Maintainers Weekly Chat July 7 - July 13
 

We survived Hurricane Arthur with only a good soaking of highly needed rain. Hope everyone else in the path did as well.

My challenge this week is to get a few items off my to-do list without snacking my way through them.

Good Morning all! Thanks to Andrea (neurodoc) I now have a new activity I'm going to try - the trampoline "park". The weekends are really good for paddling this year so far so I'm saving this other thing for bad weather days.

I was quite good on the regular trampoline in high school and at summer camp. they even have a "skyrobics" class which I'm going to try. I was too intimidated by aerobics the first time around - all those frenetic thin people - and this now would be ideal since there's very little impact and my feet are basically shot.

Good week all!

Dagmar :yay:

Hi, folks! I'm officially maintaining so I thought I'd pop in.

I never heard of a trampoline "park" before, but I googled it and there are a few in my state. They look like a fun way to exercise! Unfortunately, none of them are close to me and I don't feel like getting into a program with a half hour commute, but maybe I'll do a one-time thing some day.

My weight has been bouncing like it's on a trampoline: 138.4/137.2/138.6/137.0/138.6
Hopefully, that means I'll be lighter again tomorrow, lol!

We had a quiet weekend. It was terribly humid with the monsoonal flow--even saw some showers in the vicinity but not at our home. Went out for lunch a couple of times and saw two movies (Snowpiercer was just plain weird and Begin Again was a fun movie).

I joined a gardening group on Facebook for gardeners in my area in hopes of learning how to grow things here. Right now my aim is to keep my third Rosemary plant from dying. The first two were disasters.

We drove down to LA this weekend from Monterey. I was amazed at how hot it was there compared to Monterey. Glad to be back to this 60s weather! Don't know how I will stand Orlando when I get back in a few weeks!

Anyway, we did a lot of the tourist stuff and took one of those hop on/hop off buses to see/hear a bunch of Hollywood/Beverly Hills/LA stuff. We didn't do the one where you could see the stars home because as I told my DD, I wouldn't know who the stars are unless they are old! I just don't keep up with who the stars are and I don't really watch TV, other than Int'l House Hunters sometimes.

We walked tons - and I was thinking at the end of the day I am SO thankful I lost that 52 pounds. I wouldn't have been able to walk as much or feel as good as I did in that heat last summer! I just ate what I wanted all weekend but luckily it wasn't anything extreme. DD became a vegetarian recently so we ate pretty healthy anyway and just a few desserts. Still missing having a scale though! But clothes are feeling fine so hopefully all is okay. :)

I've got a close friend from college visiting from Oregon. We are headed to San Francisco for the day. I'm excited but my weight is up and I suspect today's food will be off plan as well. She leaves tomorrow and I plan on buckling down until I leave for London later in July. I want to be down 5-7 pounds to give me some wiggle room. We will see how close to that I can get.

Hi folks! I am back at work today after a 4-day weekend. My mom is visiting so we did a lot of stuff with the girls this weekend (zoo, etc). Here's your super-cute twin story of the day -- last night near bedtime they were both getting into that stage of overtired where everything is funny. A decided she wanted to give C a hug, so she tackled her to the ground and snuggled her while giggling hysterically. Unfortunately C didn't appreciate being thrown on the floor (esp. since she landed on some rubber blocks) and was crying! In any case, some adorable baby wrestling ensued with much snuggling and some giggling and some crying.

I'm starting to plan for my first business trip since the girls were born. It's only three days away from home but I am still nervous about it.

Apparently cat Mudpie CAN navigate the basement steps. I just found two huge piles of p**p down there. I guess she'll be expecting me to put another box down there. ARRRGH!

Dagmar :mad:

Oh no. I hope it was at least the solid kind...

BF and I are mostly moved into our new place and we moved Rusty in on Sunday night. He still defaults to hanging out under the couch, but he is comfortable around us. I wonder when the night meowing will stop...anyone know how to "remedy" that?

So much work keeps piling on me, day to day, that it's getting laughable. Yesterday's crisis is the direct report whom I hired this past November. She called in sick, and then the second day, was still out, but didn't call in. Meantime an analyst whom she'd kept promising work to, and then reneging, for about two weeks in a row, contacted me angrily asking what is going on. Something's not good there. I have to get this guy new help IMMEDIATELY. And I can't do it myself as I just got something big handed to me personally yesterday. Then there's something to rewrite from Japanese English.

Again, I ask: What summer?

I'm fortunate in that I'm able to turn work down if I want less, without losing my job. I figure standing on my paddleboard at 7 a.m. on a calm lake on Sunday is waaay more worth it than $16 for walking a dog. I do tend to make up for it in winter, if people hire me, but the money is not all that matters at this point in my life. I have only so many days left of vigorous life and I plan to enjoy at least some of them.

Dagmar :dizzy:

Who doesn't call in the second day? What a nerve. I wouldn't be able to show up after that. Of course if I was just hired in November I probably wouldn't miss any work for over a year unless I was deathly ill.
Sorry you are so overworked! :hug:

Your last sentence reminded me of those assembly instructions you get sometimes that were written in China but put into English by someone who doesn't know English. Some are hilarious. High school students will try to turn in translations by googling the changes... yeah... that doesn't work.

Kinda like those souvenir T-shirts that people buy in other countries... Do you really know what those Kanji characters mean??? Or vice-versa - weird random English words on a visiting exchange student's T that make no sense when put together. Even worse if you come back from your exotic vacation with a tattoo that says something entirely different from what you asked for!

Now I know what was wrong with the woman who didn't call in. She has a raging case of Lyme Disease, such that she's been bedridden for two days straight and pretty much out of it, waiting for powerful antibiotics and painkillers to kick in. She told her husband to call in or instant message me, and he completely forgot.

How I found this out is that after hearing nothing from her for two days, I contacted HR, who took over from there and called her emergency contact number that they keep on file. It was her husband, and boy was he sheepish and apologetic.

I felt alarmist after the fact, but listen, if you've ever had or heard of someone working from home who **died on the job** (this happened to a manager in the dept next to mine) and then of course couldn't be reached, then you'd worry, too, if someone didn't call in or contact you for two days, and missed their weekly one-on-one meeting with you -- particularly if that person is generally responsible and conscientious.

Whew, so anyway, after that, and a document that I worked on till nearly 9 PM last night, and more Japanese English to rewrite today, I am so very done with this week.

The Japanese English rewrites can be an exercise in creative writing as I try to divine the intent behind the construction. But I admire them for their effort, which surely is strenuous. I don't know any Japanese. And the languages are so far apart in derivation. With analysts whose native languages are Portuguese and South American Spanish, or Italian and German, there's some relationship to English, but not with the Japanese or the Chinese.

Saef, glad you were able to get in touch and make sure that the woman was still alive and was actually sick and not skipping out on the job. ;) I have studied Japanese and I can tell you grammatically it is extremely different from English. Verbs always come at the end of sentences, for example, and sometimes verb conjugations can have all sorts of innuendo encoded in them. For example, a single verb can say that someone else ate your food and you are upset about it ("taberareteshimatta"). In English, the verb would still just be "ate."

My mom goes home tomorrow. :( I really don't mind having my mom around, which is kind of an interesting discovery. My dad and I don't get along very well but my mom is a great house guest. She helps out a lot with the babies! Poor C has another cold, just after getting over the last one. Sigh.

In other news, we are meeting with a vet behaviorist to evaluate Carter today. Hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. He bit my foot the other day and if I hadn't been wearing sneakers it would have done some damage, so it is not looking good for him. :(