Random

Today turned out to be a great day!

First off, as I am writing this I am sitting my parent’s living room waiting up for my sister.  This week I’ve been sleeping over at my parent’s in Loveland, while my mom is in Orlando taking a well-deserved vacation.  So to help the family out I am house-sitting here and taking care of my 16-year-old sister.  I’m still trying to keep her out of trouble  . In all seriousness she is really responsible.  Yes she’s been staying out late, but she’s always calling me letting me know where she’s at, who she’s with and when I can expect her home.  When I drop a curfew on her she’s been home at that time so as far as younger sisters go she’s being great!  Right now she is coming home from the Kenny Chesney concert, so I am being a good big brother and waiting up for her.

Work today turned out to be pretty hectic, but also pretty fun. It was hectic because I ended up spending over 7 hours on the phone and we ended up having to do a few installs with one of them failing.  We ended up going home for the day not knowing what exactly has caused our problem, or how we can fix it.  This does not bode well for our decision in choosing to adopt this upgrade into our current migration efforts.

It also turned out to be pretty good because I managed to cut through a lot of my tasks like a hot knife through butter and get everything done.  I’m at a poitn where I’m looking for work to do – it feels great!  It was also funny because as these installs were going on we ended up with a lot of down-time which gave me a chance to have some good conversations with my co-workers.  We talked about everything fromt pets to wines to retirement accounts and social security.  It was pretty interesting and turned out to be time well-spent.

I had a great dinner + dessert tonight.  I got to make dinner for a really amazing girl, and then we went up to Horsetooth to enjoy dessert while watching the sun set over the reservoir.  It turned out to be an awesome night, and I found out I’m not such a bad cook after all.

I just wasted half a day here at work because of one stupid character.  We’re in the process of upgrading to a new platform and while I’ve been doing that I was updating my component of the application when I realized it wasn’t submitting.  It wasn’t returning any error messages at all – it just plain wasn’t working and reloading the form.  I went through and broke down the 80 different fields in the app and verified they were all doing the right thing.  Then I went through and debugged 1600 lines of code..  Only to find that one of the fields that I’m relying on was depending on my input to be 5 characters, when I was feeding it 6 characters!  Turns out it’s always been that way, but now the field isn’t as forgiving!

So I wasted four hours of my work day for a stupid character limit of 1!  How lame!!  More to come….

Well today ended up being a long, but great day!  In one day I got to be both a teacher and a student of sorts, and both experiences were rewarding.

So first my experience as a student… (and don’t laugh).  I learned how to drive a stick-shift today.  Yes I realize that I am 23 and am just learning how to drive one. You may laugh now, but NO MORE LAUGHING AFTER THIS!!!

I didn’t do as bad as I thought I would.  It took a little getting used to for the first few minutes, but I managed to get the knack and did some pretty good driving.  Driving a stick is really not that much different than playing drum set: both your feet are working separately, but also have to be in time with each other.  I drove down from Fort Collins to Loveland, then to south Loveland to get gas (where it’s $1.98 a gallon!!!) and then drove out to I-25 to trade cars with my sister.  A lot of stop & go traffic, I think I am ready to give up my Explorer in 10 days.

Now my experience as a teacher…  I ended up teaching a 4 year old about drumming!  Okay so I wasn’t really a teacher, more like a babysitter, but I did manage to teach her something…

After I finished cruising town in my sister’s Mazda I went back up to Fort Collins, got my drum set and went to church to play.  Usually our choir has anywhere from 5-7 people.  Well today we had 2…  Myself (the drummer) and Pete the guitar player/singer.  We also had a piano player on loan from one of the other choirs.  So needless to say we were in dire need of singers.  Luckily our on-loan piano player managed to call his sister who was happy to come and sing, along with her husband and her three kids.  Next thing we knew the choir platform turned into Romper Room.  It was chaotic, but at the same time it was pretty sweet.  Their 4-year-old daughter was so interested in the drum set that she parked up a chair right next to the drumset.  It was really sweet, but at the same time hilarious because all throughout Mass she kept asking me "What does that pedal do?" "What sound does that stick make?" "Why are you using those red brushes instead of the blue weird-looking sticks?"  "I bet I know what sound the tambourine makes"..  It was really funny.  I answered all of her questions and ended up giving a mini drum clinic right there.  It was cute, and I got really good at being able to play all my parts, (try to) sing, and entertain a 4 year-old at the same time.  Way to go for multi-tasking!

This was also a great affirmation that a LOOOOOOOOOONG ways away from having kids!

I don’t know if I like or hate the first day of a 4-day week.  A big part of me hates Tuesdays of the 4 day week because it feels like a Monday, but jammed in with all of the Tuesday stuff as well.  This usually means I have double the work that I need to do.  But I like 4-day Tuesdays because after a long weekend there is nothing better than realizing that you’re one less day from the next weekend…  So I think the jury’s still out.

Today was a good day but a tough day.  Good because I had a really good night with a very sweet gal   Tough because I had all of my Tuesday meetings mixed in with my Monday confusion.  Then I ended my day by driving my sister Amanda to the airport.  It’s kinda funny, but even after yesterday’s rant I’m still really going to miss my sister.  It’s funny because as we were driving home my mom and I realized that my sister probably won’t ever be coming back west for any extended period of time ever again.  I think that during the summers she’ll probably find an internship like the one she’s going to now and have another reason to stay out in Boston.  As I picture my sister I really think that she’s going to be happier in the east, as well as far away from her family as possible

Alright, bed time…  I’m really zapped from such a long day – but there are only 3 more left before the weekend comes!

What a weird day today has been!  Basically it’s been a really lazy day – that had it’s moments of productivity, but overall I was more lazy overall.

First off I worked from home today, mainly on the sole basis that I needed to do my laundry.  That was a pretty weak excuse to justify working from home, but for some reason I just didn’t feel like going into the office.

About working from home: Luckily in my job I’m blessed with the ability to work just about anywhere.  I have a laptop that I use as my primary machine, so it has all of the tools and software I need.  I have call forwarding enabled on my office phone to send calls to both my cell phone and my home phone.  I have high speed Internet and a cool cordless headset, so really I have everything I need.  This last school year I was horrible when it came to going into the office.  I moved across town, so my old 5 minute drive to work now becomes a 20 minute drive.  Along with that I have a virtual team where I was the only person in Fort Collins, so I really had no inclination to go into the office.  At my worst point I had been home for 20 consecutive work days – so yeah I was bad.

Luckily about 6 weeks ago we brought in a contractor that does work for my team and sits in the Fort Collins site, which has been giving me incentive to go into the office more.  Right after finals week I was back into the office 85-95% of the time (if I had early morning meetings I did them from home, got ready and then headed into work).  I was doing pretty well.  But my goal this summer is to improve my office attendance and break the cycle of working from home when I don’t really need to.

It’s not that I don’t like working from home – the reality is I love it.  I get to blast my music all day, listen to Rome, make my own lunch and get to do all of the little household things I needed to do anyway (like laundry).  But the problem is when you work from home too often you become to prone to distraction.   There are so many times during the day when my electric drumset is calling out my name, or my messy office just can’t take it anymore and needs to be cleaned.  Then I get suck into this "unproductive" run that can only be alleviated by going back into the office and being re-energized.

So the moral of the story is working from home can be a good thing in moderation, but going to the office can never go wrong when it comes to being productive.

Hence, where I’m at today.  This week is already a slow week at work.  We’re a little ahead of schedule with our current project and I’ve made pretty good progress in my smaller-scale projects.  So far the majority of my time this week has been spent tying up loose ends.  Well I ended up just getting lazy today working from home and being completely unproductive..  So my workday really felt like a waste.

Tomorrow I’m going into the office 1st thing in the morning (for once).  and looking forward to re-energize my productivity.

The funny thing is – my laundry; the sole justification for working from home today – I didn’t even start it until 5:30pm…  So what a joke!  I spent the evening cleaning up and being productive on the home front, but I’ve been a complete slacker on all of my other fronts.  I have a pile of NCSC work that needs to get done that I keep putting off (ARGGH.. TIME TO MAKE TIME!) and as far as Pastoral Council goes I have a meeting on Monday and I’m still slacking around with the agenda, action items and all of that good stuff.  So yeah I’m being a slacker in that area…  Gotta kick my butt in gear.

It’s these 4 day weeks, I’m tellin’ ya…  My whole sense of time is thrown off right now!

Oh and my sister made it safely to Puerto Rico today, after 9 hours and one layover later (yuck!).  I, the airfare king booked my mom and sister’s trip back to Boston this August to bring my sister to school – $186 round-trip for my mom and $94 one-way for my sister!  HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES?!?

I also ordered prints today of my sister’s graduation pictures…  Here is one with all four of us kids: