The week of 12/8 I was nighttime upgrader and I was scheduled to work the weekend of 12/13. That got bumped, but completely ate my Friday night. Then from 12/18-12/25, I’ve been on-call, which means 24-7 support coverage by phone. I also did that weekend work that got rescheduled this past weekend. It’s all very exhausting and totally screws up my sleep schedule.

So on the 25th I’ll be “free” for a few days before I go into two solid weeks of traveling. Just being away from work will be nice… but traveling has its own exhaustion associated with it. I just wish I was going somewhere warm and tropical. I need to get somewhere to dive soon else I’m going to go stir crazy.

Sun: 2100-0200
Mon: 2359-0700
Tue: 1900-0700
Wed: 1900-0200
Thu: 1900-0200

Every night until Friday is overnight work.

It’s just the luck of the draw, and this one is gonna suck.

Click for larger.

The video doesn’t really show the rain (though you can see it hitting a bit on the rail), but you can hear the thunder and see some lightning flashes. I still don’t really know much about the video setting on my camera — or about properly converting higher-res video to lower res at a decent file size and quality — but this is what you get.

I have work to do tomorrow starting at 7:00am. That’ll last a couple of hours and I should be free for the day. Then Sunday early (sometime between 3:00-5:00am), I should get a call to do another piece of the work that needs to wait on a bunch of other things to happen. The hours kinda suck, but it shouldn’t be too bad… I hope.

Today’s Wednesday, so I picked up some comics on the way home. It was a good day for some titles that I’m a fan of – Deadpool, Farscape, Hellboy and Army of Darkness. I’m going to need to get a new box to hold comics and another set of dividers soon. Space is getting tight and things are starting to get disorganized – which irks me to no end. Some aspects of my life can be blissfully disorganized, while I get super ADD if others are not. I don’t claim to understand it, I just deal with it.

The past week or so has been Lego-centric. I’ve made a few small purchases for specific pieces that I need for a project that I’m visualizing. I think I’m going to be building a set tomorrow or Friday night (that’s exactly how cool I am) and then start putting specing out what I need for the other work in progress. I think I need a second container for parts. My current one is almost at capacity and I have more things that need to be sorted. Meh.

I ordered some candy through Amazon and I’m waiting on its arrival. It was supposed to show up on Tuesday but didn’t due to the snow we got. Then it was supposed to show up today but apparently requires a signature- even though another package was delivered without one. Luckily I can work from home tomorrow morning and wait for it to show up. It’s just a pain in the ass. At least I’ll have a bunch of candy!

The only other bit of news is that I’ve signed up for a course at NESOP. It’s a creative lighting course, which I’m excited about. Most of the things that I enjoy shooting require external lighting to do well – so anything that helps me in that area is beneficial! There’s also an “advanced” lighting course (meant to be taken after the one I signed up for) which is definitely an option pending how this one goes and what the specific course material will be. Bridges to cross though.

Since I’m working tomorrow evening, I’m forcing myself to stay up a bit later tonight so I can get up a bit later and thus be prepared for the later end time tomorrow. My sleep schedule has been pretty messed up since vacation and I can’t afford to be a zombie while working on production systems in the evenings. Gotta get my sleep scheduled shifted back to where it should be. Hopefully something can get sorted out in the next week or two. This is getting old real fast.

That’s more or less it. Like I said, nothing big. Staying busy, but still not doing a whole lot. Strange how that works out.

Today was an early day waking up at 6 so I could get up and “beat the rush”. I was also up early yesterday, though for no real reason. I didn’t sleep well and when Corinne’s alarm went off, I was already partially awake and there wasn’t any way I was going to get back up – so I just woke up and started working from home. Given that I was up early for our entire vacation, it looks like I’m going to have to break myself back to a later schedule.

I’m obviously online now and logged into work. I’ve already done a few small tasks and will be working until my car’s done and then head home and finish off the day. Better than having to take a weekend or personal time.

On Monday night I gave all of my underwater photo equipment a once-over. I did some repacking of the hardcase that it all lives in and made sure everything has a home. I also consolidated all of the paperwork I have for it and got that all stored. I probably won’t be touching it again for another few months, so I’m glad it’s in a good state while it’s stored.

That’s really been what the last few days have been like – just taking care of the mundane and getting back into the routine.

Not horrible, but not amazingly fun either.

Packing was a bit of a bitch. I have all my photo stuff plus the underwater photo stuff. On top of that is dive gear for the two of us. On top of that is the normal everyday stuff that people need – such as clothes and toiletries. Ugh. Say hello to extra baggage fees. I’m totally going to invest in some bigger/more appropriate luggage once we’re back.

My on-call rotation ended this morning at 10:30am. Our rotations last for a week from 10:30am Wednesday to the following. I’m so glad that’s behind me. People on my team have been commenting on how bad my on-call week has been … since last Friday. All you can do is keep your head down and plow through. Still, it’s not as bad as the week where I spent 27+ hours over the weekend rebuilding data for a particularly large and influential customer. That was all sorts of shitty.

But that’s looking behind me – I want to look forwards… sunshine, scuba diving, sharks, tropical fish and generally doing little else.

Can you dig it?

This means I got a late start on the day – rolling out of bed around noonish.

After convincing Corinne to make me pancakes, we went to the dive shop so I could get a tank for a few hours to make sure all of our gear was working fine. We haven’t dove since the end of September, so it’s good to give everything a once-over. The only thing that needed tending was getting new batteries for the dive computers.

I also trucked Corinne over to Target so she could get some warm weather clothes. Being oncall, I’m always hyper-aware of time and when some of our automated processes fire off (as problems will usually revolve around these set times more often than not). Luckily for me, she powered through the shopping and we were out of there in no time.

After dropping off the scuba tank, I grabbed some food and fell asleep on the couch for a little while. Nothing too crazy – maybe 20 minutes – but now I’m just foggy and want to sleep for a long time. I probably won’t – but that’s what I’m feeling like.