Dec 25 2007

Two 3-Day Weeks

A lot of people at work took advantage of the fact that Christmas and New Year’s allowed for two three-day weeks in a row. The director of my department is taking this whole week off and won’t be back until the 2nd of January. I, on the other hand, opted to take the 2nd and the 3rd off for when we go down to Anaheim and check out the Disney scene during the New Year’s. So, I’m looking forward to that. But this also means that I’ll have about three days to close as many cases as I possibly can before the end of the year, so the group’s statistics won’t be too horribly skewed when they do the month-end (and year-end) reports. I already did a poll of the report right now and if they closed it tomorrow, I would have like twenty-one cases open and that’s not good.

I kind of wish I could’ve taken a two week vacation, but I haven’t really accrued enough time off. One of the crappier aspects of starting a new job is that your balances are pretty much zero. By the time you need to take off, you’re going to be owing time off to the company. Or seeing if your boss is generous enough to let you slide off the books and then make up the time later, which is what I’ve done in the past when I had ultra-cool bosses that I worked for. Unfortunately, my current boss is quite by-the-book when it comes to PTO, so I can’t really skate with time owed or under-the-table time. He wants it to be all documented, which is fine, considering that this is his first managerial gig ever. I can empathize with his need to keep to the regs.

In other news, I enjoyed my Christmas at home. I got to hang out with my wife and Tap, and I wish every Christmas were that much fun.

Dec 24 2007

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas…

This is the third Christmas that Julia have spent together since we started dating, but the second since we married in April, 2006. As I sit here in the overnight hours of Christmas Eve, having enjoyed Julia’s orange chicken dinner that she made specifically for the occasion, I’ve come to realize that I’m really very happy in this relationship. I know, this is probably something I should be considering on something a little more appropriate, such as an anniversary, but the truth of it is that I thought of it today. And it wasn’t because I got some awesome food to eat, either… though that was a bonus.

I think there are times when it hits you like a ton of bricks. Maybe you’ve been in a relationship for so long that it becomes like second nature, or maybe you’ve been in it so long that you begin to take the other person for granted. You know, I never believed in the whole taking the other for granted. I think it really has a lot to do with the fact that you let someone become such an integral part of your life, that you become accustomed to their presence as a matter of fact, rather than simply ignoring them. How many of us can look at our respective SOs and say that we don’t appreciate everything they do for us? That’s not taking them for granted. That’s recognizing that they make a major contribution to our lives. And so, I try to take a moment each day to remind myself how lucky I am to have her with me. I try to tell her that, when I can. At least once a day, if not then twice the next. A simple, “I love you,” or perhaps, “I’m very happy that we’re together” can do a lot to communicate that to her.

So, on this night, as she’s sleeping in the other room, I want to take a moment to tell her here, in front of the Internet, that I love her. And I do appreciate everything she does for me. And that I’m thinking of her always, but moreso for Christmas. After all, I’ve been told many times that it’s the thought that counts.

But just in case… I hope she enjoys Mario Party DS as a small token of that love. 🙂

Dec 23 2007

The Todd Has Landed

I picked up Todd today, he took the train in from Sacramento and I had to meet him at the station a little before noon.  He liked the Excelsior model I put together for him and then he passed out his gifts to us.  I got a $50 gift certificate to Amazon.com, and Julia got the complete set of Azumanga Daiou DVDs.  So, now I know what she’ll be watching all the time in the coming days, weeks, and months.

He was pretty exhausted, having stayed up all night wrapping presents (because he’s a procrastinator like me), and then slept sparingly on the train down. I had him take a nap in our bedroom, because holding a conversation with him was pretty pointless when he would just start nodding off without warning in the middle of a sentence.  It was like talking with a narcoleptic.  Once he napped, though, he was a lot more livelier!   Tap cooked dinner, using chicken, broccoli, potatoes and red wine.  It was awesome.  After dinner, he had to go over to his brother’s house so he could prepare for the family Christmases (2) before he heads back to Sacramento on late Christmas Day.  It sucks I don’t get to hang out with him more often.

Dec 22 2007

Gingerbread Cookies

Every once in a while, Julia goads me into making gingerbread cookies.  Gingerbread is the first kind of cookie I ever made in my life, because my dad loves gingerbread and so I learned how to make it so I could bake it at will.  I came up with a great recipe in middle school that I learned while taking Home Economics, but in the course of moving over nearly twenty years, I lost my notebook that had all my cool recipes in it.  So, instead, I will part with the recipe I’ve been using lately.  If you’re willing to do this, then feel free to take the recipe.  After all, it’s on the internet…

Gingerbread Cookies

Ingredients:

1 cup packed brown sugar
1/3 cup shortening
1 1/2 cups dark molasses
2/3 cup cold water
7 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt

Put brown sugar, shortening, molasses and water into a large bowl and mix.  Then add everything else except flour and mix once more.  Add flour and mix until you end up with the dough.  Then chill for 2 hours.

Roll dough into quarter-inch thick slabs and cut into shapes with a floured cutter or knife.

Heat over to 350 and bake for 10-12 minutes.

Done!

Dec 21 2007

The Weekend Begins…

The holiday weekend has begun and already I’m feeling the shell shock of the season.  One of the biggest problems is the last-minute frenzy of the season, and the fact that live across from a damned mall made it near impossible to actually get out of my apartment building today.  I pulled out of my carport and the gate opened to a traffic jam.  It took nearly 30 minutes (I know, because I was watching an episode of Stargate: Atlantis on my iPod) to actually touch the road with my tires.  That’s a half an hour of waiting to actually get onto the road.  I’m just really glad I had my iPod with me to pass the time, but it meant I was delayed for that long before I could join the rat race, myself.

Tap is down for the weekend, and Todd is coming in tomorrow.  I’m so glad that I got to finish Excelsior this week.  I was honestly worried that I wouldn’t make it.

Dec 21 2007

Excelsior is Completed

I forgot to post the pictures, but Excelsior was completed! I want to share some of the photos with you, and then point you to the gallery where all the finals are stored. I usually do model building as a means to relax, but under these circumstances of spending most of my nights over at Robert’s garage in the freezing cold. And the freezing cold had a weird effect on the painting sessions. It took much longer to dry, which I explained in an earlier post. This prolonged my plans. All told, the entire project took 31.75 total hours.

Final Impulse housing (12-21)Let’s begin with the impulse housing. This was kind of a pain, because the small red strips embedded within the rear housing were a bitch to paint and even harder to cement in. If you look closely at the detail, you might see some of the red streaks that the CA glue dissolved as I was forcing it into place. There’s also a small trapezoid piece that fits in between the twin slats, though I’m unsure as to what that’s supposed to be simulating, since the small strips were pretty much the engine nozzles. While I was trying to fit them in… I dropped one of them and lost it amongst one of the toolboxes. I was cussing up a storm when I did that, because that meant I would have no piece anywhere in there. And the model would have been incomplete.

Final Ventral Engineer Hull (12-21)One of the problems I noticed while working with oil enamel was that some of the paints were a little too thin when applying a coat. Unfortunately, this meant additional touch-ups were noticable. On the underside of the engineering hull, the Pacific Blue strip needed one more coat because it looked really patchy. The Dark Grey panels to the rear of the strip were quite the bitch. I mean, holy hell… no matter how much I painted, I couldn’t quite get it to fill in the panel completely and the way I was handling the brush… I didn’t trust myself to do it freehand. Near the aft section, there was this little piece that had the two tractor emitters and a vent. I had fun just touching Dark Grey to the vent, and Chrome Silver to the emitters. I used a light hand and managed to keep the paint within the bounds of the emitters, but the vent overlapped a little bit.

Final Close-in Port Side (12-21)This is a tight shot of the port side engineering hull. The Pacific Blue strip was the more difficult part to paint. I used a long strip of low-adhesive masking tape to act as a guide. It eventually bled over, but we were able to save it by scraping off the excess with an Xacto knife. Really light scraping, so I didn’t lose the primer at all. The Dark Grey on the neck of the ship was the easiest. For some reason, the coats I applied were really smooth. This was probably because it was curved nicely, and at an angle that allowed me to use gravity a bit more than on other pieces. I used Flat Black for the torpedo tubes. Cobalt and Grabber Blue for the navigational deflector.

Final Lower Forward (12-21)This is a better view of the neck and forward section of the engineering hull, not to mention the underside of the saucer section. The original decal set required pinstriping, but Excelsior did not have the pinstripes that Enterprise-B had, so I decided to skip using those parts of the set. When I build Enterprise-B, I’ll use them. The block stripe on the underside of the saucer looks a lot better with an additional coat of Pacific Blue.

Final Port Dorsal (12-21)Here’s a beauty shot. Overall, I think I did pretty good, considering this is the first model I’ve done since… 1999. I’m looking forward to moving onto something a little more complex, like the Reliant model I got in the mail. I just hope Todd likes it.

View the complete gallery at Flickr.

Dec 20 2007

Holiday Party

Today was my company’s holiday party and it was pretty awesome. Though it was just in the open space near the kitchen, they had it all decked out with casino games. Craps, poker, blackjack, roulette… ping pong… and there was supposed to be a darts tourney, but they never got their act together… so I didn’t get to throw any darts. I hope someone remembered to bring down the dartboard before leaving. That would suck if they didn’t.

I gravitated toward my usual games… poker and blackjack, but they were full. So, I noticed some of my co-workers were at the craps table, and I walked over to see what they were doing. I used my 500 dollar chit and got some chips and started playing. Folks, I had no idea craps was so much fun. When it came time for me to roll, I was hitting sevens and elevens, and then I was like a six magnet. Kept hitting six over and over… until the seventh time I hit it and then I rolled nines and fives until I hit the eight and won on the pass line. And if you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, then you need to go online and find out what craps is. I think the next time I enter a real casino, I’m going to play, because it was so cool. Now that I know how to play…

Dec 19 2007

Rudolph

Today’s Holidailies prompt is: “Tell us about your favorite holiday concert experience.”

I was very much neck-deep into the music performance program at my high school.  As a freshman, I joined Concert Choir, and for Christmas, we would break up into duets, trios, quartets, and quintets… walking around downtown Los Gatos and caroling people in the early to late evening hours as they were shopping in the first week of December.  It was always the Friday night before the Los Gatos Christmas Parade.  When Branham closed and I transferred to Leigh, I joined the choir (led by the same director) and did the same thing the next year.  And I love caroling a great deal; it’s a lot of fun to sing in public and have people sing with you.

When Branham and Leigh merged, the music program pretty much doubled in size.  We could break up into large groups and bring a more dynamic sound to the Christmas carols we sung.  After my sophomore year, I was ‘drafted’ into the marching band, because I used to play saxophone in middle school.  That year, I had a choice.  I could join the choir in caroling or join the band in playing songs.  Well, I had two years of caroling, so I figured, what the hell… might as well see how the other half of the program does it.

I loved it.

I was put into a saxophone quartet (soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone).  I was marching bari and playing tenor in the jazz band, so I played my bari sax for this quartet.  We had a bunch of arranged saxophone tunes, but the one that I fell in love with was the Nuclear Whales Saxophone Orchestra‘s arrangement of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  The best part was the solo for the bari, which had the melody in the second verse.  So, I played it and played it, until I had it nailed down enough where I could start improvising a little bit.  I thought that I was pretty good, if I do say so myself.  But the other musicians hated it.  Oh, well

That year, 1992, was probably one of my most memorable moments in music.  And it’s a holiday memory, to boot!

—————
Now playing on iTunes: The Chipmunks – The Chipmunks Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)

Dec 19 2007

Fooling Myself

At one point, I weighed over 400 pounds.  And not just over, either.  I was smack in the middle of the 400 range.  I believe it’s called ‘morbidly obese,’ for a reason.  Carrying that much weight around on your frame is never a good thing.  It was not a pretty sight and I was always tired.  I felt lethargic and sluggish, not really wanting to do much of anything about it because when you’re that big, the last thing you want to do is exercise.

That was about four or five years ago.  Since then, I altered my diet somewhat and added walking to my regimen.  I take the stairs instead of the elevators at work, and I try to stay active in one form or another.  And I dropped below 400 pounds somewhere in 2004, which was a big thing for me.  I was really happy about it and I remember thinking that it was a long road to hoe.  I felt lighter and I was feeling good about myself there for a while.  I had not had access to a scale in a while, but I kept telling myself that I had to be closing in on 300… maybe between 305-325.

Yeah, well… I weighed myself recently.  I’m 365.  That’s really not good, but at least I’m not where I once was.  I need to work a little harder at dropping another 180 pounds, so I’m at my target weight of 185.  Now, 185 might be a pipe dream, but if I can drop below 250, I’ll be really happy and I’m sure I’ll feel much better overall.  So, I guess what I’m asking for is some moral support.  I put up a Traineo page a while back, but it seems no one goes there.   I’m not sure if it’s because you guys don’t want to be associated with someone as large as me, or maybe we’re just not that close.  But I would love it if you guys would hammer on me a little bit more about this.

I’ve decided to start taking pictures of what I eat and post them up on my blog.  I’m hoping it’ll help me remain accountable to myself, if I feel I have to make a full report on what’s going inside my body.  And hopefully, seeing all that up on the blog will help me avoid eating something I’m not supposed to.

So, here goes.  I hope I stick to this a little better.

—————-
Now playing on iTunes: Greg Edmonson – River tricks Early

Dec 18 2007

Balance

I got into a bit of a snit today at work.  It wasn’t huge or anything, but I felt frustrated with my boss during the course of the day.  I nearly bit his head off, which probably isn’t a good thing when you’re barely two months into starting a new job, but it was one of those things where I kind of have to shake my head and wonder what the fuck was going on there.

I take a number of  issues during the day, and depending on how complicated the troubleshooting can be, resolving it can take anywhere between five minutes to five hours.  And I mean five straight hours, especially if you’re on the phone with the customer while you’re trying to resolve it.  And we have customers who won’t let you go until the issue is resolved.  It’s difficult to get them to let you call them back, especially when you might need to bring it up in an engineering meeting.  I’m guessing these customers don’t have a lot to do at their jobs, because it seems that they love to just hang out on the phone all day.  Maybe that’s their way of getting out of work.  Who knows?

Anyway, I was having a day such as this.  Right as I walked in the door, I got grilled on an issue from yesterday.  I mean, I hadn’t even taken off my coat, yet.  No good morning or any other kind of greeting.  Just a straight up accusatory question.  Shit like that will ruin a day for you, but even if that hadn’t happened, the rest of the day’s events might have done me in, too.  So, while I was working on the open cases I had, my boss walks in and asks me to do a whole mess of tasks.  Except it turns out that these weren’t just asks; he was handing off five new cases to me.  I already have eleven, and I’m not even complaining about the number of them, really.  What I’m complaining about is that he handed them to me and gave me no information about what was going on.  He just said, update the binaries on these units and then walked out the door to a meeting.

When he came back, he started asking all sorts of questions about the units, and I was like… whoa, there.  All you did was ask me to update a file, which I did.  I have no idea about why it didn’t work or why it’s still in error state.  I didn’t even know it was in error to begin with.  Did any of these units have case numbers?  No.  That meant I would have to create five new cases for myself.  And creating cases is yet another nightmare, because Salesforce.com is not bred for support organizations whatsoever.  Opening a case is painful, requiring a lot of information that is assumed… if you got the alarm either by phone or by the monitoring system.  If you open a case without customer information or contact specifics, it becomes a bit harder to open up a case.  The system wants to know who to email the ticket to, but whatever… it just felt like the whole thing was piling on top of me so fast.

Of course, the eleven cases I had open got neglected, because these five new ones took priority and took up the day.  So, now I have to hope that tomorrow, I will be left alone long enough to quickly close cases before my boss decides to dump stuff on me like that.  And hopefully, with better communication and little more than a simple task request.

While I’m at it… I hope for a pony, too.