A Post of Olympic Proportions

It is now T-minus 56 minutes to the Olympics! Or at least the opening ceremonies, shown on a seven-hour tape delay from Italy. But I'll take what I can get! Because I love the Olympics, even more than I love the Tour De France!

We got a Tivo last month as an anniversary present to each other, which we're both loving so far. (Providentially, we discovered after ordering it that the fourth anniversary, at least on contemporary lists, is the electronics anniversary. Go us!) I'm really pleased to have the Tivo, because this is our busy season at work and I'm now getting in almost all my hours for the week on the weekends, which is of course when most of the Olympics coverage is on TV. On a job note, although 6 a.m. events are pretty rare so far, 7 a.m. events are coming along much more frequently than I think is really ideal. Disregarding the occasionally obscenely early start times, though, my job is still going quite well.

Um...what else? I successfully hemmed a too-long pair of pants, which was a first for me. Randy set up a wireless network for our computers and the Tivo, so we can now listen to music and browse pictures stored on our computer from the TV, as well as set up programs to record from the Internet. Thanks to an anniversary gift from my parents, we have peaches and pound cake from Harry and David, which is incredibly delicious. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

We've also both been doing a lot of reading recently - Randy's been reading The Count of Monte Cristo, all 1300 pages of it, while I've been flying through a bunch of much shorter books. I especially loved The Perilous Gard, which I keep thinking back to, even after finishing it. I love books that can make me do that.

And I note that it is now T-plus 6 minutes from the Olympics starting. (I got slightly distracted while typing this up.) Don't worry; I'm Tivo-ing it!

You have one new message!

I ran some errands this afternoon, and when I got back, there was a message on the answering machine, an automated phone call from our congresswoman. She was calling to invite us to attend a town hall meeting on identity theft tomorrow afternoon. It's a growing problem, she said, particularly in the suburbs, and she's arranged for a panel of experts to speak. It was a very convincing message - I will definitely be there. Because it's being held at my conference center. And I am scheduled to work.

Okay, I know I'm a dork, but I got kind of a kick out of telling her recorded voice, "Why, thank you. I'd be delighted to attend. I'll be sure to get there early to get a good seat! And to unlock the doors!"

In other news, dinner tonight was an unmitigated disaster, to the point of throwing it away and going out to eat instead. It wasn't even a new recipe - something just went terribly wrong somewhere, leaving Randy and I staring at the stove and then at each other until I finally said, "Um...You want to go out instead?"

New Job and Other News

Good: Everyone has been really friendly and welcoming.
Bad: "Everyone" is, so far, approximately 578,459 new co-workers whose names and faces I need to remember. It's a much bigger college than my old one.
Redeeming: There is widespread nametag usage.

Good: I can set my own hours, outside of the events I need to be there for.
Bad: The events are sometimes on evenings or weekends. For instance, I worked yesterday afternoon, and this coming Saturday, there's an event with set-up starting at 6 a.m. For those of you playing along at home, that means I'll need to leave at 5:30 a.m. I am so not a morning person.
Redeeming: 6 a.m. events are very rare, I'm told.

Good: I have an actual office, with walls and a door.
Bad: It's pretty small, and I share it with two other people.
Redeeming: They're very nice and funny, and can answer the questions I can't, such as where the bookstore is, and whether we take credit cards (through the pillars and past the information desk, and yes).

Good: I really, really like my job so far, and can't stop talking about it.
Bad: Randy's getting kind of sick of hearing about my day in excruciating detail.
Redeeming: He's happy to see me so happy, even if it means reliving my day in almost real time.

In short, I'm really pleased to have a job again, and I'm really glad it's this one in particular. It was disappointing to be rejected for the other jobs, but I think this is the right one for me.

In other news, this weekend we went to The Pumpkin Patch and walked through a six-acre corn maze. It took us about 30 minutes, and was lots of fun. We also got some apple cider and pumpkin donuts, although we didn't actually buy any pumpkins. Priorities, after all.

Also,using the last of his birthday money to (partially) fund it, Randy bought The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. We've been working our way through it (all 23 pounds of it) and really liking it.

And in conclusion, poor Notre Dame. What a way to lose.

Employed!

I am very pleased and excited to announce that I am once again a productive member of society: I got the job! I will be a conference center assistant in the Continuing Education department of a nearby college. It's part-time, and will mainly be event planning and coordination. My first day will be next Wednesday. Thanks for all the good wishes, everyone!

Also, the weather today was fall-like and gorgeous. Earlier this week, we were back up into the high 80s, but today was mid-50s and delightful. Hurray for October!

Pizza Night

So my first week at work is in the books, and it went quite well. All of my co-workers are very friendly and helpful, and they've kept me busy with plenty of things to do. By the end of my first day, I had a bug report assigned to me and I had started tracking it down (I found it and fixed it the next morning). There's a huge amount of stuff that I have to learn, but that's actually a good thing. After just one week, I can say that this job is already a lot more interesting than my old one.

When I got home from work this evening I discovered that Wendy had made sugar cookies with chocolate frosting to celebrate the completion of my first week at work. They are quite tasty. For dinner we made our own pizzas, and they also turned out to be very good.

The weather turned a bit gloomy today, with cloudy skies and rain (and a chance of snow tonight). After spending 3 years in sunny Colorado, this kind of weather is a refreshing change. Wendy saw recently that Miami, FL gets 236 days of sunshine a year. That's nothing -- Boulder, CO gets 300 days of sunshine each year. After a quick check on google, we also discovered that Boulder gets more sunshine than San Diego!

Finally, we haven't forgotten about posting photos of our place now that we're unpacked. We'll try to get some up this weekend.

Cheers!

And we're done!

The last box is unpacked, and everything is (more or less) put away. All that's left to do is finish hanging our pictures on the walls, but that shouldn't take very long at all. Everything looks much, much nicer - we'll post new photos in the next day or two.

A few more random things:

- There are a lot of motorcycles here. The other day, we were at a stop light and probably 30 motorcycles in a row turned left in front of us. We're not too far from a Harley-Davidson shop, but I don't know if that really explains the sheer number of them.

- There are a lot of limousines here, too, and not just near the airport. We've seen them at the gas station, at fast food places, driving down suburban streets - pretty much all over.

- Ditto pizza places. There are 121 pizza places in the phone book for McHenry County, 16 in McHenry proper. McHenry has about 20,000 people. I don't really know if that is a lot, statistically speaking, but it sure seems like it.

- Pepsi is having a promotion with iTunes right now, where (so they claim) 1 out of every 3 diet Pepsis will win you a free song from iTunes. I was running 0 for about 11 on the free songs, but over the last 2 days, I'm 2 for 2! I haven't decided which songs I'll get yet. I don't want to squander my winnings on the wrong songs!


And last but definitely not least, Randy's first day at Follett is tomorrow. I'm sure he'd appreciate any good thoughts any of you would like to send his way!

Follow your bliss

Today was my last day at Naropa. I knew that it would be sad to say goodbye, but I think it was actually harder than I was expecting. I managed to avoid thinking about it too much for most of the day, even though I (like Randy) didn't actually have that much to do today. It felt a little bit like the last day of school before summer - everyone was terribly unfocused and unproductive today.

After work, my co-workers and I all went for a bowling-pizza party extravaganza, which was lots of fun until it was time to leave, when most of us ended up in tears. Even though the job itself wasn't always the greatest, I don't know that I could have ever imagined having better co-workers or friends than them. I learned a lot of wonderful things while working at Naropa, and very few of them actually had anything to do with university admissions.

One of the phrases you hear on a semi-regular basis at Naropa is "follow your bliss." I think that writing will give me the opportunity to do that, but maybe I hadn't realized just how much this job was allowing me to follow my bliss until it was time to give it up. On the other hand, I can't pretend I'm not glad that I'll never have to look at another visitation request form again.

It's bittersweet. And I'm melancholy.

I'm a Follett man, now

Today was my last day at IBM. It was fairly uneventful; I spent most of the day waiting around for it to end. All in all, I think I came out ahead, because as a going away present I was given a small, but very tasty, cheesecake.

For anyone who's interested, here's the job posting at Follett that I applied to. You can definitely tell that it was written by a programmer (and not an HR person), and that it was written by someone who loves what they do.

Stay tuned for Wendy's last day...

A tribe of superior men

Hello everyone!

So, Randy and I will be moving to Illinois in about a week. We decided that now would be a good time to start a blog where we can keep everyone up to date about what we're up to in the Land of Lincoln. (Side note: You may or may not be interested to learn that Illinois translates from Native American as "tribe of superior men." I was interested, but then I'm a dork.)

Randy has a new job with Follett Library Resources as a web application programmer. (Follett provides services, software, and books to K-12 school libraries.) I'm not quite sure what I'll be doing, but I think I may give professional writing a try.

We spent this past Thursday, Friday and Saturday up in McHenry looking for a new place to live. We found a townhouse that seems really great - it's comparable to our apartment now, but it has a two-car garage as well. Goodbye, ice scraping on winter mornings! I met Randy's new boss, who gave us a tour of Follett and went out to dinner with us, along with his wife and their daughter, and another of Randy's new co-workers and his wife. Everyone was very friendly, and I have a good feeling about Follett and Illinois in general.

Feel free to leave us comments or questions - we aim to please!