elorg.net

Things have been crazy lately. Due to funding problems they had to let a large number of people go at my company over the past couple of months. At first it was just upper management-types and people that we didn’t know what it was that they actually did. The last round they let go around 15 of the people in my office alone - many were friends and team members (we’re estimating somewhere around 1/4 of the company). So far I’ve been “safe” because I’m a jack-of-all-trades and they can put me on almost any team.

They let most of the people go with the hopes of bringing them back once we pick up more billable work. So far we’ve only brought one person back that I know of. That gave everyone hope at first - but we haven’t heard too much about new projects. I love the company, but things aren’t looking too good.

It seems like most of the people that remain don’t have enough to do. Perhaps it’s a short lull. Most of our billable work has to be done on the weekends, so a lot of people (including me) have had to shift their work schedule to accommodate. The rest of the time… we sit around waiting for emails or something else to do. There’s really no reason to come into the office most days.

Right now I’m split between two projects. One has minimal work during the week, but I make up for that on the weekends. The other has no management or direction. I’m left with having to read through a list of very dry documents, and do whatever I can to learn more about the application I’m supposed to start supporting. The only other guy left on the team is busy traveling to client sites and actually working. I have to tell ya, this situation isn’t very motivating - but I don’t want to think of the alternative.

I don’t feel comfortable actively looking for another job. I mean, just look at my websites! They’re hideous! What a time to start everything from scratch with a complete overall. And I don’t exactly have Photoshop installed on my work computer to clean them up when things are slow. My evenings are taken up by school work and house & garden work…

There’s a possibility of a great new opportunity in the Boston area that I would LOVE to have, but again, I’m not too confident because my portfolio isn’t up to snuff. After all, would you prefer to spend your time on school work, helping friends with their websites, or updating your own websites? My websites are the lowest priority. *sigh

Maybe I’m not used to the new schedule of Daylight Savings. Or maybe I’ve just never had a handle on remembering the time change unless I’m reminded. We didn’t realize it happened until late last night when we were watching tv. We noticed the clock on the cable box read one time, while the analog clock above it read an hour earlier. We checked our phones which confirmed the cable box’s time, but my wrist watch and other analog clocks confirmed the other analog clock… Talk about confusing ourselves. We were exhausted from working on the master bedroom walls for the first time in 4 months and were totally baffled by what was happening. lol

Have you ever been tempted to move to Europe? Just because?

Things are going really well. My brother appears to be settling in well in his new place far from “home” and even making friends. His job is sounding like it’s requiring less travel, stress, and hours, and he’s even taking kung-fu classes!

My job changed, and I should be getting the full details of my projects tomorrow - I’m very excited. No more on-call. Yay! I have a life now. Yay again! I’m getting out and walking with the dog (it’ll be more often once it gets warmer outside). I’m working on a website with a friend for our favorite local restaurant in exchange for food. I have a growing list of design projects for another company to work on. One of the projects is a new logo design - and I think I’m finally on to something that will fit well. These projects will also help finally pay off some debt. Our taxes have been submitted and accepted - and are really nice this year because we bought the house. That should help give us a small buffer as well as catch up on a couple of things. I’m also actually making decent progress on my school work as well!

It’s amazing what some “spare” time can do.

Now to make progress on redoing the master bedroom. Ha!

It’s such a relief to no longer be on-call. I have free time in my evenings and weekends to work on the house, bring the dog out, make progress on school work and some design projects, and even relax if I want.

My new “job” at my company started today, but I still don’t have any info on who I report to or anything like that yet. I think I’ll get that on Wednesday.

Two weeks can’t come soon enough. It’s like the application that we support knows that we’re leaving so it’s helping us go out with a bang. It continues to fail over and over and no one can agree on what the root cause is. Friday’s on-call was just exhausting. I was only the secondary but it was enough wipe me out for the weekend. I feel bad for the primary on-call… he had it much worse.

I’m still not sure where I’ll be in a month and that’s a little scary. But at the moment, getting away from supporting this application and the on-call requirements outweigh that. I can’t wait to have my life back. Thankfully though it looks like I have another project or two that will at least help me pay off some more debt. It’ll help me fill up my portfolio too, so that’ll be awesome.

Meanwhile, I’ve been putting my mixer to a lot of use. I tried to make chocolate chip cookies on Christmas and they came out all wrong. Since then it’s like I have a mission to figure out how to make the perfect cookies.

A lot of things are changing at work. Our contracts are coming up for some of us and we’re getting shifted around to other opportunities. It looks like my time is coming up in a month, and I’m really looking forward to it. I think. I’m hoping that it will all be for the better, though I’m not entirely confident that I’ll enjoy the temporary positions that I’ll need to be placed into until the right one becomes available. At the very least I think that in a month I won’t have to worry about being on-call, and perhaps I can work a normal work week instead of bringing it home with me. That means that I’ll have more time to finish up my classes and perhaps even some of my design projects that I’ve had to put on hold (sorry guys!!) because of all of the projects we’re working on now.

Wish me luck!

P.S. I can’t promise that I’ll be checking MySpace often, but I did finally sign up for both Twitter and Flickr and should be updating them frequently.

It’s been ages since I’ve updated wordpress. I’ve been spending a lot of time testing the upgrade and a number of plugins, etc. Hopefully my site will be a bit less rough around the edges in no time. However, I do still have a number of other projects that I’m working on for friends, and a ton of school work. Not to mention the puppy!

So if our breathing wasn’t bad enough with our recent sinus infections / head colds - whatever you want to call them, we decided to tear down a wall.

We moved everything into the guest room - and I have to admit that after living in the master bedroom that was without wallpaper, primer, or paint (a nice WWII theme), that it was nice to stay in a room (albeit smaller) that had paint on the walls and curtains.

We started demo on Friday - removing the plaster from one wall. We removed the lath (thanks Andrew!) on Saturday, and put up some drywall (thanks Pete!) and reboxed the outlets on that wall last night. We have about 80% of the wall done - but the edges are going to require a bit more work because we’ll have to demo the connecting walls to find the studs.

If all goes well, we’ll be on our way to finish up the remaining walls in the room soon enough.

My sinus infections are becoming more few and far between - as long as I take care of myself and start taking my allergy stuff at the first sign of irritation. Last week (or was it the week before already?) I didn’t act soon enough. I’m paying for that now and recovering from another mild sinus infection. I think this is only the second one this year?

Anyway. I’ve been coughing quite a bit and have a lot of congestion. I spoke too much yesterday with a sore throat. My voice did sound pretty cool yesterday though. But now I’ve lost my voice. Work should be interesting today.

Happy Halloween.