I saw this:

So I looked closer.

Can you see it?

He’s kinda little.  Let me zoom in a bunch.  Here you go:

Lizard!

I’m not sure what he was doing, but he looked pretty happy.  It’s not like he’s going to cause any trouble, so I left him be.  It’s kinda chilly outside right now.  When it gets warmer, we’ll put the tree outside and let him run away, if he hasn’t done so already.  I haven’t seen him since we moved the Christmas tree out of the house and moved the ficus back closer to the door.

The sun is rising earlier in the morning tomorrow than it did today and that makes things just a little bit better.

Also, there are windows in the building where I work now.  I can actually see the sunlight!  The windows are all northern facing so there’s no actual direct light at any point of the day, but there’s LIGHT.  And that is so much better than working in the white-walled, grey-cubicled, florescent-lighted box where I used to work.

The guy I used to work for contacted me yesterday to do a quick document review because he was seriously under the gun and needed help.  So I took an hour to look it over and get it all set except for the signature he’d have to get and the actual finalization of the physical document.  I work with his wife now (have I mentioned that before?) and she told me today that he was so thankful for the help.  She mentioned (to him) that I seemed really happy and that she thought that I enjoyed having more to do.  (At which point he got concerned that he shouldn’t have bothered me, which was silly because I wouldn’t have helped if I didn’t have time.)  But it made me happy to hear that she thought I looked happy.  I am happy!  It’s just good to know that it shows.

I am thoroughly enjoying my new job.  The days go by so quickly!  (Except for the meeting today from 9 – 11:45.  That was long.  And I didn’t understand half of it because they kept using acronyms that I didn’t know.)  My boss wants me to be there on Fridays so I’m back to my 9 hour days on Monday – Thursday and 4 hours on Friday; for this week anyway, while he decides if that’s going to work for him.  It’s either that shift or I’ll do overtime every single week to put in time on Fridays just because he wants me there that day.  We’ll see.  It’s tricky for me to actually excuse myself from my work at 4:30 (getting there at 7am) because there’s so much to do and people aren’t expecting me to be leaving at that time.  But I LOVE leaving at 4:30.  I get home before I’d usually get off work previously.  It’s still light out!  (Are you sensing a theme?)  Justin and I have gone for walks in the afternoon/evening because there’s time and light (LIGHT!).  My evenings are so much longer with just the addition of that one hour!  If I can talk my boss into this, it’s going to be AMAZING.  Plus, there’s a yoga class at work on Wednesdays at 5:00 and if I leave my building by 4:30, I can get to the main plant, change clothes, and get to the class.  Did I mention it’s free?  And that some of my previous coworkers (who I miss) are also in the class?

Of course, tomorrow I might have to go to a meeting from 4 – 5pm so I’d not make it to the class, but hopefully that won’t happen all the time. I went last week and it was SO FUN and I hurt for days.

My tailbone still hurts, by the way.  Guess how much fun that was in my 2 1/2 hour meeting today?

But other than the hours and the windows in my building, the work is just so much more interesting.  I still have so much to learn, but I’m starting to get the hang of things and starting to get these people organized.  They’ve really gotten disorganized, especially since their admin left back in November (November?  It’s kind of ab blur… ) and there’s been a lot of catching up to do for everybody.  Today I got people to start scheduling the overtime they’re planning to do over the weekend (if any) and start working on the reports about what they’re working on for the boss.  I learned how to order food for a big meeting that’s happening next week.  I found a ton of information for a bulletin board that I’m supposed to maintain.  I learned a lot about a schedule that we’re going to build and I’m going to maintain.  I sent a bazillion emails about a bazillion different things.  I sorted out items for a spreadsheet that will need to get tracked to make sure the items get done on time and reported to the right people.

I don’t sit still all day!  I get to help people.  And organize people.  And, okay, some of it’s annoying (trying to schedule a meeting with 14 people for 2 hours when there are only 3 conference rooms that really work for that many people, unless I want to put them into rooms that hold twice that many or make them stand the whole time, is SUPER ANNOYING) but most of it is interesting and challenging and I’m happy to be doing something that matters to people instead of staring at drawings and editing a book of information that no one cares to read and has the same information over and over and over again for each airplane.  My replacement started yesterday — she had orientation so I haven’t heard anything about her.  But maybe I’ll drop her a line tomorrow.

Anyway, today was a mix of hectic mixed with patches of “so what should I do now?”  Calling to get someone to fix the copier, emailing someone else to get toner cartridges for the printer, calling to get my phone number transferred over to my new desk, calling again to ask why only people in my building were able to call, setting up a meeting and calling people to make sure they’d be able to come to the meeting, and then getting an email saying that another meeting is being held at the same time involving most of the same people.  I’m going to let the boss figure out that one.  But I should probably still set up the coffee he asked for.  So far, it’s a lot of administraive assistant-type work, but I’m confident that it’s going to be a lot more than that.  Super admin plus!  I can order coffee AND plot all your tasks into Excel and Project and explain all about your resource issues!

I have a lot of tasks to learn:  they’re tracking a lot of information in a lot of different places and I have to figure out all those places and who needs what information and by when.  Having the boss away this week is actually going to be really helpful in that since I get to focus on what everybody else needs in the quiet of his absence.  After his return, things will pick up pace a lot.  So everything I can figure out this week will make next week so much easier.  Which is obvious, but still.  I’m glad it seems like I’ll get a quiet week to roll into this job.

Here’s hoping that my cold will finally go away so I can concentrate on the work!  And it’s be really fantastic if my tailbone would let me sit down on a chair like normal instead of sending spikes of pain up my spine.  Sitting without pain and not coughing up a lung, doesn’t sound like too much to ask, right?

Good luck on your first day tomorrow, Nathan!

Justin is blowing his nose a lot, but not really coughing (yet).  He’s also exhausted, but that’s partially because (a) when he woke up last night I was snoring so loudly it was hard to fall asleep and (b) when he closes his eyes sometimes, he feels like he’s falling.  That, obviously, makes it hard to fall asleep, too, so he’s been waking up and sitting in his office until the dizziness goes away and he’s able to fall back asleep.  I think his ears still feel weird, too, like they’re blocked up or won’t equalize, but I’m not really sure and I don’t feel like asking him right now.

Short and long of it is that we’re still sick.  I took an expectorant this afternoon, so hopefully that’ll help with my cough.  We both took a nap this afternoon.  We’ve been following Dad’s advice to “take it easy and drink lots of fluids.”  Hot chocolate counts, right?  We’re almost out of orange juice.

Things you will need:

Coffee cup and spoon, coffee dripper, coffee, filters (this dripper uses #2), some way to measure out the water, and boiling water (not shown).

Put the filter in the dripper.

Put the coffee in the filter.  I’m using 3 teaspoons for this cup.

Put the dripper on top of the coffee cup.

Wait for the hot water to boil.

Measure out the water for your coffee.  You can do this by using another coffee cup the same size or by only boiling as much water as you’ll need, but I found that this coffee cup uses just about 1 1/3 cups of water and I need something with a spout on it so I don’t end up with water all over the place.   So!  Measuring cup it is.

Pour hot water over the coffee grounds.  Make sure to get them all moistened.

Coffee will drip out of the bottom of the dripper and into your cup.  I lifted it up here to show, but this usually just stays resting on the top of the coffee cup.  And it sits very securely.  I haven’t been at all worried about it falling over.

Keep pouring water over the coffee grounds until you run out of water.  This is why I measured out the water first — there’s no way to see when the coffee is near the top of the cup without picking up the dripper and checking the cup.  It’s easier just to know ahead of time how much to use.

It starts to get sluggish toward the last of the water. I’m impatient and squish it around with a spoon, but I’m not sure it really helps at all.  It just gives me something to do.

Eventually there is no more water left in the dripper.

Remove the dripper and you can see a beautiful cup of coffee.

Sweeten to taste and enjoy!

The filter and grounds go into the garbage and the dripper goes into the sink for a quick wash.  It doesn’t take up any space on the counter, which is good because we don’t have any left.  And I get to go enjoy some coffee!  Total time it took to make this cup, with taking time to take pictures, was 10 minutes.  So it’s not something I have time to do while getting ready for work in the morning, but I get free coffee at my new building anyway.  This is for weekends when I’m at home and craving coffee.  And it’s awesome!

My hands are already much less chapped than they were on Tuesday.  It’s amazing to me how quickly my hands react to the change in humidity.

I used my new coffee maker this morning.  It was awesome!  We picked up coffee and filters at the store yesterday afternoon.  It’s so easy!  I mean, not as easy as Erica’s spiffy Keurig machine, but still pretty easy.  I’ll try to take pictures or something tomorrow morning when I do it again so I can show you.

We’re pretty sure that what hit me on Monday wasn’t the flu, mostly by the fact that Justin hasn’t had any stomach troubles at all.  Generally, he’s going to catch whatever it is that I’ve got, if it’s contagious.  It’s surprising that I got sick first this time, actually, with this stupid cold.  But my immune system was already taking a hit, so that’s probably how that happened.

I’m already frustrated at being sick.  My nose is sore and flaking and my head hurts.  It’s annoying and I’m ready for it to be done already.  I have stuff I wanted to do in the handful of days between getting home from our trip and going back to work.  But “the best laid schemes of mice and men” and all that.

You know, I just looked up that reference.  Did you know it’s from a poem from 1785?  It’s nearly impossible to read about half of it (link) because of the changes in English, but it’s a man talking to a mouse scampering away from the nest he just plowed up in his field.  (Wikipedia has a translation here.)  I find that interesting.

Anyway, I hope you’re all doing well.  I think I’m going to try to drag our luggage upstairs and try to get some semblance of tidiness to this place.  Or find another anime to watch and drink more hot chocolate…  Decisions, decisions…

This morning, I had to drag myself out of bed for a 9:00 dentist appointment, which I was late to because I set my alarm to ring at 9:30 instead of 8:30, so I woke up at 9:00 and ran out of the house.  I didn’t even brush my teeth!

And then we had a chiropractor appointment at 2:00 where I got to tell about falling down the stairs and get all the kinks twisted out of my neck.  So many kinks!!

Other than that, and picking up a bunch of stuff from the grocery store, we’ve been incredibly lazy.  Our luggage is still on the floor of the dining room — sprawling open because I dug through there to find my glasses at 9:00 and then pawed through there again to find my new tea infuser this afternoon.

I’m feeling miserable.  My tailbone is still kind of sore, especially after all that sitting on hard airplane seats.  But mostly my nose won’t stop dripping and I’m sneezing.  I keep getting chilled and my sinuses are raw.  It’s probably just a cold, but it’s not any fun at all.

Between the tailbone, the cold, the bruise I got from running into an armrest on the airplane, and the mild case of food poisoning I dealt with on Monday that’s still lingering a little bit, I’m just a mess.

I’m assuming that was food poisoning, anyway.  It lasted all Monday afternoon and evening, but I’m feeling mostly better now.  I got a little green in the grocery store for a while this afternoon, but I haven’t been having the stomach cramps since yesterday.  (Tim, Erica, Luke, and Krista, did any of you also eat the stuffed mushrooms at the Chinese buffet?  I’m trying to pin down what it might have been…)

I miss you all.  It was wonderful getting to see everybody!  And I am happy to be sleeping in my own bed and lounging on my own couch watching TV.  But I’ll be honest:  I almost started to cry several times between Sunday and yesterday evening, saying good-bye to everybody.  It sounds like everyone made it safely back to their destinations, even though several of us are still sick.  And I know we’re all ready to get back into our own routines and prepare for everything that 2012 is going to bring.  It’s going to be an exciting year!  And I can’t wait to see you all again in November!

I love you all!

Justin and I are lounging around in our pajamas, eating breakfast, and relaxing a little this morning.  Our church had a big service last night and no service this morning — most of the ministry staff travels to spend the holiday with family and they encourage the rest of us to do the same:  spend time with loved ones and enjoy!

We’re having people over this afternoon, and I’ll have to get up and shower here in a little bit and make sure that the house is presentable and there are enough clean plates for everybody to use later on.

I’m not sure if I’ll have a chance to call later this afternoon, especially with guests in the house, but I wish you all the merriest of Christmases and I hope you’re having a fantastic day and I can’t wait to see you all soon!  (I texted as many of you as my phone would let me earlier and then realized that some of you were probably in church already — SORRY!)

God bless you all and be well!  I LOVE YOU!

There was a brief interlude toward the beginning of my cleaning quest when my fantastic husband took our Miele vacuum apart to figure out why it wasn’t working.  Turns out the problem could have been fixed by replacing a $100 part OR by putting in a $1.50 rubber washer.  Guess which one we did?  Woo!  $1.50 fix!  And nobody lost an eye to the crazy spring in the cord reel mechanism!  WIN!

So Justin fixed our vacuum and I went absolutely to town on the cleaning.  I dusted, I mopped, I finally got the bedding off the sofa bed that’s been on there for months and months, I dragged all the random stuff that’s been piling up at the bottom of the stairs piled up in my office where I can figure out what to do with it all, I finally strung the Christmas light up the banister of the stairway, and, happy day, I vacuumed!  The vacuum has been broken since before we got our Christmas tree.  This place has been in serious need of cleaning.

I finally stopped when it just wasn’t as much fun anymore, which was maybe 4 or 5 hours of cleaning?  I’m not sure.  But the living room, dining room, kitchen, stairway, and bedroom are looking awesome!  And tomorrow I’ll tackle my office and laundry and getting stuff back up into the attic and maybe pull some of the leaves out of the bushes in the front yard.  I’m not totally sure yet.  I still can’t find the stupid key to the storage closet outside, so I can’t get to the rakes or big trash bags.  And we have been looking all over the place for that dang key!  It’s getting seriously annoying.

Justin thought I was a little crazy because I wanted to clean and I didn’t mind that he wasn’t doing any cleaning to help.  He did help (awesomely) fixing the vacuum and helping take care of the light/fan fixture in the living room.  And tomorrow he’s going to help with laundry and he’ll clean the bathrooms (I hate cleaning bathrooms) and getting stuff into the attic.  But it felt SO GOOD getting the house clean again!  It’s like all this static noise is gone and I can think about other things.  I don’t look in the living room and see how much the end table needs dusting and that there’s bedding on the bed and all the pine needles on the floor.  Instead, I’m thinking about all the mess in my office right now, and how there’s paperwork that needs to get addressed and boxes that need to go into the attic and handwash clothes that need to get washed.  I’ve reduced the mess that I need to think about down to just a handful of places and that’s such an enormous relief I don’t think I can explain it.

After tomorrow, the mess should be small enough that I won’t have any of that static at all and I’ll be able to focus on other things — like getting ready to see everybody over the holiday!

Our neighbors are having a party tonight — I can hear loud bass music pulsing through the walls and people chatting outside.  Justin just went to the grocery store to buy a frozen pizza for dinner.  I’m sitting on the recliner in his office typing this in my pajamas, freshly showered after all that cleaning.

It’s been a wonderful day and I’m looking forward to a continuation of the wonderful for the next two weeks!!

The unintentional thing about that is that I’m here this week – one of a very short list of employees in the office this week – and then I’m out on vacation for 2 weeks.  So I’ll work this week and then when I come back from vacation, I’ll start my new job!  Talk about short notice! 

It makes for interesting compare and contrast to my previous job in Toccoa.

When I quit my job in Toccoa, I gave them a 3 months notice.  And when I left they still hadn’t interviewed anyone to fill my position.  This job:  They’re hoping to offer someone the job later this week.

When I quit Toccoa, there was a huge amount of guilt laid on because I was leaving my “ministry.”  Here, people have told me to do what I think is best for my career.  They’re sad to see me go, but completely supportive.

It’s exciting and terrifying.  And I’ve got a couple days to try to wrap up all my projects, get word around to people who work with me on different projects, hand off the 5S program to someone else, and try to write up a manual explaining how I do a lot of the things that I do.  And I’ll miss the people who I work with right now, but I’m looking forward to a new direction.