My Insect Life

Just some updates as to what I've been up to. More for my benefit than anything else.

Work's coming along. Finished off my second review on Thursday night. Probably could have had it done way sooner, but I'm still staying pretty busy during the week, and got hung up with some things. Still beat the deadline by several days. Company I'm working for recently automated everything too, which is good in a lot of ways -- mostly because my "handler," while a nice and helpful guy, seemed to always have a pretty full plate, and I'm sure dealing with newbies like me was small, but pretty annoying, part of that. Really simple interface too, which is good. Now, I just wait for the next one.

My work on the dentist's website is almost finished too. Right now, I'm just waiting on a handful of personal information. Terry and the rest of her crew tend not to send me much on weekends, and my standing deadline for the job is June 4th, so I'm winding down on that, too. There's a chance they'll be some sort of retainer, for me to help keep up a couple of incidental things with the job, but the site will be going public on the 4th, I'll be getting paid on the 4th -- until they need a copy writer for another job, I'll be out on 4th.

With the work, I've had a little extra money, naturally. Should be putting it back, and that's in the plan, but I've been using some of it to shore up my wardrobe, which, thanks to the nuclear heat of my dryer and using powder soap [not doing that anymore], has seen better days. Few new t-shirts, a tie that matches my suit a bit better.

That last bit is particularly important. College friend is getting married on Cape Cod in June, and I'm flying up to Boston so I can go on the weekend of the 12th. Should be a good time, and along with the wedding it's going to be a little like a reunion for me, since I'll be seeing what I affectionately call my "first family" - Hannah, Sam, and Julia - and staying the latter's family in Hull. It'll only be for about five days, and should be a real whirlwind of trip, since it's a plane ride up, a ferry to Hull [I love ferries], a trip to Cape Cod, and then... everything in reverse again. Really looking forward to it, though I will admit, even as close as the date is, the fact that I'm going still hasn't quite set in.

To some degree, it's this place. It's a little hard to think of anything beyond it at times.

I'm too sentimental.

Speaking of which. Spring cleaning here, in a way. Laptop's hard drive has seen better days, and my external, the one ripped out of my old Toshiba has just been acting... oddly, giving me I/O errors on occasion, freezing up too easily. So, a reformat for that was in order, which meant transferring everything over, and that made me realize how close to a full hard drive I was, so I decided I needed to start deleting some things, making room for anything new that might come my way. Right now, I feel pretty good about it -- everything that was on the external, with everything important or still unwatched, is resting comfortably on my laptop, with a good 100+ GBs of memory left. Would like to get about 50 extra GBs out of it, but you know, baby steps.

Swiped some computer cleaner from an office recently. So I'll be doing my best to make the outside match the squeaky-clean inside of the machine. It's a budget computer, and I've already been way rougher on it than I ever would have dreamed of being with my Toshiba, but there's no excuse for how much I've neglected it's upkeep.

Other things. Plan on working on cleaning up another one of those prose pieces I was working on. I hate self-editing. Vaguely like cutting yourself bad enough to need stitches, waiting a few weeks, and then re-opening and rooting around in the wound. Maybe I'm being dramatic. But boy, it feels that way sometimes.

Probate continues it's slow crawl. Knee-deep in insurance information lately too. Lot of "hurry-up-and-wait" there. Going to be a little like a photo-finish to hit the August deadline, but it happens whether I'm ready for it or not.

Starting to get that vague sense of "what the hell am I going to do when all this is over?"

Better to worry about it later. Eyes on the prize, and all that.

More soon. With any luck, I'll have time over the next couple days to look over something else like "Arches" and give it a post. Appreciate Andrew for commenting... even just knowing people like what I wrote is helpful, especially with something like "Arches" which is/was a part of a bigger thing.