The beginning of the week is -not- supposed to make me feel like I’m dragging ass already!  I want a recount, this cannot possibly be Monday.  Maybe Thursday, and tomorrow is Friday.  Ah, to dream.

The lovely Goddess is getting ready to start a new journey, and I am more envious than you know.  The prospect of just picking up, packing up, and starting fresh has never been more appealing than it is right now.  But I made a commitment to my daughter to stay right where we are until she graduates, and I intend on keeping my word.

Although… (yeah you saw that coming, didn’t you?) if I were to, say, find a job within driving distance of her father, I bet she’d take me up on it.  And driving distance from her father is about 1000 miles from here.  Oddly enough, right around the same area that Goddess is relocating to.

Possibilities?  Perhaps.  Rather interesting that I keep finding these reasons, and enticements, to return to the state I came from.  I’m not especially homesick, having run from Florida as fast as I could once the opportunity presented itself.  But I am… something.  I don’t know what.  Ready for a change of my own?  Yeah, ready for a change of my own.  And while I doubt that change is going to be a move back to the land of sunshine and warm breezes, it is nice to think about from time to time.

Tonight I believe I’m going to just shut the thinking machine off and curl up with my book, and later Heros, for awhile.  I don’t believe a whole lot in things being “meant to be” or anything these days, but I think that when the time is right, an opportunity will arise that I won’t be able to say no to.

I won’t actively seek it for now, but I’ll certainly know it if I happen to accidentally walk into it.

Oh, and Monday?  Shape up, bitch.  You are making me crazy.

“Truncation”

If I have to hear that word one more time, I might just begin screaming. And never, ever, ever stop!

Is there anyway, I wonder, to truncate “truncation”?

Anyone?

My office is closed today due to water main breaks in the area. I’m real broken up about that, can you tell?

I’ve got some work to do, but not much. So mostly it’s just sitting around getting caught up on some reading and a side project. And as soon as the rain stops, sitting outside and enjoying the day! Or, maybe just going back to bed
Well, maybe not that. I slept till noon as it is.

Life is so tough.

function defineHeaven($IceCream = ‘ ‘ , $Flavor = ‘ ‘ ) {
if (ereg(”vanilla”,$IceCream) && ($Flavor == “Guinness”)) {
return = “zomg! Guinness Ice Cream! Hot damn I love my job today!”;
}
else {
return = “Just another boring day at work…”;
}
}

echo defineHeaven(”plain_vanilla”,”Guinness”);

In a meeting yesterday, one of the officemates had a small box of Nerds candy he was sharing.

Him: “Want some Nerds?”

Me: “Uh…”

Him: “What?”

Me: “Little cannibalistic, isn’t it?”

He responded with great glee and many crunching noises. If I were a nerd, I’d be askeered.

Our company is getting ready to relocate to a new facility, and in an effort to stop cramming us all into shared offices, they decided an “open collaborative environment” was the way to go. Great, I’ll be a cube monkey. However, on a positive note, my team’s upper management has approved Nerf warfare in the new facility. Rawk! On! I know a few guys who are goin’ -down-… and not in the nice way!

Meantime, since we are moving and having a complete office space make-over, it’s been decided that many items in the current building are up for grabs. Chairs, desks, bookcases, pretty much everything. I laid claim to the only currently available corner desk this morning. I got in early and my boss and I wandered the building doing a little bit of “shopping.”

Most everything that has been labeled as free has been spoken for. All items labeled such have bright yellow signs on them. The deal is, you get to it first, put your name on the sign, shoot an email over to dude down the hall, and it’s yours. Some wise guy decided to plaster everything else in the building with white signs.

One white-sign item has become a hotly prized commodity and several of us are bidding on it and prepared to scrap it out. What could such an item be? Is it a fax machine? Perhaps an uber snazzy coffee pot? One of the many copies of Monet?

Nope!

It’s the personal items vending machine in the ladies room.

That’s right, bitchez! We are fighting over the tampon dispenser! Now how often do you think -that- happens?

*** What? You think I’d tell you guys where I fricking work? Hells no! You’ll be wanting in on the tampon action too, and there’s already too much competition!

As I’m coming in to the office today, I’m chatting up one of my super duper nerd pals in the elevator. Comparing stories about the weekend, the usual.

As I run through the litany of everything that happened this weekend, he turns and looks me up and down, snickers a bit, and says, “Yeah, you’re a rock chick. You need to see about getting on Rock of Life.” And then there we are, both of us, coming out of the elevator, throwing the goat and laughing our asses off.

Oh well, if nothing else, I know all the funny stories I bring into work manage to make people smile, laugh, shake their heads, and wonder what it’s like to be me.

Trust a bitch, it ain’t easy!

Wikipedia describes it thusly: Typically, the scope increase consists of either new products or new features of already approved product designs, without corresponding increases in resources, schedule, or budget. As a result, the project team risks drifting away from its original purpose and scope into unplanned additions. As the scope of a project grows, more tasks must be completed within the budget and schedule originally designed for a smaller set of tasks. Thus, scope creep can result in a project team overrunning its original budget and schedule.

Sabre describes it as follows: “Are you fucking kidding me? When the hell did this get added to the reqs doc? Whose brilliant idea was this? GDI, someone is getting a smackdown!”

Although, it should be noted that Sabres, being somewhat intelligent, don’t respond that way outside of the confines of their small group. Rather, Sabres send out diplomatic emails to the PM noting their objections and expressing concern over their team being expected to come up with unmanageable solutions in unreasonable time frames. Politely. One may even say, if one were so inclined, in a non-adversarial fashion.

*ahem*

The latest PFH* has been successfully launched and I am feeling a great deal of relief. It’s been quite an insane schedule for me over the last couple of months. There’s been a real push to get as many of these new projects launched as possible during the first quarter.

I had a rather interesting email exchange with my boss and one of the other key players on this project:

Me: For all intents and purposes, it’s live.
Boss: Yeah!
Me: I feel like I’ve given birth over here!
Boss: Hey, I’m not cleaning that mess up.

Ha! It’s going to be one of those days! We are all punch drunk from working long hours and the nerd humor is coming out. I’m exhausted, but very content. If you listen closely, you can probably hear me purring. And I think I may just go back to normal working hours now… although, I’m not holding my breath.

* Project From Hell

It’s been a month, people. A really bad month. Health, work, financial, personal, you name it, it’s all falling down around me and I can’t keep up.

First, though, the good news. The urine cytology came back negative for malignant cells. I’d celebrate, but I still have to have the damn biopsy. That lovely little bit of fun is scheduled for the end of February.

Why so late? Between their schedule and my work projects, well that’s about the only time it can be done. I’m feeling pretty confident that all is well in the internal workings of Wonderland, but you know, that whole C word thing really fucks with my head. According to the lovely man who will be pulling out pieces of my bladder for further examination, it’s possible for the cytology to come back negative but still be, well, you know.

I had a major disappointment at work this week, and on top of that, I had the rug pulled out from under me as well. Between a meeting on Tuesday, a weird turn of events yesterday, and another meeting today, I’m actually pretty surprised you can’t see the tire tracks on my back from the bus I was thrown under. But hey, let’s all keep our spirits up and knock this project out!

Yeah. I got your fuckin’ team spirit right here. *middle finger* You know, there’s no “I” in team, but if you add an extra e, there is an “eat me.”

Next project on my list is at least with a team that doesn’t have unrealistic expectations. Well, sometimes they do, but when I explain to them why it’s unrealistic, they do the oddest thing. They listen to me. Strange that. *kisses their way*

Financially, well. Yeah. That’s a bit of a mess right now, but if I can just find some time to take care of two lousy things, I’ll get that squared away quickly. Please, mister, can you spare some time?

And I’m so not touching on the personal stuff right now. I’m feeling pulled from several directions and spending every day being more confused about which way I’m supposed to go. Pretty soon I think I’m just going to go completely insane, and that will solve that little issue right there.

Too bad I can’t get paid for being crazy, I’d be rich!

And now I’m off to finally move my personal sites off of my old host and put them on my new host. Uh, Sabreland? Yeah, she’s going down for a bit. Maybe that’ll be the incentive I need to finally finish installing WordPress and getting it tweaked out correctly. I’ll back up her db and hopefully be able to import it into WP when it’s up. Ha!

That’s it, that’s all. I apologize for not having my usual nonsense and goofy stuff up here, but it’s been a bit too overwhelming for me.

Peace, bitchez!