Some weeks it just doesn’t pay to leave the house. As K and I were getting ready for bed last night she noticed that the bathroom window was broken. Being a wildlife rehabilitator, her first thought was that some bird (maybe a hawk) had smashed into the window. I went out to check. Nope – someone had removed the screen and smashed the window with some junk they found on the deck. ...
Okay, it’s only Monday, but it’s been about a week since wrote anything here. In that time: The non-profit I work with and on whose board I serve has gone bat-shit crazy. They say that academic politics are so petty because the stakes are so small. Trust me, academic politics haven’t got anything on non-profit politics A friend at the university has announced her resignation to move on to a different job. This is probably good for her – she’ll be happier, but it means that half the people I know took it hard. I got a call last week from a lawyer representing my old employer, letting me know that I am a witness in a case against them. Go me! *grumble* The thing at my new job did go through and I now do people management for six staff members. Oh, and their performance evaluations were due in November, can we finish those soon? They’ll be done and signed tomorrow, but what a pain. Finally, I went to (sort of crashed) a holiday party for the school of arts and sciences at my former employer. That was a lot fun, but odd. Particularly when I ran into my old boss and then the woman who inherited part of my responsibilities when I left. Theoretically, she was doing the job until they hired my replacement. It’s been four months – I don’t think the position’s been posted yet. Regardless, I talked to a lot of people and confirmed my original statement – the thing I miss most is the people. Now if I can only get through this week: finish up the last part of a project and put the presentation together, I’ll be in good shape for taking some time off.
To forestall my mother’s nagging polite and subtle reminders, I took some time yesterday to select pictures for a 2008 Yellowstone calendar. I tried to limit myself to pictures taken on this year’s trip and was happy to see that I could 🙂 The ones I finally selected are shown below. They start with the cover image and then go from January through December: To print them, I’m going with Lulu instead of Kodak. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is price 🙂 The other is that Lulu will do a full 8.5″x11″ edge to edge print whereas Kodak always puts a border. The images above are all scaled/cropped to a 8.5×11 aspect ratio, so hopefully, I’ll end up with a pretty nice result. ...
Looks like my ipod died today. As I was packing up to head home it slid off of my bag and onto the floor. Not a bad fall – it’s had worse. It seemed fine when I started it back up, played a couple of songs. But apparently, those were in the memory cache. Once it was done with those, it locked up and the hard drive started clicking I guess my options are to either replace the hard drive or buy a new one. I’ll probably replace the drive. I don’t think I care enough about the magical features of the new ipods. At least not enough to justify blowing three to four hundred dollars.
Maybe random Monopuff songs aren’t the best blog post titles, but what the heck. K asked me what I wanted for my birthday (fwiw, I’m either very easy or very hard to shop for depending on whether or not you want to get me a gift certificate to a bookstore – thanks Mom!). From what I’m sure was out of the blue for her, I asked for a guitar – hey, I’ve always wanted to learn. ...
I started thinking through why I didn’t care for management at my last job and as is often the case, I wrote it down to help me think it through. It’s probably not worth posting the reasoning, but I did decide that most of the things I disliked about my most recent management job were due to the environment and not management itself. Don’t get me wrong, management’s not something I enjoy, mostly because it’s a lot of hard work – at least if you are conscientious about it. ...
I’m not Michael Corleone and the places I’ve worked at could hardly be compared to the mob; but I did have an interesting, brief discussion this afternoon with the president of the company for which I’m working. For the record, I don’t think that any discussion which begins, “you used to be management, right? can be characterized as anything but interesting. It seems that the company (like the family, only smaller, legal and less profitable) might have a need for some management and there is some interest in me filling the role. Unfortunately, in taking this job, one of the big pluses for me was that it was not a management position. On the other hand, there are some good things about management and the company is much smaller than the university. I would still be expected to do technical work and the management is anticipated to be about 5-10% of my time (if I did it). ...
Ok, maybe not as exciting as bicycle repair man, but we did spend some quality time this evening with light fixtures. For reasons that neither K nor I can fathom, the breakfast room had a fan attached to a nondescript light fixture. K found a new fixture in the pottery barn catalog and it fits pretty well with the house. Since I didn’t have much else to do this evening, I installed it. Pictures below. The first two are the original fixture: when we first moved in (3 years ago) and the fixture on the floor after removal. The next two are the new fixture. ...
I’m up at the university yesterday, tying up some loose ends from my job there when I ran into the executive vice president. Essentially, this is the guy under the president who runs everything administrative for the campus. I used to see him every month or so as a part of my job responsibilities and we always got along reasonably well. So, I’m talking to him and he tells me that whenever he sees someone who has left the university, he always tells them that he hopes they made the right decision… because they aren’t coming back (implying that he will prevent them from returning). He then goes on to say, but you are welcome back if you ever want to return and that this puts me in a very small group – three in twelve years. ...
(odd: i thought i had submitted this last night. i guess i just saved it in draft) It’s been raining today which is good. The forecasters are predicting rain tomorrow and Friday which is even better. However, I’m still worried. It’s been over a month since the last real rain and close to six months since we’ve had normal rainfall. Raleigh i s down to about 3 months worth of water supply in the reservoirs – Atlanta’s not any better. What happens when cities actually run out of water? Do they evacuate? ...