Hot August Nights

I’m not talking about the car show in Reno, either. In spite of the lack of sunlight, the nights here in the South Bay have risen a little in temperature. Last night, I slept without anything on me, which is pretty unusual for me. I need at least the sheets covering me or else I’m not really comfortable sleeping. It’s kind of like trying to sleep on my back versus trying to sleep on my stomach. On my back, I start snoring and don’t actually hit REM sleep, which means I wake up once an hour when the snoring gets so loud I wake myself up. Needless to say, the heat of the nights around here has been making it so damned uncomfortable, I’ve been heavily considering a portable air conditioning unit, I don’t give a shit if it costs me a thousand dollars. I need to be comfortable in my own room.

The weather notwithstanding, things in my personal life have been in a state of change for the last nine months or so. Melissa moved in with us back then, though we’d been sort of involved with one another some time prior to that. I think there’s a certain amount of ambiguity that a relationship endures before any sort of formal declaration is made. However, it does need to be made and so it was. Circumstances have lent themselves toward putting as little distance between us as possible and ever since we’ve been living under the same roof. At the time, I think that I thought that things were probably moving too fast for us, but that thought was discarded rather quickly in the face of those circumstances. Over the course of the past nine months, though, we have come to really known each other well, though I will readily admit that we both still have so much more to learn about one another. With all honesty, following the last relationship I had, there’s quite a bit of insecurity to overcome before allowing anyone to get remotely close to me, but she has a way about her at times that’s charmingly disarming. They say you’ll know someone as much as you can by living with them; that’s certainly worked out for Todd and I. However, knowing myself as I do, I’m simply astonished she’s not uprooted and moved out even after one of my tirades. My patience can be tried and my frustration expressed in the worst ways at times, but she takes it in stride. There’s a lot of compatibility between us, and yet enough differences to keep it interesting. We have fun together, and the time we spend together is something I look forward to every day. When she started attending summer session at Foothill, I got a little taste of what it was like to wait for me to come home every day after school and work during the spring quarter. I really miss her when she’s gone. What can I say? I love her.

I’ve been working pretty hard lately. I know I have made mention of it in the past, but the days at eBay have been somewhat steeping in their workload. As I become more and more accustomed with the eBay side of operations, I’m noticing that my previously laid-back work ethic is being obliterated day-by-day and I’m coming home from work damn near exhausted. My sympathy for Stephanie has risen sharply, given I was always at home during that time. I’ll bet eBay tops Cisco in workload, though. I can’t imagine internal stuff being as b0rky as a site that’s accessed worldwide every second, every day, every year. Even PayPal did not have the level of maintenance that eBay requires. I figure, if I can work at eBay, I can work anywhere. Which kind of brings me to another point: career paths.

PayPal had zero in the way of upward mobility, and after nearly two years of working there, I figured I was either going to be NOC manager or I was going to be a NOC engineer for the rest of my time there. Since we’ve moved over to eBay, I’m not limited in that regard any longer, which is a prospect I hadn’t really thought about before. Given the options available to me, it seems like I could literally move into virtually any related group with ease. In all honesty, though, I’m still so new to the company that I’m going to wait a bit to figure that out before I give some sort of answer to my boss. I’ve been giving serious thought to either the DBA group, or Change Management, or Technical Documentation… either of those three are really my speed, and the people who work in the DBA group are incredibly awesome people to work with. Every week, I get to work with a new person from that group, because each of them sits a duty shift in the NOC, which is a really cool aspect of working at eBay’s NOC over PayPal’s. You have instant access to the individual from system administration group or the database administrator’s group in case a problem in their area arises unexpectedly. On top of that, no longer am I alone in the NOC. There are at least one or two other people who’re my peers to support me if multiple issues arise, or if perhaps aspects of a major issue need to be delegated. I wish we’d had that earlier, because it sure would cut down on response time as it does at eBay.

The rest of this week has been pretty much booked up by JTAF. I have an early afternoon meeting with an old friend over at Paramount’s Great America to discuss some plan for live programming. Wednesday, I must jaunt up to the city (San Francisco) to meet with two different hotel staffs and the live programming department head to walk the layout, approve it, and then negotiate additional rooms at one of the hotels for our guests of honor. Am I looking forward to those meetings? Sure, I am. It’s nice to be back under some sort of project again, but I’m hoping that I don’t stress out as much as I did when I worked Fanime as a division head. I need my nerves to stay intact for work.

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