It’s just a blog

This was my project for today. It’s slowly coming together. I’ve started learning a bit about the way that work flows through the shop, kind of getting my bearings. It doesn’t seem like there’s anything that I couldn’t do that’s part of the day to day stuff. For the most part, it’s all pretty basic, straightforward work, which is pretty much what I was expecting.

Problem is, I’m not really there to do the day to day stuff. So it’s a little weird. There isn’t really a place for me yet, I think they’re going to have to get another mac for me to work on. Or maybe a PC. Possibly both.

I spent most of today putting this together. I was handed an illustrator file and put on the one computer that had Dreamweaver. What I came up with is pretty close to the original layout, with a few tweaks. It’s fluid now, with a mostly fixed left navigation. Still some tweaking to do, but it’s still light years beyond what they currently have. Which isn’t even loading for me to check the link to right now. Funny. I still need to add some tabs that blend in with the gradient on the right, under the header images. And the company name and an address go in the image header. Headers are fixed left and right, they change spacing as you resize the window. I’m pretty happy with the fade, if somehow the coastline ends up behind the leaves, it looks like it’s fading off into the distance more quickly.

Really, doing the layout doesn’t worry me. It’s not going to be that hard. What does worry me is that they are getting a new order tracking software. They want to integrate it with an online ordering system. They want browser FTP uploads. Eventually, live order tracking through our imposition RIP software. That’s a little ways out, but I know that they are pretty hot for it. Is it something that I’m going to be able to do? I have no idea. I guess I have a lot of learning to do. It should go OK. I hope it goes OK.

I probably should have asked for more money.

Moving is pretty much on track, though I still have a lot to go. Probably another three trailer loads on the bike, or probably two in a truck. I haven’t really gotten started on the cleaning, either. Part of me just wants to say fuck it, since I’m having to pay so much to get out of the place, and I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to be getting my deposit back, either. Pretty much everything that is left is all piled up in one room, though. And there’s still space to move around. So it can’t be that bad, right?

So yeah, a little worried that I’m in over my head on a lot of shit. But it’s good. I don’t seem to learn any other way.

I’ve been going through and packing, cleaning.  Trying to keep myself busy.  Tonight I moved furniture around so that I could sweep and mop underneath it.

I never got around to mopping the living room, but I noticed that my futon would fit nearly perfectly right next to the door.  A few minutes later, and the boxes that need to be moved next week were moved into the office (which I had mopped) and my living room was rearranged.

Kind of amazing, it seems much larger and more functional than it ever did before.  Simply by reversing everything and moving one chair.  It’s about as far away from symmetrical as you could get, but for some reason I like it.

Why do I figure this out a couple weeks before I move out?

Yesterday was my last day at work at the hell job forever.  Not many people came out for the after party, but I never really did make many friends  down there.  A lot of people that counted on me, yes.  Friends, not so much.

So now it’s time to get started on working towards the future.  Things seem to be good.  Really good.

Which  is kind of unusual for me, and something I really hope I get to experience long enough to get used to it.

I picked it up in Seattle.  It’s pretty much a book that I’d been looking for for years, a sketchbook that’s made to look like a book from the 1600s.  Quality paper.  Gilded edges.  A clasp.

But it’s still blank.  I haven’t been able to bring myself to start putting anything in it.  I have a moleskin that I picked up at the same time that’s been getting the random sketches and doodles, shopping lists and notes from endless meetings at work.

Sometime soon, I think that I’m going to know what to put in that book.

Seems like next month is going to be a pretty monumental one for me.  Lots of things are changing.  Work has left me frustrated far too much lately.  Everything that I think I’m doing well is swallowed up by the monumental organization I work for, lost in committees, implemented wrong, or just doesn’t make sense to anyone but me.  It all seems to work, and to work well, but nothing good seems to really come of it.

So I’m giving up.  I took a job at a smaller shop, working with my old boss.  He called me out of the blue while I was out sick the other week, and when I called back the next day, it sounded interesting.  I’m not really sure on the details yet, but I know that it’s going to be more money and a shorter commute from the new place.

I guess that’s the other major update - I’m taking over Felipe’s apartment when he moves out. May 1st.  A few days after starting the new job, probably.

Kind of a leap.  5 years I’ve been at this job, longer in this apartment.  I think it will all be good, but there’s the possibility of falling on my face.

Lots of other new stuff.  I’ve been so busy that I haven’t even thought about blogging.

I’m really hoping that busy is almost over for me, that the stress is going to lessen and life gets more manageable.  It’s almost spring, I want to be able to have a life and get outside, not spend all this time working.

I’ll keep anyone still reading this posted.

Sometimes the whole 100% thing gets to me.  This last week has been horrible at work, nothing is going right, there’s nothing I can do about it, but a ton of the stuff seems to just land in my lap.

Doesn’t help that my boss ended up working 22 hours straight on one of the things that I wasn’t  involved with fixing.  They told him to take a five day weekend after that, then he was back on Tuesday.  Today, his dog was sick so he was out.

More crap landing all around me.

Tonight would be a really great night to just go and tie a couple on after work.  Just say ‘fuck it, just tonight.’

It doesn’t work that way.

If I go do that, it’s essentially saying ‘Fuck it, I’m going to kill myself.  I just don’t have the balls to do it quickly.’

But yeah, tonight I want to drink a bottle, pass out and forget today happened.

Not sure what the hell I’m going to do instead.

Guess it’s that time of year again.  I get older in about an hour and a half.  The clock ticking past midnight probably doesn’t mean much, but there are other signs I’m getting old.

1. I have to trim my eyebrows.  Not because they’re growing together, but because they’re starting to grow much longer than they ever have.  Eyebrow hair should not be able to get an inch long.
2. Grey hairs everywhere.  It’s not just the beard and the hair on top of my head anymore.
3. Sleeping in is now waking up at 9am
4. I don’t feel like doing anything at all for my birthday.

I guess that’s not too strange.  My birthdays never seem to go as planned, not really festive occasions.  I only really remember one from being a kid, that was the one where I actually had friends over for the night in middle school.  One kid had brought a roll playing game for his present.  Some scenario where you played this guy who’s sword ate the souls of the enemies that he vanquished.  My mom burned it in the bathtub because it was satanic.  Not really the greatest way to say thanks.

Last year I ended up too hung over drunk to make it to my own party.  That was fun.  Puking while riding home from Stuporbowl planning.   Pretty awesome there.  At least, I won’t be doing that again this year.  Definately one of the low points of my drinking days, too messed up to go and eat the cake that my friend had made for me.

As of now, I have no plans for tomorrow other than working.  Maybe do laundry.  I don’t want to go out and celebrate anything.

I don’t really have the money to, anyway.  Turns out that I spent a little bit too quickly after getting paid Friday.  But it’s on good stuff.  Picked up a 24″ wide screen LCD monitor, I’d been using the same 19″ CRT for something like eight or nine years.  Time to give it up.  Honestly, I probably would have been a little better off getting the 22″, and it would have been quite a bit cheaper.  But I wanted the 24, I had the money, and I got it.  The box was by far the biggest thing that I’ve ever transported on my bike, but it turned out OK.  It would have really sucked to have it fall off halfway home.

Need to work on that impulsive streak a bit.

I also got plane tickets to head out to Seattle to visit PinkZilla at the end of the month.  She’s going to be coming out here, we’re actually taking the same flight back, so I guess I really didn’t need to get the tickets.  But I’ve never been on a plane, and I haven’t been further than I can ride my bike out and back in a day since we went to Montana for Christmas in 2006.  I went out shopping for a few parts for the Olmo today, a more weather worthy saddle than my Brooks and some toe-clip style pedals.  I’m probably going to leave the bike out there so that it’s around for people to use when they go to visit her.  Gets it out of my apartment so I have more space, too.   I was going to sell it, but this seems like a better way to get rid of it.

Though I could probably use the 5-600 it would make.  There was a pretty nice looking LCD TV for 899 at the store where I bought the monitor.

Other than that, not much going on around here.  It was nice out today, all the way up into the 40s.  Got some riding in, just to a couple bike shops.  Sloppy with all the snow melt, and I will probably have to be careful of ice on my way into work tomorrow.

It is going to be nice not doing anything tomorrow, I think.  With as blah as I’ve been about everything the last month or so, I don’t really feel like being around happy people.  Especially if I’m expected to be happy, too.  Being around happy people just seems to remind me that I’m not.  Which is never a good thing.

I was working in some directories on servers that I hardly ever have to access any more today at work, and ran across a nearly defunct folder.  It was called ‘Personal Office’ and I had a folder in there with a time stamp from back in 2003.

A little while later, they sent out a little excel spreadsheet from HR for tracking paid time off accrual over the course of the year.  I glanced at it, noticed that with five years working there, it was 13.33 hours per month, less than that and it was 10.

12m*10h = 120hpy/40hpw = 3weeks off

12m*13.33h = 159.96hpy/40hpw = 4weeks off

Interesting.  I dug an old performance appraisal out of a pile of papers when I got home tonight, it lists my hire date as 5/19/2003.  So, starting in June, I get the higher accrual rate and the extra week off each year.

It is a little weird.  I always had kind of thought that this job was kind of a transitional one.  Anyone that’s been reading this for a while knows that I can get really frustrated sometimes.  Yet somehow, it’s turned into five years.

And I guess, on a lot of levels, it has been transitional.  I’ve just changed what I’m doing while staying at the same place.  When I started, it was the thrid shift, B&W.  Load paper, open and print files.  Very simple.

Now?  I spent most of today working on tests for a huge high profile project.  Several batches of eight multi page PDFs,
hundreds of records in each file.  I have to write a batch sequence that runs through the PDF, picks up a unique identifier for each record and turns it into a bookmark.  Then split the PDF into the individual records named per the reg expression that reads the unique identifier.  Then I wrote a script that goes through the resulting files, reads their names (uuid_01, uuid_02, etc) and writes a text file telling another program how to assemble them into unique files.  So each record has an output file with one or two pages out of each of the eight pdfs.

I wouldn’t have even known where to start five years ago.  I could have gotten it down to a very accurate, very time consuming manual process, but it still would have been manual.

Now I’m doing it all almost automatically, with zero error.

And that’s just how things have changed at work.  Seems like life has made even bigger changes, and not just in the last half decade.  I’d say it’s through hard work, blah blah blah, but it’s not.  Just being more conscious  of the choices that I’m making and what comes from them.  I think it’s good.

I slept through it.  Tried staying up until it was official.  Made it past midnight.  But not until…

I don’t even know what time it was.  The last drink that I had.   Well after two in the morning, not wanting it, but needing it to calm myself down enough to sleep.  I had made a lot of phone calls during the day.  Thought that I had everything figured out, but they couldn’t fit me in to detox on Monday.  I didn’t bother calling on Tuesday, figured it would be better to go in there in person.  Still freaking out at the whole idea of it.

Only one way that I knew how to deal with freaking out.

Another shot, a few hours of sleep.  A ride to the hospital.  A week with almost no communication, locked up, drugged up.  Watching people that were far worse off than me.  I could deal with it, on some level.  Knew that it was time.

It seems like that was a hell of a lot longer ago than it really was.  Six months is nothing.  It’s no time at all.

Fuck it, it’s subjective.  Nothing changes.  Everything changes.  I don’t know where anything is going, not really.  Things seem better most days.  I’m not feeling like it’s just a hair’s breadth away from turning and heading to the bar for a drink.

At least, not most days.

I thought last night, two friends of mine would be coming by.  Supposedly for help in getting sober.  An odd shift where now it’s been long enough that people seem to think that it’s permanent for me.  That I’m not still having problems.  It’s not really true, things still suck sometimes.  And it’s not like I have any real answers.  I don’t know why it is that I’ve been able to keep from drinking for so long.

They didn’t make it.  One said that he was going to get together with me today, but then left a message while I was in the shower.  He’d forgotten that it was his mom’s birthday.  That doesn’t seem that likely.  I was going to talk with him, and give him the leftover Campral to help with his cravings.

Fuck it, it’s his life.  I can’t stop him from imploding.  I’ll talk with him about it, but there’s really nothing that I can do if he’s going to call and ask for help, and then not show up.

The other friend, he’s mostly sober these days, but not by choice.  It’s a court order, and he doesn’t seem too happy about it.  I didn’t think that he’d show up anyway.  Most likely, he went to the AA meeting like he was supposed to, then went out to a bar or a party.

It would have been nice, made it feel like it was more of an accomplishment to make it this far.  I don’t think that I’ve been sober for this long at a stretch since I started drinking.  What freshman year of high school?  15-16 years.  It wasn’t all as heavy as it was at the end, but still…

I’d gone through and cleaned up the place as best I could.  Whatever I may have said about deep cleaning six months ago, I hadn’t really gotten there until now.  Now, the place is finally about at an equilibrium of being clean.  Where I’ve gotten rid of enough stuff that I can stay on top of things.  It’s nice.

Still, it makes things seem empty.  I wonder sometimes if it would be worse if I was in a larger space.  I could almost be happy just in one little box.  I know, I’ve done it before.  Just a spot to park your body when you’re not working, you can live like that.

It does help a lot to be able to shut your brain off when you park the body,  and I can’t really do that anymore.

But I think, I think it’s going to be good this year.  I can’t really say why.  I know they want to put me back on the R&D automation stuff at work.  It’s at least challenging.  It would mean that they’d have to hire on a couple of people to replace me.  Being replaced isn’t really a bad thing,  if you really think about it.  It is if they are trying to get rid of you.  This is more that they want more coverage, and then want to use me differently.  I like the thought of that.  Still haven’t convinced them to buy me a mac laptop and let me work from home, though.

If things continue to go well, I should be done paying off all of my old bad debt by late spring/early summer.  I’ll still be paying off the hospital bills for the detox and outpatient, but that’s OK.  That is done in October, I think.  Need to start investing in the future, too.  Right now it’s just 20% into my 401K.  I started it a few months into last year, without a match and not knowing if I really wanted to stay at the company I really didn’t trust putting my money there.  It’s vested, but I never put anything in.  Kind of amazing how quickly the difference between 5 and 20% shows up.  It’s more than doubled since I made the change at the end of November.  It doesn’t feel like I’ve really lost that much in the take-home on the checks, either.  I think that it changes what tax bracket I’m in or something.

Weird to be thinking about stuff like that with anything but pessimism.

Of course, I might still go and do stupid things like buy a new TV.  I want to save up and try to move when my lease is up this time.  I need to get a bed and some better furniture, but I think that I’m going to wait on that until I do move, so that moving is easier and I can make sure that everything looks right in the new place.  It also means that I don’t have to sell bikes, which I would have to do to fit furniture in here.

Really, there is a lot to be done this year.  There’s a lot of good things that are going to happen this year, I’m sure.  I just need to get a lot better at recognizing that and being happy with it.  It seems like nothing is ever good enough for me.  Every good thing in my life is always weighed against what would make it better.  On some level, that’s healthy.  But not, necessarily,  the way that I think about things.

And I really need to change that if I’m ever going to find any sort of peace and contentment in this life.

I guess that my boss is taking a half day tomorrow.  Tomorrow is also the night that we’re doing ColdSprints again.  I told him there was pretty much no way that I was going to be able to work late, since I still didn’t even know how I was going to get the TV down there for the monitor.  Figured that I’d have to ride home real fast, call for a cab down to the bar, barely making it in time to get things set up…

Of course, things would be more flexible if there were some way to get the TV to work that night, since it’s a block away from Grumpy’s…  He ended up giving me a ride home and back.  Actually came up to help with the doors and for once, I didn’t even think about having to apologize for the state of the place or anything.  For all the talk of cleaning I do, the apartment is usually pretty damn abysmal.

Heck, I’d even folded up the blankets this morning and turned the futon back into a couch.  What the fuck?

Left work, headed over to the t-rock for dinner.  Didn’t feel like cooking, thought I could say hi to Pigtails.   Actually almost finished a po boy sandwich, at least, a half order of the sandwich.  Those things are fucking huge.  Pigtails was heading out for a smoke just as I left, she hadn’t been working, but was there for food and drinks.  I’m not sure how long, sitting at the other end of the bar where I couldn’t see her.  Oops.   Said hi/bye to her and Kiecker, but didn’t take off my gear to stay.

Switched around the time of day that I shower and shave three days ago, knew that I wouldn’t wake up in time to shave the day after Christmas, and I’m kind of liking the whole chin beard.  But it doesn’t take long for it to grow back to a full beard, so I’m trying to be good about shaving it at least every other day.  So night showers, which means more time in the morning.  So I’ve been feeling a bit less stressed at work, even though it’s still a nightmare.

I really need to find some new habits like this one I think.  Just little things that I can use to mentally break the routine of my normal days, turn things around from how I’ve always done them…

So I’m going to get offline and go read some fiction.   JK gave me a bunch of books a while ago when I stopped by the Reader, just haven’t gotten around to reading them, started the first on Christmas day.  Turns out it’s a sequel, so I might have to track down the first now.  I also have a slew of ancient paperbacks rescued from the entryway of my building, lots of things that I tell myself I should read, so I grabbed them.  But didn’t read them.  Utterly typical of me.

There’s even a set of shelves that I cleared off the other night that would be good for books.  It was mostly covered in foods that I could never be bothered to prepare, or foods that I had leftover from a time when I really didn’t eat much of anything.  But sometimes, you realize that you really really need to get something in your belly.  Now.  Things like instant mashed potatoes that aren’t hard to eat or digest, or prepare.   That was a few years ago, didn’t seem to last too long…

But the food was still on the shelf.  It didn’t need to be.  Looking through my cupboards, I found other things that were long since expired and needed to go, all in all I was down to only one cupboard filled pretty quickly.

And three shelves empty, ready for something new and different to be put on them.  As soon as I get the motivation to scrub them down.

I’ve been thinking too much lately, at least it would seem that way. Damn winter is wearing on me already. Too much snow, too cold, just too much all at once.

Honestly, the cold is fine. I don’t really mind the cold, especially now that I’ve switched back to platforms and steel toed boots. Really, my feet are usually the only part that gets cold when I’m out riding with the cleats on the bottom of my shoes.

Could have something to do with the holidays, too. Watching on the one hand all the people having a good, happy time, on the other seeing so many things falling apart. I’ve been doing a lot of overtime since I came back, too. Feeling like nothing is getting accomplished.

Even when stuff does get done, it’s often turning out to be wrong. Not any of the stuff that I’ve been doing, that I know of. But there’s been a lot of things going wrong with an aspect of business that we do for our largest client. It boggles my mind how things could have been as bad as they were.

Are.

I guess I really can’t say anything about that. Googleing my name tonight while working on an updated resume brought me here, I should probably take that as a bit of a warning. But I did catch a major mistake on Monday, one that had started while I was on vacation. It really has me wondering.

Should I really be doing the work that I am doing? There is only so much that I can do with the tools that I have available to me A lot of what I have set up seems to only allow my coworkers to make more mistakes, bigger ones, faster. I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Probably not. But there’s nothing that I can do about it.

Well, I guess I could update my resume

But even there, my options are pretty limited. That’s really my own choice, one that I made a long time ago. I don’t want a car. It would make things a lot easier, there would be more places that I could consider working. Maybe I shouldn’t have renewed my lease and paid the extra fifty bucks a month to go without it. Then I would also have more options. So I’ll have to wait things out and see if anything changes in the next few months.

Come spring, a 10, even 15 mile commute each way wouldn’t be too bad. I could certainly handle it for the summer and then find a new place when my lease is up.

Just another one of those things that’s out of my control. Frustrating. I think I’m getting better at accepting that.

But it’s hard, especially with the sheet ice under a foot of snow that seems to be everywhere. I can’t just get out and ride, can’t clear my head that way. So I’ve been spending too long thinking about meaning, trying to figure out what to do in the absence of a truth.

Probably shouldn’t have watched the last anime I did, Welcome to the NHK. It was pretty bleak, and there was far too much that I could identify with in the main characters. The thought that there is no great purpose behind our actions, that there is no meaning to anything that we do. I always thought that there would be. that I would do something.

Seemed like I was working towards that, at least in a small way, at work. But I know my limitations, and I know that I can’t actually change anyone else’s behavior. It’s just too big of a corporation, I can’t really do anything to make it better. I could figure out what needs to be done, even mostly how to do it.

But I can’t figure out what I need to do to implement it. It’s like trying to build a raft out of the stuff floating around you in a flash flood. Even if you manage to get a few pieces of wood and some twine, chances are that all you’re going to end up doing is twisting yourself up with something that’s going to sink.

Damn, this post is coming out a lot more literal than the thoughts that have been going through my head for the last couple of weeks. I guess I will keep it that way, by adding some other stuff:

I got new socks today. They were delivered on the 17th, this was the first time that I had a chance to get to the post office while they were open. Even more smartwool. I’m pretty happy.

I think I had the wrong length spokes on my front wheel. Again, it’s the whole time thing that has kept me from getting back up to the bike shop to have it checked. That and the thick layer of grit from riding around in this crap. Hopefully this weekend.

I’m going to be selling two bikes, I think. The Olmo and the Surly. I never get out onto the dirt with the Surly, and I have the Masi for a road bike. And honestly, I always hated reaching between my legs to shift. The Bianchi is going to stay around, but I think that I’m going to turn it into a wall hanging piece of art as opposed to a riding piece of art.

I’m getting rid of more furniture and junk along with the bikes, I think, so that I can actually make room for a bed. The last few months, it feels like I’ve gone a long way to scrubbing the residue off of this apartment, getting rid of the junk that I don’t need. There’s always more to get rid of. Last night I found the funnel that my dad gave me to fill my flask. He used it when I left my flask back there in MT, after breaking my jaw. Second longest that I stayed sober since I started my drinking career. This time seems a lot more solid.

Hard to believe that it’s six months in six days. Depending on the day, sometimes even the hour, it seems so much longer than that and so much shorter than that. That’s probably what has me the most down right now. Wanting that instant gratification. Wanting everything to suddenly be better because I’m sober now. Thinking maybe then I won’t have bad days where I have to actually try not to drink. Where everything that I’ve experienced in life tells me that I should be going out and just having a shot or two after work, just to cut the edge.

But I know that’s not why I want it. I want it as my excuse for why everything isn’t OK. I want it to be the ‘meaning’ in my life. The great tragedy. The conflict. When I don’t live up to the potential that I think that I have, there it would be, the reason. An easy reason. A common enough one that it doesn’t need explanation.

I’m still a little bitter that nothing has come along to replace it. No great love story. No cure for cancer. I haven’t solved world hunger, or brought world peace. There’s no second chance at life. Maybe that last one is wrong. It kind of is a second chance.

Still feels like somehow, I’m wasting it, that there should be something more.

If this were the NHK, it would be a conspiracy. Just like pillowcases that come in packs of two, even if there isn’t another head to rest on the other pillow.

Almost done with vacation, sitting here and staring at the cars driving by on Lake street.  I’ve changed the angles in my office, moved the desk and bikes.  Now it’s as if I’m locked in a corner when I sit and fuck off on the computer, I guess it’s actually true.  I am in the corner now.  Without a view of downtown, the city seems even smaller.  Maybe looking east every day will be better for me than looking north.

It’s hard to describe how much has happened over the last week, and how little I feel like I’ve gotten done.  I think that mostly, I’m going to attribute it to letting myself get far too close to a situation that I shouldn’t have.  I knew better, but for some reason just couldn’t back away.  Now I have a friend that I can’t speak to, I haven’t returned any of the last messages that she left for me.  Wondering what if anything I could have done differently, but there’s not much that can be done about it now.

Built new wheels, they’re really not the best.  For the money, I should have just paid the extra to have Chuck build them up for me.   I guess that’s another learning experience.  I need to try to pull out two of the nipples on the front wheel, they somehow ended up getting all deformed from the spoke wrench and won’t turn anymore.  Oops.

Man, I really wish that I had of done more this week.

Through the  stress and the confusion, I’ve actually been hitting the bottle pretty heavily this week.  Even though it’s been NA beer, I know that’s not a good thing.  It’s still fulfilling the same need for me, I’ve been acting towards it a lot the same as when I was drinking.  A thursday night spent at the bar with friends so that I wouldn’t have to think about stuff.  Last night, running across town to pick up a couple of six packs before the liquor closed.  I haven’t been eating well enough, either.

It’s good to recognize that, I guess.  This close to six months, I really don’t want to let myself slip.  Too much free time to think about things, maybe that’s it.  Monday I rode up into NE to meet with PinkPigtails and the CaffinatedLibrarian, it’s a really good thing that we weren’t meeting at the t-rock.  I probably would have ordered shots that weren’t espresso.  But it was a coffee shop, so I was safe.

It’s actually going to be kind of nice heading back to work and having a distraction to get my mind off of things.