We celebrate 19 years of marriage today

Rob and I celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary today.  We didn't go out for dinner, but instead stayed home and cooked a very expensive rib-eye steak on the grill and drank some rather expensive locally brewed beer that I brought home in a growler.  I haven't found a restaurant yet that can grill a steak better than we can and drinking tasty beer at home means we don't have to worry about who is staying sober enough to drive back out to the boonies where we now live. 

There's not any "traditional" gift designation for 19 years, but even if there had been, well, we probably wouldn't have followed that anyway. Rob briefly considered combining the 15 and 20 year gifts by getting me a crystal china-man, but didn't have much luck finding such a thing, at least not in our price range.  $3500 for a lamp?  Not gonna happen.  Instead, he got me a little diorama of a day-of-the-dead skeleton bride and groom.  And we were apparently in tune on the day of the day theme since I bought him a day of the day cookie cutter as well as a skull shot glass and some Lil' Devil Cinnamon Toothpicks.  Not exactly traditional gifts, but very personal and I think that beats the hell out of diamonds and what-not other things that advertising says you ought to buy for your sweetie. 

The anniversary card that Rob gave me pretty much says it all.

 

 



One week is too short, too long and just about right

I was trying to decide if a week of vacation was too short or too long and I've come to the conclusion is that it's both. Today is day four so I'm over the half-way mark. I've managed to get some rest and also get some things done around the house. Although I haven't been at the office, work has never left my mind any more than it ever does. The only difference is that I'm not doing any work-related action. Four days is the same as having a long weekend and that feels about right for a break which makes a week of vacation seem too long.

That said, the fact that I've haven't really stopped "working" nor have I even begun to do any kind of vacation activity, well, that indicates to me that a week is too short. Too short, that is, if I was actually taking time to go off on a vacation. I'm guessing it would take me about a week to unplug from work and then I'd need another week to really have a vacation. 

In this case, where I'm taking time off just to prevent dropping dead from exhaustion, one week seems just about right. It took me four days to get to the point where I didn't wake up still tired in the morning, but I woke up at 5 AM this morning, after 8 hours of sleep (what luxury!) and for the first time in months, I didn't have to force myself to put one foot in front of the other. I got up extra early so I could have time for leisurely breakfast before mowing the front lawn at 8 AM.  That's a god-awful time to mow the lawn, but any later and it's too hot, plus I wanted to do it before the bees were all over the crepe myrtles.  Unfortunately the bees were already out in full force so I'm sure the neighbors were scratching their heads at my mowing technique while I tried to avoid any pissed off bees.

Even at 8 AM, I was hot and sweaty by the time I was done mowing the lawn and I figured I'd just collapse on the couch and be done for the day (other than picking Rob up at the airport tonight.) After all, just a week ago, mowing the lawn would have taken every bit of energy I could have summoned, but today, it was not a big deal and I happily discovered that I wasn't ready to just collapse on the couch.  In fact, I'll probably knock out a few more projects before I go pick up Rob at the airport later tonight.

Now that I've bounced back a bit, the next three days are going to seem like what used to be a normal long weekend, back in the old 8 hour M-F days.  I'm looking forward  to it!

Turns out "a couple of months" was overly optimistic

Things at work did not slow down at the end of March.  I am still working pretty much the same hours and to give you a hint of how crazy it's been, I took Saturday night off to attend a memorial service for a close friend, but still ended up having to take a call from work while I was there (fortunately I did not have to leave and drive to the office!) That said, the end might finally be in sight.  If I don't drop dead myself before then, I'll be taking an entire week off in mid-June, come hell or high water. No big plans.  I'll be hanging out at home and if I can find enough energy, I might get the garage in order.  Or not. The only plan is no plan.  And  no goals, no projects, no deadlines, no waking up to answer work emails or phone calls in the middle of the night, no eating breakfast, lunch and dinner at my computer while still working,  no grabbing only 5 or so hours of sleep each night.  I'm going to turn off the clocks and sleep as long as I want!  Maybe even the entire week.

Avalanche of Work

The first full week of the year kicked off an avalanche of work at my job.  Projects that should have been started in September were finally begun and it's now a mad dash to get everything done before March 1st.  I've been working seven days a week, with many of those days lasting as long as 12 or 15 hours. I'm not being "forced" to work this much, although I would probably find myself out of a job in a hurry if I wasn't stepping up to the plate and taking on extra work.

The truth is that if I had sat around and waited for duties that fit my job description of "Technical Writer" since my transfer out of Customer Service, then I would have been hard pressed to have enough work for even a part-time position.  Mind you, there are plenty of things that need to be "documented", but this would involve other people giving me information and that would take their time away from far more urgent duties.  Documentation can always wait, that is, until the only person that knows how to do something is no longer around.  But as long as that person is still available, there are just too many other competing priorities which leaves me with very little to do in my official capacity.

However, I am not the kind of person who is happy sitting around with nothing to do so I managed to stay busy by scrounging around for projects and tasks.  This was not easily done at a company where projects aren't announced to the company as a whole and I would only hear about them on the grapevine, but I was able to find plenty of work to do thanks to a lot of groundwork on my part.  In fact, I actually invented several of them which meant I had to "sell" it to management.   I was, for all intents and purposes, a freelancer, albeit one with with a boss and a steady salary.

And so there I was towards the end of last year, still scrounging around for work and still waiting for my manager to give me more official duties when all of a sudden things got turned upside down.  I'm not going to go into details, but end result was that my manager resigned and a recently employed consultant ended up in charge of the department.  This consultant had already told me that there was going to be no room for me in the newly restructured Information Technology department so the fact that he was now my manager meant that I was under even more pressure to make a place for myself.  

I suppose that sounds like a somewhat reasonable explanation for the workload I'm currently experiencing, but it's not the whole story.  I could always say no, take a layoff and find another job.  And the company could easily replace me with a fresh-faced college student for much of what I'm currently doing (although they would have to pay them a higher salary and probably take a big hit on work ethics.)  Instead, I'm doing this because I love the challenge and it gives me the opportunity to update my IT skill set in an actual production environment.  And if that means working my ass off for a couple of month, then so be it.

That said, I'm still going to whine on occasion about what I know is ultimately a personal choice because at the end of a 15 hour day, sometimes it just feels damn good to whine and complain.   And if I do, there's no need to tell me that it's all my own fault; I'm already perfectly aware of that.

Hello 2013

I've not blogged much over the last three years, a time when while my life took quite a few unexpected twists and turns. If this had been a truly anonymous blog then I'm sure I would have posted a great deal, but since it was not, that left me with so many elephants in the room that I got to a point where I just couldn't seem to write a blog post that wouldn't somehow reveal information about things that were best left private.

I've always considered this blog to be a journal.  A chronicle of bit and pieces of daily life, perhaps boring and routine, but I find those are the posts I enjoy the most when looking back through them.  It's the same with my private journals, written from the age of six to my mid-thirties.  These private journals contain plenty of entries filled with emotional angst, but I've discovered that those are not the entries that hold my interest so many years later.  Instead, it is the entries about the routine, the mundane, those every day things that didn't seem important enough to mention or write down but occasionally would sneak their way in to my writing.

And while I'm quite happy that I didn't fill this blog with much of the emotional turmoil that has taken place recently, I do wish I had been able to see past the elephants and post more often. Even if it was just about the weather and what I cooked for dinner that night.  I'll try to remember that for 2013.

A leap of faith

Today we turn in our signed lease on a house and get handed some new keys. The rent on the house is reasonable by Austin standards, but will be considerably more that the rent on the apartment or, for that matter, more than any other single monthly payment either of us have ever had in our lives.  But that's not the only leap of faith we are taking since we are also breaking our lease on the apartment, just two months after renewing it. That will be a rather expensive thing to do, unless we are able to sublease it quickly.  

The circumstances that brought us to this point were what most people would call a strange mix of coincidence.  A co-worker has a rental house that we were hoping to get before we renewed the apartment lease, but his tenant decided to stay another year so we renewed the lease on apartment instead.  Then about three weeks ago, my co-worker's tenant gave notice and moved out immediately.  That made the house available, but we had renewed the apartment lease and besides, we didn't have the extra cash needed to pay another deposit plus double rent for at least a month. My co-worker advertised the house for a bargain rent price so it would rent quickly and we figured that was the end of that.

Labor Day weekend came along and the RV sold "as is" on the same day that I had it scheduled to be it moved into the shop for some minor repairs.  At that point I had some cash, but did I really want to spend it on breaking a lease and moving into a house?  And was my co-worker's house at the bargain price even still available?

I returned to work on Tuesday and talked with my co-worker who said the house was still available.  Despite my misgivings about the whole idea, I decided to go take a look at the house on Wednesday so I could make an informed decision.  I was not expecting to walk in the door of the house and get one of those "gut feelings" that I've had so many times in my life.  But that is exactly what happened; I got that feeling of "this is the next logical step".   But just the same as I did with the RV purchase, I tried to talk myself out of it.  I had the idea that there was no way Rob would agree to go look at the house that day after work since he always wants to go straight home (which is understandable, I usually feel the same way.)  Even if he did go look at it, he might not like the house and I already knew how he felt about the hassle of moving since we had discussed this prior to renewing our lease - he wasn't going to go for it unless it was the right house.  

Much to my surprise, Rob not only went and looked at the house, but he also liked it.  That left me with only one thing to use against the whole idea - the expense of breaking the apartment lease.  That could cost me several thousand dollars, maybe more. Or it might only cost $200 if we were able to sublease quickly.  That made it a gamble and I'm a person that has a risk-adverse personality.  Despite my worries, all that night long and all the next day, no matter what I said to myself, I couldn't shake the feeling that getting the house was the direction I needed to take.  And so I took the leap and dragged Rob along with me. It will be interesting to see how it all works out.

Hello ham radio, goodbye RV

My dad and my brother both were ham radio operators when I was growing up and eventually my mom and I also got our Technician class licenses (my brother holds the next level, a General class and my dad has what used to be the next level above General which is an Advanced class.)  

As a young adult, I didn't have the time or the money to get seriously into the hobby and eventually let my license expire.  That was quite a long time ago, but I suspect once Ham Radio gets in your blood, it's always there lurking, just waiting for something to trigger the fever again.  I say this because a couple of weeks ago, while surfing the internet, I inadvertently stumbled across some of the new things going on in the world of Ham Radio.  Well, maybe not so new to folks active in the hobby, but new to me since I had been away from it for 20 years.  

I did a little checking and most of the things that had caught my attention could be done with only a Technician class license.  I figured it wouldn't take too much study to retest and since there was an exam date of June 16th, that would give me two weeks to get back up to snuff.  I took a couple of practice exams to see what I might need to brush up on and much to my surprise, I found that I had not forgotten much at all. In fact, it only took one day of study before I could easily pass the practice tests.  Since I still had almost two weeks to go before exam day, I decided I would study for the General exam.  If I could pass this, it would be a nice surprise for my father on Father's Day because it would mean that I would be able to transmit on his favorite HF bands (something I could not do with just a Technician license.)

Yesterday I took the tests.  First was the Technician exam which I sailed through and then the General exam which I also sailed through.  As a result, the examiners were quite insistent that I take the Extra exam next.  I knew there was no way I'd pass that one since I hadn't even looked at the question pool or studied for it and it's got some pretty esoteric stuff on it.  But they strongly encouraged me to take it anyway as a way to get acquainted with what was on the test and since it didn't cost anything but a little extra bit of my time, why not?

Needless to say, I did not pass that test, but I did manage to get 27 out of 50 answers correct, far more than I expected. The half I didn't get right included quite a few things I'd never even heard of, but it all seemed like things that I could learn if I applied a little bit of effort.  I don't really need an Extra class license at this point, but it would give my dad quite a thrill if I could achieve it.  It's something to think about in a few months, after I've finished moving out of the RV.  

Yes, my RV days are over.  I've enjoyed living there the last two years, but with Rob and I moving back together, the RV is way too small for two people and two dogs.  Instead, we'll be living in an apartment for a while.  And while an apartment will make getting back into ham radio a bit of a challenge since my antenna choices will be limited, it's the best option at the moment.   

R.I.P. Maurice Sendak

"Where the Wild Things Are" is my favorite book of all time.  Having read thousands upon thousands of books in my lifetime so far, I'm surprised that I can say that one stands above all the rest.  But for me, this one does.

2012 has been a steamroller so far

It's been a very busy three months.  On the work front, we had a major project that needed to be complete before the start of peak season in April.  Despite the typical setbacks and delays you get with any major project, we were able to push it to production in early March.   And in any other year, this timing would have been just fine, but this year it seemed like the entire US had an early spring. Business had already spiked up by then and it feels like it's been a madhouse at work for the entire year.  First there was the push to get the project done, then the push to handle all the extra, unexpected business.  For the last month I've been spending over half my work hours helping out in Customer Service taking calls while trying to still get my regular work done.  It's a good problem to have in this economy, but it does leave me pretty damn tired at the end of the day.

Other things are afoot in my personal life that have brought some major changes in my routine, all of them good, but even good change adds a bit of additional stress.   Over the next few months I hope to find the time to get get my RV ready to sell and if things work out, I might be moving back into a house in June.  If the deal on the house falls through, then maybe a duplex.  I'd even go for an apartment if I could find one with a small yard (a few of those do exist in this town.)  Affordable will be tough to find in this rental market where even a small duplex or two bedroom apartment can run over $1000/month.   I've asked for a pretty substantial raise at work that would let me qualify for such a rental amount, but given that raises have been on hold since November plus the fact that my "regular" job might be changing to something else... that means a raise is not something I can count on.

Overall, there's much that's uncertain in my life right now, both at work and at home, and given the track record of the last couple of years, I think this is the new normal.  That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can make life seem just a bit more challenging at times.  Ah well, at least I'm not bored.

PS - those of you that are long overdue for an email from me, my apologies.

Hello there 2012...

Last year wasn't a particularly bad year, but it certainly didn't have very many high points.  The fact that I'm still employed is a plus, considering the number of people who don't have jobs right now.  I'm still doing the technical writing job and I still live in an RV.  My dog, Theo, is also still hanging out.  He doesn't get around as well as he used to, but considering he is well over 15 years old and a large dog who has lived far beyond expectations, I'm thrilled that he's decided to stick around.  I seem to be in a holding pattern at the moment, just in a "one foot in front of the other" mode, but I do have my eye on a renting a house in the spring.   It may not happen, but I need something to get me focused looking forward and that seemed as good a thing as any.

I figure food is a safe bet...

I'm on the morale boosting committee at work this month.  It's a rotating position for three people who are charged with decorating the office in general and decorating the cubical or office door of anyone with a birthday that month (on their birthday.) We also coordinate a monthly potluck and come up with games/puzzles/some sort of activity with a prize for the winner.  The only budgeted items are one cake a month for all the birthdays and a couple of gift cards for prizes.  The committee last month set the bar pretty high with lots of activities, tons of decorations brought in from the committee members' personal collections and little Halloween trinkets on our desks in the mornings.  It's going to be a tough act to follow.

Rob donated some fall harvest decorations he found on sale at Walgreen's and I found some red leaf garlands at Dollar Tree, but I'm afraid our office decorations are going to be a bit sparse this month since no one has a personal stash of decorations appropriate for November.  However, I figure with the Thanksgiving holiday falling in this month, I can just make it all about food.  

Tonight I'm making three dozen deviled eggs to take in to work tomorrow morning.  Total cost, if you don't count the time, was under $5.  Items planned for other days are homemade Chex mix, Rob's famous V-8 chili, a big pot of my homemade potato soup, a batch of cookies, maybe some cupcakes and who knows, perhaps  I"ll spend one weekend making bread.  I've got a couple of other easy and cheap dishes up my sleeve, but don't know yet if I want to devote almost every weeknight to cooking.  

Happy Halloween!

Been a while since I've been here. I turned 50 back in September and did not buy that red BMW, nor did one magically materialize. At some point last year I decided I didn't really want one and the same happened with the new Camaro that caught my eye for a time. I'm pretty much against car payments and apparently I don't have enough desire for a new car to save up for one. I figure that no new car on the planet is worth eating ramen noodles all the time and forgoing decent coffee.

 I'm still doing the tech writer thing with some phone coverage for customer service. It's an okay gig, but really low pay and no raise in sight. I often feel like I ought be performing at 120%, working longer hours or trying even harder to become some sort of brilliant, "document everything in a blink of an eye" employee because, well, that's how I've always operated. Then I remember that past history has shown that sort of behavior rarely results in a raise and usually only benefits my employer who continues to get more bang for his buck. This puts me in a quandary. I'm usually not happy in a job unless I'm pushing myself, but I'm also not happy when the "above and beyond" behavior isn't rewarded. You'd think after all these years in the work force I would have found a happy median between the two.

 The people I work with, for the most part, are still a great group. We had our Halloween potluck today and I brought enough enchiladas for everyone. I had planned to make them myself, but Rob chased me out of the kitchen last night and I did give credit where credit was due when everyone raved about how good they were. It's nice that even though the company is growing we are still hanging onto some of the old smaller business traditions. Not so many dressed up today, but that was likely due to Halloween falling on a Monday. If I hadn't had such a simple costume, I probably would have passed on it myself.

Speaking of Mondays, I'm heading to bed early tonight despite the fact that it's Halloween, my favorite holiday of the year. Hope everyone had plenty of treats and fewer tricks today.

We might finally get a break from this heat!

Tonight the weather forecast had this to say:

More stable conditions will quickly follow on Sunday night and Monday...with daytime highs on Monday moderated...from the much above normal daytime highs since late May. For next week from Monday through Friday...dry conditions are expected...with cooler overnight lows and moderated daytime highs.

Only got to 101 today so it's a bit cooler outside this evening (down to 96 degrees at the moment.) I think I might even sit outside with a cold beer just like in the old days before the summer from hell arrived.

Plodding along

The weather has been brutal this summer. We've had week after week of high temperatures over 100 degrees and it's usually still over 100 degrees outside when I get home around 7:00 PM. The little A/C unit for RV can't handle these very hot and sunny afternoons so the inside temperature is normally sitting at 88 degrees when I walk in the door. That feels pretty warm after spending the whole day in a cold office.

This is also the time of year when it doesn't cool down much outside in the evenings so it's likely to still be 100 degrees outside at 10:00 PM. Instead of my usual after work ritual of being outdoors, I've been staying inside in the evenings whether I'm at home or at someone else's place. Mind you, visiting other folks does give me a change of scenery, but it's still too much time indoors.

In other news, my dad is doing as well as can be expected and plans to attend the family reunion in Fredericksburg this weekend. I'll actually get to go this year now that I'm no longer working weekends. I'm not looking forward to the drive, but I am looking forward to visiting with relatives that I have not seen in years and years.

Work has been keeping me very busy and things are rather chaotic since it's a new position doing things that have not been done before. It's challenging, interesting and occasionally frustrating, but I'm enjoying it for the most part. I forget to go to lunch most days because I get too wrapped up in what I'm working on to notice the time. I consider that a good sign, even if it's not particularly good for my health.

Theo is still hanging in there. Apparently he really likes the TV because when I would occasionally watch it in the evenings, he'd struggle to get off the bed and come out to the living room. And as soon as I would turn it off, he'd struggle back onto the bed. I decided to move it to the bedroom and run the cable in through one of the cabinets so I could just leave it on for him all the time. He seems very happy with the arrangement so far, especially when I do come back there to watch something. The only problem is that it's right by the foot of the bed and even though I've turned it off at night to go to sleep, I frequently wake up in the middle of the night to infomercials. I think he's just accidentally hitting the on button, but I suppose he could have figured out how to turn it on.

Much has happened these last two weeks!
There are a few things that I can't blog about in order to protect the privacy of those involved, but there was so much stuff going on that I have plenty of other things that I can talk about.

First off, my father had a heart attack a couple of days after I posted my last post. He's doing as doing as well as can be expected for someone who cannot have any surgery. His first heart attack was over 40 years ago and the treatment this time is pretty much the same, except instead of spending 30 days in the hospital, he was sent home after 1/2 a week. Mind you, getting sent home right away is a huge improvement for the patient over staying in the hospital for a month, but the whole rest/recuperation, nitroglycerin for the angina pain and "hope for the best" type of treatment is straight from 40 years ago. But since there was no surgery or other obvious treatment, we have to keep reminding him of that old 30 days in the hospital routine when he gets frustrated that he's not bouncing back right away. There's a whole lot of saying, "No, you can't do that yet!" Hmm... in retrospect, maybe locking them up in a hospital for 30 days had some merit.

Then, the day after my father had his heart attack, I learned that the technical writer they had hired at work had accepted another job and was leaving at the end of the month instead of the end of October. As a result, I moved to the IT department full time this week and starting next Monday, I'm totally my own as the sole tech writer without the benefit of those three months of training. Ack!

But despite my father's heart attack, I have managed to cram an incredible amount of information into my head in the last two weeks. A bit of it was about technical writing, but much of it was researching software programs for code documentation and then learning how to use them (the tech writer had not used them before either.) In order to do that I had to learn a bit about the code I'm going to be documenting as well as test a multitude of software options in order to decide the best one to use. In addition, some of that code documentation was due by yesterday (I met the deadline) and I also had to learn a few other things there were not related to technical writing in order to provide backup for an IT person who was on vacation this week.

It was a pretty wild ride these last two weeks and yesterday evening, I was winding down with a old friend of mine by reviewing my two week cram session. I was also expressing my doubts about being able to do this new job and he just laughed and said, "Of course you can do it, because you are crazy smart." That made me laugh too because I've never considered myself "smart" and if he had just said "smart" or "super smart" then I would have immediately disagreed, but I was okay with "crazy smart". And that's the great thing about old friends, after so many, many years they know you well enough to know exactly what to say when you need a boost.

And in other news, a sad thing happened this week when my next-door neighbors, D&S, moved away to another place on Wednesday. They couldn't hang with the recent lot rent increase and found another place that is $200/month cheaper. They tried really hard to get me to move with them, but their new place doesn't allow dogs. We do plan to stay in touch and they are close enough that I can visit them on a weekend. Still, I will miss the day-to-day contact we used to have.

And with the recent monthly lot rent increase, I'm not likely to have another long-term neighbor any time soon. Many of the old-timers that have been in the RV park for years have pulled out this month. It will be interesting to see how the RV park culture changes if it ends up being mostly short-timers in the future.

T.G.I.P.
P for payday instead of F for Friday. Finances were very tight this pay period because back on the 1st I found out that my rent had gone up $75 and I didn't have any wiggle room to allow for that. It was tough, but I did not have to sacrifice my somewhat expensive morning coffee having stocked up on it a while back when it was on sale so I weathered it okay. Now, I did have money in a savings account that I could have drawn out, but I purposely made doing that as difficult as possible by placing it in a bank that I could not easily get to in person during business hours and I had no way to electronically access the money, also done on purpose. That way, on a hot day when a cold beer really seemed like the best idea in the world, I couldn't give into the temptation to pull money out to buy a six pack. And there were a lot of hot days since we've had 14 consecutive days of temperatures over 100 degrees.

My poor little air conditioner unit in my RV is working overtime, but it's still usually 86 degrees inside when I get home from work. Normally that would feel pretty comfortable to my heat-loving self, but the office I work in is a damn freezer and that's what I get used to during the day so it feels really warm to me when I get home. Seriously, almost every chair in every cubicle at work has a blanket or a jacket draped over it. It might be over a hundred degrees outside, but we are wearing jackets inside - how screwed up is that?

Oh, and I got off early today so it was late afternoon instead of evening when I took the trash out to the dumpster and as usual, I was barefoot, not thinking about how hot the asphalt paving would be at that time of day when it was 103 degrees outside. And so yeah, I burned the bottoms of my feet. Not fun. There was a time when I was a kid that I could have walked that stretch without any ill effects, but these days of wearing shoes in a office every day, well, it was sizzle time. I've got too thick a callous on my feet to end up with any blisters, but it's still quite the burn. Oops.

Very nice 4th of July
I was off work today and I continued my long time tradition of grilling hot dogs on the 4th of July. I don't know why or where it came from, but at some point after moving out from my parent's house and setting out on my own, I decided that I needed to grill hot dogs on the 4th of July. And I've pretty much done that every year since.

Usually, it's just me solo, doing the hot dog thing, but this year I got my RV park neighbors in on it. And so a bunch of folks came by; I grilled a lot of hot dogs; we all drank many a beer and had great conversation for hours. No fireworks because of the extreme fire danger during the current drought, but still a good time was had by all. And there was an extra bonus - everyone helped to clean up the mess and cart off the trash before we all headed off to bed! Awesome.

1/2 of a new job
I found out yesterday that I didn't get the position that I interviewed for a couple of weeks ago, which is not surprising since I was definitely NOT qualified for the job and it wasn't just the degree requirement. Although they hired someone else, the interview still paid off for me. I was offered the opportunity to work 1/2 day in my current role in Customer Service and 1/2 day in the IT department until October and I'm very pleased with the arrangement.

Funny thing though, most every one I've told so far has been disappointed that it's not an increase in pay. I'm a bit puzzled by that because even though it's not any more money, I'll be doing more of what I like to do and that seems like a pretty good deal to me. Same money, but more fun. I don't see anything wrong with that picture, but maybe I'm just wired differently.

Still waiting...
I haven't heard anything on the results of the job interview. Maybe by the end of today?

Three hours in the hot seat
I had a job interview today that was three hours long. It's a job that would be extremely interesting and very challenging. I'm don't have the qualifications that they were requiring for the position, but despite that, I was asked to interview for it anyway. There's plenty of unemployed talent in Austin that does have the qualifications that they were asking for so I think my chances are pretty slim. Nevertheless, it was a real treat to get to sit and talk with the people that interviewed me (all of them brilliant) and that alone was well worth the three hours of my time. It reminded me a bit of the annual conference I used to go to in Canada. Although I was probably the least knowledgeable person there, I never had any trouble talking with all those movers and shakers of the industry and what a great opportunity to listen and learn. Same thing here, because although it was an interview and I did answer a lot of questions, I still spent the majority of the time listening to the people who were interviewing me. And that was a very cool thing.