LolaGeek

We have some visitors from out of state at work this week, so they put together goodie bags for everyone. They are adorable! Brochures and postcards for local attractions like the outlets, zoo, Longwood Gardens, and Valley Forge park; Tastykake krimpets and tandy cakes; Herr’s chips; Hershey’s Kisses and Twizzlers; Wawa water bottles; mini Liberty Bells; and Slinkies (which I just learned are the official state toy of PA).

My birthday seriously sneaked up on me this year – I thought I had another week! So it’s going to fall on a pretty busy weekend. But I think GG will take me out to dinner somewhere nice.

Speaking of dinner… this was awkward… Last night we had a dinner for work with those people who are visiting. There’s also a woman who is joining the group in a couple weeks, but she’s attending the meeting this week and came to dinner too. So she doesn’t know anyone or what our backgrounds are. She was sitting next to me, and at one point in a lull in the converstaion, she turned to me and asked, “Do you have any kids?” Nope, just the cats. Then she turns to my friend H, sitting on my other side, and asked her the same question. Awkward, H has been trying for a while but hasn’t had any good news yet. Then she moves on to J, sitting across from me. Really awkward, J had a miscarriage and some other medical issues earlier this year. I wanted to say something like, “Look, I’m the only person here who doesn’t have kids and doesn’t want them. Everyone else either has them or is working on it. Now please stop asking everybody.”

I need to catch up with the blog! I was away for most of this week, and then when I got home I was so busy, plus our internet was down at home until this morning. So here we go!

Sunday night through Wednesday night I was on yet another business trip in New England. For a trip that went so well, a lot of little things went wrong (or were just inconveniences). For example, my train ticket was just “reserved” and hadn’t actually been purchased, and even though I’d been told I could use the electronic kiosk to finish the transaction, I apparently couldn’t. So I had to go wait in line and get tickets from a human. And then the train was packed! I didn’t realize Sunday nights were so popular! And I was stuck sitting near this mom with two little kids who wouldn’t shut up.

Every time I go up there it’s pretty interesting. Driving to work at home is so boring – it’s mostly highway, and then you get off the highway and there’s the office. Up there, the office (both offices where I was, actually) is sort of in the middle of town, and you get to drive through cute historic neighborhoods and stuff. Now, I imagine the traffic of thousands of people driving through little neighborhoods is not great, but the place is adorable. Also, they have awesome views out their office windows – even the cubicles!

I was actually at the office where the other half of my department is located on Monday, and it was nice to meet with people in person, meet co-workers I hadn’t met yet, and just be “present.” I went out to dinner on Monday with a member of my new group and another co-worker from PA who came up that night. Then on Tuesday and Wednesday my PA co-worker and I were at another office a few miles away for a two-day class. The class was interesting, but sort of left us depressed – it was about a methodology for implementing successful changes, but in the positions we’re in, we’d never have the authority to do the types of things they prescribe (e.g. assembling a team of the right people – since when do we get to put together our own teams?!).

The train ride home was nice, and it goes much faster when you’re not traveling by yourself – my co-worker came back home with me. For the first time I’ve ever experienced, our Amtrak train arrived at it’s destination on time! So I got home around 10:30 on Wednesday night.

Thursday I worked from home, cleaned, did laundry, and caught up on stuff around the house. Friday I went to my office for the first time all week. We went out to lunch to a new restaurant called Zoup!, which specializes in soup – they have 100 different types, 12 per day. They also have salads and sandwiches. My meal was okay, but I don’t think this place will make it on my list of top favorite restaurants. They’re also opening an Elevation Burger in the same shopping center, I’m excited to try that when it’s open! Friday night I called my mom to see if she wanted to get dinner, and she’d already eaten, but she told me she was meeting my brother and his friend to buy him a new computer (an early Christmas present, since his laptop just melted!), so I met up with them and then we had dinner after that. His friend was a vegetarian who wanted to go back to eating meat, so we went out for burgers!

On Saturday, GG and I had a nice day together. We went to the Farmers’ Market in the morning, where we ran into some friends and stocked up on fruits and veggies for the week (there was pretty much no food in the house since I’d been gone for most of the week). We spent the afternoon relaxing on the couch, then went out for dinner and to see Dinner for Schmucks. The movie was cute! Pretty funny throughout, and generally better than I’d expected. The cast was great! Loved Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, Zach Galifianakis, Ron Livingston, Kristen Schaal, Nick Kroll, Jemaine Clement…

Today we went to GG’s friend’s mom’s house for a Labor Day party. It was catered! It was actually mostly their family and a few of their other mutual friends. It was fun! The main attraction was that they rented a PA system for GG to entertain everyone with stand-up comedy. I don’t think he’s ever done more than a 10-minute set, but today he went through every joke he had and did at least half an hour. I recorded him. 90% of his jokes are really offensive – the other 10% are stupid puns :o) But they actually wanted him to blast the offensive humor over the PA because their neighbors play loud music all the time.

Not sure what I’ll be doing on actual Labor Day, but it’s nice to have a bonus day off before another busy week! (The fun of being in two departments now – careful what you wish for when you wish for a job, I guess!)

Wow, my first official day in my new job and I’m already getting overloaded. I love it! Except I have lots of business travel coming up and it’s kind of cutting into my personal vacation plans, but hey, we didn’t need to go on a vacation anyway. I also learned a whole new component of my job today that’s actually a lot easier than I thought. My counterpart from another group in our department (who I’ve been working with for a while anyway) is such a good teacher! He throws in all these other little tidbits that are just the sort of things I’m interested in. And I think he’s glad that I got this job – while he was showing me how this system worked, I asked a “Why can’t we do ___?” question, and he was all excited to finally have someone else who “gets it” when it comes to technology :o)

Alsoooo, we got some really good money news today. Not, like, crazy good, but reassurance that we’re on the right life-path and that we’re realistic. True blog fans might be able to guess what I’m talking about. It has to do with the V.E.T.

And finally, I got fed up with all the spam comments again and installed a new CAPTCHA plugin. I tested it out and it seems good – hopefully it’s a little more user friendly than the last one, even; I know some people had problems with that one anyway. Let me know if you have any issues.

The other morning I noticed this was printed in red on the back of my tube of toothpaste:

For best results, squeeze tube from the bottom and flatten as you go up.

Seriously? This is what we’ve come to? We need instructions on how to work a tube of toothpaste?!

Since it’s official and it’s been announced and everything, I can now say, I accepted a new job! It’s actually very similar to my old job, and I’ll be in the same department, the main difference is that now I’m not getting laid off at the end of the year, yippee! Also, my title is no longer Associate but Manager (not that I am managing anyone). So I’m moving up in the world…

Oh, and television! I haven’t written about it lately, and was actually enjoying not having my nights monopolized by watching scheduled shows, but things are starting to come back on the air so I have to watch. Right now I’m watching Work of Art (on OnDemand, I don’t actually know when it comes on), Project Runway season 8 (90 minutes is a bit too long for my taste, but I am loving that Tim Gunn gets talking heads! Also check out Tim’s Take for episode 1: “Just wait, the crack pipe gets bigger and bigger as the season progresses.”), and of course the Duggars are back with more 19 Kids and Counting (and they took 500 pairs of pants with them to Little Rock, apparently – that’s 50 pairs per pants-wearer!).

I found out why my posts here haven’t been numbered consecutively since I upgraded to WP3.0. Apparently this version gives a new number to various things (uploaded media, previews, autosaves, etc.), so the numbers of published posts will no longer be consecutive. How is that a good idea? I don’t get it. Oh well.

Yesterday I used the handicapped stall in the bathroom of my new building for the first time. I’d been avoiding it because I always feel guilty – what if an actual handicapped person comes in? But it was the only one open yesterday, so I used it. I’ve never actually seen a person in a wheelchair at this entire site, let alone this building, so I think it’ll be okay. (The bathroom where I was before didn’t have a handicapped stall – I guess they are supposed to roll over to this one – so this hasn’t been an issue until now.)

Very Exciting Thing! starts tomorrow. I am very excited!

And finally, this cartoon totally cracked me up this morning. “GLOM GLOM!” But yes, they somehow find ways to do these things even with regular-sized arms, don’t they?

Yesterday I went to get my eyebrows threaded. It had been a while since my last visit to the eyebrow lady, even tweezing at home I was getting a bit shaggy. As she leaned over my face, she asked, “Eyebrows and lip?” And I said, “No, just my eyebrows.” “Really? You really need to do your lip.” I just chuckled and said I’d never done anything with my lip, and please just do my eyebrows. When I got home, I examined my face very carefully in the mirror. Yes, I can see hairs on my upper lip when the sun hits me the right way, but I can see them on the rest of my face, too. You have to look really hard, and they’re so fine and light blonde, I’m not worried. I asked GG if he thought I had a moustache and he looked at me like I was crazy. So there, eyebrow lady. This isnt’t the first time I had a problem with her. But she does a good job, so I keep going back…

Today at work we’re having this lunch thing with the senior management of our group, who were all in town for an all-day meeting. Some of us were not invited until the last minute, so I didn’t know until like Monday that I was going (and we’re supposed to prepare a brief talk on what we’re working on). Then they changed the time of the meeting. Then we found out the head of the organization isn’t coming after all, because of some problems with her flight here. So… Just another typical meeting around here.

I know everyone is eagerly awaiting my recap of my trip to New York this weekend, and I’m almost finished writing it up, but I’m super busy today so it won’t be posted until tomorrow.

It’s another crazy week at work. We’d had a lull in SOP deactivations for a while and I almost forgot how nutso this could get. There actually aren’t any deactivations this week (there was going to be one, but it’s now delayed), but we have the most obsoletions ever – whole series are being wiped out! – so it’s quite a bit of work to getting all these updates done. Plus lots of key players are on vacation, so we’ve had to schedule things around when people are here, and have back-ups filling in.

Guess what – I just got a web cam. I figured it was time to upgrade, I’d had my previous one since like 2001 (not that I’ve used it in the past couple years), and it didn’t have a microphone or anything. Now I can make video reviews of products, or some of those annoying “shopping haul” videos! (Actually, sometimes those are fun to watch, I just wish people would use a script or at least bullet notes – it’s so annoying to just hear them go, “Sooo… here’s this thing… and it looks like this… [waves item blurrily in front of camera].”)

Also, I finally did a project I’ve wanted to do for a couple years now. I got nine botanical prints, put them in matching white frames, and hung them in a grid above our bed. The prints were from Vintage Printable, the frames were from Michael’s, I had them printed on cardstock at Kinko’s (though honestly they could’ve been done on nice paper with a good home printer), and they’re hung with 3M Picture Hanging Strips, which hopefully hold up well so we aren’t awakened by glass smashing on our faces in the middle of the night. I love the way it turned out! It seems to make the ceiling feel higher, and the room just feels much more finished. I can’t help but smile when I walk in and see it now!