Category: Life

When weather, traffic or other conditions delay my packages it’s all good and well. The shipping companies can’t be penalized when a package gets delayed due to outside influences.

If my package were to arrive early, however, that’d be great. FedEx, though, has decided that it’s too early to deliver my package. Turns out that if a shipper pays for three-day shipping it doesn’t mean that a package will be delivered in three-days-or-less, it means three days. We wouldn’t want anyone to get two-day shipping for the price of three now, would we?

Taking off my cynical, the man’s out to get me hat for just a moment, I could imagine there’s a perfectly reasonable, logistical business decision for this move. If you have too many packages to handle on a given day (perhaps we’re getting into holiday shipping season) it may be a good idea to hold back packages that won’t be late.

It really comes down to this: it’s MY package and I want it! GIMME! FedEx must realize that, other than my wife, I’m the most important thing in their world. Apparently the memo hasn’t circulated yet.

Well, nothing to do with jewelry per se, but I did replace my own watch batteries tonight.

Over the past year my watches have been slowly dropping off, about one per month. A few weeks back my last running watch finally ran out of will. I had a drawer of 10-15 watches, all without juice and being a cheap bastard I couldn’t bring myself to take them to a jeweler and pay $10 and up per watch to have 40 cent batteries put in them.

Lucky for me there’s this cool thing called the Interwebs. A watch back removal tool from eBay and a pile of batteries from watchbatteries.com and I’m back to being on time again!

I learned two things:

1. You can save money replacing your own watch batteries
2. If there are tiny screws between you and the battery, let a jeweler do it

There was a snowstorm predicted for Wednesday… but it waited until Thursday instead.

I went into work in the morning for a bit to get some work done, the remote connection servers are swamped by everyone trying to WAH (work at home).  To make sure I didn’t get trapped at the office I left at lunch time.  All the stranded cars and the continued snow assured me I made the right decision.

Other than peaceful white coating, the weather has another fun benefit: wildlife. Our bird feeder has a constant crowd of patrons and our hummingbird feeders are helping the littlest customers stay warm (yeah, who knew that hummingbirds stayed here year round?). The cold also brought us a brand new visitor: a pair of coyotes. They must have come up from the park at the end of our street looking for food.

I was able to get some quick pictures of the hummingbirds, quail and coyote, they’re in our big snow gallery.

With the fierce competition for connectivity to Microsoft I won’t get much work done… but that does free me up to watch the show.

My parents were in town for Thanksgiving and I’ve been enjoying Thanksgiving dinner for four days now, but it all started with Thursday’s spread.

(Before and after… yum)

It’s stuff like this that makes e-mail fun at work.

Tim e-mailed to let the SharePoint team know he was working at home sick, this was the exchange we had…

Tim:

Hi Team,

I’m going to stay at home with the germs. I heard that it was a popular pastime for the team these past couple weeks.

Tomatoes are not to blame! Please, don’t turn against them.

And don’t worry too much about me; I took a vitamin (Flintstones COMPLETE [More COMPLETE with Choline]) , so everything should be fine.

Sincerely,
-Tim

Reeves:

Since Fred is bigger than Barney is he more nutritious?

Tim

I’d have to assume that Fred’s additional mass of chalk and artificial sweetner contributes no nutritional value.

I imagine molds of many characters, each receiving the same miniscule scoop of vitamins and minerals, moving down a conveyer to a second, varying-sized treatment of filler.

I don’t know if they do anything to even out the nutritive content. Perhaps they’re all liquids that eventually bake or cool.

When they’re formed, they go into a bottle and then I eat them.

That’s how health works.

You want to know the rest of what’s in Flintstones?

I had a glass or orange juice then brushed my teeth.  Ah, refreshing.

Why does it taste horrible if I drink orange juice after I brush my teeth but it’s tasty when I brush my teeth after I drink orange juice?

Oh, turns out the orange juice I like is made by Coca Cola company… who knew?

This is much more exciting to me than it is to the rest of the world.  I have cleared my inbox and my workload is now tracked by my task list.

Why is this good?  It now means that I’m not using my inbox to figure out what I need to do next.  Why is that bad?  Because the contents of my inbox are controlled by everyone else more than they are controlled by me… makes it hard for me to be in control of my tasks.

Now I need to actually get the stuff done.  The upside is I know what the stuff is.

The stress of moving and changing jobs has kind of put me off blogging… so for updates I refer to you Paula’s blog.  She has been much better than I about blogging as of late. 🙂

At any rate… after a much delayed flight from Dublin to Chicago we’re relaxing in the American Airlines Admiral club.  I must say, AA is going down hill.  The aircraft here from Dublin was a total beater (our seats had no functioning lights and the channels on the AV system wouldn’t change).  The Admiral’s club is not much better, the seats all look like the upholstery hasn’t been cleaned in a decade.

Yep, delaying my flight for several hours forcing me to have a 5 hour layover makes me grumpy.

Bah!

Paula and I are complete old fogies… we rang in 2008 from bed.  On the plus side… it’s the first time in several years we’ve actually been awake at midnight. 🙂

Have a wonderful, safe and peaceful 2008!

I’ve got a new job (soon)!  The beginning of next year I’ll be joining the Sharepoint team in Redmond, Washington.  I’m super-excited about this new position.  I’ll be moving into the greater Office organization and getting a chance once again, to work with friends from the past. 

While Paula and I are both really excited to be moving to Redmond we’re still a little bit stressed and sad.  We’re facing down our second international move in less than two years (can you say “gluttons for punishment”?) and are a little disappointed to be leaving Ireland. We love the Irish people, the country and especially the convenient travel.

We will, however, be over the hump soon and are working hard to distract ourselves (went to Waterford last weekend, going to Spain this weekend, going to western Ireland in early December and to New York for Christmas with my sister <phew>). 

January 14th is my first day… so I’m sure the time will fly.