Married In Ohio

People with tattoos and body piercings came up during a discussion I was having with a few of my coworkers a couple of weeks ago. I know that I work in a “square” office; but I was still surprised at some of the negative comments I heard. It’s what people are on the inside that matters, especially in the workplace. And to be intolerant of someone just because of the way they look is wrong. I haven’t exactly been a trailblazer; but, many times, I’ve been the only black person in my organization. So, I know what it’s like to have all eyes on you. Everyone is different. And it’s wrong to think less of people because of superficial differences. It seems that the more we become accepting of some things, the more we find other things to dislike. I’m glad that most of the people I know both in real life and in blog land are open-minded and non-judgmental. I just wish more of the world was.

California Girl’s watch died over the weekend. I’m almost certain that it’s the battery which is a nuisance since it has to be special ordered directly from Seiko. I’d like to get her a nice new watch; but, since we have his and hers watches, I’ll probably just get another battery. It was supposed to last 5 years; but, both this one and the original one lasted for less than half of that. If we had known beforehand that a replacement battery would be so hard to find, we would have never purchased the set. Unlike hers, my watch is still running on the original battery.

We like to have matching stuff. It’s kind of a trademark of ours. We don’t overdo it; but we do like jewelry and other accessories that remind us of each other. For example, we always have coordinating costumes at Halloween. If anyone has suggestions for a nice coordinated set of his and hers watches we’d love to hear them. We don’t want to spend too much money; but we’d really like a matched pair. After the “fun” we have had with batteries, we’re thinking that we would like to have automatic (self-winding) movements. And, or course enough water resistance so that we can swim in them. (It gives us a funny tan, so we don’t usually wear them in the pool; but, sometimes we do need to know the time). The only thing I can say is our next set of watches will not be Seikos.

Other than the battery being such an annoyance, we really like the watches. They keep very accurate time and are perpetual calendar models so we only have to adjust them when changing to or from daylight savings time. Even though they only display the date, they “know” what month and year it is and adjust the date accordingly. It’s a good idea; but poor execution. I guess the same could be said about many things.

We’ve got clocks all over the house; and we’ve always got our cell phones with us; so we don’t really need a watch to know the time; but it’s a touch of elegance that we like share. I’ve always thought that timepieces were symbolic of relationships. Hopefully we’ll be able to find something that is a suitable remembrance of ours.

After twenty consecutive weeks of six and seven day work weeks, I finally had a three day weekend. I really enjoy my Christmas and Independence Day vacations but five months is a long time to go without a break; especially since I worked so many weekends. My telephone did not ring and I did not even turn on my laptop. It was bliss. I just caught up on mundane chores and generally “decompressed”.

If you have a blog that I frequent regularly, I apologize for not visiting this weekend. I had planned to visit everyone on Sunday or Monday; but was too busy relaxing. Every year, it seems like Memorial Day Weekend takes longer and longer to arrive. I’m already paying for my three-day weekend at work; but it was worth it. I must admit that I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time playing computer games on our new widescreen monitor. The wider display made some older games seem new again.

If possible, I have also developed even more distaste for spammers. On Saturday I inadvertently deactivated the spam filter for comments. In a matter of minutes, the moderation queue was overflowing. It’s a nuisance for real people, but the CAPCHA (code words) stops thousands of bogus comments on every post. I wish they would go away. Their advertisements never show up. They are just a waste of bandwidth and processing time.

P.S. California Girl is taking The Boy to a pre-graduation event. We plan to have our photo session when she returns.

If it seems to you I have not been not around blogland much except on weekends, it’s because that is the case. I already was working a lot before our hiatus; and the amount of work to be done has only increased since then. We’re nearing the finish line; but I still have a couple more weeks of long days. In the career I have chosen, the long days come and go. Unfortunately, I’ve been assigned to two projects whose success is vital to our business back to back.

I “like” being selected to work on high visibility projects because it’s an acknowledgment of my skills and accomplishments. But, I do need a low key project from time to time. The good thing about working on critical projects as opposed to low-key tasks with open-ended timelines is that, assuming you get finished on time and under budget, you don’t have to worry much about being laid off. The bad thing is that you end up surrounded by a lot of nervous directors and VPs. And, of course, there is that whole not spending enough time with your family thing. In a way, the other members of the project team and I are victims of our own success.

I’ve always been good at what I do and expect to succeed; so I don’t have a true understanding of what is like to be a chieftain and basically have your future in the hands of an extremely capable but very overworked and somewhat irritable project team. All they can do is watch and hope. I think I would be nervous too if I was in their position; but, as hard as it is to do, the best thing they can do is leave us alone to do our job. And feed us when it gets late.

When the long days and nights are over, I’m going to take some very well deserved time off and do something nice for the family. And California Girl and I will probably have some very “interesting” photographs for the blog.

Too Bad Its Monday. For a variety of reasons, Last week was a very trying week at work. I usually don’t let what goes on at the office leak into my private life; but this was one of those weeks where it did despite my best efforts. The weekend was good but I am dreading going to work, and not just in the usual way. I need a long vacation; and probably a new job.

I’ll be sure to stop by and catch up on everyone’s blogs when I get home on today.

The new computer we got the kids is finally set up and configured. I stayed up most of the night on Saturday installing and configuring software. It was supposed to be a belated Christmas present but I didn’t expect it to be nearly as late as it was. Despite “guaranteed 3-day shipping” everything didn’t finally arrive until late on Friday. So I couldn’t really get started until Saturday. And, when you keep computers for as long as we do, there are a lot of software and documents to migrate. We’ve got all of the CDs; but, because of the new OS, I spent a lot of time on the Internet looking for updates.

The kids were very understanding, but I wish everything would have arrived when promised. It was very frustrating to receive a box every day; but not get the most important pieces until last. Plus, California Girl and I got them things that wouldn’t run on their old computer for Christmas in anticipation of the new one. We did get them other gifts; but their “big present” was MIA for three long days.

And yes, we know, everything could have been avoided if we had shopped early. But, it’s hard to hide a computer. And, we’re very cost conscious and the best deals did not happen until very close to Christmas. This is the first time that they’ve ever gotten a brand new system rather than a hand-me-down; so they were excited. Especially since, unlike their old computer, it can run all of the latest games and software.

It’s been so long that I had an off day that I almost didn’t know what to do with it. I woke up around 9:30 for some Sunday morning fun with California Girl; but I didn’t finally get out of bed until almost 2:00 in the afternoon. I’ve been on critical projects with deadlines that require heroic efforts to meet before; but I can’t recall a time when so many things have been going on at once. I especially dislike working long hours around the holiday season. I know it comes with the job but, wrestling season is right around the corner and I’ve don’t plan on missing any of The Boy’s meets. It’s his senor season and I don’t want to miss a moment of it.

In case you were wondering, this is what I do on my day off. The picture is actually fro the last time I had a day off; but you get the point.

I haven’t replied to comments (and shouts) since last weekend so I’m going to do that. Then I’m going to go catch up on everyonne’s blog. If I get around to it later this evening, I’ll post a video that we made this afternoon.

And, before I forget, O-H-I-O!!!

Its 11:00 P.M. and I just got home from work so Two For Tuesday will be Two For Wednesday instead. This had been a long “short” week for me thus far. In fact, unless I can escape from work very early tomorrow, it won’t be a short week at all. Somehow, I don’t think that I will be getting up early for any Black Friday specials.

If you were able to visits our blog at all today, you may have noticed that things were going slooow. I upgraded some of the software on the server this past weekend only to discover that there was a known memory leak that wasn’t mentioned in any of the release notes. I spend a long time trying to figure out why the server was running out of memory. I searched the web for hours; finally finding a bug report with the exact same symptoms and a potential fix that thankfully worked. What’s frustrating is that the software with the problem has released for months without an update and he vendor still calls the new version the “best available” and urges everyone to upgrade. One would think that a that the correction to flaw that causes a single program to uses gigabytes of RAM would have been widely disseminated, rather than waiting for users to experience the problem and go digging for a solution. Anyway, it’s fixed now. Please let me know if you notice anythingunusual. I’m sorry for the trouble. It should not be this hard. I’m going to go read some blogs now.

Today is a better day, but I am still experiencing the residual side-effects of a not so good Friday. Hers a few of the remnants that are still hanging around.

• The water in the swimming pool turned a yucky green color and got so cloudy that you couldn’t see the bottom. I took a sample to the pool store and they said it was saturated with phosphates, probably carried in by the wind when a neighbor put fertilizer on their lawn. They gave me same chemicals to fix it; but they were expensive, and we won’t be able to get into the pool for a long time.
• I have been typing on a laptop computer too much recently, so now my entire left arm and part of my back is hurting. I strained my arm from typing in an unusual position last fall and it was months before I was completely pain free. It doesn’t take much too over do it; but it takes time to get better.
• I got stung on the top of the head by a wasp. Stings are never any fun and the effect is magnified when it’s on your head.

There’s more; but those are the recently highlights (lowlights) for me. I’d rather not dwell on my bad luck anyway. I hope you all are having better luck than I am.