I just submitted the final log for the wellness competition we've been doing this summer at work.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll find out if I've done enough to win one of the prizes...

Cross your fingers for me.

Four offices down from mine is one of our finance guys, and on his wall is a large dry erase board that can be seen as you walk down the hall. Usually the board has numbers or acronyms scrawled in a style reminiscent of football playbooks. One week it declaimed that the owner of the office would be out for specified dates.

Today, in juvenile-doodle artwork, there is an epic battle between Martian Manhunter and the Dark Knight (helpfully labeled) with the declaration of "WINNER" over MM's head.

I'm not sure I agree with the outcome of the fight, but it does give me hope that I'm not the only geek around here.

When you're 12, getting both Park Place and Boardwalk in a game of Monopoly is justification for your sibling to punch you (twice...in the gut as I recall). When you're in your 50s, it's just another case of abuse.

Apparently the IT group at work is slowly working through making various websites inaccessible through the Company network. This morning one of my web comics came up as blocked for Mature Content and now FaceBook is an unauthorized site.

I don't know if they'll get to LJ, but just in case, I thought I should put up a warning that I may be out of the loop at some point.

*sigh* So much for my favorite "take a break" (or "bored now") entertainments.

So, the British Finance Hottie (who I may have mentioned previously) is returning to his mother country and taking his Kai-melting accent and smile with him.

I now officially regret that I haven't had more reasons to be in the finance department lately.

Of course, there's a "goodbye" dinner for him (tonight) which I shall attend and try to pretend that the drooling is all because of the good food. And there's a card from the office...in which I did NOT write, "Your gorgeous self will be sorely missed. There is no one else worthy of being my Office Crush."...because honestly, I don't think his wife would appreciate that much. =D

We do have a new employee with a lovely British accent, but he's just not the same... *pouts* So much for work related fantasizing.

Usually I love the heat, but the A/C at the office has been on the fritz this week and I'm finding that what might qualify as "comfortable" at home or outside, rapidly becomes "stifling" and possibly even "nauseating" when there is zero air flow and you're in a box with a window that gets sun almost all day. I've been drinking so much water that I get dizzy by midway through the day if I don't go find something salty to snack on.

It's more tolerable today since the temperature outside has dropped, but has gotten unbearable by about 4pm the last two days. Fortunately, no one really cares if I go home at that point...most of them have left as well. I really don't know how my boss is dealing with it, given that she's got more windows than I do and they wrap around the sunniest corner of the building.

The warm conditions also have the effect of turning my brain to pudding, or Jello, or something similarly squishy. (Honestly, all I can see is the "brain mold" that Alton Brown used in his gelatin episode - he filled it with panna cotta.)

Makes it nearly impossible to concentrate on getting work done, so rather than surf the web I might as well work on a bit of an update, since I haven't really posted anything since the last round of "GRAH!! House...Bastards...OMGWTFBBQ!" Hopefully typing complete sentences will get me back on track to work on what I was trying to do.

( All I Ever Talk About )

As mentioned, my admin quit rather abruptly at the beginning of last week. We've updated the job requirements and posted the listing. If you or someone you know might be interested in an administrative assistant position in Pleasanton, you can get the details from the job posting.

A few notes on the qualifications, background with legal or stock option/equity awards will definitely weigh in your favor. We also need someone who knows Word and Excel really well, and would love to get someone with strong Powerpoint talents too. Detail oriented isn't just a buzz-word either - as I mentioned to a couple folks over the weekend, I alphabetize my books, CDs and DVDs, and I'm _not_ the anal-retentive one in my department.

The job supports four warm bodies (three positions) with occasional projects from my boss. One of those warm bodies is in the L.A. area and works from home, so you'll have to be ok with supporting someone remotely.

So far we've had a remarkably underwhelming response to the job posting (it went up yesterday) so I have plenty of room to present resumes/recommendations. You can apply directly through the listing link above, but if you'd like me to give your resume the personal circulation touch, send it to me directly (I think most of the locals have my email address, and if you're recommending to a friend, feel free to pass it along).

Slept better last night than I did Sunday - unfortunately, given how crap-tastic Sunday night was, that's not saying much. And I fully expect that today will be, um, "interesting" as I continue to deal with fall-out from yesterday's "Surprise! No Admin!"

If the Exalted group tonight is lucky, I'll just be brain-dead ... but I apologize in advance if I end up doing something stupid and getting the whole group killed, brainwashed or contracted to 100 years of service to the Illuminated.

On Wednesday night, after work, I drove out to SF to meet up with my boss, two co-workers and their spouses for dinner at Postrio. My boss has been wanted to celebrate getting our proxy statement done and out the door - she's tried to plan a dinner like this for several years but we've never actually set a date, time and location. Usually, she wanders in to my office after we file and says something to the effect of, "We should have a group dinner to celebrate." And I say, "ok..." and she says..."but it has to be in the City" (because there's nothing good enough out here) and I say, "Uh huh..." and it gets dropped, because at least two of the people who would attend live in the Tri-Valley and have no desire to go to the City on a week night.

But this year, it happened, due to some changes in the conversation that kept it from getting dropped and never brought up again...and so there we were - a very nice restaurant in SF run by none other than the famous Wolfgang Puck. The food was very tasty, and there were one or two things that were truly fabulous (the crab cake appetizer and the butternut squash risotto in particular), but over all, I wasn't all that impressed. I expect a little more "wow" with a place like that.


Last night, we had a "family dinner" at Poe's place. Poe cooked a turkey that's been living in Stride's freezer, and everyone else brought the fixings. There was cornbread, cranberry sauce, garlic mashed potatoes, rice, salads, stuffing, green bean casserole and several varieties of dessert, including the GLADoS cake (which definitely was delicious and moist).

There was no fancy plating or exotic ingredients or fancy china or carefully paired wines. There were no table linens or fancy napkins. We sat where there was space and stood when there wasn't and put our plates in our laps.

It was the antithesis of the fancy dinner two nights before...and better than it in every way imaginable. Best way to end the week ever. =)

I have figured out the great mystery of internet punctuation - or lack thereof.

All of those posts, emails and other online drabble that lack proper punctuation are not the fault of the authors. In reality, there is simply a finite supply of punctuation marks in the universe and my boss is using them up in her "urgent" emails. Today's message alone used up three periods and eleven question marks and eleven exclamation points. There simply isn't enough left to go around.

Let this be a lesson - you CAN do something about bad internet grammar. Conserve punctuation marks!

A question (or six) for my fellow office drones...

I've been pondering my lunchtime choices. For several years now I've been getting sandwiches from a nearby shop with very little variation. I've started mixing that with some other things (pizza, Chinese, etc), but ultimately, I'm still doing basically the same thing for lunch everyday.

I haven't really gotten bored with this, but I have started thinking about what I eat, how much I pay for it and what my options might be if I started bringing my own lunch to work.

Therefore, my questions:

What do you do for lunch? Do you bring something from home or eat out? What motivates you toward one or the other?

If you do bring your lunch, what do you like to pack for yourself? How do you transport it?

Do you find that bringing your lunch makes you more likely to eat at your desk? Or do you take your PB&J/pita wrap/bento box to a nearby park or other scenic location?


Any and all answers welcome in the interests of satisfying my curiosity. :)

As anyone who's seen my computer desktop knows, I don't have a problem with "busy" designs. For several years now, my preferred desktop for my work machine has been a collage of photos of my family/friends creating a cacophonous riot of color and smiling faces that makes some people grin and others say, "My god...how can you WORK with that background?"

Of course, the first of these creations was done close to when I started my job, and has been added to in pieces over time but not updated recently. Since I've been here almost 6 years, and not updated the collection much in close to 3 years, it's a little out of date. Babies have been born, marriages have ended, new friends have been introduced and social tectonics have reshaped the landscape significantly.

So yesterday, after I found my glasses, I spend a good bit of my day going through the photos on my "brick" (external hard drive) and creating a new background.

This one is sized to the right resolution for my current system, so everything is much crisper and clearer than it was. Previously, I was stretching the old collage to fit the screen. Like the original, before any modifications, there are some spaces where I can squeeze in photos as time goes by and things change. There's a little more family and a lot more friends, and it makes me smile.


There are a few people missing from the collection, since I didn't have photos of a few folks. I'll have to remedy that, and I really need to remember to have a camera handy at parties more often, so that in another 3-5 years, when I need to update for more weddings and births and other social shifts, I'll continue to have a supply of photos of the people I love doing the things that they love...and hopefully in clothing that I can continue to put into a collection of photos likely to be seen by my co-workers! =D

Thank you all for giving me something to make me happy during the day and remind me why I keep working. I'll put a friends locked copy of the image up in my LJ collection if people want to see it...

[ETA: Compressed copy uploaded, with f-lock, to gallery. I had to shrink it to get it to upload in a reasonable time. Can be found here.]

*sigh* Ever have one of those days where it feels like every single thing you finish and send off as "Final" turns up with an error somewhere until it just starts to seem like you just can't get anything right?

Apparently today is that day for me...and I'm officially sick and freaking tired of being wrong...

< / WHINE >

The "cheap" gas in Livermore (aka the Arco and the Safeway) has now exceeded $4.00/gallon. I love my Prius more than ever.

My boss is back in the office after a two week vacation, and I'm actually pretty ok with this. She's relaxed and having her in the office when it's quiet is good, since it gives me a more consistent stream of work on any given day.

And I didn't want to jinx it, but after two weeks, I think I can safely say...I've rediscovered my happy place and winter seems to have finally been evicted from my soul. There's probably not a lot of people who will understand the exact significance of that, but the two or three who would will probably be pleased/relieved to know that I think I'm officially "Happy Place Regained" at this point and I don't think it's just BayCon residuals. *sighs contentedly*

Summer may progress now. May it be a long one. =)

On Saturday in the early afternoon, my co-worker's son Cooper finally lost his fight with neuroblastoma. He was 6 years old.

Once again, words just fail me...

I know I've mentioned the co-worker of mine whose son has been battling cancer - neuroblastoma specifically - and I may have mentioned that they've done everything humanly possible to get him through this, including several rounds of chemotherapy and other treatments. They even participated in an experimental study that had them "commuting" to NYC every few months. The treatments bought him a couple of years - long enough to get to play baseball (which he adores) and start kindergarten (this past fall) - but they've never really gotten him all the way back to healthy.

And they stopped working about 3 months ago. Since then, everything has progressed. There's cancer in his bone marrow and expanding tumors in several other places. The last few weeks in particular have been bad, since he's having trouble eating and drinking due to tumor in his jaw.

Yesterday, they got the bad news - the tumor in his lungs has progressed to where it is life threatening and there is nothing that can be done. It's heart-breaking to see my co-worker trying to get through this. She and her family have been amazingly strong through the whole experience, and they've fought so hard...

Sometimes...sometimes there just aren't words.

*runs around like a maniac* *screams* *collapses*

Holy hell what a long day that was...

But we got everything out the door that needed to go, so now maybe I can finish the rest of today's to do list. *looks at clock* *sighs* Good thing Shar's expecting me to be late tonight. *goes for caffeine*

Earnings are out, profits are up and our stock is up almost 5% on after-market trading. Maybe we're finally coming out of the slump! *crosses fingers*

The lights keep randomly blinking off and then on again in my office. It's very sporadic - three or four times in the last hour or so - but very noticeable. I keep wondering what the heck is going on with the power in the building. Maybe I should take the stairs when I go to lunch, to avoid getting trapped in an elevator...

Argh.

MUST. STOP. DESIGNING. JEWELRY. AT. WORK!

*forcibly puts down pen and note pad*

Seriously...I have pages at the back of certain note pads/books dedicated to random ideas, and they're making my shopping list expensive! Must stop. Must stop now!

Must finish current projects before buying parts for new ones!