29 April, 1998

Mothballs & Moonbeams

Why is that, no matter where I work, I always end up freezing to death? At Cadence it was a constant battle with the Usability Lab people to keep the temperature reasonable; here at WorldSite it seems that the facilities people delight in coming by twice a day to turn the thermostat to 'frigid'. Sigh.

My day has been productive, if unexciting. I successfully scheduled dinner at La Fondue this weekend, as I'll be up in Mountain View seeing people. I also set up my notify list (at long last!), and finished my log-rotation script so that the plethora of logfiles sitting on the WorldSite webservers can be discreetly moved to the machine with a big disk and then dumped to tape. I'm still having to move large chunks of logs around by hand, but once I finish with them the script will do it automagically, ever-after. Good to know I'm leaving my mark.

My jobhunt continues. Taos is doing a technical re-screen by phone tomorrow afternoon to see if they want me back. I'm not really worried, but there's a niggling fear that they're going to ask me the questions they always ask me, like 'Have you ever set up NIS?'. And once again I'll say 'No, but I'm sure I could do it if given the opportunity.' -- and once again they won't believe me. Except, darnit, this time they'd best believe me; I'd never upgraded sendmail nor installed & configured majordomo before WorldSite, but I was perfectly competent to do so. Perhaps I'll point this out if they're difficult.

Taos isn't my first choice of job, anyway. I'm not sure I want to play contracting roulette for another few years, even for the huge amounts of money they're likely to give me. On the other hand, Taos is doing something, whereas all my other leads seem stalled.

I had to write an official resignation letter today. Kirby suggested the following:

As winter fades into spring, my idle thoughts turn to the eternal quest for things of beauty. Thus, you must understand my burning need to get the hell out of LA as soon as possible.

Which is more or less what I said, actually, except I threw in lots of stuff about how great WorldSite is. I wouldn't want them to think I hate them.

* * *

What have I been doing with my life, other than angsting over the future? Hmn.

  • I work. A lot. Sometimes up to ten hours a day.
  • I've been sick with a nasty bronchial thing which seems to come and go. I took antibiotics; they helped but didn't kill the thing off entirely. At the moment my deep breaths are sort of rattly, but on the whole I'm not coughing much. Thank goodness.
  • I read. Currently the Aubrey/Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian are the fascination of choice; Earl, of course, has finished all seventeen of them, while I'm still on the seventh. This is mildly inconvenient when he wants to burble about them, but (given his stunning memory) ideal for me.
  • I play computer games. Diablo was the game of choice when I first moved down, and Earl still plays a lot of it. When I mess with the computer I usually play Angband, but this is only occasional; I've acquired a Playstation and am now enthralled with Finaly Fantasy VII.
  • I cook. Not very often (Earl does most of the cooking), and nothing fancy, but as we usually only go out to eat on the weekends a lot of cooking does happen.
  • I have allowed myself to become involved in 3 television shows, much to my dismay. Ally McBeal is the latest; it's a painfully funny show about Boston lawyers. The other two are my old standbys, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Babylon 5.
  • Finally, I am still playing PernMUSH. Seven and a half years -- and counting.

There are some other things which fit in the cracks -- I've been writing a tiny bit of fiction, and I keep up with mailing lists & Usenet in a fairly haphazard way. Monday nights after Ally I phone Jim, and I've been visiting him (and the rest of Mountain View) about every three weeks. I'm seriously looking into Judaism again, with the assistance of Harold & Rachel, both of whom are excellent about answering my questions.

Judaism is pretty keen. I went to Harold's Seder for the first night of Passover, and to Rachel&Jeremy's for the second night. Somehow I let Harold talk me into singing in Hebrew, and although I was horribly out of tune I managed to remember all the words, and even had a pretty good idea of what I was singing. I don't dare make any real judgements yet, but so far I'm very happy with the tiny pieces of Judaism that I've experienced.

Besides, as a perfectionist, how can I avoid wanting to perfect the world?

* * *

It's pretty much time to go home. Earl and I are scheduled to Talk tonight -- as might be obvious, there's some real uncertainty as to where our relationship is going to go once I've moved back up to Mountain View. We're trying to figure out where to go from there, but it's a slow and painful process.

Will I write again tomorrow? Oh, I hope so. This felt really good.


©1998 Cera Kruger

Previous Index Next