geekspeak, the ongoing saga of my job

Geekery, Continued

Everything just seemed to fall into place.

We had talked to our department’s trainer, and asked him if he thought we should train everyone on what we had of the database so far, or whether we should wait until the database is complete — god only knows when that will be. The trainer agreed that we should train our department ASAP, and fill them in on any additional updates as necessary.

We worked on borrowing a projector and a laptop, and making sure one of the nearby conference rooms had network access. Then, a supervisor from an IT-based department upstairs said that we could just use their training room, already equipped with a projector and laptop and room for eight people — exactly big enough to train half of our department at a crack. We booked the room for a week and a half in the future.

We continued to work on getting reports and statistics-gathering forms functional in the development copy (aka the test database). We met with our supervisor after he returned from vacation earlier this week, and got his reactions to the database and the reports we’d created for him. He gave us some suggestions for tweaking the reports, but said that we could go ahead with implementing the statistics-gathering from team members. Month-end is tomorrow, so the new method of gathering stats in the database would be implemented effective Monday. Just in time for training.

Everything was ready to import into the live database yesterday afternoon, and we did our update at 4:30pm yesterday. The import had only one minor glitch in one report, due to some previously-entered data that invalidated the referential integrity we’d set up between tables. We came in early this morning to fix the problem, rather than staying late yesterday. After correcting the data in the main log table, everything was fine. The database was essentially complete. Again, just in time for training.

Our first training session was at 9:30am today. I stood at the front and did the public speaking, while James sat at the laptop and did the demonstrating. Other supervisors in the loan area were invited to attend one of the two sessions, so that they might be able to see whether an Access database might benefit their department. One supervisor was in attendance for the first training session, and our own supervisor popped in for the first half of that session, making a full house.

The first session took just over an hour, including questions. That was a little longer than we’d counted on, as we’d scheduled the second session to start at 10:30am.

The second session actually ended up starting at 10:45am, and one more supervisor was in attendance, in addition to the supervisor of all Loan Servicing departments. (No pressure.) Our supervisor came in for the second part of the session this time. This session took almost exactly an hour.

Overall, we did well on our two scheduled training sessions… but we weren’t done yet. Two team members who process payoff checks had asked if they could wait until 3:30pm to train, since the end of the month is a busy time for them. We agreed, and ended up having four people in an afternoon session: the two payoff ladies, one supervisor from yet another department, and one team member who had gotten caught in a 45-minute phone call during the 10:30 session and hadn’t been able to attend. That session was a little awkward, being that there was such a small but diverse audience, but it seemed to be well-received nonetheless.

We didn’t get much actual work done on the database today — combined a couple reports into one (thank jebus for union queries) and started working on calculations for another report — but, overall, considering all the training we did, I think we had a productive day.

The next potentially stressful issue? How to tell our supervisor that we want a change in job description before we work on databases for other departments. Neither myself nor James are terribly good at standing up for ourselves… but we need to stand firm. It would be easy for The Man to take advantage of our apparently rare and valuable skills. If they had to hire new people to replace us, though, any self-respecting Access database programmer or administrator would scoff at our current wage.

I hate being a self-serving jerk. Our boss is cool, though, so I think we should be able to get our point across in a non-threatening and un-jerk-like manner. We’ll see.

Even if I do remain a mere Operations Associate… I love being able to do what I enjoy at work. This is why I went to college. I’m glad I wasn’t just chasing rainbows.

photos 1 Comment

Weeds I’d Be Happy To Grow

As I’ve mentioned in my weekly diet updates, I like to take a half-hour to 45-minute walk every day during my lunch hour. There’s a short path through a small wooded area in the middle of the business park, and I’ve walked it almost every day for… gee, probably seven or eight months now. I feel like my day is incomplete without my walk through the woods.

Since this is the first year I’ve walked the path in the early spring, I’m seeing all kinds of new wildflowers and plants I never noticed before. They all just melded together into a fantastic wooded greenness. Now, though, after walking in the winter and seeing everything bare, the new growth is really catching my eye. Especially flowers and things with splashes of color or unusual shape.

Now, I figure that if these plants are growing in the woods with no help from Man, they must be native to the NW Ohio area and able to thrive on their own in a shady environment. That’s pretty much a definition of my back yard: shady and neglected. 🙂 If I could identify these plants, and could procure seeds or seedlings (I’d rather not remove them from the walking path), I could very likely grow quite the kick-ass wildflower bed along one of our hedge walls. Assuming Aaron wouldn’t nix the idea due to his allergies.

I wish I could do a reverse Google Image search: plug in an image and have it search for images like it, or a definition of what I photographed. But alas (and alack), the only thing I can do is take pictures of the pretties and post them for my good readers to help me identify.

For pretty pictures of weeds wildflowers, read on…
Continue reading →

gardening

Frost Tonight

Stan Stachak says there’s going to be frost tonight. I do have a few perennials coming up, and I’m not planning to go out and cover them all, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to give my rose over to the last frost.

I went out this evening before sunset and pruned the rose back just a little before wrapping it in an old pillowcase and weighting the pillowcase down with some terra-cotta pots. Must remember to remove the pillowcase in the morning before I leave for work.

Hopefully this saves my rose from losing any precious growth. Poor thing looks like crap, but I’m not giving up on it.

(I did feel a little absurd, protecting a rose in the middle of a patch of dirt and weeds. Maybe I *should* move the rose elsewhere, so Aaron and I can plant grass over that entire stretch.)

As for my other perennials… the tiger lilies survived cold snaps earlier in the season, and they’re still just big bushy leaves with no blooms, so I’m not concerned about them. Something’s coming up that I planted by my Morning Glories last year (hell if I can remember what it is), but I don’t really have an emotional investment in it, since it didn’t do much last year. My coreopsis has been heaving during the winter a bit, and is just now starting to grow new leaves, so I’m a little worried about it, but I think it should be fine.

Not a peep from the lavender that was growing next to the coreopsis. This was supposed to be the year it bloomed. I wish I would have known it might not have survived the winter; I had seeds I could have started. Oh, well. Maybe I’ll just let the coreopsis have the mailbox and replant lavender elsewhere.

gardening 4 Comments

A Little Help?

Welcome to my problem spot.

When we moved in, there was a giant, out-of-control forsythia bush bogarting this entire space. Or maybe it was two. Yeah, it was at least two. At any rate, we dug all the bushes up, due to their scraggly beyond-hope nature. This, unfortunately, left a giant dirt pit, devoid of grass. I tried growing herbs and a rosebush here, but they all failed miserably. The rose still lives here, although you can’t see its teeny bare twigs in this picture. (Draw an imaginary line down the edge of the house, and the rose lives about half an inch down from the foundation on that line. Yeah, that bushy thing that looks like just another weed.) I also planted some of Scott’s tiger lilies over on the left, by the fence, and I mulched them today. (You can see the line of red mulch by the fence, barely.)

But OMG, look at the rest!

*puts head in hands*

It looks sunny enough now, but a.) this is just before sunset, and b.) this is still spring. The leaves haven’t come in on that maple tree overhead quite yet.

I can’t dig or roto-till or anything here, really, because our TV coaxial cable runs dangerously close to the surface of the yard. We’d have to be really extra careful if we dug up the dirt, even just to plant grass. I discovered this while I was digging up the area to make it a weed herb garden two years ago.

So, questions. Andrea, if you read this, this is especially for you. Melody, too, but I don’t think you read my blog very much, if at all. (Prove me wrong!) 🙂 Anyone else who’s garden-savvy, go for it. Please.

1.) There are plants coming up that don’t look like standard broadleaf weeds. Should I try to identify these, or just say Fuck It? Some of them look kinda neat, but don’t flower. I wonder if some of my herbs came back (sage in particular)? I do know that some of these are the forsythia trying to make a comeback with its remaining root system. That fucking thing will NOT go away.

2.) WTF should I plant here? Bulbs? Grass? Or mulch it and pretend something should be growing? We don’t have very good luck with grass; we’ve tried growing it in various parts of the front and back yards, and only succeed in killing it with heat and drought in mid-August, while allowing weeds to sprout up mighty fine. And those were in sunny areas. This is very, very shady in summer.

3.) Should I transplant my hybrid tea rose? The foliage keeps coming back (but no buds or blooms), for two springs now, despite the fact that I continually forget to cover it in autumn. It’s shooting up tiny canes and leaves from the crown, and the rest of it is pretty much dead. But the crown is alive, so the rose is alive. Right? So, should I try to move it before it finishes dying, or try to nurse it back to health and strength before I move it, if at all? The place it’s currently living is between partial sun and partial shade, I’d say.

I feel like such a damn failure sometimes. As long as I can Set It And Forget It™, I’m good to go. If forgetting to water for a week will kill a particular plant in a particular spot, well, yeah. That’s how I roll. Although I am thinking about trying a new ghetto irrigation system I read about in You Grow Girl that might work for whatever I try to plant under the overhang this year. We’ll see…

randomness 2 Comments

My Birthday

So, many of you may be wondering, what was my birthday surprise? And what did I do before said 4:00 birthday surprise?

The day started like most Saturdays: with a trip to the Happy Rose Buffet. Aaron and I then went hunting for garage sales, being that it was sunny and gorgeous outside and sales should have been in full swing — but, alas, the few we found were barely worth getting out of the car for.

I did open my present(s) from Aaron, too. He got me the Dune special edition DVD and Logan’s Run on DVD, and also got me a Lane Bryant gift card. Squee!

Around 4:00, there was a knock on the door — and it was Sheryl! @whee! She brought me a birthday card (complete with her own Grim Reaper artwork), Hello Kitty stickers, a gift card to Home Depot (yay, plants!), and the You Grow Girl book I had listed on my Amazon wishlist. We hung out for a couple hours, just talking and shooting the shit, before she had to go get some food and head back to Columbus. That was an awesome surprise. Thank you, Sheryls! (Oh, and your Mom’s seventies golf clubs? Quite the swanky set.)

After Sheryl left, Aaron and I headed out to Wildwood to walk around and enjoy the weather. As we walked down the bike path (we weren’t wearing our walking shoes, and had to stick to the paved areas), we saw about six deer crossing the railroad tracks. That was cool.

Then came dinner. As usual, we waffled on where to go. We’re so indecisive about restaurants. We ended up deciding on Outback Steakhouse, and having the Bloomin’ Onion and the Outback-Style Prime Rib. Mmm. Then we came home and ate some Twinkie-misu for dessert.

Overall, I had a very low-key but pleasant 30th birthday.

I wish I had written in my diary/journal back when I turned 12, though, because I really felt a connection to how I felt back then — kind of like Life was moving faster than I was prepared to go. I distinctly remember making a comment about not wanting to grow up, and I remember my Aunt Sammie finding that preposterous. I was scared, though; in a few months, I’d be going to Junior High, graduating to a new Sunday School class, maybe having my “womanhood” rear its ugly head, and all I wanted to do was watch Dance Party USA and read Star Trek books and hang out with my Mom and her boyfriend.

The irrational fears that are in the back of my mind are a little different now. I’m close to half-done with my life — how fucked up is that?! I haven’t done half the things I wanted to by now, really. And being an agnostic/atheist isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, I’ll tell you what. It would make my occasional fear of mortality a little easier to swallow if I thought I’d be seeing my stepdad Tom and my Memaw and my Granny and meeting Aaron’s Mom and all that shit when I die. As it is, death scares the living fuck out of me. Nonexistence is a tough pill to swallow.

Yes, I know, I’m only 30. But when I’m PMSing and being all funky before bed, weird shit goes through my head sometimes. And poor Aaron didn’t know what to make of the fact that I was all weepy on my birthday, when he was trying to be all Happy Birthday for me. And then he got all sweet and said that we were going to grow old together and use the next generation of Viagra so he can “knock my cobwebs out,” which was sweet in its own Aaron-ish way, and made me weepy all over again. (Poor boy just can’t win.)

I’m feeling much better now, though. It really was just PMS, I think. That, and remembering some crazy dream I had a few months ago where I thought that Aaron and I were going to die. That freaked my shit out. But maybe I’ll share that one later.