Category Archives: Work

Frazzled


I posted on my Facebook status today, just this one word: Frazzled.

My brain has had to be so ON the last 3 days – that I can feel the synapses burning from overuse. A football meeting directly after work on Monday followed by more work I had to complete from home that wasn’t done until 9:30pm. Yesterday was the first of 3 AP tests for 16. Of course all 3 are morning exams. So I went in to work for 3.5 hours in the morning after dropping him off, then picked him up, and we went home so that could work until his dentist appointment (didn’t want to drive back to work for just 2 hours). After the dentist I worked at home again until 6:30. Today was AP test #2. This time, I picked him up and brought him back to school and then came back to work. But of course the proctor for his exam messed things up and they didn’t get out until 12:35. They were supposed to be done before noon. When I got back to work, it was more mania until a little after 3:30. It’s just been a series of days with system problems, people making careless mistakes and things falling on my desk to cover gaps again.

None of this would be that difficult except for PEOPLE needing THINGS and with QUESTIONS and never having a moment of quiet to get anything DONE (dammit!). I can handle the tasks – I just need to be a Hermit for a day to get them all done properly. So it took 3 days and 2 evenings, but it’s done. And I’m frazzled.

So today I was happy that the rain had stopped, and I could take another walk. I mixed in a few photos from my house over the weekend when we had an amazing sunset. I loved the glow from the sky on the roses in the side yard.

Yes, that is a helipad in one of the photos. When I walk out of this building I head down the property to the helipad which is, of course, abandoned and not being used, but does make for a nice quiet place to walk around and take in the view across the freeway and listen to some birds. the towhee cousins were out and about quite a bit. Both brown and rufous sided. That blue roof building is some other business across a canyon from ours. No clue why it is such a bright blue, but there it is!

Anyway, here’s hoping that tonight is quiet without too many demands from the other occupants of the house and that I can just watch TV and stay offline. Thankfully there is a break in the AP schedule – the last one is next week so tomorrow is just a normal school day. No earlier than normal drop off or mid-day pick ups. Phew!

Walk #3

Roses and Running and…Lease Extraction?


Heh – I was reaching for the alliteration to be complete in the title and just couldn’t get there.

New habit check in to start: $55 in the change kitty as of this weekend.

However, work outs? Oh, utter fail. I was thrashed after the 10 mile run and the Wednesday half day run didn’t happen because the half day didn’t happen.

However, I didn’t let that get me down – I knew there was a three day weekend coming up and I put it ON my weekend To Do plan – run all three days. I’m 2 for 3 and I don’t see ANY reason that I wont be able to get in another 5 miles tomorrow morning.

I ran 3.1 miles Saturday mostly doing hill repeats (5 times up and down the hill nearest my house).

I ran 8 miles on the usual Sunday trail run – there was time for another shot at 10 but I purposely wanted to save something in the tank for tomorrow. I want to get myself into the back to back to back running as I was able to do easily before October. In fact, I looked back on my Runkeeper and saw that the first time I reached the 8 mile mark was just before the final race of the season so I was at my fittest and I completed it a solid 10 minutes faster than I did it today. Not that I care about speed – but it lets me know what my fitness level really was before the fibroids slowed me down.

Ok, so I started in the middle so now I will jump to the end since it is boring but worth updating/semi-bragging over. Lease #55 – the FINAL one that needs to be done – is 3/4 extracted and will be finished tomorrow. That’s on the 18th – a full 10 days before the deadline I set for myself. YES!

There is just something about writing down a daily/weekly To Do plan. If it is written down in front of my, I *will* be compelled to cross it off. The way I did was that at work I would extract a lease, then do a non-lease task, then back to a lease and so on and so on. That way, I didn’t get COMPLETELY burned out working in the program non stop. The breaks helped tremendously.

Then, at home I challenged myself two nights a week to post one and then every weekend I brought home three. And suddenly, the list was done! Now we have a solid two weeks to work on pulling reports and testing the rent payment process. I know – boring, but I tell ya – it is huge.

The Silver Lining to all this hyper focused work? I now know this program so well that my next task – training a temp to cover the job – will be EASY. I never like managing people for a task that I don’t already know how to do in depth.

And now, the roses. So, there was this DAY this week that normally The Boyfriend and I ignore, BUT…he works for a company that happens to ship flowers so these arrived at my office on Thursday:

2013 Roses_day1

So pretty – AND – this is what they look like today – note that I followed every step of instructions that ProFlowers included. The vase came with the roses and there were two packets of food to drop into the water. One for day 1 – and then another for today after I changed out the water and cut the steps one more time:

2013 Roses_day4

Still  beautiful and all opening up!

 

 

Rumors


Rumors

This statement may be a wee bit too harsh…but…then again, maybe not.

I tend to think of rumor mongers more as simply lazy/chatty folks with way too much time on their hands. They are also more than a little bit gullible. And perhaps lacking a modicum of logic.

Having worked at the same place my entire adult life I have experience a vast array of rumor mill results over the years, but I’m largely immune.

Why?

I’m also just too damn busy and also too damn literal.

If I need info, you know how I ask? The person who directly HAS the info.

Not the person who sits next to them, or has lunch with them occasionally, or might carpool with them or whose kids go to school with their kids. No, I ask the Decider. The Boss. The One With Knowledge.

Oddly – other people seem to be perfectly willing to waste time asking everyone BUT the horses’ mouth.

Even if they happen upon information from a source who is not even remotely connected to the topic at hand, they completely believe it AND then continue to spread the bad information around. Never once thinking to maybe check up on the veracity of what they are repeating no matter how illogical.

Most of the time I am never aware of these things swirling around. I truly don’t have the time to chat with anyone other than the people right around me and our office is pretty isolated. We don’t mingle with other departments too much and being tucked away in the corner of the basement we are not in an area where other departments pass by us at all, even casually. You have to really WANT to be down here (hah!)

And yet…today I did found myself exposed to a whopper of a rumor in our little break room while I sat there waiting for my lunch to heat up in the microwave.

The gal REALLY REALLY believed it. I listened for about 2 minutes and then could not help but interject asking her who had told her this?

Oh, well, it was her “friend” who works in the other building of course. Ok – so, did you ask your direct supervisor if that was true?

No.

Sigh….so…you haven’t heard it from your boss, or from our mutual VP, but just from a random, totally disconnected co-worker in a completely different building and you still believe it is 100% true?

*blank stare*

Yeah, she wasn’t too happy with me pouring all that ice water on her HOT HOT rumor, but I couldn’t help it.

And all I could think was “girl, if you’ve got the time to chat idly with a coworker in another building about nonsense like that, then you need to get over to my area and I’ll keep you too damn busy to care about random crap like that!”

OTOH, maybe not – I don’t need any haters, fools or idiots over here!

At home workouts for the week


Catching up from last week, I put $7.25 into the change fund so that is up over $44 as we rolled into Feb.

If I can keep up a $40/mo total I will be plenty happy at Christmas!

FWIW, what I do is get $20 cash every Sunday just to have something on hand for small things, usually snacks at work :-) When the following Saturday rolls around I empty out what is left into the change fund. Last week was a little lower because I had to give 16 money for school supplies he needed to get for the start of the the 2nd semester and I instructed him to shop after school for what he needed so he got $10 towards that.

Meanwhile, on the working out at home front – I have done three workouts in the last 6 nights.

The first night it was:

  • 90 squats (6 sets of 15 each)
  • 45 rows with 10lb hand weights (3 sets of 15 each)
  • 45 push ups (3 sets of 15 each)
  • 45 sit ups (3 sets of 15 each)

It was a rotation situation, but then I also added extra squats at the beginning and end because I really want to get my hill running legs built up.

The second night I worked on my arms using some bands and the 10lb weights:

  • 30 triceps pulls
  • 30 biceps pulls
  • 30 lat pulls
  • 30 shoulder presses

Finished up with hip flexor steps with ankle bands (40 steps) and then 90 seconds of bicycles for the abs.

 Tonight was totally without equipment of any kind:

  • 90 lunges (3 sets of 30) 
  • 60 cross over toe touches – eg: while standing you lift up one leg in front of you off the floor about 6 inches, then bend over and touch the lifted toe with the opposite hand. 20 sets of 3, 10 on each leg each set.
  • 90 mountain climbers (3 sets of 30)
  • 45 leg roll ups (from flat on your back keeping your legs straight roll up so that only your shoulders and head remain on the ground) 3 sets of 15
  • I warmed up with 20 squats and 100 jumping jacks, then did some more hip flexor steps before stretching

Each night’s workout was 30 mins long (no longer than 35 though) and I was sweating and growling through the last few of each set every night. I was damn sore after that first night for sure!

I took the first and third workout almost totally from the videos on this site:

http://www.runnersworld.com/workouts/ironstrength-workout

The other one was from exercises we’ve done while cross training with coach Tanja over the years. I bought some resistance bands and hand weights so that I could duplicate a lot of what she showed us in the gym on my own time.

So far, so good! I’m trying to stay really disciplined keeping to a daily schedule of both work, chores, working out, and rest/reading/tv time. The workout tonight was MANDATORY no matter how tired I was and I am really glad I stuck to my plan.

Monday night was all drama because my car died on the way home from work and it HAD to get fixed because Tuesday night 16 and I had tickets to see The Who in concert. I bought those tickets in August for his birthday so we have been waiting a LONG time for this event and I couldn’t believe the car failed me so close to that! I guess that was still better than having it die ON Tuesday…anyway…it was thankfully a quick and not horribly expensive fix so we got to the concert without issue last night and it was FABULOUS as we expected but then that meant two nights of missing my routine so I to re-establish it tonight.

The aggressive work plan is already paying off  - I started out Feb having to enter 30 leases into the new system with just 19 work days in the month in addition to my regular work load. Less than a week later and I’ve knocked out 10 of those so now I have 15 days to convert 20 leases and I am a lot closer to a very manageable 1 lease per day rate.  The key has been working at home! Saturday I knocked off a LOT in just 4 hours and then because of the car situation I had to work from home on Tuesday and I got three leases entered all before 5pm! I know some people have a harder time working from home what with the various parts of the house calling out for attention (wash me! sweep me! dust me! pet me! OK, that’s the cats but still..) but I haven’t found that to be a problem for me.

IOW – I can ignore cleaning like a champ!

So, it was nice to take this mental break tonight and log an entry, but now I must shut it down and gear up for another three day push of tasks. Including getting new tires for the troublesome car on Saturday. Because, oh yeah, there’s chord showing through on the tread of the front tires. Nothing like crossing your fingers every trip out that nothing happens until then!

 

Riding in the sunset for a while


20130201-193349.jpg

 

Photo by @KCAlfredphoto 

Torrey Pines golf course at sunset.

I thought this photo was perfect – I was going to look for something that depicted “swamped” or “rat race” but really, in keeping with my NO Whining & NO Gasbags motto for 2013, I must say that while I will need to maintain a more intense level of focus and sticking to tasks for the next couple of months, it’s for GOOD reasons.

  1. My co-worker (staff member in my department) is having a baby in early April
  2. We have a new software program that will, over the long term, make her tasks a lot easier
  3. Technology will allow me to do a lot of work from home so that I can still make dinner, work out, and snuggle with cats here and there.

February and March will fly by. I’ve got to get all our leases into the new system before the end of this month so that we can spend next month tweaking with reporting and auto loads to the AP system for a more streamlined rent payment process (that will benefit two departments). I have to interview temp employees and hopefully have one chosen and working with us in March. On top of the usual tasks in these months of performance evaluations and budget planning for the next fiscal year. Wee?

Plus I need to keep posting on the pergola site once a week. Plus I’d like to run now and then. Plus, oh yeah, don’t I have kids and a boyfriend and stuff?

What that means is likely just weekly check in posts with the money & exercise habit progress reports and not much else. It means no Facebook except on the weekend maybe. I’ll post on twitter, but I wont be reading 100% of my timeline. I’ve currently got four books in my Kindle that I will use as complete down time breaks. I’ll take off all work of any kind on Sundays. But yes, I will be working at night and on Saturdays for the next month for sure, and possibly into March.

The payoff will be sanity while Tracy is on leave and beyond.

And it really isn’t that bad. 16 isn’t playing sports so there isn’t a pull there. His grades are not AWESOME, but they are also not HORRID this year and that is without me monitoring anything. We just had some wonderful, solid time together – all of us – while I was recovering from surgery.

Speaking of which – oh my goodness is it ever freaking awesome to be done with all THAT! Back to normal and feeling great. Phew!

Part of the responsibility of being a manager is having to cover vacancies and I am up for it. I actually really enjoy it as long as I have the space to focus on it. And it’s only for 4-6 weeks and as I check off each lease and task from the list, the load will ease.

I do have a 5k trail race on schedule for this Sunday so I will probably share pics from that – a new trail out in Mission Gorge that I am really excited to check out. Then a 6k trail even in late March at Black Mountain. SO not to worry – I’ll be getting some sanity restoring outdoor running time in :-)

How could I not with that beautiful scenery above displaying just how wonderful it is to live in this beautiful part of the world?

 

See, this is why I don’t like people


I will be the first person to look back at the last 2.5 months and say, yeah…I’ve not been as consistent as I would have liked on being at work 5 days a week, 8 hours a day.

Because I HAD to turn in vacation time so I don’t lose it.

Because I’ve had to take my son to his fair share of doctor’s appointments (quite common during football season really).

Because I’ve had my own appointments and such for both me and the house.

So I’ve taken whole days off or else had to leave early a lot.

I get in every day between 7-8am. I don’t always stay until 5pm, but I also almost never take a lunch break. If I do stay until 5, it was a 9 hour shift. I am not hourly though so those stats are not recorded anywhere.

And yet…

Someone…not my boss…but merely a co-worker/peer…had the nerve to make a snide comment yesterday to the gal who works for me.

“Oh, she’s gone again? Football AGAIN? Must be nice to have a kid to use as an excuse…”

She said this…to a pregnant woman!!

She also said this to someone who is too damn nice and wont ever push back or talk back or say anything remotely to send the signal that she’s been upset.

I’m not nice.

You act like a passive-aggressive bully and do anything to upset any member of my department and I WILL push back.

Because she WAS upset. Enough to tell me about it. And I know that if the person said it to her, she’s made those same snidely comments to others. That’s her way. She’s constantly throwing off “comments” that she thinks are harmless but that are incredibly judgmental and often upsetting.

She doesn’t MEAN anything by it of course…..(right).

So today I told her to stop it. I was angry, yes. I told her if she wanted to know why I wasn’t at my desk that she should ask ME, not my staff. I pointed out that it was maybe not terribly sensitive to tell a mom to be that kids are “an excuse to go home.”

I really wish someone else here had the balls to tell her to shut up. Whatever. I’ll be the bad guy and she’ll be pissed for awhile.

But she also better stay away from my department with her crap.

That happy place I was in after my run yesterday has been poisoned dammit! People! Ugh!

May 27th – Cranky Toes and Testing


Jacaranda Tree

Starting off with the beauty since the rest of the day was pretty lacking in it.

Ok, not entirely true, the beach I whizzed by in the car on the way to and from work was pretty darn gorgeous but there was no chance to stop and take a photo.

The jacaranda tree is the one in the yard next door to mine and I have been noticing on my runs around the area that they purple flowers are in full bloom right now. Really lovely.

The cranky toe tale: Last month I bitched about my toe nail that sort of turns in strangely and digs into the side of the neighboring toe on my right foot. This never bothered my last year while running, but for some reason it started in this year and if I don’t file that one down on a weekly basis it seems it will be an issue. Sure enough I lagged on the grooming and paid for it today.

We met up at the middle school track at 6:30am to do a 90 minute track workout. I love those because they let me work on my speed in the perfect environment. Flat, soft track with lanes to follow. Boring yes, but since we do rounds of sprints in various distances the monotony doesn’t set in.

Today it was 4 1 mile runs at 5k speed for me. Since it was 4, which is longer than I usually go, I tried to pull off my effort and keep my pace at right around 10 min miles. I only achieved that once. The other three times were between 9:25-9:50. And even then one of the things that was making me alter my pace was that I could feel my toe nail digging in :-( Right on that first mile. Ugh! I decided to just run through it, the damage was already done so other than a bloody sock I might as well push through. Well, this time the toe issue added in a bonus entire top of the toe and down one side blister. Wee! I limped home and showered and got it cleaned up and generally tended to and bandaged for the rest of the day.

Since today is an odd number date and I did want to complete the even number day pattern and run again tomorrow, I really hope the toe is OK quickly. Or maybe I just go back to the track and go slow and easy. I know I *will* use that track for speed workouts again. I really want to run a true no stopping 5k and see how fast I can go.

Anyway….back home and got the update that testing was going so well that we would probably be able to start before noon so I went in. It took longer than I thought it would and we weren’t done until after 2:30. A couple of glitches of course, but I think they got them all worked through by 5pm.

That’s about it. Been doing market research at Eve’s the rest of the night and getting frustrated at every turn. This client is gonna be sorely disappointed if we turn in another round of “sorry, but your idea sucks!”

I’m hoping for some serious sofa time tomorrow.

It’s much more likely that I will end up finishing the ebook ;-)

Motivation – sometimes I have too much!

 

May 1 – Hormonal insomnia and HTML coding – wee!


Jeebus – on what is essentially day one of my Merry Month of May Journal, I nearly failed. Was about to close this puppy up and head upstairs because – yeah…did you see that title?

Around midnight last night I woke up with my heart racing and realized that from the time I fell “asleep” until then I had essentially been re-running my meeting with Eve in my head. Oh joy. That’s restful.

Then I realized that it wasn’t the thoughts in my head keeping me awake – it was just that I was feeling like I’d had two cups of coffee before bed. Which I didn’t of course.

Scroll down if you don’t want the following female oriented TMI. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to stop scrolling.

So, this is the new thing in hormones you see. I get to the end of a pack of b/c pills (uh oh, guess imma slut eh Rush?) and start on a new one right away to avoid the monthly visit from Flo. This goes on for three months and then I stop for a week to let things flush out and start back up again. It’s been great this way for the last five years. Instead of 12 hormone headaches a year, I only get four. Yes, they still cling on for 72 hours and no amount of pain meds gets rid of them but four times is still better than 12! Anyhoo – recently I’ve noticed that on month 2 I still get a headache, though it is not nearly as high on the pain scale and it kind of responds to OTC meds. BUT – the added bonus is it comes with insomnia – yay! So the headache started yesterday, the insomnia hit last night…it *might* hit again tonight and then by the end of tomorrow I’ll be clear. It quite righteously SUCKS and I would be quite happy if the menopause fairy would arrive already. Whcih she probably wont for another 3 or so years but this whole peri-menopause shit is..well…shitty!

OK STOP SCROLLING NOW!

So four hours of fretful, intense dream filled sleep later and I started the day with the plan right away to just get to work, get my first day of the month entries in and then head back home after a quick stop at the grocery for the remaining items I needed for the week.

Thankfully, work was again a fairly cooperative place and I somehow managed to stay pretty well focused on the tasks at hand. This is a small miracle as you might know if you follow me on twitter or facebook where I frequently fret about letting every shiny object grab my attention away from actual work! Perhaps it was leaving my phone at home yesterday (so no twitter as I strictly read that on my phone) that got me started on the right foot. Today I did bring my phone with me, but I turned off all notifications and didn’t touch it. That translated not only to actual work being done but also my battery was still 100% full at noon. An iphone! With full battery after being off charge for 4 hours! Not possible!

There was one odd thing at work. A card was passed around for everyone in the vicinity of my basement office to sign. A birthday? A retirement/moving on? A marriage? A new baby?

No.

A “congrats on your 7 year anniversary here!” card. Huh? Color me Not Impressed. Talk to me when you hit a nice round number like 10, or 15, or 20, or 25. After my own run of 26 years there, 7 just doesn’t faze me anything worthy of that kind of recognition. Weird.

Got out of there at 2:30 and was home before 3:30 and sleeping by 4. Mild relief.

15 went right to his tasks at hand a little before 5 without whining and I sat down to do my own website homework. Which involved HTML coding. Which means what I thought might take an hour ended up taking 2.5 and involved a lot of cursing. But it’s done and the home page now has better content for the first time visitor (we hope!).

Todays color = Orange. Mostly because no cat peed on it :-)

The best Valentines Day compliment ever!


Google doodle screen cap for Valentines Day 2012

I know, I know, you are dying to know how the 5k went after all that build up. So, to dispense with that – Alex finished in 22:40, I finished in 33:16 – we both thought the last hill was hell – however, I actually kept running (albeit more slowly) up the whole thing whereas is he did some walking to catch his breath.  His time was still barely a minute more than the flat race though he didn’t meet his goal since there was a flipping track team from up north that entered it and blew away his age group (unfair I say!). I beat my goal by nearly 2 full minutes and frankly I think I could have gone faster the first 2 miles to build up a bigger cushion for that last hill. I know I had more in me.

Anyhoo – forget that – here’s my cool Valentines Day story:

We all know it’s awesome to get greetings and love from friends and family on V-day. Sweet Prince and I rarely celebrate the day much though he does always write me a poem which I do treasure. But otherwise we don’t go all out for the event. But sure, it’s quite nice to see everyone spreading love and heart shaped images on Facebook and Twitter and all over the social world wide web. It’s cool that someone bakes cookies here at work. But, what’s even MORE cool is what happened in a meeting just now. A faculty member who I see about once or twice a year joined the meeting late. She works up in LA so had to drive down and was stuck in traffic. We’ve been in these joint budget planning meetings every year for 5 years now but it really is the only time we see each other. She sits down and says “Well, can you catch me up on introductions? I don’t think I know everyone.” I was a little bemused because looking around the table I figured she knew all of us. The gentleman conducting the meeting must have been too because he said “Oh, we didn’t do introductions because we’ve all met before, but OK.” She then pointed to me and said “But I don’t know this young lady.” I think they then all said my name nearly in unison (also still somewhat in confused). She then looked at me again and said “Wait, seriously?! My gosh! You look so much younger and so beautiful, I am shocked! Really? How do you get younger every year?!” Now, I know in writing that may seem backhanded, but I tell you, it was not – she was literally gushing at me about how good I look!!! I don’t blush…I really don’t…but at that moment – I *totally* blushed!! It was so unexpected and so genuine and adorable and…well….probably one of the most spontaneous & sincere compliments I’ve heard in a long time.

Best Valentines Day Compliment Ever!

Cell phone workplace etiquette


Now, this isn’t going to be your usual list of rules. At this point, we all know them right? Actually what I am curious about which rules are you OK with breaking and why. So – to the polls!

What prompted this is a regular meeting we have where one person ALWAYS has their phone, does NOT have children, and ALWAYS has it in his/her hand, and rather obviously looks at it or responds to a text in every single meeting no matter how short.

The only time I ever carried my phone with me to a meeting at work was when I was expecting a text from my school aged child about where he was going after school and if he needed a ride somewhere. I knew that text would come mid-way through the meeting and I had planned ahead to be able to discreetly handle the situation. I am quite sure the only person who knew I had my phone was the person seated next to me because I kept it on my lap the whole time, then put it away entirely once the messages were exchanged.

So, I am curious – am I just SUPER conscious about cell phone etiquette in meetings? Or is this person regularly crossing a line that most people just would not cross?