I never did get around to posting a summary for the end of 2014. I feel a little bit bad about that, but it was never a high enough priority, I guess. Life has just been too busy lately. I think part of that is the added time spent on my commute.
I tried carpooling this month, didn't care for it. While I was still working at my last job, I wondered what it looked like to work in Bellevue. It seemed so far away so I wondered about carpool options. In order to see potential carpools, you had to program in your route. So I had programmed in a fake route from the nearest park and ride to Expedia and forgotten about it in the subsequent months. Someone found it a week or two ago, contacted me, we arranged to meet. We met, I drove. I wanted to be there at 7:30, she didn't start work until 8:30. I wanted to be done at 4:30, she worked until 5. She was late in getting to the carpool the first day, she didn't get to leave on time that evening, making me late for an engagement that evening. The next day, I somehow overslept and so told her not to wait for me. The next day, she was really late arriving so I finally left without her. It was a good thing, I didn't get to leave that night until 6:30. If I had tried to leave at 4:30 that day (or, as it turns out, any day the rest of the week), it wouldn't have worked. So I told her I was just going to remove my name from the carpool list. My schedule's too unpredictable, I like my audiobooks and I'm not sure the time savings is really sufficient when you take into consideration the time to stop and collect other people or stop and drop off other people and when you have to keep moving across all general purpose lanes to get in or out of the carpool lane or change freeways and when the carpool lane runs as slow as the regular lanes so often.
Things at home have been pretty good from my perspective. Work has kept me away from home quite a bit, but I don't have too many recollections of words spoken to me or deeds done against me by my children that would have made me sad. Ben did kick me in the eye once last week, but it didn't cause any lingering effects and it's been a struggle for him, he's been sick and having to have eye drops put in his eyes which is no fun for people who understand why they have to have eye drops in their eyes - let alone someone who's being held down by a parent (or two) who's holding something above their eye, holding their head steady and then as soon as they open their eyes - sploink. So unfair. I'd flail my limbs, too.
Date Night tonight with Lori. Lori's mom watches the children and Lori and I go off some place for a few hours. I was embarrassed to be returning home before 9 pm from our last date night, but we had a nice meal out, a nice time to talk, and it was a dark and stormy night, so not a lot really to do. We had tried to go to Home Depot to look at night lights for the house, but they were closing when we got there.
Minor excitement in the neighborhood earlier this month - in preparation for our new furnace, a phalanx of spray-can wielding surveyors painted the street (and our grass and flower beds and mulch) many brightly colored lines and symbols. Then a crew came with a backhoe, generator and a bunch of trucks and tore of the sidewalk on both sides of the street, dug a trench in our yard and a big hole. I missed all the action - by the time I returned home that afternoon, temporary paving covered the holes, the trench and hole expertly filled in (grass re-laid in place0. A new shiny gas meter on the side of our house, the backhoe in the street and a massive flatbed trailer on the side street were the only signs that something had happened. On Monday they'll install the heater and hot water heater and thermostat and run a power line to the back of the house to a new electrical line to the back of the house and a new concrete pad. They'll return later to install a heat pump and I'll build an enclosure because they're building the pad large enough to also hold my generator and they're running a line to the back of the house so that I'll be able to plug the generator right into the house in a power-outage (instead of running a cord out the garage window which is a code violation necessary to run the generator from behind the gate where it's secure.)
Work is going really well. There's only 2 months left in my contract, so I'm starting to look to see what my other options are. It was originally a contract-to-hire but based on some changing priorities for the business and a reorg, they may not have a need for me after the end of the contract. If that's the case, it's still a nice thing on my resume and just having not-my-last-company as the top item on my resume has opened a lot of doors from other interested companies and recruiters who apparently don't think too highly of my last company or that its employees are worth poaching. So work itself is fun. There's a lot of challenges and I'm groaning regularly at some new thing to deal with, but at the beginning, almost all of the groaning I was doing was at something I'd done. I think I've reached a level of competency that I'm not the one making the mistakes. That's kinda nice.
Coffee's ready, must go get some.
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