Errors and Omissions

Well last week was pretty damn grim - my birthday was just horrible - I think I'll just pass over that rather than memorialise it

Let it come down

Well, that was exciting - we had a rainstorm yesterday afternoon (a change from the regular 7pm ones), and wow did it rain. 7 inches in about 2 hours, thats some heavy shit.

Cat was coming to pick me up for 5, but the rain had flooded so many intersections (and cars), she didnt get here til 5:30 (for a 10 minute drive) and we had a look at the queue to get off this island and decided we could just have dinner here instead (which we did, a middle-easternish restaurant that was pretty underwhelming over all), then finally left about 7. \

Amazingly, the drains here are so good that the floods had all abated by then, and the bottlenecks cleared up so we had an easy trip home. I wish I'd gotten a picture of some of the major intersections though, with water four and five feet deep ... and idiots trying/failing to drive through it.

Still struggling

Each day seems awfully hard, and leaves me wrung out. And Cat keeps saying, "I know it's hard, and I'll try to avoid taxing you with anything extra" .... which lasts about 30 minutes each time, before she does anyway. I get that it's hard for her and she's not very well still, with the Meunieres disorientation coming and going, but ... geez, she's not actually working a job, can nap every afternoon. Eh, I'm just being bitter and unfair.

Last Sunday was a bit of a fiasco - Cat's birthday, and we went (after a late-ish breakfast) for a road trip to a park called Weeki Wachi (sp?), to watch underwater mermaids swim/dance. No really, google it. Well the drive up was pretty enough, along a toll express, but we stopped just before the park for lunch at Ruby Tuesday's and that was pretty bad: food substandard and not very warm, waitress totally checked out and oblivious.

THen we got to the park, to find it full (no parking even in overflow), and realised we should have gotten there 3 hours earlier. At Cats instigation we wisely gave up on the idea, then tried to find a different route home, hoping to drive by the sea.

Ha! Instead we stumbled onto route 19, which was basically 40 miles of endless stripmalls, fast food, and ... well pretty much any sort of product-sale you could think of, except for gin-joints :)   Really horrible. She spotted a Baskin Robbins/Dunkin Donuts, and decided ice cream would cheer her, but we couldnt get any, the service was really horrendous (and the 2 donuts we got were stale as shit).  

Still couldnt find a coast road, so we drove home on 19, through several torrential rainstorms (all heading for that Park, so aborting that turned out to be a doubly-good idea).

OH well, dinner at the Columbia was much much nicer - very upmarket & swank, without being TOO horrendously expensive (the Babe Ruth Steak was $39, the priciest entree ... which I ordered of course lol).

Grim

Bad week at work - imposter syndrome, bumping up against bits that I'm not esp familiar with (and which have been mutated -radically- since the last time I did deal with them, esp SSIS). Lots of depression & frustration.

Also financially squeezed, without the income from Leidos I'd budgetted on for last Friday, we've been running on fumes all week - and Cat's kind of ignored that and kept spending carelessly, despite my pleas.

Bad week all around.

Vertigo

Cat's Meuniere's disease has unfortunately reemerged as an issue, again, so we had a pretty quiet weekend, & she spent a lot of it lying down to minimize the vertigo.

On the bright side, I drove us to Fresco's for a wonderful brunch, looking over the yacht harbour.

I seemed to spend a lot of the weekend zoned out, myself, tired from the work week. I guess the last 18 months of indolence take some time to put behind me. Nice holiday (heh), wish it could have continued longer.

Leidos ... Incompetent? or Evil and Incompetent?

I'll go with the latter, I think.

The latest (and hopefully final) screw-over by Leidos is to inform me today, that - despite what they told me in April - I will NOT be given my final pay on the last day of formal employment there, today (having been on unpaid leave for the last four weeks). No, now I have to wait another two weeks. No actual reason given - it's not like it hasnt been known when this is happening for the last 28 days. Just, Fuck You, We Can.

Which is pretty much the Leidos motto, actually. nowadays.

HR departments are notoriously poor quality, the world over, but for a combination of incompetence, malice, deceit and fraud, I dont think you could find anyone to compete with the Leidos HR department.

Adjusting

Still adjusting - for me, mostly about adjusting to a new job, so very different in ethos, setup and environment; and at having to go to the office every day, not just roll out of bed at 2 minutes to 8 for an 8 a.m. start. I must admit, it's leaving me quite exhausted at the end of each day, between the earlier start (6:30) and the mental stretch and concentration.

It's also kind of alarming how amateur this place was (until my boss started, about 3 weeks before me) ... documentation is either wrong or nonexistent, ditto most policies. Oh well, we'll lick it into shape.

Memorial Day we took it fairly easy: Cat was really wiped out, so I did the driving, and we didnt go anywhere much, just lunch at the Acropolis. And it was nice enough but man do I miss the Santa Fe - for the food (obv) but also for that warm sense of being among friends, of being home.