttering-around, organizing-EVERYTHING thing, woot!

Someday, I expect that I will learn to never, ever do such things; to never congratulate myself on having pulled something / anything off, or decide that this will happen in just so a way…and certainly not to make any acknowledgement of seeming success, even in the silence of my own mind.

BECAUSE, well, y’all can probably guess what started happening, right?

I spent most of the day Friday loading a borrowed pickup truck with dirt and masonry; when I finally called it a day, I was feeling really yucky so I just sort of flopped…and didn’t notice that I had, I kid you not, fourteen missed calls.

FOURTEEN. And ten of them left voicemail messages that I didn’t return until Monday. Oops.

It has not gotten any better in the meantime. I have now come to a point where I have my phone set to silent and am simply not picking up calls from numbers I don’t recognize. My email is a scary place to visit.

I have had seven interviews already this week, and was actually happy that the one I had scheduled for today got cancelled yesterday. Sweet! A whole day to mull over what I already have on offer!!

(Or catch up on my blog reading. Either way.)

Just a hunch…but I strongly suspect I will be back to work rather quickly.

Which has me in this weird head-space where I’m torn between do nothing and do everything.

Part of me wants to have everything in the whole entire house cleaned / organized / purged / put away ASAP. Once I’m back to work, I know my available time for Such Things is going to return to being “sharply limited” again.

Part of me just wants to sit here knitting and watching stuff on Netflix all day. With occasional pauses to walk around the garden looking like I know what I’m doing, bake something, or play video games. Because I also know my time for that kind of thing is going to be even more limited and dammit…it feels pretty nice. I could get used to sleeping in, loafing around, and taking inclement weather as sign that God approves of the work I’ve already done, so I should go ahead and slack off now. (Thank you, God! Love you! Mean it!)

I’m 99% sure I know which thing I’m going to be taking. And I’m 99% sure that if I do take it, I’m going to find myself so fully absorbed in it that I’ll be right back where I was at the end of my work for MegaBank – having trouble disengaging from it at the end of the day, with saying, “That’s enough for this week, let’s pack it in and do something else now!”

It’s the database version of ‘one more row’ syndrome, really; I just wanna get this one more thing figured out, I just wanna get five seconds more shaved off this query, I just wanna fix this one last report.

…lemme just check that real quick…{three hours pass}

Well…at least I’m not bored, right? Which is good, because y’all know how I feel about being bored…and besides, when I am bored, I get dangerous, because I start coming up with all kinds of great ideas that will inevitably lead to shovels, hammers, rakes, wheelbarrows, lots of sweat and grime and other things that can only be called “fun” if you are playing the Opposite Game.

It’s going to be yet another interesting year around here, I suspect…

Crazy + Spring

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 03:10:00 +0000

GUESS WHAT? It’s spring.

GUESS WHAT ELSE? I am crazy.

Spring + Crazy =

Yeah, GOT to do something about all those WEEDS…

Ah, that’s better…

Argh, my TOE! How long are these things going to SIT here, anyway? Been, what, like, three YEARS now or something?!?!

HMMMMMMMM…

THERE you go!

This is what spring tends to look like around here; as we were building a second, smaller box with (almost all) of the remaining bricks, I asked the husband (rhetorically, since I already knew the answer) if All This would ever be, you know, done. Would I ever, ever have a “finished” yard?

He, of course, responded by giving me A Look, laughing, and saying, “Um, no. You will never stop tweaking and fiddling around with stuff out here.”

Sigh. He’s undoubtedly right. But I have to say, my empire is beginning to resign itself to being under my rule again. We have artichokes.

And cherries starting to form.

And baby apples.

Brussel sprouts (with bonus potato, because of course a potato plant came up).

Beets and bell peppers and a few stray carrots.

And even a few wheat stalks that survived the Bird Invasion of Just After Planting Time.

I planted some corn and pumpkin among the wheat, and bordered the whole bed with yellow onion sets; later, I’ll drop some scarlet runner beans among the corn and let them climb in and around the stalks.

There are twenty-four roma plants in the back bed, with basil planted all around them, and four Blue Nile potato bushes in the apparently now Forever Blue Nile Potato Bed. (There is also what I’m pretty sure is another Blue Nile bush growing in the compost bin. Heh. Persistent little dickens, ain’t they?!) Four cucumbers in the front box. Two container zucchini flanking the sliding glass door. Peas all around the Found Object, with a curving of pak choi around it.

There are bush cherries coming to go along the sunny back fence, and a morel habitat to take up residence along the dark-side side fence…we’ve already been finding a few morels back there for the last few years (I KNOW, RIGHT?!?!), so I figured since they obviously already like it back there, we’d go ahead and spore the dickens out of it and see what happens.

The blackberries have been gently tied up to their new trellis. The second brick-box is full of butternut squash (which I’m going to encourage up a tripod as it begins to vine and get all crazy like it always does), and the first one shown above is being held for the strawberries that are on the way. Stuben yellow eyed beans are all around the bean towers, soon to be climbing up the strings in determined vines.

Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll finish scraping the old mulch from the big patch around the play structure, and drop the watermelons into the back part, and okra and spinach around it.

A small army of heirloom tomatoes are waiting for their enormous pots and why-are-these-so-complicated cages.

There are also jalapenos, and lettuce, and a tremendous variety of herbs and flowers waiting to be planted. A few pots of ginger to be started. More potatoes to be planted.

Oh. And then, something will have to be created with these.

Ah, Freecycle, how I love thee…

About 27 retaining wall blocks worth, at the moment…I’m thinking Herb Garden, y’all…!

A week of mostly nothing

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:12:00 +0000

It has been raining all week. Which is awesome because here in California, we can use all the water we can get, thank you very much…but at the same time, was a little bit meh for me personally because I have an awful lot of gardening I wanted to do this week, since (according to theory) next week I’ll be getting serious about getting a new contract or something.

The reason I have that “according to theory” in there is, well, this just in: The novelty of staying in bed until a ludicrous hour in the morning still hasn’t worn off for me. This morning, I even got up and then went back to bed to wait for my cold medicine to kick in.

Yes. The cold, it is trying to make a comeback. I am furious, because NO, PLEASE, I ALREADY-ED on the whole having-a-cold-thing.

But at the same time, I have to admit: If it weren’t for the headache/body ache/sinus-pain-and-pressure parts? It would be worth it, just for that ability to holler out the bedroom door, “I dink mah cobd ib back…iz goink badh do bebd!”

Luxury: It has many faces.

SPEAKING OF…on my last day at MegaBank, we did indeed go to Art Fibers. And my coworker (just one person!!!) bought me this.

~1,000 yards of Carezza, 30% silk, 30% baby alpaca, 40% extra-fine merino…rather on the pricier-than-I-would-generally-buy side!!

Now, people…this was a ludicrously costly sort of going-away present to buy somebody, and I wasn’t going to let her do it; at the very least, I was going to get just enough for a nice scarf or something.

But…well…you’d have to know this lady. Trying to make her not do something she is dead set on doing is kind of like telling an oak tree not to drop acorns on your lawn anymore. And will go about as well for you. Except you’ll have to make the oak tree rather vocal and fast-moving instead of being, well, a tree.

They mostly just stand there and ignore you. She doesn’t really do that. She just charges ahead and the only way to stop her would be to get extremely vocal and pushy right back.

And I am not an overtly aggressive person.

No.

I am passive aggressive.

Which is why I was already plotting my revenge on the walk back to the office, and it involved some moderately-hot-pink cashmere/merino wool and…a pattern of some sort…revenge, it shall be mine, miiiiiiiine, bwahahaha…

So, since I was thinking, you know, like, “hat and hand-warmers of some sort,” obviously I started with this, which is a shawl/scarf (what? I find this to be a perfectly logical start to a hat + gloves set!) called Flowers on the Edge - a free pattern download via Ravelry.

It’s proving to be a very agreeable knit. The pattern is easy enough to be done while watching a movie, but also interesting enough that I’m not clawing at my face groaning, “When will I be done with this, u-g-h, why did I START this, oooooooo, I hates it…!!!!”

And the yarn is lovely. It’s a Newton Yarn Country score from last year’s Stitches convention, and is positively luscious…it just has an incredible feel to it: soft and warm, and knitting up very light.

And it’s a very pink sort of pink. Which is her favorite color. See? Revenge! Mine! Shall be! Bwahaha!

Meanwhile in other other news…did you know how easy it is to make paneer? (Which is that soft cheese in some Indian dishes, like saag paneer, which is like a sometimes-spicy creamed spinach with a soft cheese in it?)

Eight cups of milk, heated to boiling.

Add lemon juice about a tablespoon at a time until it starts to curdle – it took about half a cup altogether for my eight cups of milk to get to this point, using lemon juice courtesy of our tree (which unlike bottled juice is subject to having more variety in terms of acid content – hence the ‘one tablespoon at a time’ part instead of “dump in half a cup of lemon juice and be done with it”).

Pour the resulting curds and whey through a couple layers of cheesecloth to drain; if you catch the whey, you can use it to make bread (I made some naan with some of the whey from this)…it can also be used as a substitute for buttermilk.

Yeah, I think that looks a bit gross, too…

Add salt to taste, then form it into a square-ish thing that is about 1” thick.

Square-ISH

Now, this is the part that uses some pretty darned fancy kitchen tools, ONLY available for $$$$$$ from high-end kitchen stores. I’m sorry. There’s really no way around it…if you want to press the cheese into a firm block, you’re going to need something like this.

OK, fine, yes…it’s a cheap Target tea kettle full of water and two equally cheap plastic cutting boards. And yes, the dish rack is pretty much ALWAYS that full. 24/7, 365 days a year.

If that looks a little crooked – it is. That way, the whey being pressed out by the SUPER FANCY AND EXPENSIVE CHEESE WEIGHTING DEVICE (ahem) runs into the sink, rather than pooling up around the cheese.

Wait a couple hours, and then you can either cube it up and toss it into your saag paneer (or whatever) or put it in the fridge to continue firming and even ripening a bit…eaten right away, it’s very mild to the point of having no flavor of its own at all – if it were tofu, you’d think it had “too much” flavor, but if you’re thinking “cheddar,” it’s…not like that at all. More like ricotta (which is exactly what it is, actually…except that pressing it instead of merely draining it, plus using “fresh” milk [that is, not re-using the whey from some other cheese-making exercise, like mozzarella, say] makes it less spread-able and more cube-able).

I threw the cubes into a skillet of hot butter and gave them a quick fry on all sides, removed those from the pan and replaced them with diced onions and garlic, cumin, hot pepper flakes, salt, pepper and some of our home-grown blanched-and-frozen spinach.

And then I put the cheese back into it and called it saag paneer, and ate it with basmati rice and the naan I made with the whey.

Nom.

(The children…ate naan and rice, recoiled in dramatic horror from the spinach-dish, poked suspiciously at some chicken [like, what, they thought I had stuffed it with spinach when they weren’t looking or something?!] and called it a night. Sigh. Someday, they will voluntarily eat real food, right?!)

Money Monday: April 9, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 03:19:00 +0000

So. Here we are. A full week after my last day of the contract. The cold has (mostly) run its course, I think I’m almost caught up on sleep, and starting to get into all those things I said I wanted to get into while I was between contracts…one of which was, of course, a more in-depth scrutiny of what-all we accomplished over the last thirty months.

I’ve been a little afraid to look, actually. Math can be rather cruel, you know? You can “believe” that things are “about” here, or that it “should” be about right…but then math comes along and is all, “ACTUALLY, if you subtract 32 from 9? Negative number.”

And no matter how hard you believe, expect, or want it to be otherwise…math is mean that way. Subtracting a number greater than the originating number will result in a negative number. Period. (WAIT! Unless you use ABS(x – y)! I smell loophole…!!!)

I finally screwed my courage to the sticking place and started looking – long, and hard, and with merciless refusal to use any “special” functions [dammit! Another brilliant plan, thwarted!] – at where we were and where we are.

I have to say: I’m rather impressed with what-all we accomplished over the last thirty months. We have paid off…get this…$83,340.69 in assorted non-mortgage debts. I know, right?!

The loan on the van, all the credit cards, and the whopping-huge tax bill I’ve been pissy about for going on four years now are gone, and the larger and nastier of the two medical gotchas is well on its way to being nothing more than a peculiarly angry and frustrating memory.

Yeah…we did good. Which is good, because if we hadn’t I think I might have suffered a complete mental breakdown.

Which leads me to where we are.

On the one hand, we definitely are in a much better position than we were; we’ve got a lot less being forked over in interest and payments, which means we have a much better ability to ride things out while I look for my next Adventure in Employment.

On the other hand, there’s still a fair amount of work to be done. I decided to forgo putting a whole lot of cash into the emergency fund in favor of paying off those debts, so we have a fairly thin bank account balance right now – and we have a lot of goals coming up that are going to be hitting the “write a check” line all too soon.

I looked at Eldest the other day and had one of those moments, you know? She’s off to high school next year, which means that college is only five short years away…and her college fund is woefully inadequate right now. Eep.

I look at our retirement funds and almost want to weep. We are not only behind where we wanted to be, but behind where we should be for “average” retirement savings.

We’re still underwater on the Den, and laughably far away from being able to even dream about moving somewhere with a little land around it.

But, you know…in terms of how things could have gone…we came out pretty darned well, all things considered. When I look at the kinds of things that we have simply absorbed, and how little direct harm we actually took from them…I have to say I feel like I just climbed over a fence, turned around and saw a big old sign on it that says, “Danger: Mine field! Do not enter!”

…wait…sooooo, that field I just walked across…was a…?

The husband is making about 15% less now than he was in 2008; my price book tells me that the cost of stuff like flour, eggs and milk has meanwhile gone up between 18 and 24% in that same time. We’re paying about $700 more a month for healthcare premiums and such, too, which makes it no wonder that I’m finding it awfully hard to yank the ends far enough to, you know, meet.

But when it comes to this household, crazy as we are I can say this one thing for us: We ain’t no bunch of whining crybaby work-fearing wimps. Nobody around here wasted much time sitting around sobbing and carrying on about things – nobody pitched fits about vacations not taken or stuff not bought.

Everybody just pulled up their socks and got to work, did what they needed to do and didn’t fuss about it.

And we did some amazing things.

I’m so proud of this family I could about bust.

I’m also kind of excited about the next phase; this last one was a bit dark and gloomy, actually. I mean, it felt good to be taking a hatchet to all those bills…but at the same time, it was also like endlessly picking at scabs on my knees or something.

Most of those bills were the direct result of something at best ill-advised (and at worst, flat-out stupid) that I’d done…and every time I looked at the bills, it was like taking a little jab, you know?

Yeah…that also was not one of your brightest moves ever, right there…sigh…

When I get started on the next contract, that money will be going into far happier things – into college and retirement funds, into those future dreams, and hey, while we’re at it? Some right here and now stuff too.

Two words for you, people: New. Ovens.

I wants them.

Working ovens, that don’t get to 225 and say, “Eh, that’s close enough to 375 for ya, right?” or zip up to 475 and then go, “I dunno what you’re all pissy about…350, 475, they’re practically identical! Oh, fine then, I’ll just s-l-o-w-l-y lose heat so that in an hour, I’ll be at, like 117, bwahahaha…”

That’s the stuff I couldn’t bring myself to spring for while working on this last contract; I was so determined to pay all that other gloomy stuff off first, get rid of it, make it not be there anymore.

Destroy the evidence, as it were.

Now that I’ve done that, and I’m sitting here with nothing left at over 5% interest, I’m ready to start adding back in those things that are not necessarily “needs”…but which sure would be nice to have, nevertheless.

That was a rather long, steep and dark hill to climb – I’m ready to do a little coasting in the sunshine now.

With maybe a hint of spoiling on the side.

…so…boring…

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 23:44:00 +0000

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

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

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

…sigh…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it is now 1:45 in the morning.

{sobs}

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

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

OK! Just wanted to share that!

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

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

This still counts as ‘working,’ right?

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 22:49:00 +0000

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

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

Just in time for warm weather! Woo hoo!

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

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

…yeah…those are ALL weeds…

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

Three weeks ago, that area was bare earth.

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

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

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

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

{face-palm}

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One down…couple dozen to go…

Strange new world

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 05:51:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And packed it in.

And handed it over.

And walked out the door.

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

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

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

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

Onward and upward and onward again…

…really…?

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:30:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who called his friend, the fever.

Who invited the body ache over.

I mean…really?! REALLY?!

Right now?

This week?!

REALLY?!?!

…ugh…

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

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

Like, before lunch.

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

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

Argh.

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

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

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

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

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

Why I will miss these people, #341

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:31:00 +0000

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

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

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

[weeps]

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

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

(sent from my HTC)

It’s really VERY simple…

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:22:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

{weeps}

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To me.

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

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

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

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

Money Monday: March 26, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:25:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the midst of Chaos

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 03:33:00 +0000

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

Because there must always be a sea monster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wonder what I’ll be doing next.

I’m kind of looking forward to finding out.

And also to getting a little more sleep.

Yeah.

That…will be awfully nice…

Stick a fork in me…

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 05:03:00 +0000

…cause I am done.

With the backlog of bills, that is.

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

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

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

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

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

…geez…

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

Seriously. Enough, now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…days…

…aw, @^*&@...

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

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

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

{head-desk}

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…sigh…

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

Or dismemberment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(p.s. yay!)

(p.p.s. I am a bad, bad person…)

I’m not REALLY dead

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 06:16:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heh. Corporate America, baby. Gotta love her!

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

…wait…

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

“…ohmygah…”

He started chuckling.

“Shut up,” I snapped at him.

He started laughing.

“DUDE, SERIOUSLY, this is not funny…”

He proceeded on to howling and slapping his knee.

“ARGH!!!!!!!!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been working my arse off.

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

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

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

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

@^*&@.

Well – life in the fast lane, huh?

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

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:43:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See…something always does, is the thing.

And it’s just about always something good.

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

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

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

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

See? It’s all good, really.

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

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

But…I don’t know. I can’t explain it.

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

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

I really don’t know what to call it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Random and Rambling

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 04:38:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

But I digress.

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

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

Repeatedly.

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

…sigh…Yeah. It was a long week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I got nothin’.

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

I almost feel a little sick to my stomach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wooooo, how awesome is my life?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

…ugh…

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like.

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

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

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

I WIN.

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

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

I’m not completely hopeless, y’all.

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

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

An idle moment between storms

noreply@blogger.com (Mother of Chaos) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 06:12:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

I KNOW, RIGHT?!?!

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

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

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

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

Picky, picky, picky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sigh.

It’s going to be a looooooong week.

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