The New Post on the New and Improved Blog

I apologize for the length of time that has gone by, but as I am beginning to notice, time flies faster and faster as I get older. My friend Claudette from Hampshire College currently lives in Somerville, which is about a 15 minute drive away, and I probably see her every two or three months. I blame it partially on the 9-5, which I have realized really doesn’t suit me very well. If I work earlier in the day, like a 7-3, or even earlier, then I have the rest of the day to do something. If I work a 12-8, then I have my mornings to sleep in so I can do something when I get out of work. But if I work 9-5, as I do right now, I don’t get home early enough to do anything with my evening after eating dinner and still manage to get to bed in time. It doesn’t work out very well for me. I know I’d do more with my time off work if I had different hours. Not to mention the fact that I work during business hours and can never make it to the post office, and I work out in the middle of nowhere (for Boston), so I can’t do anything with my lunchbreak.

So I don’t know if you’ve been reading my blog regularly or not (I don’t blame you if you haven’t – I can barely keep up on my blog myself), but I took a much-needed mini-vacation down South myself last weekend. I went to visit my college friend Patty at Duke University in North Carolina, and we drove up for a night and day to see another college friend in Richmond, Virginia. It was so great! It was so lush and green down there with trees and vines growing in every crevice. It was so nice to be lazy for a few days and to visit friends. And nice not to be working!

Yeah, I hate the job again. Sigh. I know there are always ups and downs, but things have been on a steady downward spiral for over a month now. And now they’re working on making everything more beaurocratic and stratified. We'll now be documenting and formalizing everything like a big company because we're trying to meet a certain kind of certification. They’ve made it clear it won't change out accrual of vacation days or our pay. Or health benefits. In the same meeting that he told us that we need to keep better track of our vacation days, because next Christmas we'll be expected to be there between Christmas and New Year’s even though Production gets it off. Also, now I do have levels of people ahead of me instead of feeling like part of a family. Not, perhaps, umpteen level, but they've made it clear that Denisse and I are ENTRY LEVEL, and then there is ASI, production, and management, and administration. And it's all cleared up now. The HR manager really went out of his way to make us understand that we were lowest on the totem pole. It just is feeling less like a small family there and more like a big unfriendly corporation. So I’ll be working at a big company without getting the actual benefits of it (I only have 5 vacation days a year, and I have used 3 of them already. One for NC, and the other for Dan’s grandmother’s funeral. That pissed me off. I shouldn’t have to take a freaking VACATION DAY for a FUNERAL. The worst part of it is really that I stopped looking for a new job about a month ago when I registered for the GRE’s (which I’ll be taking on June 26th) and I was able to feel ok about it because I knew that no matter what, I had Christmas through New Year’s off (like it always used to be), and I still felt like I was an important part of something. But that rug got swept up from under my feet and tossed out the window last week. Ah well. I’ll resume the job search when I finish the GRE’s. I don’t know if I’ll look for another office job or not. I just don’t think they’re for me.


Otherwise, things have been going well. I feel like I’ve been using a lot of my time wisely, and my overall mood has changed tremendously since the springtime has hit in full bloom here, the lilacs are out, grass is growing (in some places) and the trees have leaves on them. It’s beautiful! It’s wonderful to go walking around and see people smiling and things growing. And I repotted a lot of my houseplants, and that was really nice too.