Stream of Conscience

Today was my first day back to work. I had only about 1/2 hour to myself this morning to actually do any work. Meetings. Then, this afternoon, it was so effing noisy, I couldn’t concentrate, thus was getting extremely irritable, and when my computer decided to take its own sweet damn time, I slammed my fist on the keyboard. I ended up having to go to the cafeteria to finish my work. The cafeteria was quieter than my office.  (And the conversations in the cafeteria were more work related than in the office.)

And, since I didn’t go to the grocery store yesterday, I really needed to do so today, since I forgot to pick up my happy pills, which… well, just see paragraph 1. I ended up buying nearly $100 in groceries, not including the happy pills, which cost nearly $100 themselves. But a lot of the stuff I needed was on sale, so I went ahead & bought it. Non-edible things like shampoo, skin lotion, hairbrush, yadda, yadda. Oh, and edible things like the diet (100 calorie pack) Cheetos. And diet ice cream bars. Yes, I needed them, too.

Oh, and red wine, too. Remember the $200 trip to Target? (You may not because I wrote about it at my other blog.)  One of the items I bought was a set of 4 balloon style wine glasses (for the grand total of $8). Since I finally washed & put them away, I thought tonight would be a good time for a test run. So far so good. (How many misspellings have I made so far?)

So now I’m just going to chill and watch a few hours of “Fashion Day” on QVC. I’m not sure if I’ll buy anything, but I might be able to get an idea of what I might possibly need this fall—once the weather decides to actually act like fall and not be over 90 degrees!

After doing very well abstaining from tv shopping—I didn’t even buy one thing during QVC’s Creed Silver Strike Day, which was Oct 2, when I was home recovering from surgery—I did end up buying a few things over the weekend. But a few of them are Christmas presents, and a few of them are items I’d been thinking about buying. I actually did restrain myself. But I’m sure it’s not going to feel like that once the credit card bill comes. Especially in light of tonight’s Giant episode.

All right, Natalie, I think you know by now that I have a fairly obsessive personality. Once again, I am ticking my life away.

Even tho’ this is the date I can retire, I most likely won’t, because I’d have to take a serious cut in retirement pay. And I just learned last week that my retirement calculator has a serious flaw in it. (Thank goodness no one other than me has used it!) Turns out I can’t retire with full pension for another 4 years. (I thought it was 3. Waaah!)

Sometimes I feel like all my time is taken up with meetings and I never have a chance to get any work done. So, without further ado, here are 13 meetings I’ve had to attend this week. I am going to use military time, because… well, because I can?

1. Monday, 0800-0830: “Stand up” brief in the director’s office. It’s literally stand up—lots of people, very few chairs. And it went over about 10 minutes, which made us late for…
2. Monday, 0830-0930: Operations center update. Reiterated most of what was briefed in #1. Loads of fun. (Not.)
3. Monday 1030-1115: meeting to prep for briefing the boss, who is being prepped prior to meeting with the General who is being prepped for Big Video Teleconference later this week. (I even had to miss another meeting I have scheduled for the same time.)
4. Monday 1130-1335: meeting with boss to prep him for meeting with General who is being prepped for Big Video Teleconference. Cafeteria closed at 1330, so had to grab junk food from snack stand prior to attending…
5. Monday 1330-1415: weekly “synch” meeting, which is a fancy name for staff meeting. Fortunately, this meeting was chaired by someone who actually makes sense, hence, getting out in only 45 minutes.
6. Tuesday 0800-0900: stand-up in director’s office. This one lasts for about an hour because we don’t have to be elsewhere at 0830.
7. Tuesday 1030-1100: meeting to review slides prior to meeting with General to prep him for Big Video Teleconference this week.
8. Tuesday 1300-1500: meeting with General to prep him for Big Video Teleconference this week.
9. Wednesday 0830-0845: stand up in director’s office. Received demoralizing “pep talk.”
10. Wednesday 0845-0945: operations brief, which began late because of “pep talk”
11. Wednesday 1100-1200: collaboration session that reiterated some of the things presented at 0800 and 0830 meetings along with review of latest slides for Big Video Teleconference later this week.
12. Wednesday 1130-1315: “Operations & Intelligence” conference with General. This is a regularly scheduled meeting and had nothing to do with prep for Big Video Teleconference this week.
13. 0800-0900: stand up meeting boss’s office. Didn’t even get through the entire brief due to another “pep talk.” Gah.
14. 1300-1415: Big Video Teleconference. Had been in the works for approximately 2 months. Went pretty well, but still cause for banging of head. (More about that some other time.)

Shit! I couldn’t even cut it down to only 13! And this was a short week! (Military has Friday off, so things slow down… a lot.) Oh, and there meetings that I actually missed.

(By the way, the “pep talks” happen when something ticks off the boss, and he lectures us on everything we’re not doing. He’s got a lot of great ideas, and he’s very good about not yelling. But telling people who work 12-16-18 hours a day that they need to do more & be more attentive to his direction is pretty demoralizing.)

I sat in a briefing today that really peeved me. It puts the folks I work with in a bad light, and I feel horrible for them. They are terrific people who are working their asses off; and now, if the briefing slides don’t change between now and next Thursday, there is going to be hell to pay. We will have to scrape no less than three senior officers off the ceiling. So, in order to make the evening more enjoyable, here are:

Thirteen things I’m grateful for:

1. my paycheck, which is rather nice
2. my commute to work, which is pretty easy
3. my car, a 2000 Lexus (I bought it used) that runs like a dream
4. the people I work with. They’re very smart and hard working and I’m so privileged to know them.
5. my home, which provides me immense comfort
6. Kristen and Michael’s impending new arrival
7. in addition to Kristen, her two brothers, who are the absolute bestest
8. my renewed interest in knitting, which allows me to make adorable things for #6
9. all the kitties that have graced my life with their unconditional love; Brandy, Cassie, Chelsea, Britta, Gigi, Daisy, Kimmi and Shadow (even though his unconditional love is sometimes a bit too much)
10. Michelle Market, whose specialties are a perfect fit for my neuroses
11. my iPod, which has allowed me to download songs from Supernatural and make CDs for my “best friend-in-law” and me
12. Supernatural Season 1 DVD sets being on sale so that I can buy a whole bunch of them to give out to others
13. several friends who have birthdays this month who will be getting Supernatural DVDs and CDs as presents.

Yes, it’s true. It really does all boil down to Supernatural!

It must be the May 2. It’s my best friend’s anniversary. They picked that date because the first weekend in May is the prettiest weekend of the year, with the dogwoods and azaleas in all their beautiful glory.

Of course, anniversaries are really just for the couple, so I’m not celebrating. Except that it’s hump day. And I’m pooped. The guy that’s in charge of the place I work (he’s not my boss but I support him) is a very demanding person on a normal day. No matter how much you do, he wants more. He was gone for a day & half, and returned today with a vengence.  It’s like someone slipped some steroids in his Wheaties.  He gets like this every now & then.  Granted, what he’s asking for is usually needed, but people can only do so much.  And worker bees aren’t supposed to think strategically, and yet that’s what he wants from them. It’s very frustrating.  And kind of demoralizing.

So I stopped off at the grocery store and bought some wine to ease into the evening. Besides, American Heiress is on tonight & I need to be ready for the AH drinking game. And tomorrow is Supernatural, with an episode that looks very intriguing.

We have a big 4 day conference coming up, starting tomorrow, and the fellow who’s coordinating it works next to me. He’s been working late every night for quite a while. I know his pain. When I was in the Navy, I had to plan a big conference 2 years in a row. Late nights, no acknowledgement, no thanks.

The first year, I had my foot in a cast. Fortunately, it was a walking cast (crutches are evil things!), but it was still a pain, both literally & figuratively. The second year, my mom was in the final stages of her terminal illness. In fact, the idiot senior officer gave me duty the Saturday after the conference (and I worked closely with him). And that Saturday, my mom took a turn for the worse. Everyone tried to get ahold of me, but I wasn’t at home, and I wasn’t at my desk at work. When I got home Sunday morning, there were several messages on my answering machine. They had taken her to the hospital and she wasn’t very coherent. I made my plane reservations for Monday, but Sunday night my dad called to say she had passed away.

As I was thinking about that, a sudden wave of intense sadness came over me.  This was the 2nd time in as many weeks.  Even tho she’s been gone for 20 years, I’ve recently been longing for her company.  I’m not sure why I’m having these feelings again.  She died in December, not in April.  Her birthday is in February, so that’s not the trigger.  I have no answers.  I guess it’s just best to remember what a remarkable and wonderful woman she was.

I’ve managed to fall about 3 days behind my blogging & treasure hunt schedule this week. First of all, I didn’t spend much time online on March 1, since it was my favorite day on QVC. (Big Bonanza Silver Day.) Some years I totally forget about it, but this year I’d been saving up my purchasing power for the big day, not buying anything since Christmas, so I was really looking forward to it. I left work early & never even logged on when I got home. Oh wait. I take that back. I did log on so that I could order a couple of things online, rather than phone it in.

Then yesterday, our (unclassified) network was down for pretty much the entire day. In a way, that was good. I was able to get some work done on the classified network that I’d been putting off. And another woman said she got a lot of filing done. Supposedly the network came up at lunchtime, but I was heavily involved on the classified side, then went out to lunch with a bud. By the time I’d finished my “classified” work, the net was down again. It didn’t come up until after 4:00 p.m. And while I did stay a little late to get the urgent e-mail answered, I had no desire to stay there later than necessary.

So now I have to put in a little extra weekend time to get back on track. That’s not bad, per se, but I have a tendancy to forget about the blog on the weekends. Fortunately, I remembered today. And with any luck, I’ll remember tomorrow.

Yeah, yeah. I’m not keeping up with my goal of posting 5 times a week. To be fair, I have posted a little at my Benjamin Bratt website and at my Supernatural blog, but certainly not with the frequency I’d planned. I’d also fallen off the wagon with the Treasure Hunt. (I spent much of the last couple weeks making user pics for my LiveJournal site. I can’t help it. I’m a sucker for pictures of pretty boys.) But I did a quick calculation this week & found that if I find 2 treasures per day (including weekends), I’ll finish on time. Yay.

Friday night I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, and this morning I’m all befuddled. When I came on to post, everything was in HTML. Now, I know HTML pretty well, but I’ve really gotten used to the WYSIWYG editor. And since WYSIWYG helps with the flow of thought (and the blog is title “Stream of Conscience,” after all) , I really didn’t want to be hassled with having to stop, think, and put in HTML tags. (Besides, the tag editor wasn’t working all that great.) But I finally got the WYSIWYG back. And yet I was still having problems. For some goofy reason, I didn’t have all the editing options available to me. Things seem to be back to normal now, though. But, have the buttons in the Insert/edit link box been swapped? I keep wanting to hit “Cancel” instead of “Insert” (which is really annoying because my links & link titles in the Treasure Hunt are pretty darned long).

Oh, and I had this very annoying greeting in the upper right-hand corner, “Howdy, NICEUSERNAME” (or something like that). Fortunately, I found where to correct the name. I’d sure hate for this post to show up as “Posted by NICEUSERNAME.” And the really odd thing? I upgraded my Ben Bratt website blog, too, but everything over there is working just fine. Sheesh.

It’s snowing its brains out! We were supposed to have a “wintry mix” changing over to (freezing) rain this afternoon. But this is the whitest damn rain I’ve ever seen! Well, the good news is, maybe work will be cancelled tomorrow. Heee. That would be terrific. Oh wait. I just realized there’s something I’ve got to do first thing Monday morning. Rats.

I just got back from the shopping center. Boy, am I pooped. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have gone out, but the folks at work are sponsoring 5 soldiers (3 men & 2 women) and the gifts have to be sent off next week. I bought a couple of paperback books & several DVDs, including the Supernatural season 1 set. (I can’t believe I paid full price for it, but I don’t know if Amazon would have gotten it here in time.) I figure the Supernatural set is great because it’s gender friendly. For the guys there’s rock music, action, mild gore & scary stuff. For the gals, there’s… Jensen Ackles & Jared Padalecki. It’s a win-win situation. And I’m hoping I’ll get at lease one person hooked on the show, so that they’ll want to watch when they come back to the States.

I’d asked some of the guys at work (who’ve been in Iraq & other deployed places) what items would be good. Their first reply was batteries. And the second was… cocktail weenies. I kid you not! Cocktail weenies! Of course, once they said it, I understood why. Batteries to run their music players & such, junk food because it’s hard to come by in a strange land, and DVDs & books to alleviate the boredome. So maybe when I go to the grocery store tomorrow I’ll pick up some non-perishable junk food and some batteries.

Next weekend I’ll be shopping for the kids of the family the work folks adopted. Have I mentioned how great the people I work with are?