right

it’s tuesday, i’ve always felt tuesday has sort of gotten the shaft. i mean it’s pretty benign, sandwiched between the dreaded monday and oft maligned ‘hump’ day. tuesday is the jan brady of the week. not sure where i’m going with this. but anyway…

let see, what’s new. well not all that much. really.

commuting sucks. it took a year for me to get sick of it, but it has officially happened. the stupid trains dont’ run on time, and i’m sick of getting home so late. there i said it. otherwise life at the DFTU client is pretty quiet. i have  a big ass, widowless office to myself (though i still have a playschool desk) the project i am managing requires about 20 hrs of work a week, at the most. the other stuff they have me doing is another 5 hrs, or so. so there’s a fair amount of free time.they want me on site  40 hrs a week in case something comes up, hey i shouldn’t complain. i’d trade busy days for not leaving the house though. oh well grass is always greener.

we headed up to my parent’s compound this weekend for visit. it’d been a long time since we were up there and now that natty has free time on the weekends we can do such things. we decided with some prompting from my folks to take the train up. and i have to say, except for hauling the capt’s car seat around, it was rather pleasant. apparently, we also sidestepped a huge delay on the hutch on friday, so really, you can’t beat that. The visit was short and pleasant, the capt seems to have a natural ability to butter up my parents. not a bad skill to have-certainly one i never had, tee hee.

life at the fort is quiet, i seem to have lost all my gardening skills and have really gotten good at killing plants that i am trying to help/move/care for. that sucks. mr. henry has had some health issues. his shoulder was hurthing him again, so 300 bucks at 3 prescriptions later, he’s back in good form. well an there you have it. you’re up to date.

write some comments–lazy people!

so they want me on site almost every day (i’ll have to get out of that somehow) and they said they’d set me up with a desk. so i’m picturing a grand rich wooden desk (like the other one in the office i’m sharing with another consultant), today i come in and see this plastic toddler style desk, granted, i know i’m not very tall, and i’m an outsider, but this is a bit depressing, also–no aeron like everyone else.

 when i arrived , i went to the company’s cafeteria to get a diet coke. as i was grabbing the “sweet elixr ” (i’ll let jimmy explain that one), i turned to head toward the cashier, in the process i almost took out this guy and chick who were headed over to the oatmeal bar (yes, oatmeal and a salad bar-esque set up of oatmeal fixin’s) i thought nothing of it. i headed over to the breakfast/power bar stand, somehow the 2 of them got ahead of me by the time i got to the cashier. it was then i noticed that he was wearing a black turtleneck sweater and gray slacks. very slacky slacks i’d say.

as i left, i ended up following them all the way to the elevator, then to the same floor and then to teh same area of the same floor. they work in the cubes just outside of the office i squat in. ok fine. guy in turtleneck sweater–it was popular 25 years ago, why not now?

so as i was headed ot the exectutive washroom, which oddly enough is not locked today (what if the riff raff get in?). i passed the office of a, well, guy that, err seems to take his fashion pretty seriously. he must be a pretty big whig b/c he has a full blown office, not just a cube, and i often see rocking that new fanged stripped suit, striped shirt, striped tie look that i thought only british men had enough balls to wear. strangely he still wears the black new media glasses and the fauxhawk, like it’s 2001 (before anyone jumps on me, yes i have the glasses, and yes i ‘ve been wearing them around the house lately…the capt bent my less dated glasses last week–oh he’ll be sorry when he’s 14 and grounded for something he did in 2006).

anyway, i come around the corner, and there is mr fashion plate…in a black turtleneck sweater and gray slacky slacks.  i saw another guy in the lunch line at the cafeteria with a red turtleneck sweater, though we was wearing tight jeans rather than the slacks. i wonder if its turtleneck thursday.

i’ll keep you posted

(wow, that was a lame post).

but for now:

so i went back in to the big client’s office in DC yesterday. i only did a half day trip, taking the 12:40 train down. the train was full of some group of european art students or something, they all knew eachother and woudl talk to eachother but say all over the train car, it was weird.

so i wore a tie, b/c i noticed that all the men i was seeing on the floor where i’m working wear ties. oh i forgot to mention…i’m getting a key to the executive washroom. yup, i’ve finally hit the big time. well it’s a bathroom, on the executive floor, on the side of the floor where the CEO is, and one needs a key to get into is. but i have to admit, i don’t think it’s really the executive washroom, well if it is, i’m sorta saddened by it. though there might be a martini bar in the handicrapper stall, i should investigate that.

so anyway, i headed down to DC without incident. even got some work done on the train. after i navigated the metro with no worries-though i actually had to wait for a train, which i’ve never had to do before (all 2 times) i guess b/c it was midday and not rush hour, no biggie.

walking from the metro to the office building i heard a ton of sirens and noticed on of those super fast action motorcade/caravan/bunch of unmarked suv’s that have lights and shit than you don’t notice unless their on. ok so i ‘m in DC makes some sense, this shit happens all the i’d imagine. so what weird is, you ahve the first suv come and block off the intersection for the other 3 or so. it’s a red suv with the driver wearing one of those "i’m a special tactics cop so i wear this so you don’t recongnize me when i bust down your door whie being filmed by a TV crew" ski masks. ok, fair enough, i guess he’s afraid bystanders will identify him as he blocks off intersections. his partner, however, didn’t seems concerned as he was sitting there in the passenger seat with his wanna be matrix sunglasses.

so they block the intersection, ok fine. then a fucking pickuptruck with tinted windows and the hidden police lights zooms by. apparently this government agency (or highly motivated high schoolers) now tricks out pickups. i just don’t get that. why do you need an unmarked police/law enforcement/cia pickup truck. i mean if you need space…use one of the super suv’s, of you need to haul a top secret washer/dryer combo, you use the unmarked pickup? i don’t get it, oh well.

so then a couple more cars sped by and it was overwith. it only saw that masked dood for a second, but i could tell i would hate him. i’m sure he’s prolly spent some time in special ops in some hot zone and now is doing this until his orders come through. and i’m sure he’d look at me and shake his head b/c i don’tknow what a dangerous world it is and all the things that go on everyday that i’d disagree with but are necessary so that i can live my cushy naive life. yup, i’m sure of it. i hate him.

so this meeting was my first solo meeting with the project lead/interim president of this new company. it’s times like these that i wonder how the hell i ended up where i am. the meeting went well, i really, all i need to do is keep alist of milestones and check in with peple to see if they are hitting them. i don’t think these people want (or need) me to really do anything else. but i’ll admit i still get a little nervous when its actually time to do my job. i suppose that’s natural.

at one point the client said "why go to school to get an MBA when you can get one on the job?" in a sort of sarcastic mocking tone. I had no fucking clue what she was talking about…my mind raced 1) is she getting her MBA and is making fun of how much work she needs to do for that and her job at the same time? 2) did someone tell her i’m getting my MBA and she’s making fun of me? 3) he hates people with MBA’s and is testing to see if i hate them too?

turns out after some awkward laughter, it was 3, well no, not really. though we did make some good fun of mba. (which for the record i do actually hate) no no i don’t i’m jealous. but i digress.

I then high tailed it out of there to catch a train home it’s weird they open up the trains about 35 mins before the depart, and they just get fucking packed. what’s even weirder, is i’m starting to recognize people from previous trips, there’s this hippy red headed girl that always takes off her huge faux deersking coat and stuffs it in the overhead rack. and there is this one gadget dood, that has the most pronouced flavor saver i’ve seen. (good yielded no suitable examples of flavor savers).  he seems to have all sorts of gadets, ranging from huge 1970′s esque earmuff head phones, to some sort of camera phone that looks like it could be used to do one’s taxes.

anyway. onsite 2 times in one week, and i’m still alive to talk about it. amazing.

now, having the northbound lanes of the NJ turnpike closed down might have had something to do with it. yeah that was it.

when we crossed over the delware memorial bridge, there was a huge sign that said "NJ TURNPIKE CLOSED AT EXIT 7A–USE 295" what we didn’t get, was, was it that the exit was closed, or the whole fucking turnpike, i mean they can’t just close the turnpike, can they? –oh yes they can. turns out that they were diverting all traffic to another road, and then another and another etc. but once we were on the turnpike, there was no turning back, so we just kept on heading that way. we caught up to the traffic about 2 miles from the detour. thankfully there was a rest stop right before the exit/detour, so we got off for food, walk the dog/change the baby. by the time we finished, the accident was cleared, but there was a 10 mile back up. so i quickly jumped off the high way to follow the detour anyway.  suddenly we were weaving through small jersey towns and the seemingly infinetely repeatable jersyscape. i swear, every thing in that state looks the same. i feel like i’m in a 50′s movie where they just keep repeating the scenery outside the car window. i did get to see a monster home depot though, i didn’t suggest stopping. eventually we made it back to the highway, and sure enough, it was right were traffic was opening up. i bet we saved an hour of stop and go. i was pretty happy with myself. really.

we got to the compound without further incident.

However it was time to walk henry, at it was 16 degrees. now that i don’t live in the north country, that’s pretty fricking cold.  but that was nothing, compared to the -5 it was at 5:30 am when i was walking him before my commute. now that’s pretty fucking cold. on commuting, man, it’s a been a long time. seems like a lifetime since i was doing the daily CT to NYC grind back in 1999. in fact, it feels like i have had like 10 different lives since then. i had forgotten the crazy ass culture of slowly climbing the platform and the rushing to seemingly random areas of the train platform in anticipation of where the doors on the train will open. that and all the train buddies. people that don’t know each other outside the commute, it was interesting that people were all talking about how they were taking the ‘slacker’ train (which was the 7:20) i guess the hardcore people are already in the city by 7 am. freaks.

naturally the train car i picked had no heat, which didnt’ help my toes defrost much, i then opted to walk to our meeting space, which was at 48th and broadway…so like 5 big long avenue blocks. by about 5th ave, i had no feeling in my feet at all. good times.

training was crazy. nothing like meeting a guy that is a leader of an industry–and has been doing something for 13 years or some shit.

so i opted to take the times square shuttle back to grand central at the end of the day, which for a 5 min ride is not nec. worth the 2 dollars i spent on the metro card but whatever. i got on, got a seat, and was pretty proud of myself. then in grand nyc style, some homeless guy jumps on the train right before the doors close. and in nyc style, he had obviously just recently shit himself. as the toxic stench moved over the car, people started moving all to one end, ahh it’s good to be back. then there was a mad rush out of the car to get away. i caught an express train home and was back at the compound by 8 something.  like a real business man, i completely missed a day of my son’s life. he was asleep when i left, and was asleep when i got home. it was pretty fucking weird. then at 5:30 am, it started all over again.

more later….