Eastered

03/23/2008

So The Great White Way was fine and for my first business trip ever, was mostly easy. There was a missed flight due to no fault of my own but other than that, I survived being a grown-up. Then my second conference was okay as well. My co-workers are doing their best to make my job as difficult as possible and make really unreasonable suggestions in how they want our research data to be presented. But it’s cool because I made it entirely clear that I wasn’t doing the presentation so if someone in the audience had a question the presenter would be on their own to explain things. I think that they will come to the belief that the data should be shown in as simple way as possible.

The way that this last week went, next week is going to be a beast. The week after I head to super northern California for yet another conference. As much as I like a job that sends me to interesting place, I am almost burned out on this. I always thought I would love being a consultant and travel weekly to a customer site, and maybe I would if it were consistent, but this traveling for a day to be somewhere for a day to spend another day traveling home stuff kind of sucks.

The flip side is that the job itself is going really well. I tend not to write too much about the job but not because funny things don’t happen there, it’s just a different atmosphere than my last job so the “funny things” are much more contextual. Like the last funny thing was that I made the menopausal admin feel bad. See, without a huge contextual story that is totally not funny. And when I say funny, I mean not funny for her. And I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong the day I walked into the reception area of my office and asked if anyone else smelled that odor. (I described it as that smell of old lettuce. Like when you get a sandwich and eat only half and then eat the other half in a few days. The lettuce wilts and gets a very distinct taste. That taste was what I smelled). After spending about three minutes sniffing the air, the admin (aforementioned menopausal admin) said she couldn’t smell it, but she had just eaten her sandwich in the conference room but that it was a freshly made sandwich. Come to two days later when the analyst who sits next to the admin told me that apparently as a side affect of menopause our admin is secreting an odor out of her skin and two days before my odor sniffing adventure the other analyst and our boss had a similar conversation wherein the our boss who can’t smell because of a cold asked the analyst to sniff her (perfectly acceptable in our office) to confirm or deny that our boss was the source of the smell. When the analyst said that our boss was in the clear, the admin asked if it was her. The analyst innocently leaned in to sniff the admin and drew back quickly and was like: “um, kind of.” Unfortunately the way she drew back was more in line with the way people pull back when they open a container of rotten food, you know, all dramatic like. So you can now imagine how unfortunate my whole, “Do you smell that?” thing was.

So I call that funny, because when I was telling Bruce the whole thing from start to finish, the only thing I could do was laugh. I mean the whole thing was really unfortunate. And I totally feel bad knowing what I know now, because our admin is a nice person and is just doing her job.

Speaking of Bruce, who does not entirely find all my work stories as funny as I do, but totally thought the “Do you smell that” story was funny, he’s doing well enough. He’s got some weird pain things going on right now because of a tetanus shot he got on Friday. You see after the whole episode that meant I had to bring him to the hospital I made him get a complete physical (hence the tetanus shot). It turns out that the diet we’re on because Bruce felt fat has worked wonders on him, Bruce is now 5 pounds above his ideal weight. I wondered where I was at in the scheme of things and was rudely informed that I am not just overweight, I am technically considered obese. Damn, that is not good. Bruce seems even more motivated than ever, because those 5 pounds are totally weighing him down (seriously, why is he like this?) and wants to join a swish gym. I’m all in, because unless you’ve forgotten, I am technically obese.

Other than all that, things are so normal. I’ve taken to dropping the word marriage into every third conversation, least he forgets what I’m looking for here. Just yesterday we went to lunch with his sister and I told her that if Bruce didn’t propose in a timely manner I would move into a certain neighborhood in San Francisco. Bruce just rolled his eyes because he’s become use to my tactics of mentioning the fact that he hasn’t proposed marriage yet. His sister laughed but I am sure she will now apply gentle pressure to Bruce, mostly by telling her parents to pressure Bruce to propose. We’ll see what happens today at Easter lunch with his family.

And one final point: who finds Flavor Flav attractive? No really stop it VH-1.