April 26, 2005

The Wegmans contract finally came through and everything got finalized this afternoon and I am writing today’s update from the back room of the Titus Ave. store in Irondequoit, NY near where Josh and I used to live many, many moons ago.

I slept in quite late this morning getting ready to work the overnight tonight. I am SO excited to finally be back working again and nothing could be better than this contract. I am working Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights from today until the first week in October. Only some of those weeks I am not working all three nights. In fact, almost half of those weeks I am only working two nights. But the pay is the same regardless – more or less I am salaried which is awesome for this type of work. On average, I will work 2.5 shifts per week and often those will not be eight hour shifts. In fact, they could be as little as four hours. And not only that, but there is generally a one hour lunch break during that four hours as well that is also paid. So, the job situation is actually starting to look a little bit better. For a change.

Min was up at some reasonable hour this morning but she woke me up at noon when my contact with the consulting firm called to make sure that everything was ready for tonight. What a good feeling to wake up knowing that you will get to go to work tonight. It has been a long time since I had that feeling. I worked for five weeks at the end of last year but this is six months of work stretching out in front of me. This will actually be one of the longest projects that I have been on since IBM in 2000. Everything else has been really short projects and, of course, the Niagara work that I always do.

Dominica had to go up to the city to take care of a few things today. She had to do her exit interview at the hotel that she wasn’t able to do last week and she had to do some shopping. Min accepted a one month teaching position, full time, down at Castile this morning that they had talked to us about last Friday. We prayed about it over the weekend and decided that it would be a good opportunity for now. She is going to use this month to work on getting her A+ and other credentials so that she will be able to get a job on a help desk or doing some basic tech work to get us through the rest of the year. We were really hoping that she would have been able to find something already but not a single place in Rochester that claims to be hiring has even bothered to call her back. John Stephens has been having a terrible time getting a hold of anything up this way as well. Times are still tough no matter what anyone says – especially in the Rochester area. Min had to do some shopping while she was out to get some clothes for teaching.

I spent the afternoon getting caught up on all of the things that I have been getting behind on. I have a lot of work still that needs to be done for the lecture this coming Friday evening and I have a really busy week since I am going to be in Syracuse on Thursday night. So I have no evenings at home left before I have to have all of my material ready for the class. I also had a lot of chores to do around the house because the place is a mess and it is mostly my fault. Lots of dishes that need to be washed and lots of little messes all over the house.

Min and I went over to the Wegmans Plaza and hit the new Chinese take out place over there to see how they are. We haven’t heard of anyone going over there yet and the weather was really nice so we decided to give them a try. We got take out and brought it back to the house and ate out on the deck. It was way to windy to be eating outside. We kept losing everything that was on the table. We were lucky that the food itself didn’t end up blowing away. The food was okay but only so so. Nothing special. Maybe we are spoiled having lived in Ithaca for so long but I don’t think that this new place is living up to the Main Moon on Main Street.

It was a really short evening for me. I had to leave the house at 7:45 to make it up to Irondequoit in time for work. That makes for a really non-existant evening. It feels like you should just be starting to kick back and relax and all of a sudden you have to head out the door to get to work.

I arrived at work on time, a little early in fact. I need to remember to keep track of my mileage because I am getting reimbursed for my driving which is really awesome. That makes a huge difference on a job like this. It doesn’t affect me all that much today but when I start going to central PA and eastern New Jersey it will really start affecting me. There are weeks where my mileage could add up to over $250 of extra cash! Of course, I have to pay for my gas out of that, but that is a lot more than gas money.

Things went pretty well and I was wrapping up around 1:30! I love it when a plan comes together.

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