I had an almost astonishingly productive morning yesterday, but when I'd finished, I was afraid to try to test the results. So that's what I have to do today - test yesterday's code, and make a couple more minor changes so I can finish it all up. Luckily, they pushed the deadline back to next Friday, or I probably wouldn't have been able to finish in time.
Not without working afternoons, at any rate.
I was sortof thinking about jobs yesterday. Kris and I talk about work occasionally, because even though our jobs have nothing to do with each other, I'm sortof jealous of her situation. She's a part-time nurse who more or less gets to pick her own hours. I love that idea, that freedom.
We talked about telecommuting. I'd love to telecommute part-time. I work so much better when things are quiet and I'm not being interrupted or distracted. Ideally, I'd telecommute two or three days a week - that way, I wouldn't be out of touch with the office, I could still confer with other people on my team and attend meetings and that kind of thing, but I'd actually be able to get some work done when it was necessary, too.
Anyway, the conversation got me thinking, and I sortof started thinking about sending my resume around, just to see if I got any nibbles; to find out if I could land a job with a telecommuting option. And then I kept thinking, because while I like building algorithms and designing interfaces, the actual programming part of the job is tedious and boring.
And I started thinking about teaching again.
It always comes back to teaching. I love to teach. I'm actually pretty good at it. There are enough business colleges and community colleges in this area that I could probably get a job teaching fairly easily. Heck, I have a master's degree in mathematics - most of the local public schools would hire me sight-unseen and pay for me to take the three or so classes I'd need to be certified as a teacher, they're so desperate for teachers in general and math teachers in particular.
But it would cut my pay in half. (Approximately, depending on where I wound up.) And the benefits aren't nearly as nice. A little idle figuring (because that's what us mathematicians do) tells me that either Matt or I alone could pay the mortgage on the house right now if it weren't for Matt's student loans, but I'm not sure I wouldn't feel like a sponge if I suddenly took a massive pay cut in order to pursue a job that I only think I'd like better than the one I've got now.
(For damn sure if I were a teacher I wouldn't be able to spend as much time online during the day.)
So I'm chickening out once again. But it's kindof hard to watch my colleagues, who are so obviously doing exactly what they want to do with their lives. They love programming and computers in a way that I think I never will. And it will be forty years before I can even think of retiring.
Word of the Day: collywobbles - bellyache
Now that's interesting. The definition, that is. I tend to learn the meanings of words through context instead of looking them up, and I've always thought that collywobbles meant something along the lines of butterflies in one's stomach. Not an ache, but a general uneasy feeling.
I get touchy about meanings of things. My second reason for never reading another David Eddings book is his frequent mis-use of the word "bleak." He uses it a lot when what he really wants to say is "grim." But while they're similar, and there are certainly occasions when either word is appropriate, "bleak" to me has connotations of sadness or depression, and Eddings kept using it when the overall feel he wanted to convey was anger and implacability. It was like hitting a speed bump - being jolted out of the story. (My first reason has to do with the fact that he's only got one real plot and a pretty limited selection of personalities, so once you've read one David Eddings series, you've read them all. But that's a rant for another day.)
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