Waiting Game

I'm down to the dregs of the cold, which is to say a little bit of a sniffle and an occasional cough. Which is good, because we've got a busy few days ahead of us.

Fall Festival tonight, errands and Art Day tomorrow morning, visiting friends tomorrow afternoon, and of course all the excitement of Hallowe'en on Sunday.

Which I think I already talked about in my last post, so I apologize for the repetition.

I know my posting here has been kind of sporadic. I expect it will continue to be for a while.

I'm playing a waiting game right now at work. Two documents I'm working for next week need new screenshots. (One of them just needs two screenshots; the other needs about sixteen of them, because the author stole a chapter from another product's installation guide on how to install Windows Server 2008, which is fine -- except that this particular product doesn't use Server 2008, it uses Server 2005. So while the actual instructions don't vary much between the two, all the pictures are wrong.)

I did all my paperwork yesterday. Well, all of it that I could do. There's a few documents that I need to scan to PDF, but our copier/printer/scanner is broken, so that task is on hold until the repair guy can get out here. So now I'm just waiting on those screenshots, really.

I need to swing by the bank today and get my passport out of the safe deposit box. Not for any exciting reason, though, alas. My company is issuing everyone a new smartcard badge, only being the company that it is, it's doing it in the most ridiculously byzantine manner possible. So in order to get my new badge, I've got an appointment for next Wednesday to drive to a location about 45 minutes away (at least I don't have to go all the way up to one of the NoVA offices, I guess) and present not one, not two, but three forms of identification: my old badge, my driver's license, and either a passport or official birth certificate. (There are some other options, but those are the prime candidates.) Which, I have to say, is simply absurd. Turning in the old badge makes sense. Showing my driver's license even makes sense, if they want to make sure I'm me.

But seriously? Passport/birth certificate? WTF? Who do you think you're fooling, here? This badge is not going to gain me access to secure locations or classified data, here. It's a key to the building (where secure data is required to be kept under lock and key) and a login for my encrypted laptop. Oooo, a mis-issued badge could get the Bad Guys access to the company intranet, where they could be just as stymied as me by the completely labyrinthine corporate sites!

And seriously? You're making everyone in our office drive an hour and a half, round-trip, for what should be a 15-minute photo-and-printing job? We write software to issue smartcards for the military, stupid company, we know how it's done. We know how excessively complicated you're making it, and we know how stupid it is that one guy can't pack up the camera and a card printer and come up here to our office and get 90% of us in one day.

God, I hate bureaucracy.

Shaping Up

The weekend is shaping up to be busy, already.

Friday evening, I think Matt and I are splitting up to take the kids to separate Fall Festival events at various locations.

Saturday, Matt is leaving bright and early (really. like, at 6am) to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity in DC with Braz. I'll get up slightly later with the kids, watch some TV, eat breakfast, and then take Penny down to my brother's for an "art lesson" with him. I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with Alex in the meantime -- maybe we'll just go visit my folks for an hour or so. I'm not sure exactly when Matt will get home, but the rally ends at 3, so I don't expect to see him until 7 or 8 at the earliest. Later if they stop to do something crazy like, say, eat.

Sunday, of course, is Hallowe'en, and I expect Penny to be in full crazy mode all day. Which will either be enormous fun or hugely irritating. Maybe I should come up with a craft/project/activity for the afternoon to reduce the crazymaking potential.

Somewhere in there, we'll need to carve our pumpkins.

And watch Nightmare Before Christmas.

And eat some candy.

Of course.

Cold

What I'd hoped was an allergy attack appears to be an honest-to-god cold. I should've been suspicious when I got sniffly; my allergies usually live in my ears, not in my nose.

The good news is that the sore throat from the post-nasal drip is pretty much gone. The bad news is that it's been replaced with that bricks-for-sinuses leadhead sensation and a persistent, if mild, headache.

I took some Tylenol Cold & Sinus before bed last night. One of these days, I'll remember that nothing really works on my colds and that, whether it's listed as "daytime" or "nighttime", it's going to make me groggy but not allow me to get any real rest. Bleh.

And at 4:30, Penny woke up with a coughing attack and kept both Matt and I awake for a good while.

So when the alarm went off at 6... I rolled over and groaned and fumbled for a kleenex so I could breathe, and then decided that I can excuse myself from the morning workouts when I'm feeling miserable and sick.

If I didn't have documents to cover, I'd have thought seriously about staying home and going back to bed today. As it is, I've got six documents sitting in the hopper. Two of them have to be delivered tomorrow, one goes next Monday (but is huge, and there are three others that will be going with it that I haven't received yet) and the other three are advance prepwork for a massive software delivery in a couple of weeks. I'll also find out today whether one of our customers is going to want an unfinished software delivery tomorrow (...yeah, really. I told the manager that if they do that to me, then someone owes me a drink) so that could be a big scramble, too.

That's not even considering the paperwork that's stacking up and waiting for me to have time to get to it.

On the plus side, the ugly documents that were originally on the schedule for Friday have been pushed down a couple of weeks, so if I get through Wednesday's deliveries intact and the deliveries for Monday are in reasonable shape, maybe I can work from home or even take a couple of extra hours off on Thursday or Friday.

Damocles

It was a really good weekend -- we enjoyed visiting with Rachael and Rimas and their adorable little girl. I took many cute pictures while we were at Pumpkinville -- check out my Flickr account to see!

I'd link them straight here, but blah blah blah insane amounts of work and also blah blah blah IS dragons not letting me see Flickr myself.

It was a good weekend, though, just the right amount of Stuff To Do balanced with quiet evenings. On the other hand, I had this work situation looming over me like the sword of Damocles the whole time, so I never really quite managed to relax. Every time I started to, I remembered this crap situation waiting for me, lurking just out of the corner of my eye, like a spiderweb I'm trying to ignore.

And to make matters even more fun, my allergies hit with a vengeance yesterday -- I spent the whole day with a post-nasal-drip sore throat. I'm drugged up today, but still sniffly and sore.

It's going to be a completely crap few weeks. I apologize now if my blog posts are extra-short, whiny and/or even entirely absent.

Shrinkydink

I bought this Hallowe'en Shrinky Dink kit for Penny, on a whim. I fondly remembered Shrinky Dinks from when I was a kid and thought she might enjoy it. (I mentioned it to Matt, who said he'd never heard of it. I was shocked -- I thought every child of the 70s had Shrinky Dinks!)

They're just as fun as I remember. For an hour or so, Penny colored and I cut, punched, baked, and assembled little plastic Hallowe'en decorations. We peered in the oven to watch and marvel as the plastic sheets curled and shriveled and re-formed at a quarter their original size. Then Penny hung them on the little decorative tree, and we were both as pleased as punch with the results; only one of the two dozen or so pieces got stuck to itself and refused to flatten.

I saved the scraps that were big enough that we might be able to do something with them, so maybe later we'll try some freehand pictures and see how those go.

I'm definitely getting more of these. And I might even share some of it with Penny.

Crunch

Time is a funny thing. It compresses oddly. Things stack.

The document person at my office is leaving for another job. Tomorrow is her last day. As near as I can tell, the job posting for her replacement still isn't posted.

Which means I'm looking at doing all the documentation for my office for at least the next month. And picking up a lot of the slack for another month or so beyond that, as the new person gets settled in and trained.

And I won't say my days were already full, because they weren't, but time is a funny thing, and the times when I was busy before? Those are the same times that the document person was busy, which means that I'll be spending the next few months swinging between insanely busy and dead bored. Oh, goodie.

Penny's school is having its Fall Festival tomorrow night. We won't be going, because Matt's sister and her family are coming in to visit us for the weekend. We're not sure what the plans are with them, entirely, though. I thought a trip to Pumpkinville could be fun, or maybe the Virginia Living Museum's Hallowe'en events. They said something at one point about taking the kids so Matt and I could get away, too, though I don't know if that's still in the cards or not -- it sounds nice, but with such a short visit, I don't know if there will be time.

Penny begged me this morning to take her to the middle school's Fall Festival instead, which is next Friday... and lines up exactly with Alex's daycare's Fall Festival, which I'd assumed we would be going to. (Matt and I may split up and take the kids to the separate festivals, since I suspect there will be little at the middle school festival to interest Alex, and similarly not much at the daycare to hold Penny's attention.)

Note to self: plan a quick-and-easy dinner for next Friday that we can eat as soon as everyone gets home.

Also next weekend, Matt's going up to DC for the Rally to Restore Sanity, and then of course there's Hallowe'en the next day...

Breathing? Completely optional, at this point.

Purple

I'm wearing my purple today for the GLBT Spirit Day in memory of the teens who were hounded and bullied literally to death, and in support of kids everywhere who have been taught that it's wrong to be what they are.

I have said it before and I will say it again: what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes is their own business, and thinking it's yucky is not sufficient excuse for banning it altogether. We're adults, for pity's sake: if someone offers you something you don't want, say "no thanks" and move on with your life. It's a rule that applies equally to vegetables, media, and sex. Say no (politely, if you were raised right!) and move on.

Nor is religion a valid reason to ban anything in a country founded on religious tolerance; by all means follow whatever rules your deity of choice has laid on you, but those rules have no place in civil law.

In the meantime, my publisher's LiveJournal community is celebrating the ruling against the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. That's a fight that's far from over, and some are worried that the ruling will end up being a step in the wrong direction, but for now, we're enjoying it.

In other news... Alex has stopped referring to my back-scratcher as a "back'n scratch'n stick" which makes me slightly sad, because "back'n scratch'n stick was just adorable. Sometimes I wish I could just freeze him right where he is. Two-year-olds are supposed to be difficult and horrendous, but Alex is sweet and adorable and wonderful most of the time, and when he's not, there's usually a pretty clear reason for it. I love this age, and I'll miss it when it's gone. How much longer is the word "adorable" going to be my go-to adjective for him? How much longer is he going to run pell-mell into my arms the first time he sees me each morning and evening, or dissolve into a giggle fit when I'm tucking him into bed at night?

Memories to be treasured. He'll be a three-year-old in just two months.

Which is not to say I'm not looking forward to seeing what the future brings for him, and not just because the end of diapers and naps will make planning our afternoons so much easier. Penny gets more complex and interesting with every passing day. Sometimes when we're talking, I forget that she's only seven, her thoughts can be so clear and straightforward. In the last few weeks I've had fascinating conversations with her about acting and theater, about death, about God and religion and faith vs. proof, about college and growing up, and (just to bring it all full circle) about gay marriage. (She brought that up on her own, not me.)

And they're only going to get smarter and cooler and more interesting as they grow.