Apr 03 2003
Rainy Thursday
I guess I shouldn’t really complain about the weather, as at least it’s not snowing AGAIN.
However, the constant gray skies and drizzle/rain makes me want to just stay home and curl up in bed with a book. Motivation at work is a little more elusive than usual, but this is also typical of the days shortly after the pseudo-end of a project; much of last month was spent gearing up for events of this past Tuesday, and over the last couple of days I’ve been mostly monitoring our server, web pages, & database in anticipation of a huge fallout (which, fortunately, hasn’t happened). The rest of this month will be somewhat chaotic as well, as our group prepares for our small role at the annual engineering conference our company holds. I’m hoping that after the conference I’ll be able to once again focus most of my work-energies onto my largest project, which has pretty much been on hold since early December. Little other projects keep rearing their heads, though, so the reality will probably be that my work schedule will be crazy as ever, up until, through, and beyond July, which is when I’ll be starting my grad school program.
Oh, right. That’s my latest news: verbal acceptance from Syracuse last week! Yippee! I’m still waiting (impatiently, as usual) for the official paperwork/acceptance letter, however. Once that arrives, I start planning my arguments to present to my Boss in order to avoid being forced to use precious vacation time for the week-long stay at Syracuse this summer. It’s something I really don’t understand; the program I’m taking (the (mostly) distance learning version of Master of Science in Library and Information Science) is directly related to my current job, and it’s been suggested to me that one of the requirements for future promotion may be evidence of furthering my education. In my mind, this means that my 5-day intro to the program should be treated like any other week-long training class, but based on past conversations I’ve had with people here at work, this is often not common thinking (”your degree is something that can never be taken from you; vacations come and go” sort of thing). ?!? I suspect the compromise will be that I offer to work longer hours/weekends in order to offset at least part of the week I’ll be in NY, which, while not optimal, is still better than using up vacation time (we were forced to use a handful of days around Christmas for a company-wide shutdown; while nice to have an extended break around the holidays, it tends to cause me some difficulties when trying to schedule time off later in the year).
Have spent part of this day outlining documentation I need to write, while listening to our Wedding Dinner playlist on my iPod. I’d forgotten how cheesy some of the music we chose is. Rather than hire a band or a D.J., we had one of Husband’s friends preside over my iPod, which was connected to the banquet room’s speaker system. We created two separate playlists - one for dinner, one for after dinner - and I remember seriously stressing over the selections and ordering for both lists. As it turned out, on The Day I really couldn’t have cared much less about whether other people liked our selections or not (yeah, L, I know most of what we had wasn’t very conducive to dancing, but once we got the two or three “necessary” dances out of the way, we didn’t much care any more 
). One band represented on the dinner playlist was one I had the great fortune of hearing live while I was on a business trip in Ireland: Dervish. Great Irish music, and watching them in person was really a treat. [crap! I just saw that they played in NH 3 weeks ago! ] This reminds me, I really need to have my passport updated and Husband needs to get a passport so he can come with me next time I go to Ireland (or maybe we’ll just take vacation sometime in the next few years and go on our own).
