Selenay's Ramblings

hockeybosh and I are still in recovery from Guardian. This mostly involves exchanging vids and fic and feeling very odd last night about not watching it together via Whatsapp. Oh dear.

Maybe we'll feel less discombobulated when I start watching The Untamed and she does the supportive co-watch with me? And then we might need to find another thing to watch together...

Anyway. This is not a Guardian post.

I have a week off next week. Probably. Someone today asked me whether I was going anywhere nice and I don't know how to reply to that honestly. "Yes, I'm going to my sofa to watch telly and read fic for a week" probably isn't what she's expecting. Heh.

The part of me that is finding it increasingly difficult to disengage from work every day knows this is an important thing to do. I haven't taken any time off since January and I'm told that moving house doesn't qualify as a restful holiday. Today I ended up texting my coworker to check my diary because I'd taken a late-ish lunch, had just made a sandwich, and couldn't remember whether I was supposed to be in a 2pm meeting right then. So at least I got to eat my lunch in peace. But my work meetings keep taking over my life and I'm getting increasingly frustrated with that, so I definitely need a break.

Except so much stuff keeps coming for my team to do and everyone is impatient for their stuff and OMG how can I be thinking about taking time off right now?

Yes, I know, there's never a time when this isn't true. I have to keep remembering that this week so I don't cancel my leave. Today's 5pm meeting is hopefully going to be the last post-work hours meeting of the week.

Mainly because...I'm going to be an ops rover at Worldcon! I'm not going to Worldcon itself, because all the programming is happening at night and I couldn't take the time off this week to attend it, but I'm working on the ops team in the evenings (and early Saturday morning). Apparently I can't say no when people put out the ops bat signal. Hey ho. It's going to be interesting, doing this for a virtual con.

I'm suddenly very glad that I've become reasonably familiar with Discord during these weird and troubled times.

But that does mean I can't do any late meetings for work after today and I'm hoping people actually check my calendar and notice that I've got the time booked out before they try scheduling things. It would make a nice change if they did.

Annie keeps licking my trackpad and scrolling this window. Helpful, cat. So helpful.

After several weeks of incredibly mild weather here (no snow, lots of rain, not terribly cold), winter has decided to remind us it isn't over. We had a storm today and another nor'easter is heading in tomorrow evening/Saturday. Then another one might hit us early next week.

Ugh.

I know, I know, the UK can also have some nasty winters...but still not quite like our version of nasty.

So it's likely that my plans to go to writing group on Saturday might not happen :-( But I made it out shopping (to the giant shopping centre I'd never found before!) last weekend so I haven't been a total recluse.

I bought clothes. It was fun. I enjoyed getting compliments on my cute new outfits this week. What's happening to me?

As for other stuff, I'm still doing a lot of training, reading, and prepping for the concept of a job hunt. I now have a LinkedIn profile (DM me if you want to connect). Doing all of this, brushing up skills, monitoring job boards, etc, is giving me a much clear idea of what I want to look for and what might be realistic. I know that I don't want to just do the same job except in a different office. That's not a step forward, and a step forward is what I want. So I'm starting to get a clearer picture of what that means. I'm starting to work out what a small step would be and what a big challenging step would be, and feel like I've got the confidence to maybe push myself further than I thought about originally.

It's actually exciting, which I never thought I'd say.

( Cut for career and computing babble )

In less career and future related news, Star Trek Discovery was amazing and I need to blog about it. Legend's of Tomorrow has become the Arrowverse show I actually keep up with and I suspect that's because it's the queerest. I <3 Sara/Ava.

And Holby City is keeping me going. I <3 Serena. And Dom/Lofty. And Jac. And Frieda forever. My medical soap is so great.

Ways I can tell that we found an(other) issue with code due to the unnanounced impact of data changes in the source system: I have code running in four different test environments and the production box trying to find the source ofsome differences in a materialised view.

*headdesk*

But it's amazing what a beautiful sunny day can do. This morning I drove to work with the sun shining on the ocean (damn it, I love that first section of my drive to work) and felt happy and cheerful despite knowing I was stepping back into yesterday's madness. It was a good feeling.

And somehow, despite the frustration of trying to fix half a dozen things that shouldn't be going wrong, I'm still feeling pretty cheerful. Go me!

My project for the day, after all the crazy is fixed, is to hide away with all my many lists and a set of highlighter pens and triple check that I've got my bill of materials absolutely 100% correct.

Is it really sad that sometimes I am a wee bit squeeful about the chance to cross-check lists with highligther pens?

Today I'm working from home due to complicated transport reasons. It has been a lovely quiet day and nobody has been overtly stupid around me or asked me Zombie Project questions.

I suspect that this is because I've seen nobody except the cats because Mum handily never bothers me in the office. I must remember that for future reference.

The only moment of "OMG, Whu?" was when my boss sent me an un-editable form that he needed me to fill in and return to him today because he's in a completely different province. When I pointed out that filling it in and returning via email was not something I could do with the UN-EDITABLE FORM and offered to print it out, fill it in and return it via internal mail tomorrow (so it would arrive on Monday) he found a different solution. I will print, fill out, scan and email it to him tomorrow.

He is, I feel, making a big error here based on two critical misunderstandings:

1) That anyone in the department knows how to work the departmental scanner
2) That we are in any way good at figuring out equipment more complicated than a stapler

Seriously, we are the IT team that requires three of us to change a battery in a phone headset and never, ever hand us toner for the printer. It took the copier guy two days to fix our fuck up the last time.

So, the whole scanner thing could be very interesting tomorrow. Particularly as the poor copier is also the scanner and we...are not good with printers.

I sometimes feel that we are probably being mocked by other IT teams for our technological incompetence.

Will wonders never cease? My office move was actually fairly successful - for me. I'm hearing cries of "can't get into any servers!" around me so obviously I was lucky. My boss insisted that it would be a smooth move, no problems at all, and for me it's true. I appear to be almost the only one! Crates aren't where they should be, white boards are missing, computers haven't been set up correctly, cupboards aren't accessible because crates have been piled in front of them...

At least there are enough people here to keep the motion-sensitive lights working now :-) Sadly, the heating is working as well as it did in my old place so I'm huddled in a thick fleece jacket still. Never mind, it could be worse. It could have been a move with my old employer.

The weekend was pretty quiet, due to a combination of exhaustion (me) and sickness (my aunt). I did do some cooking, but no baking because I was feeling lazy. Saturday I cooked tuna parcels, which were delicious and one followed me to work for my lunch today :-) Leftovers are great things. Yesterday I dug through my recipe books and discovered some magazines that I collected as a teenager, all hopefully titled 'Easy' something and never proving to be that easy. My Easy Chinese magazine had a recipe in that sounded rather good and promised to rid me of an orange that my parents helpfully left for me - lemon and orange beef.

I wasn't too sure about it while I was cooking it, but the taste is amazing. Wow. The only slight issue is the quantity: it promised to serve 4, but only if those four are eating at least one (probably two) other dishes plus a ton of rice. It's definitely not enough for a full meal for 4 unless you fill up hugely on rice. Oops. I was good and didn't eat the lot. I'd planned to reheat the rest and put it with some rice when my aunt comes over tomorrow, but right now I'm thinking that I'll need a second dish to go with this to get a proper feed. I need to have a chat with my aunt tonight: the magazine also has a recipe for broccoli in hoisin sauce that sounds fantastic but I need to check with her as to how much and what kinds of veg she can eat. Otherwise I might need to rethink my menu plan. Hmm.

What I really need to do is plan a quiet weekend and actually do some writing rather than playing with kittens and reading. Despite my best efforts, I still don't seem to be finding enough time for everything that I want to do and part of that is because having a house requires a fair bit of work each week. I'm hoping that when the weather warms up and I'm not losing a day or more to shovelling each week that will change a bit.

And now I must get on with some real work. Yay.

PS. Written this morning and emailed to myself for later posting. We have discovered the major problem with the new office: no drinking water. Supposedly the water out of the taps is filtered and drinkable, but it's looking rather brown and cloudy. Blech. There is no other source of water. This could become a major issue, I sense.