The Longest Schlep – Still Schlepping

Where do you go from a beautiful day spent piloting a plane over the gorgeous waters of South Florida? Nowhere but down, that’s where. This week has been one of shock and awe…and at times just plain shockingly awful.

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If it’s one if by land and two if by sea, light up three lanterns, baby, because I’m airborne!

I haven’t managed to do a whole heck of a lot since moving down here to Ft. Lauderdale, but somehow last weekend I managed to pull the coolest weekend ever out of the bag! I was a bit late leaving work Friday afternoon because I had a few things I was trying to get done when a guy who’d been in my training class IM’ed me to say hey, and five minutes later I had an invite to go flying in a four-seater Cessna the next morning. Score! I’ve always wanted to do that! Apparently a guy he worked with was a flight instructor as a hobby on weekends and asked if anybody wanted to go for a flight. Umm….yeah. Yeah I would. I can hardly stop grinning whenever I fly on ordinary jumbo jet airlines, put me in a fun little thing like a Cessna and I might need a minute alone.

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So tonight I finally felt like writing something. I was all set and ready to go when I noticed my laptop wasn’t connecting to my wireless connection, and I’ve become too much of a wireless snob to use a network cable that’s tethered to the wall. Sometimes the box goes on the fritz and I have to reset it, so when I went to quickly do that before I sat down to bash out a post a long time in the making, I was absolutely appalled when I traced the power cord from the router through my hand to find the adapter, only to have the frayed ends of a severed cord slip through my grasp. And my little Bora, the wire chewer, looking so sweet and innocent…yeah right. My alarm clock’s radio antenna apparently didn’t slake her thirst for electronic destruction. So, after a fair amount of time spent splicing wires and brushing up on the electrical skills I’d learned when designing my graduation cap last year, here I am–online, wireless and nearly too tired to write.

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Part of the reason I’ve been putting off updating my blog is that I haven’t really wanted to go into a sad subject. I couldn’t very well not go into it though, so I decided that I’ll just post about it in its own little sad post so that when I do my regular one I can start fresh and happy!

 The week before last while I was still in training at work we had our usual Monday departmental meeting. We all found out that day that one of our team members, Ed, had died of a brain aneurysm. It was a really awful time. I’d been working closely with Ed on a project and he’d been helping me get used to things at work and had become the person I felt closest to. It was just so bizarre to think that he wouldn’t be back. For the longest I expected to see him pop his head into my cube to say hello and it was really frustrating knowing I couldn’t walk two desks over and ask him a question anymore. It took a while to get used to and it still doesn’t feel right now. I just got my first real project assigned to me, which is an update of a course he wrote, so all the documentation and stuff I’ve been working with has his name on it and it seems like every time I ask someone something about it Ed’s name comes up. It’s nice to hear his name still. I think it would be even sadder if everyone acted like he’d never been around in the first place.

We use Yahoo! Messenger at work to communicate with one another, and Ed’s name is still on my list. It’s weird seeing the little sleeping face next to his name and knowing he’ll never sign on again. I guess when things like this happen to people you know it makes you think about things a lot more. After nearly three weeks I’m a bit burnt out on introspection though! Ed was awesome and I miss him. But he was a happy guy, so now it’s time to move on to a happy post…

Actually, things have been extremely busy and not too lazy at all, but I haven’t been able to muster up the brain power to try and tackle everything that’s happened in the past few weeks. And today is no different. I’ll try and update properly within the next couple of days, but until then, I do at least have a cute cat video!

It doesn’t seem fair that the worst times drag on forever and good times go by all too quickly. This week in particular was neither really great nor really bad, though, so it went by about as quickly as you could expect. It was a week a bit like the intro to Tale of Two Cities, so I suppose the best times and the worst averaged out to be, well, average. I’ll take that! Hey, lukewarm is a vast improvement…

I thought this week was going to be awful seeing as how I was back in training full-time at work again. It actually turned out all right in the end, although I’m only halfway done now and still have the worst part (a presentation in front of my boss and my boss’ boss) ahead of me. The people in my training class have been really nice and fun, so it’s made it a lot easier than it otherwise would have been. Unless you consider learning how to install and customize application virtualization software a good time, in which case the activities alone and the 1,000+ page book would be all you could ever ask for.

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Despite being a short week at work, and considering it started out with a trip to the Bahamas, this seemed like a painfully long week, so I was more than happy when a girl from work (I’ll call her Girl from now on…you’ll understand why) emailed me about meeting up for happy hour Friday evening after work. Little did I know then that over the course of the several hours we would spend together, an entire hour’s worth of happiness would be wishful thinking.

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This week I found myself with a substantial amount of time on my hands, so I turned to Google, as I so often do, to satisfy my simple entertainment needs. It is amazing the vast amount of useless junk you can find on the Internet! (Not that I claim this blog is in any way useful, other than for Kelly’s morning entertainment at work and to satisfy my own narcissistic tendencies.) So, lacking any other mildly entertaining news, I thought I’d share with you some of the random sites that have helped waste a few additional hours of my life.

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I’m back from what is without a doubt the shortest trip abroad I’ve ever taken. I’m not even sure if “abroad” is the best word to use, considering I’ve traveled farther for an afternoon of shopping, but The Bahamas is still a separate country, even if they didn’t stamp my passport when I passed through the empty customs hall.

I had to wake up painfully early yesterday morning to get to Port Everglades by 6:30. It wouldn’t have been quite so bad, except I’d been woken up by a kitten jumping on my face and hadn’t managed to get back to sleep. When I got to the port it took a while to get through check-in and I was seriously regretting not having stopped off at Starbucks on the way over. By the time I made it through the first enormous line I had a headache, by the time I made it through the second I had a migraine, and by the time I actually made it onboard and to the breakfast buffet I was prepared to physically assault a waiter if I didn’t get my coffee cup filled within two seconds.

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At the tender age of 23, I’ve decided to become a cat lady. Aww, bless. Not the crazy long-haired variety that smells of mothballs and Tender Vittles, mind you, but the young, cool kind that wears stilettos and watches Cash in the Attic every morning before work. Heh, oops…well at least I’m young.

This morning started off infinitely better than yesterday, which wasn’t exactly a difficult feat to accomplish. I woke up by 7:30 because I was so excited about going down to the humane society to look for a kitten. I bided my time, drinking my coffee and watching a little Cash in the Attic, then left in time to make it to the shelter by the time it opened.

When I got to the shelter and went into the cattery it was so exhilarating! I hadn’t gotten myself a new cat since I got Jasmine when I was 10. It was really neat knowing I would be getting a pet that would be with me through everything that’s going to happen for the next decade and more! It was a bit scary at the same time, committing to take care of and clean up after a little thing for years to come, to love it even after it shreds my couch and throws up all over the carpet, but there was never any point in my life where I would’ve traded away even one day with Jasmine. It’s just that much extra fun and love to go around.

So since I was in a share-the-love kind of mood, I decided to share the love with not one kitten, but two. I had thought it over and decided that one little kitten would be lonely in my apartment all by itself (and I read online that a single kitten tends to be more destructive than those with a friend to entertain them), so I picked out two kittens–a boy and a girl. They are both absolutely beautiful. I get to go pick them up tomorrow afternoon once they’ve been neutered/spayed. Then I can commence my life as a bona fide cat lady.

After much consideration I decided to name the boy Acton and the girl Bora. I took some pictures with my camera phone today at the shelter, so from left to right are Bora and Acton. The decent one of Acton is the one from the Humane Society of Broward County’s Web site, where he was the cat of the week this week. 🙂 The one on the far right is a picture of their cubicles with their “I’m adopted!” signs. This is just a sample of all the kitty fun and thousands of pictures that are sure to come!