Stress!

It's been quite a while since I blogged and I apologize, one of my resolutions for the new year will surely be to blog more often. My optimism stems from the hope that my schedule will become more regular and conscious choice. I've decided I'm going to be better than "the glass is half-full" I'm going to be a "that glass still has a few drops of water in it so quit your whining you're not going to die of thirst yet!" I'm not sure if that's optimism or not, but it's the best I can do.

At the moment my stress level is pretty high (not as high as it's ever been, that was last week...) to the point that I can feel it gnawing away at the bottom of my stomach. As I mentioned I'm optimistic that my schedule will be better after the first of the year. Right now it's like I have three sets of children. I have my actual children who need me to be home on the evenings when their mother is out rehearsing and performing. I have the children at my day job who keep calling me to ask for my advice and then I have my new baby, the business who keeps me up late at night and has a tendency to crap at really inconvenient times (the entire extended metaphor was just so that I could get in that last line).

Speaking of my wife performing, that was one of the bright spots in the otherwise endless ocean of stress. First she did the Bell Concert which was really cool. I'm not 100% sure but I think it was the biggest English Handbell concert ever. Part of that obviously stems from how big the concert center is. Handbells normally don't get to play venues that large and when they do I imagine that they don't usually fill them up, but my wife and her fellow ringers did. The next week was the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas Concert with the King Singers. I think I liked last years with Sissel a little bit better, which is not to say the King Singer's weren't awesome, just that Sissel was superlative.

In my long absence from blogging I missed seeing a comment from Ed. It has now been approved and posted but since most of you are unlikely be checking old posts for new comments I'll relate it here. He said that http://xkcd.com/282/ was his favorite. For anyone who knows Ed this should be absolutely no surprise, in fact I'm sure that ttocS is even now air-punching an imaginary shoulder.

We'll send you to a rest home... I'm already in a rest home... We'll send you to that crooked one on 60 minutes... I'll be good...

Adjusting to the transition

I'm still trying to adjust to the transition from working for the man to working for myself. Part of the difficulty is that I still sort of work for the man, and so I still have a little bit of psychic baggage weighing me down from that. But I think that if I try to be objective I'm making the transition fairly well, which is not to say that there aren't things I can improve on, but I'd be surprised if there weren't. Anyway that's enough about the drudgery of work. Now for something more amusing. I'm fairly parsimonious about websites I visit regularly. It's really easy to end up with a list that quickly takes up half of your day, and even with being vigilant I frequently have to trim my list, for example I can't remember how long it's been since I visited "The Onion" or slashdot.

Anyway so I have to be particularly excited about something for it to make it on to the list of websites I check every day. So I just added a new webcomic: xkcd.com. I'd had a couple of people send me links to individual comics before, but it was finding out that it was Jonathan Tweet's favorite webcomic that really pushed it over the top. As I've been going through the archives these are some comics that stick out:

Centrifugal Force - It helps if you know the line from Goldfinger. (Bond- "Do you expect me to talk?" Goldfinger- "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.")

Velociraptors

Family Circus

Moral Relativity

If you're going to delve deeper into the archive like I did, be warned that there is the occasional bad word.

That's why rap sounds better on the highway at 90 mph

Last Week

After Ed posted this comment:

Ok, no posts from Ross in 4 days. I take it the Cheerful Pledge has broken him. Look in all nearby bell towers and gun shops.

I thought I'd better post and let everyone know how I was doing. Last week was pretty crazy. It was my semi-official last week at my day job. Semi-official because I'm still on what amounts to a 20 hour/week retainer until mid-January. Long enough to train the new guy (who starts on the 17th of Dec.) Anyway, since it was for most intents my last week everyone in the world wanted me to do one last thing, not to mention all the last things I wanted to do. On top of that I had a welfare assignment at the cannery that ate up most of Tuesday (I was making applesauce) and then I had a really important lunch meeting with our TM and IP attorney on Wednesday which ended up (with travel time) running about two and half hours.

To top it all off Wednesday night I came down with something, which was exacerbated by the fact that I had to wake up at 5:00 am Thursday morning to move a server (kind of my last act as an official employee). So Thursday was pretty bad, and Friday was not all that much better, but I think I'm basically recovered, at least recovered enough to shovel all the snow we got today. My rudimentary measurement came up with about 9", but I could be off, all I know was that in order to keep ahead of it (mostly I was trying to keep people from driving on it) I ended up shoveling four times.

And through it all I remained relentlessly cheerful. Okay, not really I was mostly grumpy, but to the grumpiness I managed to also add quite a bit of guilt because I wasn't more cheerful. Not sure if that was really the best outcome, but I intend to keep at it. I think being largely free of the pressures of having two jobs will help.

Relentlessly Guilty