Maius Intra Qua Extra

Post titles are so difficult sometimes.

( Not so serious Yipes )

( Serious Yipes )

( Not Yipes at all )

So as you probably are aware, I used to be employed by the company my husband still works at, doing software QA and project management work, but I was let go late last year and am currently unemployed (or really, semi-retired). My husband also does project management, so our skill sets overlap quite a bit.

About an hour ago, he called me for some help. He was trying to set up a new process in their task-management software (that's Jira, for those of you who care), and he didn't know how and was stuck. It's not something you do often in the first place, and this one was particularly tricky. (And Jira is a complicated piece of software, so it's difficult to learn to use well.) However, I'd done that particular task for him once, albeit nearly a year ago now, so he figured that I would be able to figure it out.

But, like I said, I'd done it a year ago and haven't been working with the software for nearly six months now, so no, I didn't remember how to do it. (Though I will say that I remembered and understood many things a lot better than he did.) We spent an hour going back and forth over the software, trying to find the right things to create and set to get it working. Even having the example of the previous process I'd set up only helped a small amount.

We finally got it working, and he turned to me and said, "Okay, now I'm going to write this down, because I'm going to have to do it again for this other project soon." I kind of grinned at him and said, "Do you guys still have the documentation archive? Because I think I might have already done that." He opened the docs and... yes, there it was, full, step-by-step instructions (as in, go here, click this, and this is why you're doing it that way -- that much detail). He just kinda stared.

I'm still laughing.

Until trobadora posted yesterday, I had totally forgotten that dwfiction existed! I looked at the comm, and other than trobadora's fic and scifirenegade's fic last month, there'd been no traffic since July. I guess DW fanfic on Dreamwidth is mostly dead?

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Stuff and things

Printer

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"Joy to the World"

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Oh, by the way...

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And random comments about current life

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And lastly...

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I did say a little while ago that I wanted to post more frequently. I'm not really succeeding at that, so here's a new attempt.

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It's been an eventful week, and I really need to get my thoughts down. In the ongoing saga of work, my former company did another round of layoffs, due to the major client (the big company that keeps reorganizing and cutting departments) cutting even more people.

My husband has survived the latest round, but now it's almost guaranteed that he'll be cut at the beginning of the year. Basically, his project is for the minor client who is funded by the major client... or I should say was funded by the major client, who just cut them as well. They are able to pay for my husband and two other people, but not for very long.

So, my former company, which at one time employed over sixty people, is down to about a dozen, and over half of that is staff, meaning, people who are not paid for by clients. The company is not actively looking for new clients because it's the end of the year, and is planning to start searching in January. Honestly, if they do manage to land a client, I have no idea how they're going to staff the project, with no engineers left.

Anyway, that's been the major downer. The other news is that I quit the trad jazz band I've been playing with for the past year and a half.

(Long rant behind the cut...)

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The tl;dr of the cut is that things have been frustrating and stressful due to interpersonal stuff, not music stuff. I announced to the band that I was leaving after we finished our performance today, and I have to say, I felt really happy from that moment on. Not like a huge burden was lifted, but more like, hey, freedom from responsibility tastes really nice. Maybe I can get back to enjoying playing music again, without having to worry about band politics.

I'm trying to post more often and with meaningful stuff, but this is what you get today.

My husband and I were looking at this Imgur post showing dice with all kinds of numbers of sides and designs. The author included some description, written in a general, humorous style.

We got to the 11-sided die, which said this:

"The 11-sided die, the one where they gave up on pretending to make something ball-shaped. The reason for its existence is shrouded in mystery but scholars maintain that it's an ancient dialect for a whale's... no, that's the lion king."

And we were just like, "What?" I mean, first, what was the author going for with the ancient dialect thing? How does that relate to the shape of the die?

But then throw in a totally unrelated line from "The Christmas Invasion"? Especially when they made no other reference to DW in the article?

And then we were like, "Cool." Cos totally unexpected DW reference that we got.

(Yes, we do own a lot of these dice, including the d14 and the d100. We were disappointed that this didn't include the d34, which we both own.)

I am very much on edge today. As I've said in the past couple of posts, I'm taking some time off, not searching for a job and catching up with life. It's been nice, though neither as fun nor productive as I'd hoped it would be, but of course, that's my fault.

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It's 21-Oct, one month and one day since I got home from my trip, and almost a month since I got laid off.

We knew that the layoff was coming - as I said before, we don't know why the company kept me around as long as it did; they had no work for me, just a few little things that no one else wanted to do - so we were pretty prepared. We'd been discussing this for a while and we had decided that I would at least take some time off, to enjoy life a bit, while we saw what happened with the company and my husband's job, and if that looked like it was going to last, my "time off" would just quietly morph into full retirement. We hadn't intended to retire this early, but we'd been calculating for both of us retiring at the same time. With one of us working, the income is enough that the other could not work.

(Of course, it's really unlikely that the company will survive past the beginning of the year, at which point, we'll both have to start looking for jobs, but we'll fall off that bridge when we come to it.)

The past few months (not counting the trip) has been me, working remotely as I have for the last four years, and pretty much tied to my desk. While I had very little work, in the form of three to four meetings a week that I had to attend and nothing else, I still couldn't go off and do other things for the other thirty-six hours, because I had to be here in case someone needed me. (They never did.) So, I was stuck at my desk, doing things that could be done at my desk, and could be dropped immediately.

Thus, I couldn't really do anything crafty that would require time to put away paints and other supplies, or play computer games that required saves or getting a character to a safe area. I couldn't go off and clean the house, or do laundry. About all I could do was write, though I didn't get much of that done. I did volunteer to do a couple of long tasks for the project my husband is on, thus racking up some "work" cred, and I spent a good amount of time organizing things on the company wiki.

When I got laid off, it was actually a relief! Now I can go do the things I wanted to do! And you know what? I'm STILL not doing it!

I'm absolutely amazed at how much "retirement" time is eaten up by work! Everyone says that retirement is busy, that you'll find you have too many hobbies to do and too many places to go. I'm not even talking about that. It's been a month, and I have not yet spent a single hour doing hobbies or playing computer games during the weekdays.

Granted, a bunch of the time has been spent cleaning up after the trip, which is something that will eventually be done. I had to pursue a number of refunds on things that went wrong. (The worst was attempting to request a refund on an upgrade from British Airways, when their flight got canceled and I was put on a different flight without the upgraded seat. That took two different refund enquiries and multiple followups just to get them to go to the right department.) I wrote reviews for all of the activities I went on. I'm still not done cleaning up the stuff I traveled with, not even considering dealing with the souvenirs. And I'm still working on transferring my travel journal in Google Docs to the paper journal (TARDIS-shaped, of course). I haven't even gotten to posting about my trip here.

But most of my time is taken up by other stuff. Cleaning things up, organizing things, laundry, scheduling things and making appointments... the list goes on. Part of it is implementing a new organization system for my stuff (my things, my tasks, etc.), and yes, I can see that it'll save a lot of time later, but right now, I'm wondering how in the world I managed to do all the things I need to do in a day while also spending eight hours a day working.

I've gotten a little bit of writing done, but that's mostly been in fifteen minute snatches just before going to bed. My husband keeps saying that I just need to relax during the day and I'm like, "When do I have the time?" Well, we'll see how it is in another month. In the meantime, yes, I will eventually write up my trip, but who knows when.

Well, I'm most of the way through the first week in my new job situation. It's... interesting. I mean, things are much easier, and yet frustrating in some ways.

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