It was a good visit and while we were there:

• enjoyed a bit of Christmas fun at Bronner’s
• bought a new hat (kind of like this but in a dark grey)
• picked up a new light fixture for our porch (only $56!)
• picked up Zoe’s Tale and read it (very likey Mr. Scalzi’s best work yet)
• some books from the local used book store
• ate far too much food, including some fresh taffy we picked up in Frankenmuth
• reminisced with Mom & Aunt Penny (including going through a bunch of old photos)

Ah, good times.  :)

Update: Oh yeah, I almost forgot.  Friday (day before we came back) got a call from awelkin that our furnace had gone out while we were gone and the indoor temp was down to 40 degrees.  Urk!  Fortunately with some slight prompting, the inestimable Bryon was able to revive it.  My in-laws stopped in to check on it the next day while we were in transit and the house was all nice and warm again.  Wahoo!

¹ Versus the 9–10 hours we were expecting the drive to take.

Thanksgiving Vacation © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Sunday was a better day though. We drove out to Davenport to visit with a friend, as she invited us out for a bit of a BBQ³. The BBQ was very nice, though everybody else who’d talked to her about it cancelled on her (shame on them!). After we ate, we sat around chatting for a good, long while. Though he add to move away from her brick oven/grill as the wood was popping/crackling and spitting bits of hot ash out at us. Later we went out and caught a movie (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End). It was a fun movie, but not good. Over the night, Michelle had multiple coughing fits and finally around 3 AM this morning I gave up trying to get any sleep. I dinked around for a while and then ended up mowing the lawn in the early hours of the morning. It wasn’t fun, but it needed to be done. On the bright side, I did make some progress on my super-secret decorating project (more on that when I finish it) this weekend, which is a very good thing.

¹ Some gardening books for her, some paints for my super-secret decorating project.
² At least it wasn’t hurting at the time.
³ And unlike other people issuing invitations to get together, she actually replied when we contacted her.

What a Weekend © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

2005. May. 7th. Ariesna and I were joined in wedded bliss. Unfortunately with her just finishing her degree and paying for a wedding money was tight so we didn’t have the cash to go some place exotic and we couldn’t really afford to spend more than a night away. So I picked a B&B just a few hours drive away. A helpful friend had recommended it as the most romantic B&B in the area. After the ceremony & reception, we drove out and enjoyed our one night there.

2006. Ariesna and I went back to the same B&B for an entire weekend. We ate out at a couple of nice restaurants, did a little shopping and hit up an art museum while we were there. It was a grand time, but by the end of it we were both tired. We got home, chilled for a while and eventually went to bed. Blissful slumber was interrupted at 4:30 AM by me waking up feeling like I was choking and/or drowning. I ran into the bathroom and spent the next 15 minutes or so kneeling in front of the porcelain throne. After getting myself cleaned up, I tried going back to bed but woke up a while later with the same problem. Again, I eventually got cleaned up and tried going back to bed. Later, I got the intense fun of making a trip to the doctor on what was supposed to be the last day of my vacation. I got weighed¹, poked, prodded and a q-tip was shoved down my throat². The doctor confirmed I had the flu combined with a sinus infection. However he was worried that I was severely dehydrated and wanted to put me on an IV to get some fluids in me. Alas after much poking (in both arms), they realized I was too dehydrated for the needle to go in properly. Eventually, they gave up on the IV and let Ariesna take me home. Though they did tell her to keep pushing fluids down me and recommended she get me to drink 2 liters of gatorade that day and keep pushing the fluids at me the next. She did so, continually waking me up from some of the best sleep I’ve ever had to drink, drink drink. And I don’t even like gatorade! *sigh* I mean the fruit punch version isn’t too bad but the rest.… yeck.

Anyhoo, I ended up spending the entire week home sick and now the night before I finally go back to the office I am feeling much better. I’m just not at 100% yet. My sinuses throb (and continually drain down my throat) and on top of that I’ve got an evening cough³ which feels like it’s going to rip my throat in half. But I’m still taking the anti-biotics the doctor prescribed and I’m hoping when the pills are gone so will be the last of my health problems.

Oh yeah, if you’re wondering about the title on this post that’s pretty much all the food I’ve eaten in the last week. It’s been thrilling. :(

¹ No, I’m not repeating what that lying hunk of metal claimed was my weight.
² Apparently, that’s part of the test for strep throat. Only nobody warned me in advance. Incidentally, the test came back negative but it has a 15% chance of failure.
³ It only happens after 5. No idea on why that is, but there you have it.

Banana, Crackers and Gatorade… Oh my! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Wednesday afternoon, a co-worker and myself had to drive 4 hours to my current employer’s home office. Instead of heading straight to the hotel, we stopped along the way to get dinner. We ended up hitting the hotel around 8 PM. When we checked in there was a message asking us to call our supervisor. Neither one of us liked the sound of that. We tried calling her back but got her answering machine. We left a message and I went to my own room. I had been laying down for just about an hour and was thinking of hitting up the hotel’s hottub when the room phone rang. I picked it up and it was my supervisor. She was calling to tell me the company had decided to close our office once the lease runs out. Apparently, there’s going to be some sort of transition plan if you want to move out by the home office and continue working for the company. But as I told a co-worker, I’d rather slit my wrists then move to keep working for this company. So I’ve got somewhere between 4 — 8 months to find a different job¹. Needless to say, I didn’t get a lot of sleep that night and I wasn’t feeling motivated for teaching the next day.

Thursday, I went into the office. I chatted with a few people and they were all sympathetic (and wanting to know what we were going to do). Then I checked on the classroom and it wasn’t setup correctly, so I got to do some last minute running around to get it fixed. Then I taught, trying not to put them to sleep. The two big problems with the class were that it had to be put together at the last minute and I had 3 different groups of people attending the class. Each group having a different, non-overlapping skill set; making it impossible not to be too basic for one part of the class while being totally over the head of a different part. *sigh* Still some people seemed to get something out of the class and nobody actually snored through it.

Thursday night, we drove home.

Friday, I went into my soonish-to-be-closed office and while it was a dark humor going around; most people seemed happier than I’ve seen them for some time. Maybe good things will come of this moronic decision. Who knows? I just know that I’m going to be much more motivated to find a different job (I’d been half-heartedly looking already) and the company’s customers who pay support fees are going to get seriously pissed off².

So if any of my readers are in the Eastern Iowa area and are hiring, maybe you could let me know?

¹ We’ve got some kind of extension on the lease so it’s anybody’s guess when exactly our office will be closed, but we do know it will happen sometime between September and December.
² From what I understand the majority of the company’s best help desk personnel are in my office. So the customers will have to wait longer to get somebody to talk to them about their issue(s) and then wait even longer for that person to fix their issue(s).

Employment Woes © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Let me ‘splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Buttercup is marry’ Humperdinck in a little less than half an hour. And every Wednesday, myself and a few co-workers head over to the Terrapin to get a cup of real coffee². Almost without fail, I order a “Grand Canyon” which is 2 shots of espresso, steamed milk, a shot of dark chocolate syrup and a shot of mango syrup. *yum* When I got there today, I picked up their tea menu and Rob (one of the owners) ordered me to put it down. I explained about the congestion and he accepted it, but I wouldn’t say he was happy about it. Then I ordered their Chinese Breakfast tea, as the description sounded similar to the yunnan jig tea I’ve mentioned before. Hot caffeinated beverages acquired, we headed back to the office and I headed back to the mountain of email that had arrived while I’d been out. After clearing out that mess (most of it went straight to the trash), I started/continued testing a problem I’d been working on Friday. I’m still processing the data for that test now, but I’m also starting to wonder if I should have stayed home again.

Today, like Sunday, I woke up feeling better than the day before. The problem is like Sunday, I didn’t stay home. Sunday, Ariesna & I were invited to go to Niabi Zoo over in Illinois with some of her family. It was a fun day and I took quite a few pictures³ but by the end of the day, I was totally wiped out and realized I should have stayed home. Now I’m not wiped out (so far) but I do feel more tired than I should from just sitting at a desk, staring at a computer screen. Ah well, not much I can do about that now.

BTW, last night I upgraded Cath’s site to the current version of WordPress. I was kind of annoyed at how long it took but then most of that time was taken up my crappy ftp client having problems deleting the files for the old version from the webserver. Mind you I was booted into Windows at the time⁴ which undoubtably was part of the problem. But I did eventually get it done and wouldn’t you know it looks nearly identical to what it did before. I’d call that a good sign for a seamless upgrade, but I’m waiting to hear back from her before I call it a success. So why the upgrade? In part to patch some old security holes and in part because all the new/interesting stuff for WP is happening on the newer versions. This way if she feels like going out and picking a different theme⁵; it should be trivial to install it.

Anyway, one of the reasons I was annoyed with the amount of time it took was last night also happened to be the season premier for NCIS. I’ve been a fan of this show for a while now, but season 2’s finale was murder. Quite literally, as they killed off one of the NCIS agents. I was very much looking forward to seeing where they’d take the show next, but with upgrading the site and some other things I didn’t get to watch the show as thoroughly as I would have liked. From what I did see, I’m not sure how enjoyable season 3 will be. I don’t care for the new characters they introduced into the NCIS office (Director Jenny Shepard and Agent Ziva David). The romatic background between Gibbs & Shepard could be an interesting subplot but they seem to be pushing it too hard in an episode which should be dealing more directly with the remaining NCIS agents working to find Kate’s killer. And then to make the episode a 2-parter leaving us on another cliff-hanger is distinctly annoying. *sigh* I guess we’ll have to wait and see if they can pull this up with next week’s episode.

¹ Next to chicken noodle soup, hot tea works best for clearing up congestion and helping me feel better.
² The first part of this paragraph is a quote from The Princess Bride. And when I say coffee, I mean flavored espresso.
³ I’ll see about posting some of them later. Incidentally, there was a classic car show being held on the zoo’s premises so don’t be surprised if you see more car than animals photos.
⁴ I had some work to do that required M$ Word, as OpenOffice Writer couldn’t properly edit the fancy formating in the document (originally created in M$ Word).
⁵ By perhaps looking through the themes in Alex King’s Theme Browser.…

Feeling Better & Mumbling Randomly © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Employee Self-Appraisal Form

Instructions

To complete electronically, use the Tab key to go to the next field. To complete analogly: print this off, pull that pen out of your ass ear and scribble in your answers.

Name: Mark
Enslavement Date: 02 June 1997
Department: Crappy Code Catchers
Job Title: Intensification Whiz
Appraisal Period: From — Then, To — Now

Objective

This form is designed for you to explain to management how you’re screwing the company out of it’s money. It’s your chance to step back from the day-to-day pressures of your thralldom, and take an honest look at where you’ve been, where you are and what other company you might want to go to in the future.

Appraisal Procedures:

1. Complete this Self Appraisal Form, print out, and return to your manager via CONFIDENTIAL Interoffice envelope. Do NOT send your via diskettes or Internet email! Do NOT save this form to either the corporate LAN or your corporate PC hard drive! If you must save the document, please do so on a floppy disk. This way we can be sure that the original copy of your review can never be recovered should you decide to disagree with management’s assessment of your worthlessness.
2. Your supervisor will complete his appraisal of you. Most likely, this will take next to no time at all as they’re just going to blow you off exactly like they did last year. Management will then review your self appraisal and your supervisor’s evaluation to develop a GOALS & PERSONAL IMPROVEMENT PLAN for you to review before they fire you.
3. Supervisor meets with you to give you your termination notice. During this exit interview, you and the supervisor will discuss each appraisal topic, areas that need to be addressed, your career path, and the steps that need to be taken to get you on your way to your next employer. Specific goals will be set for the next review period; if you are so fortunate as to be staying with our company.
4. The original form must be signed and then placed in your permanent record. That way when your mind finally snaps; we can turn it over to the NSA.

Elements of your Job:

Describe your primary responsibilities and duties — your job description, as you understand it. While we’ve changed your job description approximately 8 times in 6 months; if you get this wrong, you will be fired.
Avoiding as much real work as possible.
Maintaining the illusion that I’m doing real work whenever under direction observation by either a supervisor or a manager.
Collect paychecks.
Eat the free donuts.

Accomplishments:

List your major accomplishments and contributions during this past review period. If you didn’t have any, don’t expect to be getting another pay check from us.
Avoided being downsized during reorganization.

Improvements made since your last appriasal:

What have you done to make it worth our while to keep you around instead of hiring a chimp to do your job?
Photographed company CEO “boinking” his secretary, but haven’t given copies of the images to his wife.

Self-Management:

Face it, you’re a screw up and we know it. So be honest and tell us exactly how you’ve been screwing up this year.
Failed to find another job.

Job Satisfaction:

A) What part of your job interests you the most?
Payday.
B) The least?
Coming to work every day.

Training:

Is what part of your job do you feel particularly inferior?
Coming to work.

What got in your way:

Find something (or somebody else) to blame for your shortcomings this year.
It’s all Wally’s fault.

Fully Utilitized:

How can we more fully exploit you?
I plead the 5th.

Personal Influences:

Note any personal factors that you feel should be considered in your present assignment or future jobs.
Do you mean beside that bong I smoked after chugging down my martini lunch?

Leadership/Employee Development

List for us all the ways you were able to bully your cow-orkers and/or underlings into doing your work for you.
See my answer to “Improvements made since your last appriasal:”

List project goals you are currently focused on:

• Collecting my paycheck.
• Building up vacation/sick time.
• Calculating the maximum amount of belly-button lint that will fit in an empty Coke can.

Personal improvement goals:

Since we know you’ve spent the past year screwing around on company time; can you list some things you could do to improve your productivity (if you were still working here next year)?
I could try actually working for once.

Where do you want your career to go:

What company do you want to be working in one year? In three years? In five years?
Screw all this, I just wanna win the Powerball and be independentally wealthy for the rest of my life.

General management comments:

Since we all know you’re going to be fired; here’s your one real shot to blame management for your failures. Note to secretary: Please cover this section in white-out before passing on to management. Thanks!
You’re all a bunch of bleepards!

Additional comments:

Any parting words?
Piss off!

Self-Evaluation © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I am Rumpelstiltskin!
Find your fairy tale character at kelly.moranweb.com.

I’m baaaack! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.