It’s definitely September. Last week my average commute time was about an hour. Both rides on Friday were more like 50 minutes. It was flat out glorious.
This morning, the first commute in September, was close to 90 minutes.
It is definitely September now.
Today is our first day in a new office. How far was the drive?
42.9 miles.
How long did the drive take me?
One hour and 18.6 seconds. That’s during the late summer though, I expect to add 20-30 minutes to that once school starts.
Yippee.
The work day is ending. I’ve wrapped up what I was working on. My wife is on her way here so that we can drive together to get the kids. I am in a complete state of terror that my phone will ring before I can sign out for the weekend.
Here’s a random Flickr Pic to help keep my mind off of the phone.
It’s Niagara Falls. Sure it’s only been a few weeks since we visited, but I wouldn’t mind going back with the kids.
Three minutes until I can punch out.
Two minutes until I can punch out.
One minute until I can punch out.
Only one work day left until we can go and get the kids at camp. Please, programmer/analyst gods, let them take it easy on me today. Please no screaming customers, please no critical issues, please just let me keep hammering away at the stack of tasks already assigned to me, please don’t kick my ass (professionally speaking). I just want to get through today in one piece and then finally go and get the kids.
Oh and if you can swing it so that my wife and I can drive to camp together, that would be nice too. I don’t think that falls under the programmer/analyst god’s jurisdiction though. It couldn’t hurt to try, right?
One of the customers that I support has a project going on today. In normal cases such projects require that a programmer for each application be assigned an on call for the night. In this case the project is considered minor so instead of an on call they have asked for the site’s programmers to work a swing shift and be in the office from 7-3:30 instead of 9-5:30.
The upside is that I expect a little less traffic this morning, and I get to leave the office two hours early.
The downside is that I had to get up at 4:30am. Wow, did 4:30am get here fast!
I have been wanting to get up well before sunrise and drive to the ocean for a sunrise photo opportunity. This time of year that would pretty much mean getting up at 4:30am. I thought that today would be practice, and then I would do it for reals tomorrow.
I telecommute tomorrow so I don’t have to get ready as if for work, and I don’t have to spend the hour plus on the road. I could do the sunrise tomorrow…
But I think I’m sleeping until the last possible second, thank you very much. The sunrise can wait for another day.
I have a question about vacations.
Is it possible that the horror of the first day of work following a week long vacation actually outweigh the benefits of the week long vacation? As I try to get myself ready for work this morning, I’m not anymore rested because of my week off. I actually feel more exhausted than before we left. Today I’m going to have a full week’s worth of problems dropped on me at once. I’m going to have five times the stress and frustration of a normal day. Is it worth it? If I’d asked this one week ago I would have said yes, it is worth it. Today? I’m not so sure.
As my lunch break nears its end I sit here thinking…
That I haven’t posted today.
Yesterday was nuts. I was crazy busy all day and didn’t have time to eat anything prior to about 8:30 at night, never mind post to this page. Today has been crazy busy too, but not as bad. It feels about the same though. I’m tired. I’m back into one of those sleeping-is-difficult stretches that I sometimes get into.
I had hoped to maybe catch up on a little sleep over the weekend, but I ended up sleeping less than normal. This coming weekend probably won’t be much different. Two weeks from now though… we’re on vacation. I have to survive nine more work days (including today) before I get there. It’s going to be rough.
We had planned to go to Quebec City on the vacation, but taking children out of the country when you have shared custody and the other custody sharer is not going too involves more paperwork than we expected and we aren’t going to have it ready in time. That means we need to rework our plans to stay within the US. I asked my beautiful wife if we could try to at least get ourselves to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls before the summer ends. She thought we could pull that off. We just need more documentation than we realized when we started thinking about Quebec, and now we really don’t have enough time.
So where should we go? Jen mentioned Virginia last night. Virginia Beach sounds nice. I’ve never been there, but it’s in the South where it’s warmer and it has… ya know… a beach and stuff. That works for me.
What other options are there? We could always go back to New York, but we’ve done that a couple of times now. There are always the mountains in New Hampshire or Vermont? Those are always great, but it’s still April. Maybe we want to chase the warmer weather this time. I don’t know.
I would prefer to avoid Pennsylvania, other than to drive through it to get to somewhere else. We haven’t had bad luck there, but some of their roads have annoyed me enough that I’d rather go elsewhere. There is always upstate New York. We haven’t gone there with the kids. Is it too cold for Lake George?
I’m looking for ideas, folks. Feel free to add suggestions.
Today is like Christmas and my birthday all rolled into one!
The 21st century has finally arrived!
We were just issued wide screen monitors at work! Oh bliss! Oh rapture! Oh happiness! Wide screen monitors at last!
I’m so thrilled that I want to grab my new monitor and give it a great big hug!
Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate it.
There isn’t much celebrating going on here today. I’m on call until tomorrow morning, so we won’t be visiting family. The kids are at their dad’s house, so there won’t be any Easter Bunny shenanigans, although there are a couple of baskets of candy in the living room that weren’t there yesterday. Hmmm. They must be for me! Jen is going to cook a ham today, because she’s a wonderful person, but she is going to work too. I need to clean the mini van as we have a group of five going on a drive one day this week and the rear seats need to be put in. If I am doing that much, then I might as well clean out the whole pig sty. Other than that, maybe some hammy music to go with the ham dinner while I wait for my phone to not ring?
Happy Easter.
There is a downside to working for a company that has more than one office. I have a 10:00 meeting in a building other than the one with my desk. The two buildings are too far away for me to start my day at my desk, so I went straight to the one the meeting will be in.
We have open PC stations that are set aside for folk who are in the wrong building, but they are all full. I found a training room that’s empty at the moment, but it’s booked for four minutes from now and I will get kicked out.
Where am I to go for the 9:00 hour?
Questions, questions.
Inside the Red Head's Head 