:: Casa De Morrill ::

I’m back up in Denver tonight. When I leave the airport, I take a toll road to get down to where I stay and work while I’m up here. It’s faster and more convenient than the highways, even if it does cost $5.75 each way. As I pulled up to the last toll booth and I get ready to hand the attendant my money, greeting him at the same time, he smiled down at me and asked how my day was going. “It’s going really well,” I replied.
“Well, it just got better. The man who just came through this tollbooth paid for the next person through as well. You don’t have to pay anything.”
I wasn’t even sure how to reply. At 10:30 at night, you don’t expect such wonderful acts of generosity. I finally stuttered out a thank you and then got myself back to my senses enough to tell the attendant to have a wonderful evening and drove off.
This week is off to a great start.

It’s been a while since either Sean or I have written on this blog. It’s kind of hard to say why. Our lives have continued on. I know we’ve had lots to write about. We just haven’t, for one reason or another.
Work has continued to be consuming for me, which honestly isn’t new news to anyone who has talked to me since about June of last year. As the new year has started, though, I have approached work from a new angle and turned over a new leaf with my attitude towards my coworkers. I have approached each one of my coworkers with a clean slate to work on, in hopes that perhaps this year will be more rewarding than last.
Last year, I struggled with my new position. Not only was it a new position for me, but also a new position as a whole with my software team. As a result, we all struggled to find where I fit into the grand scheme of our development effort. 10 months later, now that everyone’s determined that I’m not going to quit easily (including myself) and that I apparently don’t go crazy too easily, things are starting to go smoother.
I’m getting the hang of the documentation process that I have to go through for every test I conduct. I’m making friends with all the people necessary in order for this job to go smoother. Baked good bribery is never out of the question. (Note to anyone trying to butter someone up: Lemon pound cake is always a winner. That and chocolate chip cookies.) I’m also getting to know our customer better. I understand their processes better and I understand their expectations better. They have also become living, breathing people to me, too, instead of this nebulous idea of people booming demands down upon us. I can make most of them laugh or at least crack a smile. I also am getting to know when all they want is the honest truth and when they just want to hear what they want to hear.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve already had a day or two of coming home and being ready to break down because I don’t think I’ll get things done on time, or I’m running into this or that problem with either a coworker or the stupid processes that we have to follow. Somehow, though, it’s all gotten done so far. I’m resolving my problems or I’m finally taking them to my boss and asking him to fix them. That’s his job. I do my job and whatever is out of that scope, I go to him for.
That’s the part that I’m learning most of all. I’m learning that I can’t do everything myself. I spend so much of my effort trying to be independent and do everything myself that I sometimes forget that I can ask for help. It nearly killed me last year. If Christmas break had not come when it did, I would have either come within a hair’s breath or actually had a nervous breakdown. Instead, I got a week to take a breath, actually get some things done around the house, and get a new perspective on life and work and how they meld. We’ll see how things progress over this year.

Now that I’ve managed to be introspective for a little while, there’s a pile of paperwork sitting next to me that needs to be filtered through and I need to figure out what I’m going to pack for Denver next week. Here’s to hoping that it at least won’t snow on me.

Since my work has caused many very late nights as of late, I have been too tired to post when I am actually at home and Sean’s been picking up my slack on the home front, so he hasn’t been posting much either. So, here’s a quick update for those of you following the game at home.

Phoenix has officially gotten hot. We’ve held triple digits all week and the weathermen aren’t bothering any more trying to tell us it’ll cool down. We’d just ignore them, anyway. The outdoor pool at our gym has become our friend. I have a feeling we’ll be spending time in our friends’ pool as well this summer. Hopefully, this also means that we’ll be taking more trips to northern Arizona (ie, the much cooler part of the state) over the next few months.

We officially celebrated living out here a full year on May 29 for me and May 20 for Sean. I’ve officially worked a full year for my company as of June 7. I think the weirdest thing it feels like I’ve already been there several years. I would have laughed at anyone who tried to convince me that I would be where I am within a year. I’ll likely post more on this as our year in our home approaches as well.

This past Sunday I was asked to be part of another wedding this year. I’m already a bridesmaid in my good friend from high school’s wedding in San Francisco this August. Crutcher and Theresa have asked me to marry them in their wedding this October. Yes, now that you’ve read that sentence a few times, I’m really not crazy. Their explanation was that they felt they fully trusted me to marry them. My explanation is that I was so deeply touched there was no way I was going to turn down a chance to play such an important role in the beginning of two friends’ lives together. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get certified to perform such a role.

I’m still working on editing many photos from a few different shoots I’ve done lately. Hopefully, this weekend, I’m going to spend some time shooting a Lotus Elise and a BMW M3 as part of a photo project I’m doing for friends. My only problem with photo editing currently is fighting with my laptop. I think I’m to the point that we’ve eliminated all hardware and that it’s time for a reinstall of Windows. So, my choice is, do I reinstall Windows 2000 or do I upgrade to WinXP Pro? The upgrade would, thankfully, be cheap through my company, but I’m still unsure which way to go. If we had the money right now, I’d just buy the Mac that I’ve been drooling after, but money this year is being sunk into plane tickets.

Life continues on beyond that. Work is fine even if management has been having me jump through scheduling hoops lately. Sean is still enjoying his job. The cats still own this house. In fact, that’s another indicator that summer has arrived. Weaver has started shedding about a pound of cat hair in a week (and anybody who doesn’t think that that’s a lot of hair, hasn’t ever owned a long-haired cat). Speaking of which, Kudzu is informing me that it is time for our nightly ritual of me trying to get ready for bed and her making this task as difficult as possible.

Until next time kiddies, don’t play in the street and don’t forget to eat your veggies…

After spending the past week in mostly a sleep-deprived haze, here’s a summary of my thoughts:

- Spending only two days on 2nd shift, which is 2 - 10 (or sometimes around midnight)pm, is just about the worst thing I can do to my body, especially when I have to go back to first shift (7am - 4pm) the very next day. This is the whole reason I’m sleep-deprived right now and have been for 3 straight days.

- After working until ~11pm for two nights, when you get home, your body is not ready to go to sleep at a decent hour. Yeah, so this may be a “duh” thing for most people who’ve had sleep recently, but this was a shock to me when I tried to go to sleep at 8pm on Wednesday and my body wouldn’t let me sleep until almost 11:30pm.

- Sugar Free Red Bull and regular Red Bull is my god right now. That stuff kept my head at least up if not completely alert during work this week.

- I will never again schedule two design inspections (software) on the same week in which the before mentioned sleep-deprivation occurs.

- It’s amazing how much work I can do in a week and not remember one minute of it the second I leave work. Heck, for that matter, I can’t remember it 5 minutes later. Thankfully, I didn’t touch code all week.

- The weekend is the most wonderful thing in the world at this exact moment, although the Guiness I had a few hours ago was also very nice (and the couple sips of various whiskeys that I got).

Sleeeeeeeeep………

The past couple of days have been a slow recovery for me. This year, Dragon*Con wasn’t nearly as draining on my system as it has been in years past (last year, for example, where I decided that going to Con and then getting married 3 weeks later was a fantastic idea). I still came home sleep-deprived.

Wednesday was a nightmare. I barely dragged myself through the day. All code written on Wednesday was immediately erased and rewritten on Thursday. Caffeine intake consisted of Large Starbucks coffee, 20 oz. Cherry Coke at lunch and a 12 oz. Mountain Dew in the afternoon.

This morning was a little easier to wake up to. I started working out again, so the bike ride helped a bit with waking me up. I made it through the day with one small Starbucks coffee and a 20 oz. Mountain Dew. Tomorrow (Friday) morning, I have to stick around the house in the morning so that some repairmen can come out and fix a couple problems we found with the house. Nothing serious. Just some warranty repairs. I’m shooting for a cup of coffee in the morning and maybe a soda at Brent’s during poker night. We’ll see. Depends on how much sleep I get. Speaking of which, it’s almost 10pm. Time for sleep.

ps. For all of you guys that I got to see at Dragon*Con this year, it was really great seeing you! For those of you who I didn’t get to see, I miss you guys! If you’re going to be around the Atlanta or Huntsville area at Christmas, Sean and I’ll be in town then, so we’ll be visiting a metric assload of friends and family at that point in time.