Alice

One of my friends who lives here had her mom come in to visit this past week, so we decided we were all going to see Alice in Wonderland together after work one day.  It turns out they have family members that are basically from my hometown and we’ve probably met at some point.  I’ve always heard ‘it’s a small world’, but who knew that was true?!

The movie was really good though, so that was a lot of fun.  If you’ve read the book, you won’t be disappointed; they change things but give valid reasons for doing so.  I realize I just used the phrase ‘valid reasons’ with a book where a girl falls down a rabbit hole and meets a cast of talking animals while drinking liquid to become tiny and eating cake to become huge, but it’s all about what you’re willing to accept as reality in a story.  Also, they did mercury-induced insanity justice.  The Mad Hatter wasn’t just insane, he was also kind of moody.

To compound our problems at work with slow Internet speeds, we went to work on Wednesday or Thursday morning this week to find that the power was out for exactly half of every room.  That means two of the computers in our room were turned off and two were working, half the lights in the building were on and half of the printers worked.  We decided it was time to work from home that day.  We were also wondering who creates schematics of a building that has one circuit powering half of each room and then presents it with a straight face to the building planners?  It just seems you would be bettered served with rooms that either were powered or weren’t.  The half power idea just seems absurd.

I got put on a few more mailing lists for a couple web projects I work with and it has DRASTICALLY increased the amount of spam I am receiving each day.  We’ve skyrocketed from approximately 50 messages a day that my account automatically got rid of to around 300 a day.  Of those, about 20 a day make it to my actual inbox.  I’m flagging them all as spam, so hopefully the adaptive filters get good enough to start catching it soon.  I don’t typically get too many valid emails a day on my personal account (I’d estimate 20 or less a day) but when you have to sift through all the crap and ads for various erectile dysfunction pills or ways to increase the size of certain body parts, it gets old quick.

Midterm

This past week has been all about ramping up for our team’s midterm briefing where the customer will be coming out to basically see what it is we have done with their money.  We have a lot of information, but the rules they have put on us have kept us from getting farther than just some preliminary stuff.  We’re hoping once we talk to them, we can convince them they need to allow us to delve in a little farther.  In the end, we’re all on the same team and letting us in a little more simply gives us more ammunition to create a better final report for them.  Hopefully we can convey that in our presentation.

I decided to join some of my friends here and start the South Beach Diet.  We started on Friday and then I promptly scheduled a pancake party at my house for that very evening.  If you don’t know what South Beach is, it’s basically a low-carb diet which means you can’t eat things like … oh, I don’t know … pancakes.  We still have a lot of pancake mix left over from our ski trip a while back (thank you Krusteaz for making such a huge amount of pancake mix available at Sam’s) and we’ve been trying to use it up.  Friday night we had twelve people over for pancakes, bacon and eggs.  It turns out twelve people can certainly eat their way through a lot of eggs and bacon.

We got quite a few comments on the variety of certain items we had for people to enjoy.  Because (when I can eat them) I like pancakes with peanut butter on them, we had a few things for people to put on their flapjacks.  In addition to the simple butter approach, we had Nutella, Natural Almond Butter, Natural Peanut Butter and Skippy Peanut Butter.  That in addition to the numerous types of bacon made people wonder if we had planned it for this party or if those were just items we kept in stock.  For the butters, those are things we keep on hand.  One of the roommates likes Skippy, another likes Nutella Natural Peanut Butter and I like Nutella and Almond Butter so when we went to Walmart for the essentials, those are the items we picked up.  The next logical question was about the bacons.  I’m partial to turkey bacon or Canadian bacon (which is simply glorified ham) and one of the roommates refuses to eat anything but “the real thing” when it comes to bacon so we have to keep regular bacon on hand.  I think he should just be able to tough it out and conform, but he’s not having that.

Nursing

I got asked by a nursing student that I know here to give a quote answering the question “What is your view of nurses?” I wrote an answer and then decided I liked it so much that I would put it here for everyone to read.

It’s the nurse’s ability to provide extraordinary care to each and every patient that comes under their care while short on time, sleep and money that sets them in a league of their own. In the hustle and bustle of a hospital that is busy offering critical care to people running the gamut from neonates to geriatrics, the nurses are the ones who are juggling multiple patients and keeping tabs on medications and treatment options. They offer a hug to a grief stricken family or a wave of welcome relief to a worrying parent. The public have ranked nurses as the most honest and ethical profession in the Gallup polls for nine years running and I don’t see any reason they don’t deserve every bit of that honor. RNs are underpaid and overworked yet still can spare a smile for their patients. This makes sense; nurses are just angels in comfortable shoes.

This weekend we kind of have just been hanging out and having a good time. Work has died down enough that we don’t go to the office on Saturdays until we have our customer briefing next week and we start pulling full weeks again. We found out two of the guys from the other project may be moving to another building which is something we’re not all really okay with. We’ve gotten used to walking down the hall to say hello and getting distracted into a big conversation down there. If they move buildings, we’re going to accomplish so much more work on our day to day assignments that it’s just not going to be funny.

I let one of the guys borrow my PS3 because I’m not really playing it and the Internet speeds here aren’t really quick enough to play the online games with my buddies around the country. The next day, I restarted my Netflix subscription and changed the address to this house so we can get the movies. It was then that I realized my Blu-Ray player (the PS3) was no longer in the same house. Thankfully my computer has a Blu-Ray drive, so I should be covered. We’ll have to make sure we get the movies on DVD though for the other people in the house so they can all see them on the tiny TV we have in the living room. I do not like technological regression though, so the Blu-Ray to DVD switch may do me in.

Ballooning

Happy Valentine’s Day/Single’s Awareness Day, everybody!

After I got back to work on Wednesday, the work week progressed pretty regularly and without incident.

For the weekend, one of the guys we work with had a buddy passing through town on the way to his new job and it was great to have a larger group of people to hang out with.  We went to a movie and a club downtown while he was there.  All of us that work in my building were really tired because we wake up at five in the morning if not earlier.  The guy who was driving through town got up each day whenever his body got him up which means he was sleeping until eleven or noon each day.  At the club (it was a dance hall, really) we were all starting to yawn and get sleepy around ten and he was ready to party it up all night long.

On Saturday morning, we woke up ridiculously early to go and fly in a hot air balloon.  One of the guys on the team is a hot air balloon pilot and his dad has a few balloons that we used.  It was a lot of fun and despite the strong winds we came in for a smooth and easy landing.  We sat there with the basket on the ground and the balloon in the air for about twenty minutes while we waited for his sister to get there in a chase vehicle (to her credit, we were in a terribly difficult area to reach by vehicle).  She finally came on the radio and asked if we could jump the arroyo.  As we lifted off again, the winds went from approximately 1 knot to 14 knots.  The second landing was less than graceful with the basket on its side and us all laughing hysterically as we rolled out of the basket and off of one another.  We finally got things taken care of and our chase vehicle eventually showed up.

On the way back to the launch field, we found an old abandoned boat shell.  The festival we were participating in had a contest that involves cleaning up the town that was hosting the festival.  Basically you get points per pound for trash found out on the mesa and bonus points for unusual or interesting items.  A fridge is 1000 points, a couch is 300 points and general trash is 10 points per pound.  It was kind of interesting to see people’s reactions when a boat pulled in on the back of our truck and it was even more fun to see the look on the team’s face that brought in a car when they realized they had been upstaged.

We also played three games of volleyball, three games of basketball and then one more game of volleyball at the gym that evening.  We had a small group of people and were wondering what a good way to get some exercise as a group was.  It turned out to be a lot of fun even though neither sport was our best sport because we were all laughing at each other and having a good time.  Any time you can make exercise hilarious is a good time.