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!