15 posts tagged “work”

This has been a long week - and look, it's not even the end of Tuesday yet!

I've been having on and off tooth pain since my front crowns were done last week.  Today at lunch I finally saw stars when I tried to eat my noodles and chicken from Bentos, so I made an emergency appointment to get seen.  Turns out that my entire jaw was resting on that one sore tooth, so some bite adjustments, $12 of pain medication for five pills, and two hours and I should be as good as new in 72 hours or so.  Ouch.  It's hard to explain how much it hurts, it just does.

I also had a formal review/goal session/bitchfest today in my building.  What a waste of time.  The dude who had the position before me was a Certified Teacher, everything in my review was essentially that I was acting like a technologist (btw, this is the job they hired me for, and the skill set) and not a teacher and so they're not happy.  It's been a headache all year long, I have a building of old Macs, teachers who have no desire to include technology in their curriculum, a principal whose agenda is so far off the main drag that there's no hope of salvaging it, and a District Tech Team which has floundered in their support since day one.  They said they wanted a technologist, they hired one, but what they didn't know is what they really wanted or needed, and now, they can't be happy with everything I do for them since it's not teacher material.  Suffice to say, I'm definitely job hunting again.  Yes, I have a position to return to next school year if I'm feeling suicidal, but it's hardly something I want to be doing.

On the other hand, I did get an email that I've got a phone interview Friday afternoon for a temporary position that I'm trying to get this summer.  I want to get back into grant writing - and this job might just be my foot in the door if I can land it.  Here's to crossing all my fingers and praying it works out.  I think in the long run, it's time for me to get out of technology - I love my geek, hell, I love being a geek, but being a paid female geek is one of the hardest things to do these days, and I'm losing sight of my happiness trying to fit into the molds set out for me.  At least I know that whatever I do that way, Scott's supportive - I needed to know that more than anything else tonight.

We're still in unpacking/fixin' it up mode at the house.  Scott's doing great - he's picking up things really quickly, and when I don't screw up majorly (yeah, the breaker is supposed to be *off* before playing with the dryer or whoops, double check to make sure the drill is on forward when trying to drill through tile).  On the positive side, while tonight was kind of slow we are making progress.  The bathroom is done, the kitchen is almost there, and there's progress outside and in the other rooms.  For him being in the house less than a week, I'm really happy with how things are progressing.  The trick now is to keep at it and not completely crash from all the work that's going into it.

I got a call from Pastor Kasting at Church tonight - a please come to the New Members meeting next Tuesday.  Crappy timing, I was hoping to attend Garage night that evening, but I did apply for membership with this Church, it'd be good to follow through.  This one is important to me, I'm still not completely sure why.

Dude, it cost me $44 to fill up my Tracker today.  Ouch!  It was only five days since I last filled up.  Gas is breaking the bank.

I totally picked up two tickets to see the Mythbusters when they come to Portland in October and surprised Scotty with them last night.  He had let me know a couple weeks back that there were some interesting things coming to town and it'd be fun to hit at least one of them up.  I just wanted to do something for "us", even if it's a ways out.  It's something to look forward to - and c'mon, it's Mythbusters, what's not to like?

I think I lost my thin blood from Southern living.  It's honestly too hot outside today.  Wow.  And my office?  Sweltering.  Too bad I'm working unpaid overtime tonight.  It's been a busy, busy day!  Grr.

Picture 1

Sunday was my Mother's 50th Birthday.  As birthdays go, it was mostly sedate - we did a family lunch in Portland at a wonderful Italian restaurant and gave her the mp3/video player that she had asked for.  Of course the night before, Thad, Scotty, and I had managed to use over 2,000 feet of Seran Wrap to completely cover her car.  That was the fun part.

Wrapping the Car

From there, it was a mostly mundane work week.  We've been doing dual testing with both OAKS and ELPA testing going on simultaneously.  It's not been fun.  Not only has my building had bandwidth issues, but we're seriously lacking in available technology.  Literally every single functioning computer in my building has been in use the last few days.  I spoke with the Teacher liaison between technology and certifieds and if I'm still around next year I'm hoping for some further technology to find its way into the building. 

On Wednesday I had the next major step in getting all my dental work done - and it wasn't fun.  I literally spent four plus hours in the dentist chair.  They removed my front four caps with difficulties and fitted me for the ones that are going to be made, very painful.  Today, two days later, I'm still sore and bruised and very swollen.  I'm going to be on a "soft diet" for the next three weeks if not longer, anything that requires biting is out.  I'm not a happy camper.  Theory is that it'll be worth it in the end.  Right now I'm scheduled to be done with all my teeth work mid-July.  We'll see if that happens or not.

Last night I had to run to the store and pick up school appropriate PJs.  One of the things about working in an elementary building is that you have to participate in all the cutesy/stupid events they do.  So tomorrow/Friday is wear your PJs to school day.  I, of course, ended up with a pair of sock monkey pajamas, complimented nicely by sock monkey slippers and a sock monkey stuffed critter that Scott managed to find in the toy section.  I think he had more fun with the damn monkey than I did.  Pictures to come on that one.  Lets just say the one photo I have of the damn thing isn't safe for work.  But hey, at least I'm participating, right?

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Otherwise, I'm playing alot of Mario Kart which I finally picked up for myself on Tuesday.  We're slowly working on unlocking the important parts and having fun getting pwned by the NPC's when we're doing too well.  Weekend plans include seeing Iron Man at the theater again (hello matinée showing!), catching up on much needed sleep, Guild Wars (I've been neglecting it!), and hopefully NOT painting a house.  But we'll see.  Toodles.

I'm about ready to take a weekend and pay for a hotel room just to have access to a hot tub. :P  I am beyond sore.  I spent most of my work day moving old iMacs into the storage shed so that we'd be able to recycle them.  This afternoon I was pondering how in the world I was going to manage to get three 70lb 22" monitors into my vehicle when Jason came to the rescue.  I'll owe him one for dropping by long enough to move them for me.  That helped tons.  My goal with all this is to empty my office at work of old junk that we can't use and to empty the garage at home of old junk that can be used by other individuals.  My goal is to have it done by the end of the week.  We'll see how well that works out, it's at least three more towers to make it through.  Lots and lots of other things are likely to get in the way.

I read an article today in Wired about someone having so much junk in the way of spare parts that when they were finally ready to recycle it, it was a headache and a half.  I typically don't refer to my junk as well, junk, but lately I've had an influx of parts, some of which aren't really useful, and I need to thin out the flock.  It's a process.  I'm making progress... slowly.

This conversation stemmed from a discussion about free hardware that was donated to me, hardware that by most people's understanding is obsolete but that I am hoping to incorporate into the classrooms in my elementary building with alot of hard work and a little bit of tweaking.  Today's adventure included trying to transport three nice 22" monitors in my Tracker, on my own.  To my credit, with them each weighing in at over 68lbs. it's amazing I was able to move as much as I was.  I gave up trying to move the third one when my wrist gave out.  Whoops.

We pick up mid conversation...

Me: Hun, I live off old hardware, it's how I make my living.  Granted, I run mid-end hardware at home, but what I work with from day to day is mostly PPC architecture or ancient PC equip

WoG: How do you survive?! I get on my grandmother's p4 2.8 and I go nuts

Me: It's not fun, but if it'll get a kid on a computer or a computer with software on it into the hands of a special ed student who can't learn in the traditional sense, then why the hell wouldn't I deal with it?  New would be great, but no one cares about elementary technology, we have no funds, and without that and basic computer skills our kids may have no future

WoG:  Meh, good point. Your heart is in the right place then.

Me:  It usually is, even if it gets me into trouble

WoG:  Blah, that's what happens to everyone though.  Have you seen Nickleback's video for "If Everyone Cared?"

Me: nope, know the song though

WoG:  I'll have to send the link to you when you get home. Youtube ftw I guess.  It's actually pretty powerful, even by the band's standards.  Three different individuals are presented and the things that they've done to try and make the world a better place, as well as the obstacles they faced.  I showed it to Mom who is not really a huge fan and she used it for one of her classes.

Me:  I don't know if I want to make the world a better place, I'm kinda selfish, I want to make the world a friendlier place so it's easier to survive... for me at least

WoG:  Meh, but even by doing that don't you make the world better than what it was?

Me: I don't know.  Who is to say except the world, herself?  I think sometimes the world is tired of all the stresses we place on it and unbalanced.  I'm sympathetic

WoG:  As am I, and I'm not arguing that point.  But what I'm saying is, since the world can speak for itself, then it is in your eyes that things are getting better or worse.  If you make yourself feel better, then in your eyes isn't the world better?

Me:  My world never gets better.  I hope the world itself feels otherwise.  I make too many poor decisions, thinking with an impure heart and disregarding logic that would make some decisions easier.

WoG:  You don't have an unpure heart, btw...

Me:  I always have, it's why I'm so easily hurt.

The last two weeks have really been difficult emotionally.  Last week I had a biopsy done due to "abnormal cells" and they said it would be two-to-three weeks for results.  That week I also had a struggle with my relationship - all week long - with my boyfriend of nearly 2 years.  I think things might be on the mend then, but I feel like I'm walking on eggshells every time I talk to him now.  Don't get me wrong, I'm happy, this was my choice and I live with it, but it's far from easy.

And then yesterday, I had a dentist appointment where they took a ton of X-Rays and came across some additional questionable areas.  One in particular has them worried, they know it's not a normal infection because it didn't respond to one week of high-doses of antibiotics and they're anxious to get in and do another biopsy.  It's scheduled for a week from today, about this time of day even, and will be a surgical procedure.  The current thought is that it's either cysts or cancer, as for what it really is, I guess we'll have to wait and see.

So yeah, I'm feeling a bit... incomplete.

Apparently I don't believe about updating about myself lately.  Whoops!  What can I say?  Between work, StumbleUpon, and Clippy, there's not a lot left that hasn't been covered.  I suppose I could try to decipher this, which made for interesting reading, or ramble on about watching Batman Begins with Scotty tonight - good film, watched it on his laptop in bed, of course, or discuss that I need to redo my resume and get it sent out so I can be considered for another ISS job.  Or I could mention that it's raining and whine about how driving home in pouring rain just sucks, sure it's nice to listen to when you're indoors, but I-5 at night when the roads are wet is never a good time.  But in the end, it's really not all that interesting.  I'm sure no one in their right mind needs to know any of that.

So I guess I'll KISS and say that it was ultimately a good day.  And I got cuddle time, which made my week.  Here's to hoping he's over the latest bout of the flu for the weekend, I'm looking forward to having an excuse to party.

Somehow I thought Fridays were meant to be a good ending to a crazy week.  For some reason it just didn't work out for me that way today, not one bit.  In order of occurrence, here's the "fun" parts of my Friday:

• 7:15AM Get a call from my building Principal, her laptop which we just got back from repairs (for the third consecutive time) isn't holding a charge.  Recommended that she pull a MacBook off the student cart and try a new battery.  Ten minutes later get a call back, it's still not working.  Agree to check with her first thing upon making it into the office.
• 9:45AM Finally make it to the building after a long morning meeting at the D.O. addressing new testing for the migrant kids and software issues.  Techies complained about open source alternatives for their buildings, yes!  Lets go complain about the software which didn't cost us a penny and insist that we pay hundreds PER LICENSE for software by a brand name corp. which does the same thing!  *rolls eyes*
• 11:00AM Have had the laptop for about half-an-hour.  There's a seating issue with the battery, the ESD who did the repairs on the system obviously did not seat the logic board correctly when they replaced it.  I'm weary of opening it up myself though and voiding the warranty, decide that the best course of action is to make an appointment with an Apple "Genius" for the afternoon and get it looked at by someone who is paid by Apple.
• 1:35PM  Never did get a chance to eat lunch, it's been one emergency after another all day.  I need to leave by 2 if I want to make it to my Genius Bar appointment at Bridgeport on time.  Got a frantic call from the Office though, somehow they updated Quickbooks and managed to lose ALL the financial data for the building.  It's obviously my fault that there's no backup (it auto backs up every night but overwrites the same data, so when it backed up a corrupt file that was the ONLY file available to attempt to recover from).  Spent the next fifteen minutes troubleshooting then finally call in the Big Guns (ay, Big-D) and between the two of us, one remote connection, and alot of guess work are able to recover a file from a solid week ago. 
  
• 2:15PM  Scramble out of my building, running late but know I can still pull off a 2:30 appointment assuming that there's a 15 minute window before they close my spot and that traffic is moving.  Head out to hit the highway.  End up in a minor accident on I-5.  Big, old, red SUV getting on the highway and immediately crosses all three lanes of traffic, directly in front of me, overshoots the lane he was headed for and hits the center divider which caused myself and another driver to slam on our breaks.  As he's crossing the center line, he kicks up all the debris in the middle of the road and I get pelted by big stones and pieces of trash, damaging both my sidepanel and the windshield.  Grrr.  Make a note to call the insurance company as soon as I'm done at the Apple Store.
• 2:40PM  Make it to the Apple Store.  The Genius Bar is running behind, YES!  Spend the better part of an hour explaining the history of this laptop, how we got it serviced through the school district, what triage I've done on my own, what I suspect, reproducing the problem, and filling out all the appropriate submission forms.  They decide to send it off for repairs/replacement, I agree that it's a GREAT idea and they agree to call my personal cell phone when it's done.
• 3:40PM  Finally make it out of the Apple Store and call my insurance company to inform them that I had a near miss on the highway.  Explain the details.  They agree that the windshield likely needs to be replaced, and helps setup an appointment for Monday morning for that to occur.  Inform me that it will likely cost $250 or so for the replacement.  That's money I don't have right now.  Lovely.
  
• 4:30PM  Had scheduled a doctors appointment at the local Urgent Care facility who is now acting as my regular doctor.  Explained that I've had all the "classic" menopausal symptoms for the last month and I've been off my estrogen for at least that long if not longer.  Cite things such as:  repeated UTI's, acne breakouts, irritability, loss of self-esteem, mood swings, headaches, dry skin, excessive abdominal pain, depression, listlessness, insomnia, anxiety attacks, and of course the ever present "fogginess".  After $100 worth of bloodwork and another $35 worth of prescriptions, the Doctor said that in two weeks I should be back to my normal self and feeling much better.  Although some symptoms may take up to a month to disappear completely.  I'm sure Scott will be happy to hear that.

I'm ready for relaxing tonight.  My plan was to game but I think I'm going to curl up with a bear and zone for a spell.  Maybe give in an pop an anti-anxiety pill and hope for a nap.  We'll have to see.  

Today was a long, long day.  It started with an early morning wakeup call, just before 6, that schools in the area were running under a 2 hour delay.  After calling the next person in the phone tree, I looked at the clock, calculated how much time I could actually sleep in for, reset my alarm, and crawled back to bed.  In my humble opinion, it's one of the only 2 perks about working for a school district.

Making it into work, I got very little done before I ended up teaching kids for three hours in the afternoon.  I'm not really sure who had the bright idea to stick the building technologist with kids, alone, for multiple hours throughout the afternoon, but if I ever figure that one out... urgh!  I'm just not a kid person, I'm sorry, but I didn't go to school to be a teacher, I never really babysat or had time with kids, and I sure as hell don't know what to do with 30 or so kids ranging from first to fifth grade depending on the period.  They hired me to manage their networks, their computers, and to host training - for teachers that is - I'm still going to fight this one.  At the very least, if they want to have me teach, then they should pay me like a teacher.  I get to repeat that tomorrow.  Grr.  /Rant.

*deep breath*  So after work I drove home and finally had a chance to eat something today.  After making it through a couple of "jojo's", I swear that's a West Coast thing, and a hot pocket, Thad and I played a game of Mario Party 8 which I borrowed from Scotty last week.  The deal was one game of MP8 in exchange for one game of M:tG.  It didn't quite work out that way.  We ended up playing two games of Magic, the first where I actually managed to barely scrape by with my poor little critter-poor black deck and take victory, only to come back to a second game where Thad's red deck clobbered me in three turns.  It was fun anyways.

Having decided that I had done enough gaming for the night I finally managed to sign onto my upstairs desktop and get on chat.  Chatting with Smurfums, I've managed to finally get a full system backup started - most importantly of my "JAWS" drive which hosts everything from video and mp3 files to my documents, photos, and wallpapers as well as a copy of my home directory.  I also found the time to clear off the SD card in my digital photo frame and upload some new photos onto it.  I tried to pick out a bunch that meant something special to me - everything from photos of the beach back in South Carolina, to trips I've taken here with family and friends, to friends, and family, and of course some of my two kitties (Graebe aka Tika or Mookie, and Link).

I've easily got another half-an-hour before I want to crash tonight.  I need to finish my data backup and pop in that flash drive and move another video file that I forgot about.  I also want to get some things ready for tomorrow, make sure Graebes has food and water and whatnot for the day while I'm gone, and maybe curl up with my slanket and some fanfiction for a bit.  Tomorrow is going to be a long day as it is, I just want to relax tonight and try to center myself before I have to deal with it.  Ta!

This week has certainly ranked an "11" on my stress-o-meter.  I just can't seem to catch a break.  Every night has been an extremely late night brought on by a combination of factors, I can do late nights regularly but every single night for a solid week is leaving me exhausted.  Work is crazy.  We're having multiple, large-scale failures on everything from wireless networking to static IPs on Printers, and don't you get me started on the damn MacBooks.  It's like everything half-way technological in my building is rebelling at the same time.  They took a poll, decided that they were tired of functioning - forget functioning correctly, we're talking at all here - and have been on the blitz all week.  On top of that, I'm getting multiple repeat calls from teachers rehashing same issues and then hunting me down and being loudly frustrated towards me when I didn't have a chance to get to that email that they send me 2 minutes ago.  I mean really, how dare I not reply?  And lets not forget that my untested netboot lab is going to start being used for the damn OAKS testing starting Monday.  A challenge in and out of itself... especially when I refused to sign the damn waiver, which means I need to be able to troubleshoot the test even if I can't proctor it.  Fun stuff.

I think it probably all started with last weekend being one of the most emotionally challenging weekends I've had in years.  Things worked out, better than I could have hoped for even, but spending three days so frustrated I was in tears (a rare occurance for me, I usually have a much tighter grip on my emotions outwardly) was such a burden that I never had the chance to recharge and regain the "me" time that gives me the strength to focus on my work week and survive the absolute madness that working in a school district entails. Scotty, however, has been absolutely wonderful this week and I really should do a better job at expressing how much that means to me and has helped me survive the last while.  It was great, tonight especially, when I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin, to have someone to just... rant at and be held by.  I don't know if he realized it or not, but out of everything he could have possibly done for me this week, helping me relax enough to let down my well built walls of protection, even for just an hour so I could finally get a nap, was wonderful.

Visiting the Apple Store at Bridgeport was perhaps the most traumatizing experience I've had all week.  I had a laptop from work with a faulty iSight, I walked through all the troubleshooting aka "triage" long before I resigned myself to actually voluntarily entering the store.  Setup an appointment online yesterday, for an appointment today,  with a tech at the "Genius Bar" and then proceeded to wait and watch while various store employees successfully talked unsuspected lay-folk into buying expensive Apple products, everything from $349 noise-canceling headphones to $3800 laptops.  Careful to bite my tongue on the subject, I waited politely for my turn with the single tech on duty, and then patiently explained who I was, what the problem was, what steps I took in order to troubleshoot the problem, and so on ultimately stating that I believed it to be a hardware problem.  30 minutes later, the tech (who I'm refusing to call a genius because that's almost as lame as the nerd herd*) came to the same conclusion.  Cue another half an hour wait while the tech and the store manager tried, abit largely unsuccessfully, to enter my name into their computer service so the laptop could actually be serviced.  When asked if I've ever "bought an Apple product before" my response was a resounding "No." which in hindsight, I should have been more careful with that.  Instead, it led me on a cat-and-mouse chase with the store manager that Apple isn't the best product out there and here's the things that I found worked better than Apple products (my Creative Zen for a fraction of the price of a new, large iPod, a solid PC instead of an overpriced Apple laptop, etc, etc).  We finally ended the marathon conversation by me saying something to the tune of, "You're way too late to corrupt me into proprietary heaven, if anything, I've been corrupted into the Linux and Open-Source world.  But nice job trying."  Finally, an hour after I walked through the doors, I was able to leave mostly un-accosted, with a promise to return in a few days for the fixed MacBook.  Ahh, the things I go through for the Apple Fanboy Environment.