A Day in the Life

This is really fun to read. Great idea, rabbit.

Up around 6:50, no alarm. Stumble over cats on the way to wake cub and get him on his way to school, which only takes him about minutes. Put on the coffee. Pet, feed, water the cats. Add sugar and creamer to coffee, step out to porch for a cigarette. Come back in for coat, socks, ANYTHING to help stay warm then back out to finish my smoke.

Computer is loaded so I check out A2K while listening to MSNBC - Morning Joe. Laugh at lil puss who has climbed in front of the monitor and is attempting to paw the on screen mouse arrow as it moves. I can't read through her, so I continue to tease her by moving the mouse for ten minutes.

See that it's 8:00, so I jump in the shower, get ready for work and arrive by 9:00. Kick on the computer, put the frozen lunch I brought in the kitchen. Talk to the cleaning staff, glance to make sure all is as it should be in the great room. Go back to my office, which is the only office. Check email, (peek at A2K), sort through 30 emails in Inbox, 20 in Spam folder,and make sure I don't need any of the ones automatically sent to Deleted folder.

Answer emails. Yes, the clubhouse is available that day for rental, Yes, I'll upload the minutes to the website, No I was not aware that someone "borrowed" some of the pool furniture but while I have you here I need to let you know that the deer pulled all the pansies out of the flowerbed in front of the clubhouse.

Someone comes in to sign contract to rent the clubhouse for next June. She's so sweet. We chat and laugh. Someone comes in to exchange books in the little section I set up as a free exchange library. Phone rings asking for someone... I give them the right number.

Someone comes in to get Pancakes with Santa tickets. Their little one is with them so I play with him for a minute. Talk to Mom. Gotta start on New Years... Beating my brain for a fun theme or idea... search the internet... look at images of other events... go out for a smoke... notice the new tiled shark is smaller than the original in the pool which is being repaired. Go back in and call management to let them know before the grout dries.

More people come in. One wants to show her daughter the facilities... She's getting married next year. Beer Club guy calls to see if I got the note about needing another tank for the bar tap. Yes, already ordered and it should be exchanged next week.

Finish December calendar. Post it to bulletin board. Complete schedule for part-time assistant for the month of December. Create poster for the bulletin board advertising Hanukkah Celebration. Create and print tickets for Hanukkah Celebration. Bundle them with note to assistant on what to charge and how to record since I won't be there tomorrow.

3:00... Back to New Years... We're Gonna Party Like It's 1929? Might be fun... A Speakeasy... brick wall areas and corners, wood crates, wood beer barrels, ... how could I make like a warehouse door or ... phone rings. Cub wants to know if spaghetti sounds good for dinner. That'll be great... Thank you, Hon. Hang up and remember I forgot to eat lunch.

More tickets for Santa event sold. Board president stops by to ask a few questions. Go out for another smoke. Look up some more stuff for New Years. Realize tonights party hasn't arrived so I call and find out it has been cancelled... Sorry, we forgot to call you.

Go home. Have nice dinner, pet the kitties, tease the kitties, talk with cub and Bear, go to my computer and log onto A2K. Bed by 10:00. Watch tv until I fall asleep around 11.

Heehee....now you know all about Life With Cats!!!

You know, I suspect you are the only person in the whole world who has to deal with pansy-eating deer and shrinking sharks and a goddamn polar bear all in the one day!!!

I was just thinking what a great day I had, but when you put it that way...

up yours wabbitt....

This is the the synopsis of past Thursday.

6:00 The alarm is beeping. For reasons I have learned the hard way, it's strategically placed so I have to get up and walk across the bedroom to silence it. So I get up, walk across the bedroom, reset the alarm for 6:30, and turn on the radio (WHYY, Philadelphia's NPR station).

6:30 The alarm is beeping again. No more negotiating. I get up, enter the bath, and measure my blood sugar, which is too high. I check my gym back for stuff I may have forgotten. (Of course, there's always stuff I forget to check for.) Then it's off to the gym.

7:00 - 8:30 Working out in the gym. 60 minutes on the elliptical trainer. The other 30 minutes are for changing gear and the shower after.

8:45am - 7:45pm: Work. To protect my anonymity online, I can't really give a high-level description, except that it has to do with the planning of data network infrastructure. It's the lower levels that I spend most of my effort on, and suffer most of my frustration from. Basically it's looking at Excel sheets, drawing conclusions from what's in them, copying and pasting contents to other Excel sheets, checking for errors I make in the process, and correcting them. Because I suck at concentrating on mostly mindless clerical tasks such as these, there are many errors to correct, and I discover them way too slowly for smooth progress. In between, I reduce my frustration by stalking the profiles of my favorite A2K people. (You know who you are.) That doesn't help with my focus on the clerical tasks either.

8:00 Returning home. Checking Monster.com and Dice.com for jobs I might want to apply for. Not much. The economy isn't as bad for us as it is for most other industries, but it's not great either. Drinking some wine. Checking up on A2K some more.

10pm Going to bed.

today

got up and chatted with squinney before she went to work
showered, shaved, reluctantly dressed
rehearsed some new tunes
practiced guitar in general
updated my dj music
updated my karaoke music
caught up the laundry
cleaned the kitchen and mopped
took bpb jr to the movies
needled some inbred super right wing idiots on another site
ditto here
read some biblical interpretations of scripture re: homosexuality because no one anywhere seems to be able to stop talking about it...
had dinner with seth cub and squinney
picked bpbjr up from the movies
watching tv and a2king currently
an unusually calm day and very rare night off...

Yours'll fit more.

Wow with the exercise!!!!

Wah with the donkey work.

It occurs to me that we A2kers work too much.

Sounds like a damn fine day!

My same day continued.

I go to have lunch....table still has remnants of the Friday shared morning tea (we have a roster), so I eat cheese, biscuits and dips for lunch, as I forgot mine.

S arrives....she went to a workshop yesterday with a woman who uses puppets a lot...I explain I have puppets (some of you may have seen some of them in Penny's photos from her stay with me) and she is welcome to borrow them.

We laugh about puppet stories...I talk about how some of them kind of release parts of us we weren't expecting, and tell the story of how, when a speech therapist saw one of my human puppets being used (he's a little red-headed boy, and he was saying goodbye to a kid in the corridor), she ran up to me when the kid had gone, and examined him eagerly. These puppets have a tongue that you put a finger or two in when you are moving their mouths, so the tongue is active, and she was smitten with the idea of using him in her work.

However, she GRABBED HIS TONGUE, WITHOUT ASKING HIM!!!

I was thoroughly in the character at that point, so I started, without thinking, to yell in a someone has your tongue manner: "BAD touch!!! Leggo me tongue!!! LEGGO!!!!!!" She started back, and apologized earnestly to him (they have that effect) to the hilarity of all the people waiting to be seen in the waiting room.

This is how my human puppets look:



You put one hand into one of their arms, so they have a useable hand and arm...the other goes into their head, so they can talk and have expressions.

(Here's one for Squinney

)


And a special one for Msolga:

Bunny, what a great idea for a thread!

My alarm goes off at 5:50. I sometimes snooze til 6. I weigh myself, record my weight, shower. Fix and eat breakfast while watching local news for weather & traffic info. I try not to absorb any of the dreadful news they're peddling (apartment fires, murders, etc.) Pack lunch - always leftovers, get dressed, pack clothes for the gym later. Try to be out the door between 7:05 and 7:10. My six mile commute usually takes 12 to 15 minutes. If it's longer, I'll be late, but no one cares about that but me. Toss my lunch in the fridge, grab a bottle of water (and cup of decaf tea if I'm cold). I'm almost always at my desk by 7:30.

Check email and phone messages. Log in to eight different programs with 12 different passwords - it seems as though they're testing to see how bright we are with that. Or maybe the Help Desk folks are just trying to keep their jobs by writing more and more complex password requirements.

I work in the Title & Contract department at an oil company. Some days I can get a lot of new contracts added to the system. Adding a new file takes five to fifteen minutes. I have a huge backlog of these waiting to be added - hundreds (thousands?) of them. New ones arrive every day. The other main part of the job is responding to requests for information about and/or scans of contracts. I get requests by phone or email, mostly. Some people show up in person. The company has offices all over the world and they all send contracts to us. (It's just me and one other employee working in our division. Supposedly she works on domestic and I work on international, but I used to have her job, so I get pulled in on domestic a lot too.)

I like the customer service aspect of the job more. I like research, and it's great when I can give someone what they want quickly. Most searches are quick and I can find what they want and send them a scan in about 90 seconds. If I can't find it quickly, I'll search for it several more ways before giving up. The data entry part of the job can be boring, but sometimes a document is so weird that it's a challenge to figure out how to handle it. I like the challenges.

I sometimes take an a2k break mid-morning, but if not, definitely some time in the afternoon. Lunch is 11 to 11:30. I eat with a couple of friends who are on my floor, but I don't typically have time to talk to them except at lunch. On Tuesdays, I go to a Weight Watchers meeting in the building at lunchtime.

I'm done at 4, but frequently stay later (and earn some overtime). After work, I go to the company gym in the building most days and work out 30 or 60 minutes. Always 30 min on the elliptical, then usually 30 min on the recumbent bicycle and/or 30 minutes on weights. Sometimes I take classes there, though not lately. The gym is really really nice.

The evening commute is worse than the morning, but still no more than 25 minutes. I try not to get pissed off at the stupid drivers. Karma...karma... (carma?) I frequently run errands on the way home - groceries, library, dry cleaning, etc. I get home between 6:30 & 7 most days. Fix dinner (or eat more leftovers), TV, phone calls, a2k, computer games. I start telling myself to go to bed at 10, but sometimes rebel against myself until 11 or later. I read in bed until I get sleepy - which sometimes only takes a couple of minutes.

Oooohh! Ahhh! Love the puppets and you being able to be in character for the kids. But... Msolga looks a bit startled by that little girls hand.

Mac - Now there's a job I wouldn't have considered existed. If they entered into the contract, why don't they already have a copy?

You and Thomas are making me feel guilty with the gym trips.

My department is the official caretaker of original contracts, so most other departments don't even bother to look for a copy they may have kept, but probably can't find. They just email me to get a copy.

Goodness - some people have interesting days!

Good topic, wabbit!