Sciolist in the City of Salt and Saints

The geeky reason is that I can't modify my own CSS here.

But you don't care about the geeky reason.

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Rock on!

About a week ago, I received a certificate of appreciation at work along with a gift to say thank you for three years of amazing work. For each of those three years, it's possible that I spent about 2,000 hours working (though it's hard to really get an exact number since I'm so cool that I would often work late or check in on the weekends and made sure to use my paid vacations). So in 6,000 hours, what have I accomplished? Let's make a list; lists are fun.

• Thanks to an expensive trip to the ER in an ambulance nearly two years ago, I now sit in one of the most expensive chairs in my department; it was part of my negotiations with my current boss for my transfer, thank you very much.
• I have two mighty monitors that increase my productivity 269.09% (I did my own study to determine this very accurate number).
• This is my fourth job title (which also equates to more $$$, and that's the important part, right?).
• With the three-year certificate also came the fabulous gift of an additional 0.30 hour of paid time off per pay period (can I hear a woot woot for .3?)!
• I have accrued nearly 200 hours of Long-Term Sick for when I decide to start making lots of babies and taking maternity leave.
• Larry the VP still doesn't know that I'm Larrie the SQA.
• My guest chair is a very lounge-y office chair.
• I can access every computer in the company without leaving my expensive chair... do you know what's on your C drive?
• Sometimes I get free stuff--like when I won an iPod for donating blood or water bottles for "Deal or No Deal" at our on-site gym.
• The company pays for some of my school, will pay for my cable, and puts more into retirement for me than I do (I know, I know, that last feat alone is amazing).
• I still drive my same car only there are more miles on it, less paint on the roof, and an addition of electrical tape to a portion of the front bumper (very aerodynamic).
• And last: me... I still weigh the same (phew~!); my hair is a few inches longer and some a few shades lighter, some a shade darker; my left eye's astigmatism has gotten worse; my back is now herniated; one toe is a small piece of bone shorter; I'm really tan now; and last, I still don't sleep.

That was a good list, eh? And I mostly avoided the boring stuff like what kind of access to database tables I have, or the incredibly short learning curve of my SQL education, blah, blah, blah. Basically, I've convinced enough people around me that I make them look good (and they're the right people to make look good) that I'm still here and in a position that, for THOUSANDS of reasons, is much better than the position where I started. It's all about who you know and how willing they are to put up with you.

Here's to three more years and more astigmatism to come!

She's here. Mick and Tracy welcomed numero cinco into the world yesterday. Congrats!!!

Kate Campbell - Monday, April 21 at 4:33 p.m.

Stats: 20.5" - 7  lbs 12 oz - little girl with big lips (for a white girl)

I stopped by the hospital yesterday after work. My mom and I brought Mick's four other children in to meet their new sister. They were pretty excited, even little Jane who had the most reasons to be jealous of this new baby and her tendency to steal the spotlight.

Daddy Mick did a superb job of taking pictures and then quickly uploading them to Facebook when he got home that night. (Of course, that meant that I posted a comment or two shortly after he posted them and before starting the process of going to sleep - around midnight.)

Sometimes I am a fan of busy weekends; sometimes I am not. This weekend, I really should have been unbusy so that I could get school work done. However, I have a hard time saying no. Case in point: I was invited to four events Friday night and I ran around so that I made it to three of them; none of them included school work. (On Saturday, I only managed to show up at two of the three possible calendar items; it's more difficult when they're not all in the same city.)

Friday morning, I arrived at work a little early with the hopes of running to the gym before the evening's activities got rolling. However, I really, really like our marketing department; especially after I tell them we can fix it first thing Monday morning (to avoid an emergency release late on a Friday) and instead of accepting this, they call the CIO. CIO comes tromping over to find myself and another in my group to inform us we better get this taken care of; developer gets called in from running errands at 3:45 p.m. and I had the blessed opportunity of hanging around to release an emergency version of my application at 5:15 p.m. !!!!! So much for the gym.

So at this point of my story, you just want to know where the Misfits are, don't you? I'll jump ahead--skip over drinks at Red Butte and James's Madrigals concert (his biceps are twice the size of any of the other boys as they sang "I'm A Train" in overalls onstage)--now we're at the Ensign Stake Center for a multi-stake activity and a handful of the Toys are waiting for their turn to play Rock Band. Adam pointed out that this was a momentous occasion: probably the only time that Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" has been played in a Mormon church/cultural hall. I concur.

Eventually, we got our turn (they let me play the drums) and we rocked!! on medium. Guess what our band name was? Shoot, no. But it would have been cool to you and me if we'd been the Misfit Toys. Time to start my own band. We were the Nice Vaders and had the best looking lead vocalist... and the best looking drummer.

Or perhaps, Escaped the Island--that would have been a good band name, too. (Only 17 more days until my escape!! And yet sad, too. *weep)

After the rocking out, toys fell asleep at the Canadian's apartment. But that occurred after Alaska, "his friend from Zion," Adam, Canadia 1 and myself sang karaoke with the GameCube. What did we ever do before game systems? I have no memories prior to Q-Bert so I cannot answer my own question.

That was the portion of my weekend with the Toys (besides church, which didn't really have any out-of-the-ordinary occurrences like Adam bringing me Bawlz to stay awake, or a drawing contest between myself, Maren and Braden). Saturday was spent in Park City: swimming at Stein Ericksen Lodge, shopping for mirrors for my new place, jimmying my sunroof closed, taping my bumper back in place (I heart my car), then watching Nate and Steve hobble up and down stairs at Wasatch Brew Pub after they ran in the marathon that morning. It was a quality Saturday.

Good weekend. Now I've got to catch up on school work.

If you remember from my last post (I know, I know, that was more than a few hours ago, how could I expect you to still remember it?), there is at least one reason why I am a fan of my graduate studies: it helped me to get money back from the government. Otherwise, I would have had to pay another $400 on top of what I already paid to cover the costs of all the programs the liberals are blessing us with.

Well guess what... there is more than one reason that I like my graduate studies. Reason number two: I like my projects. Currently, I am designing a billboard and poster for a new store opening up in town called Hot Tootsies. (Never heard of it? Well, where have you been hiding out that you don't get the announcement for stores that don't exist?) I created a handful of billboards and the one that I liked the most was shot down by classmates and the professor so I ended up with this one. Before you look at it, though, get in the car and get driving 75 m.p.h. Then look at it and tell me if it catches your eye or not.

Now jumping to another topic without a graceful bridge in between. Last night, I couldn't sleep. SURPRISE OF ALL SURPRISES! So I was lounging around with a hot laptop on my lap (which made Minyo very jealous, poor kitty) and decided to "investigate" Second Life after reading about it for a while on PCWorld.com. After wandering around in the virtual world for a while, I now have a character who is bald because I put on a party hat and when I took it off, my hair wouldn't come back. That's a software bug to me, but I can't report it to the developer, hmm.

Eventually, I logged off (and wondered, briefly, about updating my graphics card so that the maps would look better, but with all the furniture I've bought or am planning to purchase in order to live comfortably in the garage, I have no graphics-cards-spending-cash). Today at work, I was browsing through the course offerings for summer in the technical writing program and this is seriously one of the choices:

English 6890/7890: Studies in Writing and Rhetoric: Rhetorics of Identity in Online Worlds

In this course, we will study how individuals and organizations create and maintain identities in online worlds like Second Life.

...The final project for the course will either be a researched report on some rhetorical aspect of Second Life or a custom-designed space which you create in Second Life with a specific purpose in mind.

So I'm all ears for any suggestions of my "specific purpose" for my space in Second Life. Preferably, I'd like an A+ suggestion and then I'll give you a pat on the back for assisting me in getting a good grade. Thanks, buddy.

(P.S. I am not actually planning on living in my parents garage, but it looks that way until I finally close on my condo and get to move everything again, but that's what boys are for, right?)