All about last week

It’s time for another weekly what-I’ve-been-up-to post.  I’m sitting here with an episode of NCIS that I’ve already seen playing on the background and delicious Hawaiian barbecue chicken pizza from Papa John’s sitting in my belly.  Admittedly I keep losing track of my thoughts here and watching the show, but I wanted to make sure to write something.  It’s been busy.  Sorry, Erica, this is going to be another long one.

I worked 10 hour days the last several days.  Monday was a really rough day.  I got back into the office and apologized to people who I’d upset, brought in Chex mix for the department to try to soothe feelings, but it was still really hard.  I sat in the bathroom crying once—people weren’t talking to me, weren’t looking at me.  It wasn’t good.  It might have been because it was a Monday, too.  Either way, I came home to my fantastic husband who drew me a bath on my way home and I sat in there for a long time, drinking a glass of wine and reading.  It was the perfect way to relax from the day.

Tuesday was much better.  People spoke to me, acted normally, no one was mad at me anymore.  It was much better.  The Chex mix finally got eaten and people mentioned that it was yummy.  We had an audit for the 5S clean up and got a 4.8 out of 5.  Our last audit was a 0.8 score, just for reference.  (I’ve really got to find a way to make this whole thing *not* just about the numbers….)

I worked frantically on a document for an airplane that was completing on Wednesday and got confirmation that I would be heading to Atlanta on Tuesday (the 26th) and started working on all the details that go into that—business credit card, car rental, hotel reservation, reading up on travel policies, and so many things that I’d never thought about because I’ve never traveled with a corporation before now.  Private colleges handle things much differently.

Wednesday we had a departmental meeting that was dull and a little irritating at moments (like when the 5S lead once again glossed over my contributions by not even mentioning me but thanked the other people on the team), but when my zone was mentioned for the audit scores, a coworker who had been sitting in our zone until just lately, stood up in the meeting and said that it was because of all my work and me pushing people along and people actually clapped for me!  To go from people being mad, to being slightly okay, to having people clapping for me all in the same week is a little overwhelming.  I blushed bright red and people around me started making comments about roasting marshmallows.  Someone came up to me later, who wasn’t even sitting at my table, and commented on how brightly I blushed.  Even so, it felt really nice to be recognized, and in front of the director, even!

I finished my document, with lots of unexpected revisions and updates and good gosh!  Those things get complicated.  Like, okay, it’s not a “crew rest” it’s a “flightcrew sleeping facility” and the pads that make it into a bed have to be included in my document to tell how to attach them to the berthed divans to make a bed.  That’s new!  And I really have to check my drawing list in the appendix to make sure I’ve actually inserted all the drawings because I saved a copy of the drawing but apparently forgot to insert the pages.  But this is why there are 5 other people who look this thing over other than me.  And God bless the ladies who wrangle up all the text and put the first copy of this thing together for me because that is a rough, thankless job. I need to bring them baked goods one of these days.

And then it was Thursday and my last day in the office and how the heck did we get to this part of the week already?!  My business credit card arrived at the house on Wednesday, my rental car and hotel rooms were reserved and ready for me to arrive on Tuesday and all my details were set.  I confirmed with the woman I’m meeting in Atlanta about where and when and what I’ll be doing and suddenly I’m all set to go on my trip!  I gathered up maps and information and anything I could think of that I might need for the time away and I’m pretty sure I’m all set to go.  I’m very thankful that I don’t have any deadlines this coming week because they just wouldn’t have been met.  With everything else in the last several days, I couldn’t do any working ahead.  But no planes are completing next week that require the documentation I provide and the next draft isn’t due for a couple weeks.  It makes for a nice change.

What I did work on this day was a lot of small projects, like a folder for a guy in our department and getting the schedule all updated and functioning.  We keep track of deadlines and milestones in an Excel document that pulls from a master schedule.  It’s a really complicated macro that another guy in our area developed.  I’m trying to teach myself how to do macros in Visual Basic but it’s complicated and this thing goes *way* over my head.  He’s using object definition and I haven’t even scratched the surface of that one.  Anyway, it was having problems because of people errors, basically, and we had to find a workaround that would make sense for our document and then I had to show the project coordinator all the changes and how they work so he could be prepared to update it correctly and how to read it and all those things.  The new macro cuts down on so many things we’ve been doing by hand.  It’s *yummy.*  I won’t really know until I get back from Atlanta how well it actually worked, but hopefully it’ll cut down on how long we have to fuss with the schedule by like 80%.

And my boss brought in cheesecake for everybody as a reward for how we did on the 5S audit.  It was delicious!

Unfortunately, that’s where the good things ended.  Justin’s boss told him that he was going golfing on Friday and no one else was going to be available, but someone had to stay in the office and make sure that there was someone there if any of the clients called or stopped by.  And by “someone” he meant Justin.  So we weren’t able to leave for Toccoa directly after getting home.  We weren’t able to drive 6 hours into the foothills.  And we weren’t able to crash-land at my brother/parent’s house at about 1:00 in the morning and then wake up and spend the next day and a half working on the house with my parents and little brother.  It sounds like it would be a lot of work and I should be relieved, but it was actually really frustrating and sad.

I called and told them the news and suggested that maybe we could meet halfway and have dinner.  Mom called me this morning and said that while it would be nice to see us, it just wouldn’t make sense for us all to drive 6 hours to spend 1 hour chatting.  And I agree.  I just wish we could have made it up there to see them.

So, instead of spending today with my family or getting ready to drive up to meet them halfway, I spent this morning cleaning the house.  Then I made a lunch and went to eat lunch with Justin as his office, where, astonishingly, three other people were working today, all of whom left while we were sitting on the front porch eating.  After that I stopped by a client’s home to drop of a handful of business cards.  And then I stopped at Target for a handful of things like dryer sheets and soap (fascinating, I know!) before going home to keep on with my cleaning.  My office looks great!

Justin got home, we ordered pizza because I have been wanting Papa John’s for weeks now, and we’re spending the evening relaxing.

Tomorrow we’re going to do some more cleaning (I hate cleaning bathrooms) and yard work (it’s been raining for days and the lawn looks like a jungle) and that’s about where the plans stop.  We weren’t planning to have a long weekend.  We thought we’d be out of town until tomorrow evening.  We thought Justin would have to work Monday.  And now we’re looking at three more days with no work!

Tuesday Justin is driving me to pick up the rental car at 8:00 and I’m meeting the woman in Atlanta around 2:00.  I’ll be there until Thursday sometime, probably around 5:00, and then I’ll drive back home.  I’m not sure yet if I’m going to be working on Friday.  I do plan to have organizing work Friday afternoon, but I have to confirm with that client this weekend.

And now I think I’ve rambled on for longer than long enough.  I’m going to go watch this other episode of NCIS that I haven’t seen before and then curl up in bed because it has been a long couple weeks and it’s just not getting any easier.