Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

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.

It seems they broke the window in order to unlock it and sneak in to the house that way. Fortunately, they didn’t succeed. In breaking the window, they knocked the window lock latch off and couldn’t unlock the window. They tried prying it up (first?) but failed there too. I’m guessing between the frustration and the dogs barking like mad, they gave up.

We called the cops and filed a report.

What I don’t understand is why the window. Sure, the doors have alarm company stickers on them since the house has an alarm system, but why would they assume the window wasn’t alarmed? If they had managed to open the window, it would have set off the alarm.

This is the second break-in or attempt in my neighborhood recently. With the number of gun owners out here, if the person(s?) keep it up, they’re going to wind up shot.

While I’m happy they didn’t get in, I’m still pretty annoyed and upset by the whole thing.

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.

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.

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.

That said, today, I did agree to give it a shot at the new place.  There are quite a few reasons for this.  Probably the biggest is that I inherited my father’s sense of responsibility – if you see a job that needs doing and you can do it, then get started.  Other reasons are that it really will make the office a better place; it’s a small company and so diversifying my role makes sense; they were extremely flattering when asking; and finally, I’m grateful to the company, my boss and the president of the company for encouraging me to come work for them.

That last one sounds a bit silly, but they really did encourage me to join them, they had a lot of patience with my initial hesitance and I am significantly happier now than I was before.  At least for now, there’s probably not much they could ask that I wouldn’t at least try.

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).

I don’t have many details yet, mostly because the president wanted to get my initial reaction before we got into details (fwiw, my initial reaction was close to, but not quite, eek!).  At the very least this means that I need to figure out what I didn’t like about management at the university so I know which questions to ask in this case.  It’ll probably be a good thing, but I hadn’t been planning to do a systematic exploration of my feelings in this area any time soon.

C’est la vie 

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.

Now we just need to get rid of the popcorn ceiling…