The last week has been interesting here in the great PNW.  This is an area that is not particularly well know for massive snow falls.  In fact, it is not uncommon to not have any snow at all during the winter.  Or at least that’s what I’m told.  Of the last five winters I have spent here, three of them have had fairly significant snowfall at least once.  In any case, about a week ago, we started hearing whispers of a mammoth winter snowstorm that would be barreling down upon us.  Soon it was all that folks could talk about.  This last Saturday, I was out in the car, and it began to snow, and it snowed hard and fast for a good while.  By the time I had gotten home from my trip, there was about an inch of snow on the ground.  Folks began to get excited.

Of course, as is often the case around here, snow doesn’t last that long.  By Sunday afternoon, all the snow had melted.  There were spits of flakes now and again, but nothing major.  But, the meteorologists told us, the big one is coming.  At work on Monday, folks began making plan for what we would do for the BIG ONE that came on Monday night.  Schools were cancelled for Tuesday morning in anticipation.  It was all that anybody was talking about.  The evening news spent 45 minutes of its 60-minute broadcast talking about snow and how bad it was going to be.

But when Tuesday morning came, I looked out the window and saw green grass.  There had been no snow overnight. At least not where I lived.  So, I went into work, a little disappointed.  I know better than to buy into that whole “excited about snow” thing (it comes from living in Michigan…the novelty wears off quickly). Nevertheless, I found myself buying into the excitement.  SNOW DAY!  So, it made working on Tuesday all the more difficult, since I had been expected not to have to go.

Tuesday night, after some more flurries here and there, the news folks were still warning about the horrendous snow storm we would be getting.  Again, the news spent 45 minutes of their hour-long broadcast talking about the snow we would be getting tomorrow.  Again, schools and businesses were announcing closures in anticipation.  And again, by the time I went to bed at midnight, the ground was still green.

Fortunately, this morning when I woke up, it was white.  We had gotten about 2 inches of snow where I live and got probably another two inches throughout the day.  A bit less than the 12-18” that had been estimated, but when it comes to snow, I’ve learned that everyone here exaggerates.  I chose to work from home because, hey, everyone else is, so why not.  I probably could have come into the office, but since nobody else was there, why bother?

Luke the Dog™ loves the snow.  That is, I believe, proof that dogs are, in fact, of significantly lower intelligence than humans.  Humans know better.  Most of them anyway. Most humans stay at home in front of a fire with a mug of hot chocolate, wrapped up in a soft blanket, and read a book.  Or watch movies. Or play video games. Or bake four dozen pretzel rolls on a whim.  There are a few mentally challenged individuals, most of the men, who think that being outside in the snow is fun. Some of them even find frozen lakes, cut a hole in them, and sit around for hours like dumb-asses trying to pull frozen fish out of the water. This is, of course, the definition of stupidity.

Had it been up to me, there would have been no outside time at all.  Snow is fine through a window. But my deep-seeded dislike of snow was overridden by my even more deeply-seeded dislike of cleaning up dog poop from a shag rug. (They never go on the laminate…always the rugs).  So we went outside a few times.  During our lunchtime outing, we met up with some of Luke’s friends: Merlin the Dachshund, Gordon the St. Bernard, Peanut the Chihuahua, and Roxy the Rat Terrier.  If dogs had the equivalent of a late night house party while your parents are out of town in a bid to become the most popular kid in school, it would be playing in the snow.  Watching them play together almost made the fact that I was voluntarily standing out in the snow freezing my Rastafarian nay-nays off seem not insane. Almost.

And, best of all, by the end of the day he was so pooped from all his romping in the snow that I found him sprawled out on my bed, spread eagle, with his tongue hanging out of his mouth and snoring…not unlike a trashy prostitute I…um…knew.  Yeah.  That’s it…

In any case, chances are I’ll have to go back into the office tomorrow for work because I won’t be able to justify staying home.  The snow is supposed to have stopped, and it should begin warming up tomorrow and raining, which will melt the remaining snow quite quickly. It’s all for the best, I suppose.  I’d rather do my work at work and my home stuff and home anyway.  But I may take the dog into the office with me tomorrow just so I don’t have to drive home to take him out at lunchtime.

So there you have it. The annual Seattle Snow™. May it not happen again until 2013.

Last night, I was meandering around the interwebs, as I am wont to do, and I came across the Twitter account of a co-worker of mine who I generally like, although I may not always agree with his methods.  I clicked onto his feed to see if he ever said anything interesting enough on his Twitter feed to warrant me following him.  Turns out that he did say something pretty interesting in his Twitter feed. About me. That wasn’t so much with the complementary.

At the time, I was a little taken aback.  I don’t profess to the best in the world at my job.  But I am pretty good at what I do…and considering how inexperienced I am, I dang good at what I do.  Moreover, I had gone out of my way to work on a project for this person that isn’t really my responsibility, as I had some available cycles and wanted to help out where I could.  And then I had my job performance called “terrible” in thanks.

My dad has a saying.  “You’ve got to care to get angry.”  And, in reality, I don’t care that much.  There would have been a time in my life where coming across something like this would have tortured me for days or weeks (or months or years, knowing my inability to just LET. THINGS. GO.)  But honestly, in this particular instance, I just didn’t care.  It did get me thinking, though, about civility.

I miss it. Or, at least, I miss the idea in my head about what civility used to be.  In the past in my mind, civility is a little like The Truman Show. People appeared to be happy and pleasant, even though it may not have always been the case.  But at least they made the effort.  But it seems like people don’t even bother making the effort anymore.

It used to be that people would be civil in their day-to-day interactions with other people, and would only don their asshats when they wrote letters to the editor or badmouthed someone in private.  But that’s not the case anymore.  It seems like the whole concept of civility is becoming more and more foreign.  Television “comedies” have stopped caring about being funny, and instead are just trying to offend everyone and everything they can, mistakenly believing that offensive = funny.  (Seth McFarlane, I’m talking to you.  Family Guy  used to be really, really funny.  Then you stopped worrying about being funny and started focusing on offending as many people as possible.)  And reality television murdered civility, threw it in the trunk of its car, and dumped the body in the middle of an elementary school playground.

The workplace seems to be suffering too.  It seems like there’s just no room for being civil with colleagues in the work environment.  It was particularly bad at my last job where, when you’d walk out of a meeting, you felt as though you needed to go the hospital and get bandaged up.  People were just brutal and belittling to each other all. the. time.

There is a whole generation of people for whom civility has become a completely foreign concept. They are incapable of disagreeing peacefully.  They post nothing but vitriolic hatred and bile on every article, blog post, or message board.  And I’m even more upset that I fall into that trap far too often myself.  I generally try to be polite, even when I disagree, because I hate conflict.  It makes me feel really uncomfortable.  But even I slip up.

In fact, I realized about an hour or so after seeing the Tweet that kicked off this minor self-reflection I had done the exact same thing nearly three years ago.  I had a co-worker much, much, much my junior who had decided that she was responsible for managing me, even though that wasn’t part of her responsibility or job description.  I posted some snot-nosed comment on Twitter to the effect of, “To my co-workers who obviously wants my job.  Back off.  I’ve got a boss already, thanks.”

She found the Tweet, and confronted me about it.  I deleted the Tweet and apologized, but the damage was done.  There remained a lot of tension between us until the day I left the company, mainly because a) her behavior didn’t change, and b) I continued to complain about her to basically anyone who would listen until the day I left.  And it all started because of that stupid little Tweet.

So my question is this:  I like to be civil, but I am also a very judgmental person who has a difficult time keeping my internal monologue…well…internal.  How do you do it?  How do you maintain civility when people drive you bat-crap crazy?  Because I know how to fake civility, but I have a really hard time “feeling” civil.

Or maybe it has less to be with me being civil, and more to do with me just being a big ole’ bitch.

I learned a lot of nifty things about some of the traditions, finally learned why Chinese New Year is later than the “regular” New Year (apparently, it’s because Chinese New Year is based on the Lunar Calendar), and even tried a bunch of traditional foods that I had never had before.  One co-worker even brought in a bunch of “Lucky Candy.”

Lucky Candy signifies good luck and fortune for those to whom it is given.  And, I might add, it’s pretty good.  It’s strawberry flavored, and has a standard hard-candy shell, but the interior is like a “whipped” hard candy that is somewhat pliable.  It’s a very unusual consistency.  But yummy.  And I love my sweets.

However, I had so much lucky candy on Chinese New Year, that I got a canker sore on my tongue.  I can’t help but wonder what kind of luck and good fortune I can expect to have when the lucky candy gives me a canker sore.  (Not to mention the chinese food that I ate that day gave me horrible digestive issues.)

Apparently, the Chinese don’t want me to have a very lucky year.

So, um, yeah.  It snowed.  Not very much.  But enough to freak everyone right the hell out and shut down the roads for a day or two.  It did get muy cold, though, so what snow had fallen got turned to ice pretty darn quickly. 

I work up this morning fully prepared to brave driving in to work, but when I woke up, my throat was sore.  Like I was getting a cold.  And I was extra tired and felt kinda week.  So, rather than brave the storm, I decided to work from home today like pretty much every single one of my co-workers. 

I took Luke out in the morning though, and while we were walking around, I wanted to run down to the lake to see what it looked like while the sun was rising up.  Snapped off a few shots, including the one above, before heading back inside to warm up. 

Working from home sounds like a good idea, and sometimes it is.  But many times, not so much. It can get hard to focus.  And since I struggle focusing most of the time anyway, it’s really a struggle for me.  I was able to get some stuff accomplished today, but unfortunately, the system was a little unstable, so I had to help with a lot of troubleshooting.

Today, I also FINALLY gave up on Final Fantasy XIII, the game that I’ve been playing for the last two months.  I’ve put 60 hours of time into it, and I could tell I was getting close to the end, but I just didn’t care anymore.  The only reason I was interested in continuing the play the game was so I could see how it ended.  But when they decided to throw in this ludicrously complex maze-thing just to draw the game out even further, I had reached my limit.  I already sank over 63 hours into this stupid game.  And while my time certainly isn’t the most valuable in the world, it’s more valuable than continuing to throw it away on a game I don’t like playing.  So, I went to YouTube, watched the ending, and sent the game back to Gamefly.  Next up, Fable 3 or possibly Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood of Man.

And for those of you who don’t care about video games, you may now return to your regularly scheduled Internet browsing.  Meanwhile, I’m going to go use my Netti Pot, take a bath, put on my PJs, and curl up in front of the fire with the dog.

Only one more day until Thanksgiving!

It’s been an interesting (almost) week, to be sure.  I guess I hadn’t realized how pervasive Facebook had become in my life until I removed it from my life.  The first couple of days were a little difficult.  I found myself going to Facebook or Twitter automatically without even realizing it.  I’d click on the bookmark icon, and would watch the page load before I realized I was even visiting the site.  And if I’ve learned anything in my life, I’ve learned that once you reach the point of doing pretty much anything out of sheer habit rather than out of deliberate action, you’ve probably passed the point of moderation.

A few days went by however, and I actually felt better.  I noticed several things:

• I was spending FAR less time on the computer.  There were days at home when I didn’t even bother turning on my computer at all. 
• I used the internet far less frequently.  I had allowed the Internet to move from being a tool to being a destination.  Take Facebook out of the equation, and its appeal as a destination vanished.
• I was getting more accomplished around the apartment.  Several times during the end of last week and over the weekend, I found myself with extra time.  I spent more time playing the piano, cooking, and cleaning.  I didn’t stay up as late.  Some nights, I even went to bed early.
• I was much less stressed
• I was far less aware of what was going on in the world.  (Some people may consider this a good thing, others a bad.  I actually rather like not being riled up about anything and everything.)

I decided about four days into the experiment that I was pretty much swearing off Facebook for good.  I’ll still keep my account, and will check on it occasionally.  I’ve set up my blog to automatically post a link to my new blog posts on my Facebook feed.  But other than that, I’m probably not going to get involved with Facebook much anymore.

I  may still post on Twitter every now and again, but I’m not going to leave my Twitter client open all day long and check on it several times a day like I normally have in the past.  Nor am I going to click on every link that gets passed along.

I’m actually rather glad I did this little experiment.  I’m enjoying my break from Facebook.  I can’t say it will be permanent (it probably won’t be) but for the time being, I’m more than happy not to spent hours of my day on FB/Twitter/Links provided therein.

***

On a completely unrelated note, it snowed in Seattle today.  About 1-2 inches.  And the city has ground to a complete and utter halt.  I left work at 4PM today…about 1.5 hours earlier than normal, and I was one of the last three people in the office.  Everyone else had scampered home as soon as the snow started to stick on the ground.  They freaked right out.  Now, I’m pretty confident driving in the snow.  One thing that I’ve learned as I’ve lived in several places around the country: the people in Michigan know something about how to teach their children to drive.  They know how to drive in all kinds of weather conditions.  They’re courteous when they need to be, but can also be aggressive when they need to be. 

I was having a conversation with a co-worker about my frustration with the four-way stops on my way to work, because it seems like nobody in Washington knows the rules of the four-way stop.  He actually said to me, “I never learned those rules.  What are they?”  This is a man in his mid-30s.  He’s from the area, and he  never learned the 4-way stop rules.  Not. Okay.

• Pedestrians always have the right of way
• The first person to the intersection has the right of way.
• If more than one vehicle gets to the intersection at the same time, the vehicle to the furthest right has the right of way.
• If two vehicles approach opposite stop signs (north/south or east/west) at the same time, both my proceed through the intersection at the same time as long as both of them are going straight.  If one is going straight and the other is turning left, the one going straight has the right of way.
• Use your @#$@#$@#$@ turn signal!  IT’S NOT THAT FREAKING HARD TO TURN ON YOUR TURN SIGNAL.  If you’re too busy to signal when you’re driving, put down your cell phone, your chalupa, and your mascara, and drive.

Anyway (whew, that was a tangent) the roads are slicker than snot out there right now, and then it got super cold for here, so now everything’s frozen.  There aren’t salt trucks or very many snow plows, so the roads aren’t getting any better.  It’s pretty darn ugly.  I could handle driving on the roads, because I understand how to drive in the snow, but I don’t trust the other drivers around me.  My neighbor drove his car into the ditch trying to get out of the apartment complex, and over the course of the next five minutes, caused five other cars to also drive into the ditch because none of them were able to adequately adjust their driving to deal with the conditions.  So, chances are that I’ll be working from home tomorrow.  Which is fine with me.  All this snow really sets off my Christmas decorations.

***

I’m laying in bed writing this blog post, and my dog is laying at the foot of the bed expelling farts that are so foul that the plastic lid of my laptop is melting.

***

I’m a huge fan of impressionists and parody as a comedy form.  A friend of my posted this amazing video of a woman singing the song “Tomorrow” from Annie as several different “divas.”  Most of them were pretty good, but her Burnadette Peters was uh-ma-zing, and her Celine Dion was so spot on I could hardly believe it.  Also, this is very funny.

***

So, I read and watch a lot of very funny thing on the Internet, but I don’t think that, in my nearly 20 years of using the Internet I have ever read anything in my life that made me laugh as hard as this blog post.  Seriously, I think I’ve read it 18 times, and every time it makes me laugh so hard I nearly puke.  This is especially funny if you have, like, or are ever around dogs.  But it’s funny for everyone.  So, without further ado, the funniest thing on the Internet,

Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving

***

I ran into one of my old co-workers today, and I was again reminded how grateful I am for my job.  I’m grateful that I am able to work for a company that treats its employees more like human beings and less like expendable resources.  I’m grateful that I have health insurance.  I’m grateful that, despite having worked there for less than six months, and having already taken two paid days off, I have nearly two weeks of paid time off accumulated.  I’m grateful that I don’t have to clock my down down to the minute, and I don’t have to get approval to leave work 15 minutes early, because there is no rigid schedule.

***

I’m grateful for living in such a beautiful area.  This is beautiful, not only because of the wonderful summer weather, the beautiful scenery, and the clean air, but because of the people.  Of all of the places I have ever lived, I don’t think I’ve ever lived anywhere where the people were more accepting of differences.  I think it’s due to the higher education level, the extremely diverse population, and the overall liberal feel of the place, but the people here just don’t seem to get so worked up over other people’s choices. 

***

I’m grateful for the Internet.  I’ve basically grown up with the Internet.  I started using the net regularly in 1992 when I got my very first 2400 baud modem.  Since then, I’ve basically lived online.  You can argue whether this is a blessing or a curse, but it has become a major part of my life—one that I would be hard pressed to live without.  I’ve been able to have fun, learn new skills, get and give support, make money, spend a whole lot more money, and share the things I create.  I’m grateful for that young man from Lansing who just gave me his old, leftover modem to experiment with so I could join the revolution so early.  (It’s strange to think that the Internet as we know it now hasn’t even been around for 20 years yet.  When I started getting online, it was using Lynx and Gopher.  There weren’t any graphical websites, and certainly no such thing as e-commerce.  Things move quickly in the technological age, don’t they?

***

I’m grateful for my family.  We don’t live close together, and haven’t for a long time.  But I still feel very close with them.  I’m grateful that they love me no matter what, and that even though I make choices that they may not agree with, that doesn’t diminish their love for me or mine for them.  Considering what I have seen many of my friends go through with their families, I’m not really sure how I got so lucky to have mine, but I’m glad I did.

***

I’m glad that I can write in my blog, take photos, write songs, play video games, play with the dog, record audiobooks, go shopping, cook (and eat), and do all of the other things that I do in the course of my life that bring me enjoyment.  I’m grateful that I get to set my own schedule, make my own rules, and live the way I want to live.  I’m grateful that I can decorate for Christmas a month early.  I’m grateful for my dog, my iPad, and my Tivo.  I’m grateful for a car that, in five years, has only needed oil changes, new tires, and (as of this moment) new brakes.  I’m grateful for my friends.

***

I’m grateful for lots of other things too, but I think I’m going to limit my schmaltziness to this list.  For now, anyway.  With Thanksgiving right around the corner, I felt like I had to throw in at least one Gratitude post.  Last of all, I’m extremely grateful for Kaspars, the place where I have Thanksgiving dinner every years that I’m not with family.  Because this is what my Thanksgiving dinner will consist of:

• Carved Turkey with Rosemary, Lemon and Black Pepper Rub
• Pike Place Market Ale and Honey Glazed Ham
• Old Fashioned Gravy
• Cranberry, Orange and Cinnamon Sauce
• Annabelle’s Savory Celery, Sweet Onion & French Bread Stuffing Corn Bread Stuffing with Crispy Oysters
• Whiskey Barbecue Pulled Pork
• Maple Vanilla Bean Sweet Potatoes
• Country Style Red Skin Garlic Mashed Potatoes
• Brussels Sprouts with Shallots and Crispy Bacon
• Butternut Squash, Spinach, Ricotta Cheese and Walnut Cannelloni Baked Macaroni and Cheese with Fine Herb Bread Crumb Crust
• Dungeness Crab Champagne Bisque
• Northwest Seafood Stew with Sun Dried Tomatoes and Basil
• Black Bean and Cojito Cheese Quesadilla with Pico de Gallo
• House Smoked Wild Salmon with Honey Rum Glaze
• Chilled Prawn Cocktail with Horseradish Tomato Cocktail Sauce
• House Smoked Penn Cove Mussels
• Olive Oil Poached Albacore Tuna with Watercress and Red Bell Pepper Pesto
• Roasted Cauliflower Salad with Curried Garlic Dressing
• Spanish Red Snapper Escabéche Deviled Eggs with Dungeness Crabmeat Orzo Salad with Green Vegetables and Green Goddess Dressing
• Caesar Salad with Focaccia Croutons and Parmesan Dressing
• Thai Noodle Beef Salad with Mint, Cucumber and Lemon Dressing
• Greek Vegetable Salad with Feta and Kalamata Olives
• Red Cabbage and Apple Slaw with Brown Sugar Dressing
• Roasted Winter Vegetable Salad with Balsamic Vinaigrette
• Tomato, Basil and Fresh Mozzarella Salad
• Caramelized Onion and Three Cheese Tart
• Balsamic Onions with Oregon Blue Cheese
• LePuy Lentil Salad with Chicken Cilantro Meatballs
• Roasted Beet, Pear, Spiced Granola Salad
• Ricotta Tortellini Salad with Autumn Squash and Crispy Sage Seasonal Fruit Platters
• International Cheese Selection with Sesame Crackers, Focaccia, Walnut Bread, Challah, Savory Scones, Cilantro Jalapeño Corn and Bacon Muffins
• Pumpkin Pie
• Pecan Sweet Potato Pie
• Crème Brûlée
• Cranberry Tiramisu
• Rustic Apple Tart
• Cheesecake
• Cookies
• Chocolate Mousse
• Banana Betty
• and Many More!

Today’s potluck was, well, astonishing.  Several things contributed to the success of the potluck.

• Generally, it’s an older crowd with smaller families, so most people didn’t bring tater-tot casserole or funeral potatoes.  In fact, there wasn’t a single dish that I could consider a casserole.
• Everyone wanted to show off a little bit.
• Rather than being provided by a bunch of white midwestern housewives, the contributing members consisted of: three Indian co-workers, two French co-workers, two Chinese co-workers, a Japanese co-worker, and Americans from all over the country.  I have never in my life been to a potluck where you could choose from baby back ribs, samosas, curry, cous cous, duck liver pate with cornichons, pad thai, and gumbo.  I mean, seriously.  I like funeral potatoes, but they can’t even compare.

My bread was a big hit.  In fact, I got one of my favorite food-related compliments.  One of the Frenchmen with whom I work said he hasn’t been able to get bread this good since he left France.  And he offered to pay me “whatever you want” if I would bake him a loaf of bread every day.  And let’s be honest…the French know from bread.

Yeah, so if potlucks were more like that, I would totally go more often.  Plus, I got to take home some really yummy chick pea curry leftovers.  (Note to self: learn how to cook Indian Food.) 

Mmm.  Food.  Speaking of curry.  I think I’m going to go warm some up as a pre-bedtime snack. 

I bought some new glasses today.  I stopped off at LensCrafters during my lunch break, and picked up the new glasses after work.  I was going to take a picture me wearing them, but they look almost identical to my old glasses.  It was a $250 hit that I didn’t really want to take right now, but my old glasses, which were nearly six years old, were starting to look like they had been sandblasted.  There was a giant gouge in the left lens right over my eye, and it would cause funky reflections when I was watching TV.  And don’t NOTHING interfere with me and my TV.

And speaking of going to LensCrafters during lunch, I’m still having a hard time transitioning from the world of the hourly contract employee to that of the salaried employee.  Most people in my office don’t start rolling in until 9:30 or 10am.  (It’s a technology startup.)  I’m there at 8:00 almost every day, and leave by 5:30-5:45 almost every day.  I usually take exactly an hour for lunch.  I was at LensCrafters, and thinking that I better call someone to let them know I was going to be late, or that I would have to stay later to make up the time when I realized that I didn’t have to.  And with a company that is as relaxed as mine is, it’s just a really huge transition to move from a job where you had to track your time in 5-minute intervals to one where they wouldn’t even notice if you didn’t come in until noon just so long as your work is getting done.

Tomorrow, we’re also going to be enjoying a goodbye party for one of the developers on the team.  He’ll be leaving to join another large technology company in the area, and so, to celebrate, the whole team is going to lunch, to see "The Social Network," and then to play pool and have drinks and snacks at the bar near the theater.  It’s like when you only have a half-day at school.  So needed.

This weekend I’m going to have to buckle down and clean.  It’s starting to get tragic in my apartment.  I’ve cleaned some since I let the cleaning lady go, but it’s just not the same as coming home after work on Friday to sparkling clean apartment.  I am missing some of the basic elements of cleaning…Formula 409, a toilet brush, comet, the will to get up off my fat butt.  But now that I have to use a machete to get into my kitchen, and the bathtub is starting to turn puce, I think it’s time. 

So, to summarize, I’m emotionally exhausted from being so angry, I have new glasses, working as a salaried employee is weird but awesome, I have to clean my apartment.  Wow.  With a life like that, how am I still single?

"What’s Early?" I asked.

"Before 5PM?" he responded.

"No, I should still be here."

"Okay.  I’ve got a meeting for the next hour, but then I need to talk to you for a little bit."

Then he withdrew.  And I started freaking freaking out.

I don’t know about most companies, but at Microsoft, when your boss schedules a 1-on-1 meeting for 5PM on a Friday afternoon, that meant one thing, and one thing only:  You were being "let go."  Or, to put it in true Micro-speak, you were "leaving to pursue other opportunities."

Why was I being fired, I thought?  We’re hiring people like crazy.  I just had a 1-on-1 with my boss four days ago and he said I was doing a good job.  I didn’t look at porn at work.  I never brought the dead hookers in my trunk into the office.  Shouldn’t they at least give me a warning first that I hadn’t been up to snuff?  How was I going to pay rent.  Rent?  How was I going to get the money to move my stuff back down to Utah so I could move back in with my parents while I tried to find some crappy job with a multi-level marketing scheme or credit card call center?  Because without a job, there was no way I was going to be able to pay rent, so I was certainly going to have to move in with my parents.

So, for the next hour, I sat in my office, unsure whether to cry, call my mommy, or delete the database for the entire system, because if I was going down, they were going down with me, dammit, all the while staring at my computer screen and not getting any work done at all.

When 5PM rolled around, my boss popped back in and said, "Do you have a minute now?"  I said that I did and I followed him, not to his office, but to a hidden little out-of-the-way conference room where, I was certain, nobody would be able to hear the stream of profanity that was sure to stream forth from my mouth at any moment.  He closed the door, beckoned for me to sit down, and sat down in the chair across from me.

‘This is it,’ I though.  I’m ready.

"Well, it’s time for bonuses.  And since you were only here for three weeks before the end of the fiscal year, your bonus is pretty small."

What?  I wasn’t being fired?  I made a mental note to go and remove the ticking timebomb left on the server’s main drive. 

At the end of our little meeting, I looked at my boss and said, "You know, when you wanted to have a meeting at 5PM on a Friday, I thought I was being fired." 

He looked startled for a moment, then said with a laugh, "Huh.  I hadn’t even thought of that."

Lucky him…

(PS – I would never ACTUALLY do any damage to the servers even if I had been unceremoniously fired.  It just makes for better dramatic tension in storytelling.)

I can now blog from my sofa.

That’s right.  Today, I received my early birthday present to myself: my new Dell laptop.  This may  not seem like a particularly fascinating development.  And, let’s be honest…it’s not.  But it’s unusual for me.  I’m not usually a fan of the laptop.  I like having a full-sized keyboard and a big screen (or, in my case, two big screens.)  But I figured it was time to get a laptop…especially for the kind of work I’m going to be doing with my new job.  Since I have to be transporting video back and forth between my studio at home and my office, this just seemed like a perfect fit.

Plus, now it gives me the opportunity to live-blog TV shows.  Not that I will actually do that, but I could do that if I were so inclined.

—-

The new job, for those who keep asking, is coming along pretty well.  It’s a great company at which to work.  (Is that grammatically correct?  I was trying not to use a preposition to end that sentence with.)  The job is enjoyable and very challenging for me, which is a nice change of pace.   The environment is very different than my last job.  At Microsoft, I was one of the oldest members of a very young team.  The team was very relaxed, fun, and—well—hilariously unprofessional.  I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, by more in a walking-hr-violation-make-me-laugh-all-the-time sort of way.  Because it was a younger group of folks, there were a lot of friendships between the people at work.  If it weren’t for some of the folks I met on that job, I wouldn’t talk to anyone else…ever.  Pretty much my only relationships here are from friends that I made on that job.

The new environment is equally relaxed, but that’s about where the similarities end.  It’s a much more staid environment.  The people are wonderful, and quite friendly.  But I’ve gone from being one of the oldest of a young team to one of the youngest of my new team.  Most of my teammates have families, and several have children.  It is, I imagine, much more like a regular work environment than I was used to.  It’s not bad, by any means…just very different.  I like the folks I work with a lot, and they’ve been extremely helpful.  But I don’t see any of my current co-workers and I hanging out on the weekends. 

That being said, the company’s great.  In two days, I will have amazing health insurance.  It’s wonderful knowing how much every paycheck is going to be, even if I take time off.  I really enjoy working with the clients, and I think that as I begin to have a better understanding of our system, I’ll be able to provide a lot of value to the company.

—-

I’m in the mood to start watching a new TV show, and I’m trying to figure out which shows I’d like to see.  I’ve thought about watching the X-Files from beginning to end.  I’m half-way through My Name is Earl which was funny for the first season, but afterwards I lost interest.  I think what I’m going to pick up next is The West Wing.  I love some of the actors in that show, especially Bradley Whitford and Allison Janney (or however her name is spelled.)  Plus I need a show that’s a little more, well, intellectual. 

Besides, I need something to tide me over before Warehouse 13 comes back on in July.

If you’re not watching this show, I’d highly suggest it.  Funny, well-written, and inventive.  Plus, Eddie McClintock!

—-

So, you may have noticed that there’s something a little different about my blog theme.  I’m trying a few different things, and I have latched on to a new theme yet.  I like the layout of this theme…especially the fact that the categories are listed as a drop-down above.  But, I still need to make some customizations if this is the theme I decide to stick with.  I’m not a HUGE fan of the white text on black background…but it’s hard to find a theme that I actually like.  Plus this theme has the comments link at the top of the post, which doesn’t make any sense at all.  Actually, the more I think about it, the less I want to keep this theme.

If anyone can suggest WordPress themes that they like, let me know.  I’m a tough cookie when it comes to themes.