I was up this morning of my own volition at 5:30! You know you are getting old when you finally take a regular “day job” and start waking up on your own early, early in the morning. Who am I turning into?
Today is my last full day down here this week. I will be checking out of the hotel in the morning so that I can head for home directly from the office. I am hoping that everyone leaves early on Friday which they definitely gave me the impression of yesterday. If I can leave by 5:30 then I should be able to get home about the same time that Dominica rolls in.
I talked to Dominica until almost 11:00 last night – until she got to dad’s house to pick up the puppy. It is a lot of extra driving for her each day to take care of the dog when I am out of town.
I managed to get breakfast in the hotel this morning and watch the news before going to work. That is something I don’t normally do.
I managed to get to work in just half an hour this morning. I am starting to learn my way around in this area. I am pretty confident driving now.
I got to work at 8:00 and managed to get right into the office and found my desk, logged right onto my computer and checked my email. I almost feel like I actually work there. Neat. I still don’t have very much to do during the day so I spent most of the day sitting at my desk reading documentation. I did actually get some real work today, though, and that made me very happy. I was actually able to help out and be productive for a little while. The time period when I was really working passed very quickly. If I was actually working all day I think that the time would fly by. But most of the day was idle so it dragged on forever. I am really looking forward to having work to do to keep me hopping.
I did receive my BlackBerry today although it is such a cumbersome device to configure that even after two days no one was able to get it working nor does anyone know the process for setting it up. It comes with directions but heaven only knows to whom those pertain. Certainly not us. I tried following the directions and it doesn’t work at all. The BlackBerry device itself is a very silly thing. Just a super cheap email device. The keyboard is kind of nice but overall the device is really just a two way pager. I can’t believe that so many people get excited over these things. My PocketPC is way cooler and I am pretty sure that it is cheaper too. I just don’t see the appeal. BlackBerries are pretty expensive from a management perspective as far as I understand. Lots of additional expertise necessary to get less from your system than what you probably paid for in the first place. But hey, its free. I get more technology than I had before and that makes me happy.
I got to meet more people at the office today. Both people from the team that I am on as well as our “sister” team. We are out of office space in our own area so I actually sit with the other team until my own desk and computer get set up for me somewhere.
I left work at 5:00 and drove as quickly as I could down to North Brunswick to look at those apartments that Dominica and I looked at two weeks ago. Unfortunately I got all of the way there and discovered that they close the office at 5:00. I was an hour late and I have no idea how I can ever get down there when they are open. What a pain. Why do so many rental companies only want to rent to people who don’t have jobs? Wouldn’t it make more sense to cater to people who actually work? Wouldn’t that raise the quality of your tenants? So anyway, my plan is to call them in the morning and see if I can set something up in the middle of the day. Maybe I can run down there during lunch. If I can’t make it during the day tomorrow then I will miss their March promotion which was really good AND I will be stuck spending another night in the hotel instead of going home so that I can go down there on Saturday to get the apartment. What a pain. I will not be happy if I have to stay here another day, drive back to Geneseo on Saturday and turn right around and drive back down on Sunday. That is not the kind of relaxing weekend that I need to have. I had a very busy and stressful week and of all of the weekend that I need to relax, this is the one.
It was 6:30 when I got back to the hotel. The last thing that I wanted to do was to leave the hotel again so, you guessed it, I ordered in some pizza and just ate in the hotel room. If I get stuck here tomorrow night I will do something else, I promise. But I really hope that it doesn’t come to that. I am so looking forward to going home. I don’t mind hotel life but this week has gotten to be really, really long. There has just been way too much going on from every angle.
I will feel a lot better once we get an apartment down here. Well, an apartment AND Internet access. I will be in really tough shape during the period when I have the apartment but don’t yet have the Internet access.
I managed to post the two part videos from me driving in the car yesterday morning. They are Quicktime videos and really should be a single video and not two separate ones but I don’t have a video editor with me and I didn’t want to go through all of the effort of getting one just to splice those two short videos together. They are easier to download this way anyway. So check them out and enjoy.
By 10:00 I was totally exhausted. Mostly mentally but my body was really tired of constantly sitting all day. I have gotten used to being able to move around and playing with the dog on a regular basis. Now fighting through the afternoon sleepies is almost impossible and my back is really wishing that the chair that I had at the office would recline a little. Not being able to lean back all day long is killing me.
I need to get to bed on the early side tonight because I have to get up in the morning and get the hotel room packed up before I head in to the office. The plan is that I will head home straight after work tomorrow evening. I am shooting to be home at about the same time that Dominica gets home but that will be tough. All of this hinges on being able to get out and get the apartment during my lunch break. I can just sense a really long day coming on. I am not sure that I have enough content on my MP3 player to get me through the day. There is a lot of potential driving going on throughout the day.