Birthday wishes

Happy birthday mrpaladin! 

MIA

Some of you may be wondering where I've been lately.  Heck, some of my friends who almost never post on this thing have been posting more than me.

Work has been kicking my ass for the past couple of weeks.  I've been putting in long hours.  I spend more time in meetings lately than actually getting work done.  I'm so far behind people are complaining.  This means I have absolutely no free time.  I've been short with people.  All in all, just not good stuff and so, no time for posts.

Are things going to get better?  Probably not soon.  We just kicked off the implementation of a new ERP system at work yesterday.  The high level kick-off meeting for the executives took two hours.  I'm part of the internal four person implementation team.  Yesterday I found out I should plan on spending 50% of my time for the next four to six months on this project.  The vendor, who will be working closely with us, said we may want to plan on fifty-five hour weeks for that time frame.  That part sounded pretty sweet; they're increasing my work load by 50% and cutting my hours back.  Unfortunately, they were assuming we were working forty hour weeks.  :-(

So that's the bad news.  The good news is, um, uh... yeah.  *sigh*

Weekend review...

...and only a day late.  Not bad the way things are going lately.  I still have to put up my post about the prior NERO weekend.  That one has been in progress for a week now and will probably come later this week.

This past weekend consisted of three things, financial stuff, database work and Battlestar Galactica.

With everything that's been taking my time lately, I've been really bad about our personal finances.  It's been almost two months since I sat down and balanced my checkbook and planned the budget.  I've been paying the critical regular bills (mostly) on blind faith.  Yeah I know, not a great thing to do.  So it took me several hours on Saturday to balance everything, redo the budget and get caught up on all the bills.  I was only off by $14 and change.  Not bad for ignoring it for a long time.

Sunday I spent most of the day working on the workflow database for United Healthcare, where I'm doing a consultant gig with all my free time.  The project keeps changing scope and direction.  I hate that.  The worst part is that I live with the project director.  I'll be focusing on it and she'll be working on something else and keep asking me questions, pulling me away from the design work.  Then she doesn't want to hear the reasons I'm behind schedule.  It's a good thing I love her and that I enjoy designing databases.  Of course, getting paid for it doesn't hurt either.  ;-)

We've been catching up on Battlestar Galactica.  This amazes me.  I never would have pictured Monique liking this show, but she's more into it than I am.  We started watching it over again as we'd missed a big chunk in the middle of season 3.  We didn't want to get into season 4 without the full picture so we've been watching it from the beginning before getting into season 4 (though we've been recording it).  We managed to get in about six episodes this weekend.

So all in all, not a bad weekend.