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Last week was busy. No, it was really a circus. It began on August 29th, when we moved The Young Man into his dorm in Wisconsin. It was a big day for him, and when it came time for us to go, I could tell he was torn between not wanting us to leave, and wanting us to leave. We had spent the morning moving him in (a nice second-story dorm) and wandering the campus and the nearby town, and finally we were out of stalling tactics and it was time to go. I really couldn't believe we were there, playing out a middle-class ritual that I had never experienced, Dropping Off at the Dorm. I had my own car when I moved out, so I don't remember such an event in my life. Although honestly my memory is so poor and i was so young and self-centered it may have happened and I don't remember! But it was good and sad and exciting and dreadful and everything one must expect from the timely departure of one's beloved son from the nest. I wouldn't change anything, but I wouldn't mind another five or ten years of my kids being this age, living at home, either. It struck me a few years ago that I was living through some of the happiest days of my life, and I'm not looking forward to four years from now when The Boy (title held now my youngest) moves out. And THAT was just SATURDAY. Monday the 31st was my last day on my contract, and that was surreal. I can't really complain about the contract: it showed up right when I was losing the Best Buy contract last December, and allowed me to survive the transition and carried me halfway through August. But at the same time it was a very frustrating contract: I was brought in by the project management office of the client, and I made it VERY clear (after the debacle in '07) that I am NOT a project manager. 'No,' they said, 'we need a security architect.' And then they put my on projects where no security architect was needed - projects where the architecture had long ago been determined - and used me like a project manager. And got mad at me when I didn't perform like a project manager. But worse than that (which after all I'd been through before) was the isolation. My cube walls were 5' 10" high, and opened onto three glass senior manager offices on a dead end alley. Only three people ever passed my door, two of whom were rarely in. So I could go to work and on some days go the whole eight hours without seeing another person. I could hear my cube-neighbors - the cheerleader blond with her fakey laugh, the guy with the Harry Potter ringtone - but they weren't on my project and I had no interaction with them. Meetings were almost all on the phone (I had to provide my own headset, the smoothly curved handset wouldn't tuck against my shoulder). Most of my colleagues were in other buildings or other states, and I had no peers with whom to go to lunch. It was dreadfully, dreadfully isolating,,, When I returned from our (priceless, irreplaceable) two-week vacation, I was informed that my hours had been cut in half, and that at the end of August I'd be done. What the point of keeping me on half-time was I do not know, but August being the second-worst month for finding new contracts (December is the worst), I was willing to take whatever I could get. People being people, my colleagues on my remaining project quickly realized I was a short-timer, and stopped giving me things to do. The last two weeks were a pointless exercise where I would go to the office at 9:00, stay til 2:00, Monday through Thursday, doing nothing in my cube and seeing and speaking to no one. But they paid me, so I was there. Anyway THAT ended on Monday. At the final hour I delivered my badge to my manager. She smiled and said thanks and "It's been fun!" which was so at odds with my experience that it was all I could do to say "Thanks for the opportunity" before leaving. Tuesday was The Boy's first day of high school, which was not so traumatic but still poignant. He was going to be reunited with all the friends he'd left behind when we moved him out of the benighted 'Anne Sullivan' middle school for seventh and eighth grades. Formerly an excellent school, it had been hit hard by the dreadful policies of Governor Pawlenty, and The Boy had gotten saddled with a bitter, misandronstic teacher who had no business being in charge of children. When after a hellish sixth grade year we learned she would also be in his seventh grade faculty, we switched him to a different public school. Since both middle schools feed into the same high school, he's back with his Anne Sullivan pals. Wednesday we moved our daughter into her dorm. As this building is just a long walk from our house, it was easier both physically and emotionally. Still it is hard sitting down to dinner with just the three of us, all huddled at one end of the dining-room table. The move was pretty easy, although in the midst of it I got calls at the same time, one from Gio in England, the other from Rachel in NYC, asking for my help with computer problems. That was weird, trying to diagnose problems in two different distant places, while hauling my daughter's stuff up the elevator to her dorm. Then we took Gennie to Coffman Union to do some start of school stuff and get lunch while I continued to deal with computer stuff. And after THAT I went to Rob and Lisa's house for gaming til 11:00 p.m. Thursday Theresa and I went to the State Fair, which was rather nice, just the two of us, and the weather was gorgeous. Always tiring though. Friday and Saturday were spent on errands and chores of various types, including getting my daughter's laptop working. At one point the laptop automatically downloaded a bunch of Microsoft patches, I hadn't meant for it to do this: I wanted to install these manually because The Young Man had so much trouble with these updates hanging and breaking his operating system. Unfortunately when i connected to the Internet to download the latest anti-virus signatures, I forgot to unplug it. When I went to reboot following the virus scan (I had imported all her files from her old computer and wanted to be sure they were clean), the computer interrupted the shutdown with the announcement "Updating 1 of 52 patches, do not reboot your computer." Well of course it stalled at update 29 of 52, which was what I believe I recall seening my son's computer do too. I was unwilling to do anything to the computer, because I knew turning it off, even if I knew it was stuck, condemned me to hours and hours of rebuilding the operating system. In denial, I left it there. When I came into my office on Saturday morning it was still sitting at "29 of 52" and I started to resign myself to the fact that I was going to have to rebuild it. Still, I procrastinated, dinking around my office, cleaning up, etc. Finally I steeled myself to do what I had to do, I had to unplug the laptop and rebuild it. Suddenly out of the corner of my eye I saw the laptop screen flicker. It was rebooting. It booted up, installed three more things, rebooted again, and smiled at me as if it hadn't spent 20 hours in a coma. I checked the update logs...and update 29 of 52 had taken over 20 hours to complete, but complete it had, and the remaining 33 updates finished in about ten minutes. For once, my denial and procrastination had paid off. I finished up my daughter's computer and brought it over to her dorm and fixed her wobblying bunk bed (which I had caused to be wobbly in the first place) and headed home, exhausted. The next day, Sunday, was the day to help our friends Debbie and Bob move into their new home together (from two separate homes). It was a LOT of work, although Debbie tried to limit me to merely electrical and computer help in honor of this being like the umpteenth time I'd helped her move. And ONLY Debbie would PLAN to hold a party on the same evening of the day she moved into a house, but she did! It was a lot of fun (although I was really tired and could have used a shower, but then so could we all). We inaugurated the house, and when Debbie's regular cook didn't show up (the redoubtable Reuben from Argentina) I stepped into the breach. Careful planning and charcoal distribution led to a long delay before cooking commenced, but then I got three grills going simultaneously and cooked all the hot dogs, hamburgers, and chicken breasts in about fifteen minutes. Monday, Labor Day, began poorly, with the cat announcing reville at 0500 hours. Fortunately I did catch a nap later in the morning, but my clock was all fershimmel after that. The day was mostly spent preparing for Tuesday: when my resume needed to be available for work; and when my class at the U of MN started up. Tuesday I worked on my coursework for the U, which included visiting the Bookstore to read the first chapter of the $125 (used) textbook. I have mail-ordered the book for somewhat less than $125, but it hasn't arrived yet, and with the first assignment due Wednesday night I had no other choice. The class itself is conducted through online discussions, which is kind of interesting, I've never had a class of this type before. Wednesday was spent on job-oriented activities, and today, Thursday, the big event was that I went to donate platelets at the Red Cross, and went to Professor Barker's at night. Across the last few days I have additionally collected and pressed and cooked and strained the grapes from our grapevine, producing about three quarts of quite tasty grape juice. I looked into making wine out of it, but I don't think I have the gumption to tackle that quite yet. So despite being out of work, I am quite busy! Tomorrow it's back to Bob and Debbie's house to continue wiring up their computers and sound! Post a comment in response: |
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