July 30th, 2004 21:31
Here is me as a doll!
Thank you indirectly, athanata!!!
(made at: http://elouai.com/doll-makers/candybar-doll-maker.php)
Mike’s gone away to L.A. for the weekend to visit his mother. His plane took off a mere 40 minutes ago, and I’m already bored and lonely.
On the brighter side, we bought wedding rings today. Nice ones. One by one, all steps are being taken care of… I have conquered many things on my to-do list, although I am still struggling with ceremony music, florist, dress alterations and accessory purchases, gifts, decorations, bridesmaid alterations, and this honeymoon jazz (plus accommodations for the varied animals that live in my zoo). Even so, though, I’ve finally got a photographer, the invitations, catering, reception music (ha ha), cake, and bridesmaid dresses as well as the rings and that is a relief.
This veil business has me worried. I’m not good at girlie things like that. Worse yet, all this manicure/hairdressing/makeup stuff for the wedding day itself frightens me. I just don’t KNOW anything about that kind of thing. I’m going to go out tomorrow to try to conquer the world of veils and appropriate undergarments and I must say I’m apprehensive. Oh well, viacimo says she’ll come with me and that should help me a bit…
But this hair thing! Don’t I have to know what I’m going to do with my hair before all this veil business can be taken care of? What AM I supposed to do with my hair anyway???
I’m really glad that they put me in this building. It ridiculously new, and the view of Boston from the little lounge/kitchen area on my floor is stunning. I asked my boss if it would be all right if I worked more hours on certain days and less on other days, and she said it was fine with her. She didn’t even ask me which days. This place is rather relaxed, but maybe that is just because I am a database programmer and thus don’t have any real customer interactions to take care of.
I don’t feel useful yet, but then again it is only my fourth day, and in meetings with Andrew (my partner) I actually had intelligent input to give so I don’t feel as much like a loser as I did on my first day. Then again, we haven’t done any real work yet — we’re just gathering information and planning how this vast database will be structured!
The DNC is, I believe, this coming week. What a mess. Mike gets to work from home all week 
but I of course have no excuse, living only 1.5 miles away 
I am not going to take the 66 bus anymore. It took me more than 45 minutes to get in today, what with traffic and the bus not coming which it never does! I will walk to work. It is only 1.5 miles which for me means 20 minutes, or maybe 25. I just have to purchase a small backpack — this shoulder bag doesn’t do well with the laptop in it. Hurts rather. And my only backpack is gigantic!
It’s damn cold in here. The thermometer says 73, but I don’t believe it. I’m wearing a sweater and it’s still cold.
My office mate is around today and for some reason that makes me restless. When I can be all alone, peaceful, then for some reason I can sit around and do work (even if it is work as boring as reading up about XML about which I know nothing). But now, with my office mate here, sitting at her desk behind me, I feel restless; I can’t believe it’s only 11AM and I’m already bored stiff (and still tired from staying up till 5AM Monday night) and I want to go home, go outside, smell the summer air and lie in the sun.
Why did I have to lose a job in December and gain one in July? Couldn’t it have been the other way round? I wouldn’t have minded spending those bitter January days in an office…
My (really Mike’s) friend John is interested in doing the DARPA Grand Challenge and I have recruited myself to be on his team. I don’t know shit about robotics, mechanics, electronics, or the like, but I’m very enthused about the project. I’m sure I can learn and perform some useful function, even if it’s just solid QA (I have a great talent for breaking things). When I was a child I spent a good deal of my time trying to build little mechanical or structural items. As I grow older, I miss that more and more. One of the greatest pleasures I used to have was finishing some little project or other and having a finished fort or Barbie sized working washing machine or automatic cat box or whatever it was. I miss building things. I wish I could build things instead of sitting around at a computer all day. I’m hoping that our DARPA team/project will actually stay solid and produce something… John has the habit of being very flighty and abandoning projects.
Well here I am at my second day of work. Things have finally settled down a bit and I have gotten my ID and my email address (though I’m still waiting for both my real ID and my pin to access the Harvard online employee stuff and timecard submission stuff) so I can actually sit and relax a bit. I am just as confused as I ever was — almost. The project seems a lot vaster than I had imagined it to be, and significantly more complicated. I had thought that my role was as web designer/cite creator for the basic Pathology site, and as assistant to Andrew in doing the Pathology database migration (migrating a financially database from Access (!!!) to SQL as well as adding to it so that it is much more automated and has room for scientific data as well as financial data). Now it seems that that is just some small pieces of a much vaster and more complicated project having to do with VSL and SPIN, two things I never heard of before yesterday and that I still have no idea about. Something having to do with a lot of disparate databases all being coordinated such that one can do natural language searches from one place and get information from the dozens of probably different platformed database in the zillion different locations in the Longwood Medical area which still maintaining very solid access control…
In any case, for a person that has just been working informally with PHP/mySQL for a few months, it seems nightmarishly confusing. I just don’t understand this stuff at all.
It turns out (according to mrtee) that almost 5 years ago, a grant was given to Pathology with part of the agreement being that they would come up with a really spanky awesome database driven site that encompassed a good area. Now 4.6 years have passed, and they have almost nothing, and so Andrew and I are somehow supposed to do 5 years of database work in 3 months? There is a mock site visit on Nov 2 that everyone is very uptight and scared about. I am feeling some stress just given that I have NO IDEA WHAT I AM DOING!!!
Ahhhhh. I have an office. I’ve never had a real office before at any job I’ve had! It’s always been cubicles or a table in the corner of some room. I have an officemate, but it’s still an office! On the 8th floor, with a big window (where the shades are booby trapped so you can’t pull them up unless, like I have done, you tie your computer bag to the end of the shade-puller-string as a weight) and a huge desk. I have a very complicated phone that I have no idea how to use, and a file cabinet, and a bunch of jacks. Perhaps I should move squelch to here? Maybe his upload time would improve… My officemate doesn’t seem too enthralled that I have move in with her and I can’t say I blame her. It’s nice to have a office to oneself. She is absent today, working from home, as she is pregnant and due in October.
I’ve gone to 4 meetings so far in the past two days. And spent at least two hours chasing Kenji the IT guy around trying to make him give me email addresses, ethernet cables, mail server information, and all sorts of other stuff. Everyone here seems happy and friendly and well-adjusted. Maybe it will be a good place to call home. Work.
So tomorrow’s my first day at my new job. I guess in one sense I’m a little nervous, just because I don’t know what to expect. I bet they won’t even have anything for me to do — I bet they won’t even have a space or a computer for me! And what good is a web designer/programmer without a machine? If they try to make me use a Mac I will have to protest…
Tomorrow morning I’m also going back to the gym for the first time in a month. I suppose that’s a good thing. I’m getting quite flabby and vile.
Can I really be so boring that I have nothing interesting to write? So much has been going on but I don’t feel like verbalizing it. Too tired.
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