Hello and happy Friday. Wanna know what I did yesterday? I WENT TO THE OFFICE for the first time since my laptop was acting up in October! I took the train and sat in the mostly empty office and had a frigging blast away from construction noises and lawnmowers and barking dog and delivery drivers and my monotonous, depressing, and isolating work from home life. We're still wearing masks at work, but at this point you could tie a smelly gym sock around my face and I'd still goofily grin at ...
What is a weekend?
As of today, I have been home for 15 days, with the exception of two car rides and one socially-distanced visit with Mom. I gave up giving up Facebook for Lent, because 1) everything is Lent now and 2) there are a lot of acquaintances on there and I wanted to make sure that they're still okay. And while there was a GOODLY amount of Coronavirus panic on there, babies are being born, pets are being adopted, and birthdays are still happening. At least this tamped down political chat. EVERYONE ...
Holy crap I’ve been Gutenberged
It's been a while. I know. I'm popping in here tonight to give an update on what's been going on as well as to try Wordpress 5.0, which changed up its whole writing experience with an editor called Gutenberg. I could install a plugin that restores the old editor but what's the point? Change happens. (I'm also trying to postpone handling the vats of clean laundry upstairs that needs to be folded.) New Phone! (okay bolding on the fly is pretty neat) After a literal 8 months of hemming ...
Friday 5: The Whole Trial Is Out of Order!
Happy Friday 5 on a Saturday! This is a day late because ... wait for it ... I went out again last night. This time was happy hour with my mom and my aunt who is recently back from a multi-year stint on Kwajalein Atoll. Go look it up. It's very far away from New Jersey. It's been an incredibly social week for me and is shaping up to be an incredibly social month. I went back to work on Thursday to this... and then 10 minutes later my A+, understanding, ...
Friday 5: Performance Evaluation
Hi! Time to get back into the swing of real-ish time blogging after a bunch of scheduled posts designed to mask the fact that we were in Seattle on vacation. (That lily? Died 3 weeks ago.) I used to liveblog vacations until I realized it's a big ol' "ROB ME" invite. We came home on Tuesday, picked up the dogs on Wednesday, pulled stuff together on Thursday and I went back to work yesterday. I should have the Seattle blog post ready for Monday. I should break it up into smaller posts, but meh. ...
Lynda, the Library, and me
The Big!Work!Project! which surely you are tired of hearing of by now involved new software, and a new-to-us way of writing reports. It's Crystal Reports, which while it's new-to-us, isn't very new-to-me. I was using it over 10 years ago at the C-P, and I won't lie, seeing it re-emerge sent a shiver of dread down my spine. What I needed was a refresher. Last Tuesday night, I had a dream that I went to Lynda.com (a training site that's been live since 1995) and signed up for Crystal Reports ...
Las Vegas trip
This year Spring Business Trip took me to Las Vegas to exhibit at the AAPA meeting. And since Mom is now a retired lady with some free time on her hands, she came along for the ride! It was a relatively short trip. We flew in on a Tuesday morning to set up the booth. Exhibit days were Wednesday and Thursday, and on Friday morning we flew home. We stayed at Mandalay Bay which is just a phenomenally gorgeous hotel. On Tuesday we set up the booth and then had lunch at Mandalay Bay's ...
Work from home Mondays
TNP (which isn't new anymore but I'm too lazy to change pseudonyms) instituted a new policy where we are able to pick one day a week to work from home. We could pick Monday, Thursday, or Friday, which allows us to have 2 core days a week where everyone can be in the office and attend meetings all day to collaborate. I picked Mondays. Mostly because WWE pay per views are on Sunday nights and this allows me to watch them the full way and not be destroyed on Monday mornings. You might think I'm ...
Five years!
Today is my FIVE YEAR anniversary at TNP, which really isn't The New Place at all anymore. Not so shabby for someone who thought she'd be fired before her first year was done. It's a good place to work, and has allowed me to travel to new places and learn new things. I'm doing great things with Excel, and I'm even doing a bit of SQL work on our database! (I also received $300 in gift cards, which will be put aside for future travel.) In unrelated news, I'm 23 days through the Yoga with ...
I'm trade-publication famous!
I try very hard to separate work from blog, but I'm very proud and can't let this go by without saying something... Last month, Associations Now magazine (official magazine of ASAE) interviewed my manager and me about how we manage data collection at TNP. The interview was published online last week and I think it turned out really well. You can read it here: Member-Data Collection: The Never-ending story. I love my job! ...
Throwback Thursday: Cube decorating
I'm going to say this was December of 2010, because I wasn't sitting in that spot in December 2009 and I didn't have that hair color or bangs when I started at TNP in January 2012. I could have sworn I posted about the Post-it note (not a sponsor, I suck, blah blah) wreath here, but I can't find it. We didn't have tall cubicle walls at the C-P, so by the end of my tenure there I was staring at that bland gray wall all day. (Which I think was painted a sickly green later on, thanks GW.). To ...
Pennsylvania Conference for Women
I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Pennsylvania Conference for Women on October 16. TNP paid for all of their female employees to go which, as I type it out, is weird and sad for the men. It was held at the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Arch Street in Philadelphia. Just a PATCO/Speedline trip for me! The doors opened at 7:30 pm for the Exhibit Hall and the complimentary breakfast. I arrived at 8:10, and all of the food was gone except for 2 muffins, and all of the coffee was ...