@ Home

This week I am leaving work at 3:15. Normally I do this so that I can pick up Sarah at 3:30 but now-a-days, she's got Drama Club at 3:30 right there at the school. So, I stayed a bit longer at the office tying up a few loose ends and then I left.

Work has been stressful for months now, what with the personnel changes, reorganization of the entire division as a result of adding a group that used to be separate and is now being folded in. This means new job openings, new management interviews, lots of uncertainty, upheaval, rumors. And all of it on top of the most stressful and time-intensive work schedule that most of us have faced in quite a few years.

Yeah, it's been stressful.

I have tried to not let it get to me, to try and not take it all personally and only take home stuff that I NEEDED to take home. And I suppose that I have been mostly successful in keeping things sane and in perspective. But, I know that I have made my share of mistakes in the projects I'm shepherding through and while I think I've caught them and corrected those to the best of my abilities, I know that I'll make more before all of this year's tasks are completed. And I know that when I discover the next one I'll struggle with my confidence, mistrust my abilities, and generally be in a bad mood for a day or two.

And for that, I am sorry to myself, my family, and those working around me.

As much as I try not to equate myself with my job, that still seems to be my default reaction when confronted with problems. (Oddly, I don't tend to do the same when presented with successes?)

But I am still learning and growing. I may struggle with these personality traits for ever. Maybe they simply are who I am and I must learn not to eradicate them but to work within their existence. After all, these personality traits also contribute to my desire to do quality work that I am proud of. They help make me conscientious to what I do and to those I work with. These traits give me drive and motivation. Those aren't bad things and they have contributed to my ability to get hired, get promoted, and assist in providing for my family.

So, life isn't REALLY all bad, no matter what my body language and facial expression may show at any random moment. And if you see me moping about, you are allowed to smack me upside the head and remind me of these words.

***

In other, more quirky news, there are interesting bits going on out there in the internets that I feel compelled to pass along to you.


1. One of my favorite websites, Adfreak, alerted me to a contest over on Worth1000.com, a site that specializes in photoshop jokes. Seems they wanted people to take their favorite work of art and modify it to serve as an advertisement for a modern company. Just the sort of thing to annoy people that are annoyed by such things. (Note that some of these are probably considered "risque" but, hey, Renaissance art was all about the human form and it can't be any worse than the lies propagated by Dan Brown and The DaVinci Code, right?)

2. For fans of the recently cancelled Arrested Development, there is some good, if repetitive news.

Some of the show's early episodes are now available for viewing online.

I admit that while I was a fan of the show while it was on . . . and while I wish Fox hadn't gotten rid of it so soon, I feel a bit silly when thinking about how some people have obsessed about the show.

3. Speaking of silly things, how about this report that Hurley's dad on LOST is now going to be none other than Cheech Marin. Is LOST going downhill so fast that it is resorting to guest-casting as a stunt gimmick? Please, PLEASE, tell me that it isn't so!

4. I've got nothing else to say and my mind is befuddled.

Yet another disappointing finish to another blog post.

Sorry.

Holidays are exhausting

It has been a very relaxing and very productively long holiday weekend.

I brought work home, but I don't think I'm going to do any of it tonight. I figure that work will always be available, but holidays don't come around that often and I should take advantage of them when they do arrive.

We went over to an old church friend's home for Thanksgiving on Thursday. Ruth, as always made delicious turkey, ham, potatoes, stuffing, seven-layer salad (my favorite thing), white chocolate cheesecake, date bars, and a nice relaxing time. Our kids played a bit with her grandchildren and best of all, we didn't have to cook anything at all (though we did help clean up a bit).

Lynda went shopping early Friday morning and I stayed home with the kids. Yesterday we pulled out all of the Christmas decorations and started getting ready for the Christmas season.

We got out our original tree and started putting decorations on it. The girls enjoyed putting on the ornaments and rocking out to "Holiday" music.



This year we bought a second tree (it was on sale) since we now have so many decorations that we can't fit them all on our original tree. And it gives us the opportunity to instigate a plan we formulated last year, but didn't implement until now--a theme tree, showing off the numerous snowmen ornaments that we have been collecting for the past many years.

It wasn't planned, but we suddenly realized a few years ago that we seemed to have quite a lot of snowmen stuff. So we decided to make it intentional.




Other than these typical holiday pursuits, Lynda and I did watch a few movies this long weekend.

First there was Pi, the Darren Aronofsky movie about a mathematician that is obsessed with finding the mathematical predictability behind humans systems. In the single-minded pursuit of his goal, he runs afoul of mystical Rabbis in search of God's true name as well as a criminal group looking to use his promised mathematical system to crack the stock market.

Lynda fell asleep about halfway through, as I suspected she might. But I found it to be an interesting film. It brought up things such as the underlying mysteries of the universe and whether or not we can understand them, the importance of numbers and number sequences, and odd obsessions with computers. Frankly, it reminded me a lot of some of the broader themes of LOST and I can see, after watching Pi, why Aronofsky wanted and tried to direct an episode of LOST during season 2. I hope he has the time and desire to try again in seasons 3 or 4. I think he would bring some interesting angles to the show.

The other film that we watched was in a theater--Stranger than Fiction, the Will Farrell movie about a ordinary man that discovers he is the character in a woman's book and she is planning to kill him off. We both thought that this movie was tons of fun to watch and we able to just relax and enjoy ourselves. Ferrell was funny and very understated in his role of Henry Glick. Dustin Hoffman was interesting as a English Lit professor pulled into service to try and identify the mysterious author that is omnisciently narrating Glick's life. Emma Thompson plays the author that is tortured with writer's block and then faced with remorse when she realizes that her literary musings might really affect someone's life. And Maggie Gyllenhaal rises above her brother to portray a bakery owner that gets intertwined in the story of Henry's impending demise.

Some parts of the movie made me think of J.K. Rowling writing the final Harry Potter book as we speak; I speculated if she shows remorse for her characters as she plots their demise. Whether you care about that or not, if you want some light entertaining fun, go see this movie that has a distinct visual style and is fun to immerse yourself in for a few hours.

Well, I'm going to stop this ramble now. It is a bit disjointed, but that's where my brain in right now, befogged with too much turkey, desserts, and relaxation. I'll try to sharpen my game a bit next time.

The Thing That Came Out of the Library

Do you know what you are looking at right now?

It's called a "cloud," a graphical representation of any grouping of things, sized in such as way as to indicate the relative percentage of each item within that grouping. This particular grouping, as you can likely guess if a collection of authors--more specifically, the collection of authors represented in my home library.

You might wonder how I created this cloud and if you are, I can tell you that I did it while enjoying a very useful and interesting item on the internets.

It's called LibraryThing, a website that allows you to create a listing of all of your books. Once you have created your library of books, you can then search the site to find other people that have the same books as you or you can use the database to find other books that fit within your indicated likes and dislikes.

I think of it as something like the Netflix "Friends" feature. It is an example of how the internet's social functions can help open up new avenues to information and connections faster and easier than in the past. (Plus, it allows me to put a nifty widget on my blog sidebar displaying a random selection of my library's book covers, sort of like my Flickr photo widget.)

I think just about all of my blog-reading friends and family would find this site useful, interesting, and fun to peruse. And with the holidays coming up, it is a convenient place for you to check and see if I already own that book that you were thinking about buying for me.

Go check our my site, start your own, and have fun.

Giving Thanks

Monday night

I'm thankful that someone at Fox Broadcasting had the human decency to not air that dispicable O.J. Simpson television interview.

I'm thankful that the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix teaser trailer is up and viewable and I am thankful that those nice people at the Leaky Cauldron work so hard to help me stay informed without me doing a whole lot of work.

I'm thankful that there weren't mass arrests and riots and fires as a result of this win.

(I'll add more in the coming days . . .)

Expressing Anxiety Through Metaphor

Lately I've just been trying to keep my head above water.

The problem is, as soon as my head breaks the surface and I start to breathe, a shark swims by and bits my head off.

Truly, I am between a rock and a hard place--neither spot is terribly comfortable (though not life-threatening or positively destructive, but all the same both positions are damaging and scaring.

sigh

Calgon . . . take me away!!!