Ain't nobody gonna slow me down (...oh no, I got to keep on movin...)

Last week, I tried to remove my flash drive from my computer only to get this message:

The device 'Generic volume' cannot be stopped right now. Try stopping the device again later.

You go, 'Generic volume,' I will not try to undermine your awesomeness again. I only wish I were having a day like that.

Where I've been...and Merry Christmas!

...well, here, really. But I've neglected the virtual world for several reasons.

1. I took the GRE (yes, after nearly a year of talking about it, I finally just buckled down and did it. It wasn't so terrible after all.)
2. Took a fabulous trip to Florida with the husband and mother - it was a mostly relaxing week with family spiced with one brief segment of fear-facing adventure, but more on that later.
3. Interviewed for and got a new position in training and development at work (yay!), and then did two jobs for a couple of weeks until my replacement could be trained (yeesh).
4. Family time at Thanksgiving - I love family. And cranberry sauce, I love that too.
5. Picked out and put up a Christmas tree. This year that meant me sawing off the bottom of the trunk with a hand saw in my kitchen and getting locked out of the house without shoes on when I went to empty the pine-needle-filled vacuum. (You know, that week it was 2 degrees in Utah? That's when I decided to lock myself out.)
   
6. Edited lots and lots of papers with Steve leading up to finals week.
7. Steve's laptop finally exploded (yes, an actual explosion, including smoke and mysterious black ooze), making us a one-computer family, and during finals week I went completely Internet free after work.
8. Threw a successful surprise party for Steve's graduation (thanks everyone who helped keep it a secret)!

I also stopped doing a lot of things since my last post - like exercising and eating sensibly. Which brings me to my next point - MERRY CHRISTMAS! To prove I have at least mostly found the holiday spirit, here's that tree I worked so hard on. It makes me happy.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

This morning I overslept and my favorite pants weren't clean so I was late and I had to wear the black ones that gather lint. I hate being late.

At work I was scheduled to move to a new desk, close to the window, with one short wall and a glorious view of the outside world. They got my PC and phone moved and I had started unloading my boxes when someone showed up with a bunch of tools and informed me no one was allowed to have short walls anymore. I had to stand by and watch the glorious sunlight be slowly and surely obstructed from my seat. I hate dark cubicles.

Then I had to scrunch all my belongings to one corner while they disassembled my entire desk to put up the new walls, even though no one has been sitting there for weeks and they could have made the change long before all my things had been moved in. I had a lot of work to do and none of it got done because I spent most of the day without a desk or computer or phone. I hate wasting time.

When it was finally time for lunch, I was excited to eat a turkey sandwich with honey mustard. I love honey mustard. When I asked for it, the server told me there was no honey mustard today, only plain old mustard. I'm sure they never run out of plain, stinky mustard. I hate plain mustard.

Then I was late for a meeting, my pen ran out of ink, someone ate the last chocolate, and when they moved the shelf in my cubicle all my books fell on the floor.

I finally got my desk back, sat down, and saw that my phone extension had been changed. They changed it back but acted like I didn't know what I was talking about. I hate when people act like you don't know what you're talking about.

When I got home, the house was cold, I remembered I hadn't cooked chicken to make soup, and I had to eat lima beans for dinner. I hate lima beans.

It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. But I guess some days are like that. Even in Australia.

Help

I was just thinking the other day about how comfortable I've gotten in the grown-up world. It seems like ages since I worked as a nanny (or any kind of babysitter) and the days at the orphanage in Ecuador seem more a part of my college life than my current one. I have a grown-up job, go to a grown-up ward where I teach a grown-up class...and I like it. I've gotten very comfortable in my adult environment.

...and then they called me to teach Primary. And not just the kids who are practically teenagers already, but the ones who just came from Sunbeams (the youngest kids in Primary). They're 5ish (some are 4 I think) and I am feeling way out of my grown-up realm. For someone who babysat as my high school job and immediately after college ran off to Ecuador to teach some more kids, I'm feeling ridiculously new to this kiddo thing.

I used to be really good with kids. A lot of them even listened to me. But all of a sudden I'm afraid I'll be a total failure and my class will be flying off in all directions out of control and when their parents ask them what they learned in Primary they'll just stare at them blankly.

So, um...ideas for calming wild kids (in English)? Best way to bribe a 5 year old? I never thought I'd be the one to ask advice for teaching a class of pre-school aged kids. I mean, I (mostly) successfully wrangled at least 10 at a time in a certain South American country, right? I'm searching desperately for reassurance here, somebody throw me a bone!

A plea to city planners everywhere

About once a month at work, I spend a couple of hours addressing birthday cards for our employees. This means I get a very close look at hundreds of addresses, mostly in Utah, and I'm noticing an alarming trend. There are several streets/cul-de-sacs/avenues/etc. that are using multiple types of street identification (for lack of a better term). For example, I would expect to see "Horsetail Trail" or "Horsetail Lane," but "Horsetail Trail Lane?" That's just redundant. What gets really ridiculous is when some city planner (or whoever the heck comes up with this stuff) gets all long-winded naming apartment complex roads. And it's even worse when it's so far south that the street number alone is unusually long. And THEN, the complex comes up with some absurd numbering system

For example: 126077 South Wasatch Rim Trail Avenue #13766 - D (not someone's real address but based on an actual pattern). Are you kidding me? It barely fits on the envelope (and looks really weird if the person's name is something tiny like Cal Brown). And are there really 13,766 units in this complex? Doubtful. Even if there were, I don't think adding the letter "D" is really going to help anyone find it.

People. Coming up with a longer name for your street doesn't make you sound richer or smarter or better educated. If we change the above to 126077 S Wasatch Rim #12 will anyone go to bed hungry? I thought not. Based on the...unusual...habits about naming children we see in Utah, I'm thinking this is a regional thing, am I right?

I realize this is kind of a weird thing to be bothered by, but I think it reflects an unfortunate lack of self-restraint in our modern culture of grammar and naming conventions. Also, I don't want to someday have to buy a ridiculously large mailbox just because I live at 543210 West Crimson Sunset View Point Lane Road.

Welcome to the club part II

One of the quirks I tease Steve about (besides bachelor-style cooking of course) is his tendency to over-explain situations. He's a friendly guy, which is one of his best qualities, but sometimes it leads him to let complete strangers in on a little too much detail.

Once, we were out at a nice dinner and couldn't finish our meal. We both had to get a to-go box and our plates must have looked basically untouched to our waiter. I probably would have said something like, "We weren't as hungry as we thought we were." But Steve, not wanting this man we'd never seen before and will probably never see again to think we didn't like the food, narrated our entire afternoon, including feeding times.

"...and we were really hungry earlier, so we had some sandwiches, and then ended up coming to dinner sooner than we thought..."

Like I said, friendly. He knows the look you get when you've over-explained though. The one that says I'm not really sure why you just told me all that, but I'm too polite to comment about it. And when he gets the look, he invariably turns to me and says, "I over-explained, didn't I?"

A little.

Well, today at work I resolved a minor billing discrepancy that I had mentioned to my boss earlier. I walked all my paperwork down to my boss's desk and proceeded to explain to him exactly what the error had been and how it had been resolved. When I finished and looked up from all my show-and-tell material, the look was unmistakably present.

"Um...that's fine...I trust you to do your job..."

Translation: "I really don't need to know every tiny detail of what you do every day. 'It's resolved' would have been fine and then I could have had those 5 minutes of my life back."

Yup. I have to say though, if it's between being being constantly hovered over (as in my previous work situation), or occasionally getting the look because now I'm trusted with *gasp* my actual job, I'll settle for the latter.

When I grow up I wanna be ME!

So I got a new boss this week (officially). It's a good thing, and when I went to my first one-on-one meeting with a new supervisor in a new department, I was feelin' pretty good about life. We talked about my "career history" (is it really called that if you've only had one "real" job before this one?), my new role, etc., without any major drama.

And then he dropped this on me: "Tell me about your career goals. Where do you want to go from here?"

Um...what? When did I forget about that part of life? I was always so sure about stuff like that in high school and college - where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, etc. But somewhere along the way in real life, I just forgot to think about it.

I realized all this and proceeded to panic. A meeting I was totally in control of 10 seconds earlier suddenly seemed completely overwhelming. I felt my face getting hot, I started sweating in a cold room, and my eyes started to fuzz over. Is that what a panic attack feels like? Job interviews, first dates, final exams...I have survived them all without such an incident, but when someone asks me what I want to be when I grow up I totally lose it. Great.

I gave some kind of answer - I tried to be honest about my ambitions changing and I told him where I thought I wanted to be someday...but it's hard to guess about something like that. I guess the real problem isn't that I don't have goals anymore - 'cause I totally do - just that they're focused somewhere else. The career ambition in me has mellowed with age.

Here's how I could have answered the question, but I'd hate to be irrelevant. I guess I could have at least proved that I DO have goals.

• I wanna be an author. Of books that have nothing to do with the industry I'm in. So you know...whatever help you could give me with that...
  
• I'd like to go back to South America and volunteer again. Will HR experience be beneficial?
• Mastery of the Spanish language. Latin day once a week?
• My secret dream is to arrange flowers for weddings. Do we have a cross-training program for that?
• Have a well-organized, stylish home. Can I use my training budget on feng shui?
• Develop chef-like abilities. Department discount at Sur La Table would be super.
  
• More literary knowledge. Surely reading the works of Dickens is a goal, yes?
  

I guess what I learned is that I really do work to live and not the other way around. But I could probably still use some more concrete goals in the career world. Something a little more specific than "pay the bills" but less ambitious than "run a major multi-million dollar corporation."

That's all. I'll be chewin' on it for a while...you know...since you asked.