Isle of Remote

Someone left a cd in my desk drawer at work. It has “Lonely Mix” written on it. Who would want to listen to lonely music? What sort of songs would be on this cd? I’d play it, but I fear I’d be hanging from the rafters fifteen minutes in.

My boss is still out. Yay! She has some kind of surgery. My hope is that she’s getting the evil cut out of her. Although, that would be a seriously long procedure. Maybe I can settle for getting 1/4 of the evil cut out of her.

Actually, guessing what sort of surgery she’s had is getting to be somewhat fun. Company policy is that you can’t find out why a person is out, so we can’t ask. Here are the clues:
It’s abdominal
She can’t drive for 5 weeks
It’s a condition that gets better as you get older
Her symptoms prompted a cancer screening
She has digestive problems and she’ll eat very bland foods or no food at all sometimes
She’s evil (that’s just her though)

My guesses so far are Colitis or Crohn’s disease. Any others?

I’ve made some decisions about where I’m headed in life. I won’t go into the details but I have decided that I’m tired of working for other people. I’m formulating a plan that will allow me to phase out that part of my life and corform it to my own terms.

It’s liberating. Right now I’m in the research phase. I hope that by this time next year I will be in phase one of the plan.

I’m also getting on track with my health. I’ve started slow and am concentrating on making better choices.

Part of the reason why my writing here has gotten so sporadic lately is I’ve just been floundering. It seemed that a lot of things changed in my life in a big way and it left me a little bewildered. My job changed, I lost my best friend to apathy and my grandmother to death, I’ve made some bad financial choices, I regained my weight. It felt like life was pushing me along and I was just sitting in the cart.

I’ve heard some people say that you shouldn’t make any major decisions after you’ve lost someone close to you. I guess that’s true. I didn’t make the wisest choices. I think that’s why, when I prayed about it last year, I really felt the strong pull to wait until March of this year to start making major changes.

So now I feel as though my head is a little clearer and I have noticed that my time is a little more free since some of the dead weight has dropped off. One of the things I’ve noticed is that some friends just don’t know how to be around you when you’re going through stuff. So those people have dropped off the radar and that has created the time to get my plans together.

A long time ago a neighbor read me this poem about those who lift and those who lean. There are givers and there are takers in life. The poem made it seem that it was far better to be the lifter rather than the leaner, but I think you have to reside somewhere in the middle. How can you lift someone if you don’t know what it is like to lean? And if you’re lifting all the time, how do you keep your humility?

So this year I’ve learned how to lean and I’ve learned who my lifters are. And oddly enough, they’re not always who I expect them to be.

It’s been a loooong week. Had my performance evaluation at work on Tuesday and it was mediocre. I mean, not that I was surprised or anything. I typically have a really hard time the first six-10 months of any job. I’m not a jump right in there kind of person. I like to know what I’m dealing with all around me before I can concentrate on the job at hand. I like to figure out the people before the job because then you know how to change things and how people will react.

I work with a lot of type A folk. Which is good because they are the detail people, which is good counter to me. Details bore me, I’m the big picture, long-range goal kinda gal and I like to concentrate on the effect my work will have, not so much the tweensy details like if there is adequate signage to the bathroom. But, I recognize the importance of having adequate signage and appreciate that there are people around to remind me of that. But it’s just not on my radar at any given time.

So luckily, my end product has been practically fault-free. But they feel I haven’t provided the proper amount of feedback to give assurance that I know what I’m doing. I can work with that.

I’m not sure I did a wise thing though. There were a couple of things that were either not directly or even indirectly my fault that I got dinged on. For example, I was responsible for the information to be provided in this memo. It was information that could not be supplied until the very last minute before it was needed because it was constantly changing. I sent the info to the next party in the format it needed to be printed in and said that the final copy would be provided at a certain time. Said and done. Then I had to leave for a meeting and my co-worker decided to change the format and I didn’t have the chance to see it before it was distributed. So I got dinged for that. Also for not doing things no one told me to do and that were not on record of having ever being done. (Because apparently, my mad psychic skills were the reason for my hiring.) Ding!

I decided not to say anything and let it slide. In the whole big pic of my job, they were infintesimally small things to pick out, so my defense probably wouldn’t have been worth the effort. But now I have to deal with things like, “make sure you double check that memo!”

Still, it is a good job and I really like everyone working there. And I know they like me and want me to succeed at this job. But I’ll be glad to see the weekend!

I made it through the heinous month that was September. Alive. Yay for me.

It was touch and go for a minute there - it was a crazy work schedule. Some days I worked from 7am to 11pm. Include weekends on that chore list and it makes for one cranky Abbie.

But I held it together and now I’m back. I can honestly say that I hope that I never have to go through that again. The only thing that kept me from losing it all together was making sure I planned some fun activities on my free time. I mean it wasn’t much - a quick facial here, a walk in the afternoon, stopping for a special treat - you can’t live putting all your energy into you work, even if you love your job with a capital L, y’know?

Anyway, I’m glad to be paying some attention to this blog of mine again. I’ve missed it and you all. I’m going to spend the next couple of days reading what ya’ll have been up to. Hope it’s all good stuff!

Having a big, lazy, take-it-easy kind of day. Two events last week - trial by fire. Both went well and my new boss gave me flowers! How nice is that?

We had a meeting the following morning and a lot of the people who attended were also at the event. The words “lovely” and “successful” were bandied about.

The craft show was a success. Even though I only made about $100 bucks, considering my output - 3 hours on Thursday night with scraps of paper - and the 1.5 hours of manning the booth….I think I did swell. Also, got to work on a scarf that someone ordered so I think it was good compensation for my time.

One of my friends e-mailed me this morning and is thinking about starting a writing group. I’m all for that. Need someone to keep me accountable. I was just talking to another friend and saying how much I liked taking writing class because it forced me to have something to turn in each week. Writing groups I’ve tried in the past haven’t gone anywhere - people are more inclined to talk about what they want to write rather than actually write.

It rained again Thursday night (was supposed to rain all day, but God and I had a talk about that and it didn’t start until my event was over!) and today the sky is extraordinarily blue. I will miss my view of the mountains when I finally do move. I see no other homes, lights or freeways from my windows. That’s extremely rare here in the big city.

This is on my HOME computer (I do a lot of dumb things, but I’m not actually dumb enough to have had this on my work computer!)

It always made me laugh when I came home and sat at the computer. But I guess since I’ve left Crazytown, there’s no reason to hang on to old memories….

• my co-workers are not power-hungry, complainers nor pissants
• people in my office com-mun-i-cate. Which means they tell you what you should do and then either tell you how great that you did it or suggest how you could improve
• I don’t have an office, but my new area was all decorated on my first day with a welcome sign and flowers.
• Things are busy!
• People help each other when it’s busy
• Co-workers are on good terms with just about everyone
• We eat lunch together at least 3 times a week and rarely talk about work
• Everyone has an outside interest
• I’m encouraged to take classes because they believe that the more I know the bigger asset I will be to the dept, unlike other places where they complained if you didn’t know stuff, but refused to let you take any classes.
• My boss is not a pinhead.

Wonderful news! I got a new job! Not only did I get a new job, but I got the job I wanted! No more CrazyTown.

Didja ever the Simpsons episode where (I can’t remember why) the family Simpson was leaving Springfield?

Can I leave like that?

“SO LONG, STINK TOWN!”

Had to put the power shoes on today. Dealing with psycho-prof. Not to bore you with a long, uninteresting story (yeah, I know, when has that stopped me before?) but this formally nice professor I had no problems with is now completely all over my case about every little thing.

He’s not very tall, so one of the things I always do is wear heels when I have to stand up for myself. Makes him have to look up to me. I had about a thousand and one scenarios running through my head and I was definitely going to be giving him the “you don’t know me” head roll if he so much as gave me a lick of trouble.

I mean you just don’t call a person, start yelling, yell some more then hang up. It’s just freakin’ rude.

Well, this afternoon I get to the meeting room before him. Everything is set up. Everything is smooth. I make sure before the confrontation that there are no distractions. Then I got introduced to a little thing called the high road; called grace. He came strolling in and I just saw a tired old guy with a bad case of middle aged crazy. I smiled, waved and said hello; took care of everything that needed taken care of and went on my way.

I think whenever you let someone get you upset to the point where you sink to their level, you let them know that they have succeeded in making you think somehow less than yourself. Don’t waste your time trying to reason with the unreasonable. Let it roll off your back and move forward. They’ll just find something else to pick on next, but because they didn’t get a rise out of you they’re likely to pick on a different target.

Got my statement of estimated benefits from social security. If I reture at age 62 I could get $879 month. If I worked until age 67 I could get $1274 a month. At age 70 its $1590/month.

I’m glad that it would be a supplementary income in addition to my retirement from work and interest from savings. But I got to thinking about my grandmother and others like her who are living on $600 - 800 a month. She worked so much harder and longer than I ever have. She started working at age 13 and, after her husband left her with 2 small children, she worked sometimes up to 3 jobs at a time. She still rinses off aluminum foil and plastic baggies.

It doesn’t seem fair, somehow.