Taken from both browngirl and puppetmaker40:
Post a comment, and I will reply with a reason why I think you’re great. In return, you have to post this same meme on your blog and comment for other people.
Category: Blog Page 21 of 141
What is the metric equivalent to the word “mileage”? Kilometreage sounds dreadful and kludgy, but I’m not entirely sure what the appropriate analogue would be.
Yesterday was my last day at $OLDJOB. Monday will be my first day at $NEWJOB. In between, I have five days where I don’t have any real obligations on my time, for the first time I can remember.
It’s 11:30am, and I’ve yet to get dressed. I keep thinking “I should do something with this lovely day, but being utterly indecisive about something even as simple as “Where should I go for lunch?”
Ah well. I think I’ll just go out and wander around for a while. Maybe something interesting will occur to me as I do. 🙂
Today at 4pm, I walked out of my office.
For the last time.
About six weeks ago, a former co-worker caught up with me as I was out on one of my constitutional walks around the parking lot. He wanted me to know that his company might have a new position opening up that he thought would be perfect for me, and he knew I had been thinking of looking for a new gig. After listening to the particulars, I sent him my resume, and told him to let me know. A couple of weeks later, he pinged me back to ask me when I’d like to set up an interview.
Two weeks ago, they offered me the job, and I submitted my resignation to my current employer. This was certainly a surreal experience. I went to work for this company fifteen years ago, when it was still a tiny startup and the Internet was only just starting to explode. As I leave, it is a well established player in its corner of the market, and in no small part it’s success is because of work that I’ve done for it. I’m very proud of what I helped to build, and it’s strange to think that as of today, I’m no longer an active part of it.
But the truth is, whatever my frustrations with my job are, the biggest motivator for me is wanting to seek new challenges. I’m going to be working in a market sector that is, I think, going to be exploding over the next few years*, so it’s an exciting time to be joining it, and while there’s a certain satisfaction that comes from being at the top of the game and the guy everyone comes to for all the answers, there’s also something to be said for getting into a new one and mixing it up with a new team where you have something to prove.
My 40th year has been one of great changes. Some of them good, some of them less so, but I’m certainly going to emerge a different person to the one I entered as. I’m looking forward to the future.
This past weekend was the Atlanta area housefilk, which very nearly snuck up on us, but we were reminded of it in time to make plans to attend, which was a goodness. Last year we decided to drop back to quarterly housefilks rather than monthly, in the hopes that people would make more of an effort to attend if they were held less often. So far, this plan has been working out quite well, as the last several have been very well attended. I didn’t make an official count, but there were at least 15 people gathered at Dave and Signe’s house to make some music.
I don’t recall all of what I played, but here’s a partial list:
Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner (Warren Zevon)
The Queen of Air and Darkness (Poul Andersen)
Sam’s Song (Zander Nyrond)
Follow That Road (Anne Hills)
Brain Damage (Pink Floyd)
We got to hear a couple of new songs from catsittingstill, which is always a treat, and Harry did a lovely Viking song that I’d not heard before. thatcrazycajun and singing_phoenix arrived just before we were leaving, so we didn’t get to hear either of them sing anything.
Sunday, I treated myself to a bit of imported nostalgia. The Taco Stand was already an institution in Athens when I moved there in 1989, and I had many a tasty meal there. It’s one of the places I’d make a point to visit when I was back in Athens since moving away 13 years ago. Saturday, while returning from picking up some things at the tailor’s, I spotted a Taco Stand sign in a shopping centre on Old Alabama Connector, so I stopped and asked them if they were connected to the ones in Athens. I was told they were, though this one was independently owned. Good enough for me. I took a menu with me and told them I’d return.
The Taco Stand is what I affectionately call “college food”. Cheap, abundant, simple, and very tasty if it’s the sort of thing you enjoy. It’s the sort of thing I enjoy. I had the deluxe burrito and a quesadilla, and kitanzi had the chicken tacos. It was a delightful meal.
All in all, a good weekend.
I’ve long fallen out of the habit of publicly commenting on birthdays, mostly for fear that I’ll eventually forget someone and offend them terribly.
But today is a day I always want to note: the birthday of kitanzi, the best wife and partner I could have ever dreamed to have. You fill my life with joy and happiness every single day.
Happy birthday, love. Here’s to many more.
“With my depression, there aren’t so many things that give me joy, and I should be able to celebrate the shit out of the things that do. If I hate just about everything in the world, let me love what I do love hard and unrestrainedly. And even when we’re teenagers, and allegedly immature enough to get away with enthusiasm, we start getting pressured to act cool, so we temper that enthusiasm so goddamn early. I’m done with it. No great art ever was made by dampening your love of anything. No great life was lived by pretending you didn’t give a shit.”
—![[personal profile]](https://www.autographedcat.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/user.png){kind=small}
maevele, in a post here
(h/t to firecat for bringing it to my attention)
Not many people had anything they wanted to ask me, alas, but I promised answers to those who did, so here they are. Feel free to go back and ask more if you want.
Would you please comment more frequently? It feels like we rarely interact any more.
Yeah, um…*blush* I’ve been really bad about this recently, and I’m working to get better at it. Mostly, I just went through a period where I was really withdrawn, and wrapped up in my own stuff and not really paying enough attention to everything else in my life. I regret that, but I can’t undo it, so all I can do is work to re-establish good habits.
It’s not personal. I sometimes get behind and just don’t catch up, and sometimes I see something I mean to reply to, mark it for later, and then space on it. I’ve even done this with far more important correspondence, to the point that I had someone ask me why I wasn’t answering any of their email, and I blinked in surprise and said “I haven’t?”, then went back and found four consecutive messages I’d failed to actually acknowledge.
Long story short: I’ll try. You remain dear to me.
How did you start making music?
Any day now, I hope to find out… *grin*
I’ve always been interested in music, though I never had any musical training in my younger years. If you left me near a piano, though, I’d sit down and play with the keys, trying to work out the puzzle behind them. I never did learn to play it, although I got pretty good at making a sort of tuneless avant-garde jazz that amused myself, though it likely drove anyone else within earshot insane.
When I was 16, I took money from my first real job over the summer and bought an electric guitar. It was a Rickenbacker 230 Hamburg (six-string solidbody electric), and I got it for a criminal price from a guy who needed the money quickly to buy a keyboard for a gig his band had coming up and was selling his least-used guitar for a fraction of its value. But I never really learned to play it, and didn’t have anyone to teach me. So when I was moving to Georgia, I sold it to help finance the move, and regretted it ever since. I kept telling myself that I’d get around to buying another guitar and actually learn to play it, but I kept putting it off until 1998, when a near-death experience convinced me that the time to get around to the things you want to do is now. I went out and bought Fenris, a Fender 12 string acoustic (the one I still play), and enrolled in a class to get the basics. Since then, I’m largely self taught, though I’ve been looking about for someone to help me get past the plateau I’m on and move up to the next level. At some point, I’d like to also get another electric guitar, and indulge the part of me that always wanted to be a rock star.
Are there any sports that you like to watch?
There are some sports I enjoy a great deal. Alpine skiing and figure skating hold my interest completely during the Winter Olympics, for instance. I was at one time an avid baseball enthusiast, but in recent years I’ve not taken the time to really keep up with it, and since I never watch live TV anymore, the chances I’ll stumble across a game and stop to watch it are remote.
Having said all that, if someone I’m with is really into a sport, I will almost always enjoy watching it WITH them, even if it’s not something I’d necessarily watch on my own. I have very fond memories of watching World Cup soccer with elgecko, or cricket with fleetfootmike. There’s something wonderfully communal about sport, and, when you think about it, that’s really the whole point of being a fan of something; being part of a larger community of people who share that enthusiasm. I might find myself more into a sport if there was someone nearby in my life who was also enthusiastic.
(I recently did attend a baseball game; I got tickets from my employer in a drawing, and took kitanzi. It was a great deal of fun, though I probably enjoyed it rather a bit more than she did.)
If anyone still wants to ask something, the link is at the top. (Or you can comment here, but I’m not screening replies on this entry. *grin*)
This morning at work, I was scanning through our tickets report to see if there were any open issues of interest to me, and the following notation on one of the workorders made me giggle uncontrollably for reasons that would probably not immediately make sense to anyone else in the office. A co-worker, indicating he was going to contact a customer to coordinate work on his cable modem plant, wrote:
“I am going to be getting with Charlie on MTA configs and upgrades later today.”
Will he ever return?