How little time I took me to fall out of the habit of writing here again, with just those two post-Holidailies entries and then nothing the week after until now. It hasn’t been a great week for writing overall, though; I skipped one day on my nail blog entirely and just did a mini-post one other day instead of the five full posts I’d planned. Work has been busier and a tad more stressful lately, so that has taken up some time and mental energy that otherwise could have been spent writing. But now it’s Friday; I can see the weekend from here, and that helps. I don’t want to let this journal go so quiet again, so here I am with a recap of the week that’s winding down.

I started participating in that 2013 photo a day group on Flickr that I mentioned in my last entry. What sets this one apart from the ones I’ve done before is there seems to be more a sense of community about it, where people have conversations with each other in the discussion threads instead of just dropping photos in the group pool. Some of that went on in other projects I’ve done but not to the extent it appears to in this new group. It will be interesting to see if that continues as the year goes on.

I went to a work event at which our old CEO said goodbye and the new CEO was introduced. It highlighted how big Purple Systems has grown when one of the comments the outgoing CEO made in his speech was that he hadn’t had a chance to meet everyone in the company. When I started here, the whole company got together once a week for a lunch meeting run by the president; him not meeting people was not a question. Everyone knew everyone else. Now, that’s so not true that I re-introduced myself to someone who works in the same building as I do. Forget me getting to know new people who work in the other buildings. It’s a little sad. I know the company has to grow; I just miss some things about when it was smaller. I did make a point to go up and introduce myself to the new CEO; I don’t expect he’ll remember me, and I don’t expect to see him hardly ever in the normal course of business, but making that initial contact was on my checklist for the evening.

I had to get up at 5 one morning so I could run some scripts on the test server for a customer who needed one more trial run of a cutover process we’ll do for real at the end of the month. The customer didn’t need it done quite that early, but I had to get it done in time to make it to an all-day training that started an hour before I usually get to work. Of course I ran into a problem I hadn’t experienced in any of the previous trial runs, so a half hour before I needed to leave for training I was getting dressed in front of my latptop while waiting on the last scripts to finish. Only when I was putting on my socks did I remember that I hadn’t showered yet, so as soon as the scripts finished, I got undressed, took a quick shower, did the bare minimum version of the rest of my morning routine, and was on the road only 15 minutes behind schedule. I made it to training, which did have some good parts but also had some very annoying parts. One surprising aspect to the presenter making many jokes at the expense of software engineers is I’ve never felt like more of an engineer, the same way I’d feel the tightest sibling bond with my brother growing up when someone outside the family said something mean about our mom. After the training ended (an hour late), I had more work to do for a customer go-live, so that was a very long day. The beauty of working here is that I was able to come in late the next morning and no one said “boo” about it.

In looking at my Kindle last night to decide what book to read next, I realized I’d read one in 2012 that didn’t make it on the book log, so I added that today. I also realized it’s been a while since I read a paper book; I haven’t even been to the library in months, as I don’t need to go there to check out the digital titles. I should make time to do that, see what I can see, but there are so many many other things I also want and need to do. Tasks large and small, like putting away my office Christmas trees (I did finally manage that one today). Better to have too many things on my plate than too few, I suppose.