Friday Randomness

A large part of what has had me so MIA lately is that I’ve shifted to a new team at work. I feel like I got a really lucky break on this deal, all things considered. There has been a lot of upheaval and movement in and around our department, and frankly I saw the writing on the wall - in pretty big letters, too - that I was so going to end up being poached out of my chair.

This is one of those things that I find hard about contracting sometimes, especially in a department like this one where there are lot of individual teams doing lots of different things, but we're all under one umbrella. You don't always have the ability to say, "Um, no please!" when someone charges up and yells, "Congratulations! You're going to be working with Satan on the Inferno project! Isn't that awesome?!?!"

It wasn't so much that the options were "bad" or anything (well...there were a couple...heh...yeah, this one time a couple of people were standing around talking about how they needed to find somebody to fill this position on this one team, and I suddenly realized that I was literally slinking down further and further in my chair, practically lying under my desk, trying to become invisible).

Which is why I was jumping out of my chair yelling, "I WOULD LOVE TO!!!" when the offer to move a couple rows over came up, because it was like not-leaving my current team. My new team is both a heavy consumer of and provider-of-stuff-to my old team. You see the beauty of this, right?

We’re basically one system – soooooo, when I'm continuing to run my usual daily statistical monitoring scripts and eyeballing the batch reports and kicking the BA in the shins and hissing, Yer bank id changes are showing, dude!!!!! ...I’m just heading off our potential errors by catching theirs before they happen.

See? It all works out.


And, I get to keep watching my previous teams collective backs. SCORE!

I’m funny that way…the work may be interesting and all like that, but the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning when on the whole I’d rather just stay put, or gets me to log in when I’m just not feelin’ it right now, is usually something along the lines of, “I need to make sure nobody on my team is going to look bad today.” I’ll even overcome my intense dislike of confrontation and {gasp!} argue with people, if I really think one of my BA team is going to get raked over the coals if I don’t head off whatever it is I see coming.

The one thing that bothered me most about seeing that ‘I am so going to get yanked off this team, any second now’ feeling was the thought that I’d be leaving my team without another ‘me.’

You know – an OCD/ADHD squirrel who just pounded back a plate of glazed doughnuts and a six pack of Red Bull…?

Because what team doesn’t NEED one of THOSE around, am I right?!?!


Ahem. Anyway. Yeah. It’s been a crazy couple weeks as I’ve been settling in and trying to ramp up on all this new stuff.

Meanwhile in other news…you know one of the cool things about working near the Ferry Building? Far West Fungi.

They have stuff like this.

Which is a mix of lion’s mane, crimini, shitake, oyster, and golden enoki mushrooms.


Which can be put with stuff like this.

Which would be a wild rice mix I picked up for fifty cents from the Extreme Discount Cart at the supermarket


And a little of that.

Yeah, onions and celery go in EVERYTHING…along with butter and chicken stock.


And then you end up with this, which is a mushroom and wild rice soup.

Which was awesome and we had to beat Eldest away from it to get any


And finally, in other-other news…I started seaming the baby blanket last night.

Oh, come on…you know…the baby blanket?

From, like…a…while ago? For my neighbor's baby? The one that got here almost two months ago now…?

It is taking approximately three thousand years to seam each section. And it is still in the upper 90s out here all day, and I strongly suspect it is at least 327 degrees in my bedroom, which is where I do most of this kind of stuff, and in related news, this is a surprisingly warm blanket…feh…


And this-time-I-really-mean-it-finally-finally…I have an Important Tip on choosing appropriate viewing material for while-seaming-a-baby-blanket brain-candy: Do not pick an anime show that is in Japanese with subtitles.


Unless, of course, you speak Japanese.

Which I am seriously tempted to try to learn to do (thanks to my recent rediscovery that I love anime), even though I have had precisely zero luck with learning any language other than English apart from about five words in Spanish, a few phrases in French and a couple cuss words in Vietnamese. I can read a few Welsh words and phrases, but cannot speak them to save my life and would not try to because even those of us who are experts at embarrassing ourselves don’t necessarily want to, at least not all the danged time.

All evidence to the contrary aside. Ahem.