Goodbye Houston, Hello Austin

Tomorrow night is the MS150 Expo at the Omni Hotel. I will be meeting my friends from Austin who will be arriving to take part in the MS150 bike ride back to Austin. Saturday morning we all take off and eventually meet up in LaGrange and then head to Austin on Sunday morning. The weather is supposed to be gorgeous and I am very excited to be riding.

It's a good thing that I have something to look forward to as today was a day that I could easily have walked away from my job. Man, what a hard couple of weeks it has been. I keep my sanity by listening to music, dreaming of my longarm machine and convincing myself that the bike ride is going to be great! It will be, of course, but there's always the chance of a bike wreck, inclement weather, high winds, etc.

Well, one more day of the grind and then I'm off for three days. Next week I've also lined up an interview so perhaps soon I'll be out of there. Yay! Actually, it'll be sad as the group is good except for the new boss and the last two new hires. Oh, well. I'm dreaming of a great bike ride for now and that is enough!

Countdown to Austin

Today was probably my last spin class before the bike ride to Austin next weekend. I hope that the last seven months of cycling like a maniac in spin plus the few road rides that B and I did will be enough to get us to Austin. Actually, I'm looking forward to this year's bike ride. I'm not the best rider out there, but I feel good and I have a pretty darn amazing bike that I'm pretty sure will get me there. We have a plan and next weekend will be time for the execution!

I took the art quilt off of the longarm today, which means that I finished the final quilting of it. Now I have to add the elements that is making this quilt an "art" quilt. The next one will be better, but I had fun quilting this one.

Doggie turns 10 this week. Happy birthday, Doggie! If my Dad were still here, he would have turned 83 this week. Happy Birthday, Dad. It's birthday season as we have quite a few birthdays in April, May, June, July, August, September, October and one in November. If you haven't guessed, I have quite a large family. It's great!

Well, it's Sunday evening . . . AGAIN . . . and I so don't want it to be over. It's been a very long time since I've dreaded going to work, but that feeling is back and I'm not happy about it. I keep thinking maybe I could take a leave of absence or somehow talk my doctor into getting on board with a disability waiver. I do have a disability, but it doesn't prevent me from doing my job and I've only told one person in my department about it. Of course, I have no idea if he's told anyone or not. Probably. Oh, well. Tomorrow comes too soon.

Perfect Storm

April has not been a good month so far. The job is out of control and I'm so wanting to leave that place. Every day it's a barrage of either new work requests due to rate cases or FERC reporting, lazy co-workers and dealing with other co-workers who do not LISTEN. They are sure that at the end of the day, I will do what they want. Not going to happen. The man does not listen to a word I say because he's intent on hearing the words he WANTS to hear. I've had the same conversation with him twice now and he's had the same conversation with my boss. So far we have told him three times that what he wants can be done by HIM offline with his own created worksheets. It cannot be incorporated into the consolidated workpapers. He has definitely gotten under my skin. Mostly because he doesn't listen. He just keeps coming at you with the same crap over and over. I keep repeating the reasons why it can't be done and he just keeps plugging. It didn't help that I had sent the man an e-mail telling him that I was extremely busy and he needed to stay out of my files so I could get everything prepped for the quarter close. So instead he shows up at my door and wants to argue with me about why I won't do what he wants. Aaarrrgghhh!!!! This was just a small piece of the frustrations that have occurred this week to create my "perfect storm".

Nothing good has happened at work this week, so maybe I'll try again next week. I'm thinking about looking for a new job in earnest. I just don't want to be a tax person anymore. I want to be a well-paid CREATIVE person!!!

Today the new A/C & heater was installed. Yay! We went the last six weeks of summer last year without A/C. That was really painful. My neighbors have had their A/C's on since the beginning of March. The old unit was the original unit from 1959. The new one is supposed to be be economical and efficient (and of course, cooler!!!).