Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity.

Well, whaddya know, it is winter after all. The snowfall is still a little anemic for this time of year, but at least the view is starting to match the season now.

When I got this morning I could hear the wind howling and the sounds of either really thick rain or sleet pelting the bedroom window. I looked out, expecting to see the lawn and driveway covered in snow, but instead saw that everything was just wet. It was that fun 33ºF that everyone loves to drive in. “Is it ice or is it rain? Who knows?”

As I made my way east along my daily commute, the rain quickly changed to snow as I descended into the Mohawk Valley. Apparently the plowing crews were not alerted to the fact that it’s January in Upstate New York, because very little had been done to clear the roads. It can’t be a budgetary thing, because there hasn’t been that much snow this season, so I don’t know where everyone was. When I got off the Thruway and onto the back roads (up by Farmer Bear’s place and the like), I was making my own tracks. I discovered that the new Jeep is a little more feisty on the slippery surfaces than his predecessor; popping into 4WD tamed him a bit. By the time I got to Amish country, I was following a Saab that was fish tailing all over the place at around 20 MPH. I made my way around the Saab, waved to the Amish commuters and continued along my daily trek, arriving to work five minutes late.

I did the best I could.

Honestly, I’d rather have a big snowstorm where temperatures are in the 20s instead of doing this ‘hover around freezing’ thing. It’s much easier to drive in snow than it is to drive in slush and it’s not quite so heavy when it has to be moved.

But on the bright side, at least January is looking like the part today.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Sleep is apparently not on the agenda for the week. Last night I stayed up for an hour beyond my bedtime. I wasn’t doing anything fun or anything, in fact, I just stared at the ceiling and wondered when I was going to fall asleep. I then woke up at 2 a.m. for a little while, just to keep things interesting. At 4 a.m. my body apparently thought it was well-rested and I ended up just laying in bed pondering the meaning of life until the alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. That’s when I officially started my day.

Last night was a repeat of the night before.

I don’t know why I’m not sleeping. I suspect it has something to do with the pressures of work and the chaos of my daily schedule. On the positive side of things, I can say that I am happier today than I was back when I would try to eek some sleep between pager beeps that plagued my old job. I don’t miss that on-call gig at all.

They’re trying out a new on-call schedule at my current job this year, where by seniority we get to pick which holidays we want to work. Theoretically, we have to work one holiday every two years. I think it’s a pretty sweet deal: being on-call only once every 13 weeks and having to work one holiday every two years. Others are not thinking as positively about the new way of doing things, though. I get tired of unrest.

Perhaps it’s the unrest in the world that is keeping me from sleep.

As I closely follow all the shenanigans leading up to the Presidential elections in November, I start to wonder what the world would be like if one of the social conservatives got to sit in the big chair. I’m all for a fiscal conservative sitting in the big chair; I think that we are throwing too much money at a wall and hoping it will stick and I think there are too many people that live off the system (without giving anything to the system in the first place), but the idea of a social conservative in the White House scares me a little bit. On one hand I think it’s arrogant for a man or woman to think they can sit down in the big chair and on day one nullify every marriage they didn’t agree with in one broad pen stroke. On the other hand, I think it shows that they’re quite stupid and out of touch with reality. Too much stupidity and arrogance plague the politics of our country.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be thinking about these things while I’m trying to sleep.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Earl and I spent the weekend in suburban Philly spending time with Earl’s family. It was the first time we had seen them since his Dad’s funeral services; we gathered with Earl’s family to go through boxes of photographs and other mementos from the family. It was a pleasant stroll down memory lane for many and a nice learning experience for those of us that are newish members of the family.

As we got in the car to leave yesterday morning, I told Earl that I was going to go home “up the Jersey side”. Normally when we visit down there we end up going through the Poconos in both directions and the making our way up home once entering New York State near Binghamton (please note, no “p” in Binghamton). It’s been a few years since we’ve gone home “up the Jersey side”, which involves taking the Jersey Turnpike up to I-287 and then joining the New York State Thruway a few miles north of the Tappan Zee Bridge. I was just in the mood for a change of pace. I haven’t had a lot of changes in pace the past couple of months.

I have been pretty vocal about my dislike of New Jersey. Most of my experience has been along the New Jersey Turnpike where it’s very much industrialized. Any venturing off the the Turnpike has involved traffic jams no matter the hour and, no offense to anyone, but I find the typical Jersey accent to be a little offensive to my ears. Not that my somewhat nasally Central New York accent is that much better, but we are lot closer to the neutral Midwestern accent that most associate with “generic American” than anything along the east coast. Of course, New Jersey is also unfortunately represented by the travesty called “Jersey Shore” and that is an abomination on society as a whole, fueled by people from Jersey.

Let’s say I’m not the biggest fan.

There’s always talk in our house of where we would like to relocate to someday, given the right opportunity, and my answer has always been “anywhere as long as it isn’t Jersey.” Florida comes to a close second in that line of thinking but I don’t mention it because we like the House of the Mouse. All of that being said, I think I have been rather shortsighted in my opinion of The Garden State.

Earl and I chatted about Jersey a little bit as we whizzed by all the construction on the Turnpike. We both decided that if we ever had to live in New Jersey that it would have to be south of Trenton. There was no way that we were going to live in New Jersey. It’s too crowded, too depressing to us and way too close to the Big Apple for our tastes. However, South Jersey might be a different story (though we agreed that Camden was a no go). Once you get away from the Jersey side of Philly, there’s actually some open area of the state, complete with farms and rural communities. That’s the part of Jersey that I rarely see, hence my unfair assessment of the state. It’s kind of like someone being overwhelmed by the magnitude of Times Square and then saying that they don’t like Pulaski, the little town I grew up in, because after all, they’re both in New York.

I guess I had a pot-kettle-black realization yesterday. If I have offended anyone with previous anti-Jersey rants in the past I apologize, and as god as my witness, I apologize to DJ Sam Storicks for an email exchange we had about Jersey a few years ago.

So now that I have reassessed my feelings about the Garden State, I have decided that we might want to spend a weekend sometime this year in the rural area of South Jersey. If any of my gentle readers have a suggestion, I would love to hear it.

There are really small things that happen in my life that I just find very intriguing and amusing. It’s usually something rather trivial that people wouldn’t take a second glance at, but for me, while it’s no earth shattering or traumatic event, I still take notice and ponder upon it to find a hidden significance.

Upon leaving my cubicle for lunch today, I forgot my iPad. That’s right, I left my iPad sitting on my desk at work, waiting for it’s opportunity to assist in the blogging process. I made my way down the hallway and out to the Jeep before I realized that I was not following my lunchtime ritual. Deciding to be adventurous, I opted to not return to my cubicle and instead make the decision to leave the iPad behind and write my blog entry on my iPhone today.

Now because of the way that I am wired, I am wondering what caused me to forget my iPad. There are a couple of possibilities as to why I have taken this alternate course of action during my lunch today.

1. Earl asked if I would buy lunch today instead of brown bagging it like I usually do every day. When I brown bag my lunch, I usually eat it at my desk before my actual lunch hour, because I’m usually hungry shortly after 11. (I blame the high school programming of the 11:04 lunch period during my formative years, but that’s just a hunch). I can hold out until 11:45 or so before needing to consume my lovely homemade lunch, but because I didn’t have a homemade lunch today I was either calorie starved and not thinking clearly at 12:00 or I was thrown off by not having followed my ritual of eating at 11:45.

2. I’m getting old and starting to forget (more) things. I’m never really good at remembering names and quite frankly I don’t trust that the words coming out of my mouth are the ones that I actually intended to say around 25% of the time, so forgetting things is not a big deal to me except when it comes to technology. Oh I can still recite the dumb stuff, like the license plate of my grandparents’ 1971 Chevy Caprice (564-LPO), but the fact that I forgot my iPad, or for that matter, any Apple product usually in my possession, is just a bit confounding to me and tells me that there’s an increasing amount of gray hair on my face for a reason, I’m aging. Today the iPad, tomorrow the Jeep, next week, pants. I see what lies ahead.

3. It could be that I’m tired. Earl and I had to take care of some family business at my Dad’s house last night and we didn’t get to bed until after 11. This made 5:30 feel like it arrived a lot sooner than it should have this morning. I still have the required amount of pep I need to get through the day, it’s just a sluggish pep.

I will probably ponder the “root cause analysis” (work jargon creeping in here) of my forgetting of the iPad through my lunch hour before dismissing it as something trivial and moving on with my day.

However, if you see me next week and I’m (not intentionally) without pants, please do me a favor and let me know.

Getting back into the swing of the work has been interesting. One of the things that I don’t particularly enjoy about the first of the year at work is our yearly reviews. I always feel like all the work that I have accomplished over the past year has to be substantiated and well documented in our yearly evaluation so that I get the raise I feel I deserve when they hand those things out in March. The worst part about the yearly review is that the company I work for is big on the “self-evaluation” concept. Basically, I have to rate myself on a scale from one to five on a whole slew of topics that have been decided for me. Last year’s evaluation included goals that I worked with my supervisor to formulate; this year’s evaluation has no such thing, we were handed team goals that we all tried to strive to reach together. I like this team approach to this in many respects, but my concern is that I write applications and support systems that provide the rest of the team the ability to reach their goals. My goals don’t exactly match theirs, but because I am part of the same group, I have to play along with the rest of the crowd.

It makes writing my own self-evaluation a little more of a challenge than I am in the mood for.

I get the concept of writing a self-evaluation and rating myself on a scale from one to five. I know folks that rate themselves as all fives, which I find ludicrous. I think I’m realist will the scoring I do, but last year I had one or two points knocked down a point (from a 4 to 3) so that I would have room to grow in the future. Keeping this in mind, I’m being even more realistic this year, but I’m afraid that if I score myself to low (on the valid points where I know I have room to grow), that no one will disagree and bump me up a little bit and then I’ll get less of a bonus than I probably would have gotten had I been a little more confident with my contributions.

We have another section of the evaluation that is called the “values” portion; here we rate ourselves on a dozen points or so on how we demonstrate the values of the company and we must give a specific point or reason supporting our number rating on a scale of 1 to 5. The values section includes statements like “I come to work with a positive attitude everyday.”  If a person is a quiet person that kind of works alone in his cubicle and doesn’t say much to the rest of team on a daily basis, how does he or she support their number rating? “I didn’t slap anyone on my way in or out of the building today.”  “I confined defecation habits to the rest room.”  Would it surprise you if I admitted that these statements did cross my mind as I was working on my self-evaluation this morning?  In a year that has been plagued by a feeling of being completely overwhelmed, I worry that I don’t have enough of a positive attitude and that I’ll score low, be scorned and then be relegated to a cubicle in a cold part of the building where the pipes clank.  I suppose having a smile on my face every morning is a good way to support that company value.

I guess because I have worked in many situations where there were no evaluations at all that at least I feel like I’m being recognized for my contributions to the great scheme of the big corporation I work for. But on the other hand, it’s not easy to make your number stand out when you’re surrounded by 15,000 other numbers, and because of that, I just want to make sure I give myself the right number so that it stays the right number.

So with the first of the year, the personal, vacation and holiday time (otherwise known as PTO, where it’s all lumped into one kitty) started back at zero and everyone in the company has a clean account of PTO to use throughout the year. I like the approach of lumping it into one big pot o’ time because I’m not one that likes to call in sick. I believe that there should be an ambulance, hospital and/or questionable mortality involved when one calls in sick, unless you’re highly infectious, then I believe you should stay home or be willing to be dunked in a vat of Lysol on an hourly basis.

Because of the yearly mass reset of the PTO accounts, several folks have already taken a day or two from their kitty of time. This strikes me as odd. We have enjoyed a couple of long weekends through the holidays and with Martin Luther King’s birthday holiday coming up in a little over a week, we have another long weekend not that far away. The Big Project™ at work is keeping me busy enough that I start to worry about the status of all the things I have my hands in when I’m not at work, so I guess that’s been weighing heavily on my mind as well, but I just can’t see calling off work right now just because the time is available. It doesn’t make sense to me, at least in our office. I can see if you have been working retail over the holidays and you want a vacation; it makes perfect sense to me to take some time off after the holidays, but just calling off because the time is available is a little strange to me.

I guess it boils down to work ethic. Everyone has their own work ethic, obviously, and I suppose everyone says that their personal work ethic is a strong one. I know I think I have a good work ethic. If I am going to talk the talk of “everyone has a responsibility to contribute to society and very few people should be a burden on the system”, then I need to walk the walk of maintaining my work ethic so that our family is as self-sufficient as possible. That’s one of the thousands of things that attracted me to Earl almost 16 years ago, he has a very strong work ethic that mirrors mine. In fact, I think he has an even stronger work ethic than I do because he has the patience to suffer much more bullshit than I would normally be able to stand. It’s one of the reasons I never followed up on my budding civil engineering career, I couldn’t imagine working in an atmosphere that was government run. I believe in doing what you need to do, when you need to do it because you believe that you’re doing the right thing. If that means doing something a little out of bounds of what you do on a daily basis, hopefully your employer will be the better for it and if you do it successfully, you’ll be the better for it as well. It’s always good to grow.

I’ve seen flight attendants who were engaged with their customers and care enough to go above and beyond for their customers. I’ve seen others love their career so much that they’ve been willing to do more outside of the airplane (but not while it’s flying) by doing what they can to better the careers of others that have the same position. And on the flip side, I have seen flight attendants who have flung pop out to passengers as quickly as possible so they can get back to flipping their magazine on their jump seat or go gossip in the back galley with someone else as equally cranky.

I believe that the folks with strong work ethic, no matter what baseline is used to measure that standard, are the folks that are the true “heartland” of the U.S., no matter where they physically reside. I once read an interview with Agnes Moorehead where she remarked that folks should work no matter what the situation because they’ll be contributing to the big picture, probably learn something from it (even if it’s that they don’t like that particular employment situation) and ultimately be the better for the experience. I love that. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I could find contentment in cleaning hotel rooms if I found myself in need of a different employment experience. I could also flip burgers, milk cows, drive a tractor or answer telephones. Would I be happy? Maybe not as happy as I am in a job that I love and is along my career goals, but at the very least I would be motivated to better myself, and that’s always a good thing.

And finding happiness in motivation is what keeps us moving with “forward motion” (my new professional buzzphrase of 2012 thus far).

So every year I start out the New Year with resolutions and goals. I ask myself, “What am I going to do this year to make me a better person?” I usually come up with a list of bullet points highlighting various areas of my life; financial goals, career goals and health goals. The latter usually includes shedding 15-20 pounds so that I can look like one of those models you see on the cover of Men’s Health; you know the guys, they’re the ones that the masses get all breathless about because they have a flat stomach, a full head of hair, arms that pop, a smile that dazzles everyone and a face that betrays their age by at least 10 years. After trying for the past couple of decades I have yet to obtain that magazine standard.

This year, I have just one bullet point on my list of New Year’s Resolutions.

* Be Happy

That’s it. That’s all I got. I have finally come to the realization that once I’m happy, everything else will fit into place. Being happy with who I am leads to be confident in who I am. And being confident in who I am leads me to finding new opportunities where I need to find them in my life. And this all starts with being happy with my physical appearance.

I weigh myself every morning. A lot of people say that this is a foolish thing to do, but quite frankly, I like to know what I weigh. In the past I did this so that I would avoid eating like a bird so that I could shed a few pounds here and there, but I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m still going to weigh myself, but it’s so I can gauge where I am and stay three steps ahead of a heart attack or something like that. I tweeted my weight for the first time in my life this morning; at last check I weight 206.4 pounds. I’ve weighed more in my life and I hav e certainly weighed less. A month ago, the 206.4 would have bothered me. A lot. But today it doesn’t, because if the weather was cooperative and I had a few practice runs, I could still do what I love to do, and that’s ride my road bike for 80 miles or so. I can still do that and I want to still be able to do that because it makes me happy.

My husband and family and friends love me for who I am. No one gasps in horror when I walk into a room. If they do, it’s probably because my beard has bushed out like some sort of fuzzy dog or because I’m wearing mismatched clothes or something equally horrific. I’ve had only two people in recent memory tell me that “wow, I’ve really gained weight” and quite frankly they’re not part of my life anymore because a comment like that is only a symptom of a deeper problem.

Steve Jobs once remarked that we shouldn’t do something day in and day out if we are not happy doing it. So I look myself in the mirror in the morning and ask myself, “Am I happy?”

The answer is an unequivocal ‘yes’. I am a very happy man. I can adjust a little bit here and there to sort of tweak the package for maximum enjoyment but as a whole, I’m a happy guy.

And as long as that remains true, I am going to meet my New Year’s resolution.