Andrew's Wandering Mind
Sitting here after work watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The new headmistress is just creepy. I'm pretty sure she'd qualify to be part of Bush XLIII's cabinet.
First day with the new folks just happened to be on the day before payday, with checks covering the last two full weeks of '07. Fortunately, we'll be off to a good start for this year and the newest people should get a quick up-training on how to properly use the payroll system.
In other news, apparently the anti-family amendment in Florida is off to a rougher start than they thought. Yay for that!
Today is my last day working with my current team at HDCS. This team was the first group I managed here, and I've had the team since mid-June 2006. There's been some turnover and some great new people have come on board. I'll miss them.
I start with my new group (moving from team 91 to team 97 in the same division) on Monday. They say the C in Citi stands for "change" :-)
Ok, so it's not a new job for me; it's a new job for Six, the boyfriend/partner person. Told me last night that he'll be starting a weekend position helping an electrician friend of his. Not unpredictably, this person has the same name as someone else who is also an electrician friend, so I'm sure I'll be frequently asking "which 'Xxxx' is this" when hearing about stories. This new position will impact our relationship; he'll have more spending cash, but less time to use it since he'll be working 7 days a week. Not sure of the start-time, nor the number of hours yet. Guess we'll see on Saturday.
Time flies when you're not paying attention, eh?
Today is the fourth day of 2008, and the year is off to an interesting start. It seems that I've brought South Dakota chill back to Florida when we arrived back in Jacksonville. I have yet to send my thank-you cards from Christmas, though that should happen this weekend, and the Iowa caucuses (guess you might say "cauci" pronounced like "cockeye") have declared Barack Obama (D-IL) and Mike Huckabee (R-AR) as the winners. Looking forward to New Hampshire to see who gets the nod there. History is nifty and all, but Iowa and New Hampshire are hardly representative of the average US voter. Wierdly, I think that's a little ok :)
Work will be experiencing changes this year as well, possibly as early as February. Not sure what the changes look like yet...
Today is the 101st day of 2005, and I've lived in my new apartment for five weeks. So why are there still boxes behind me and empty spaces on my bookshelves? Hmm.
I haven't seen any movies yet this year, but I did get to see David Sedaris read some of his stories the other night. A couple of friends were there as well, and it was fun to have a personality often heard on NPR, right here in Jacksonville.
Two movies which are coming out soon that I do want to see are The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Star Wars:The Revenge of the Sith.
I heard a reference to this story on NPR as I got home from work, but the first place I saw the story online was on cbc:
U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made a surprise trip to Iraq and warned the country's new interim leaders against political purges and cronyism that could spark "lack of confidence or corruption in government."
Too bad he didn't warn our interim leader against poltical purges and cronyism. Certainly wouldn't want corruption or a lack of confidence in our government, now would we?
Cheers.
This morning at 4:45 am local time, was the 10th morning I've awakened at my new apartment. Yay. Well, not yay for 4:45 am, but yay for overtime and yay for my new place.
I like my new apartment. And people (not just the rental agent) keep telling me it's a steal with the space I get, in this neighborhood. I tend to agree, after having looked at several other options nearby. Still a few boxes out and visible.. kind of embarassing on my 10th night here, lol... but pretty manageable. And even though it's almost 3 times as far to work, it only takes about 5 minutes longer than my old drive (only one left turn at a short light, the other four turns are right, and most of the trip is on I-95, as opposed to two lefts at long reds before.) And it definitely has
more character than the place on Powers. You can read that both as "nifty wood floors and big windows with lots of light" and as "creative definitions of 'level' and the occasional plaster crack on the wall." All in all, I like it. :-D
Speaking of being busy, right, so my staffing gig was two weeks long, then I got pulled back to the Home Depot department, this time as an audit analyst. Somebody noticed that I'm friends with Excel and Access (better with Excel) and don't mind digging through endless piles of paper (or online files) looking for details and errors. This is now officially an assignment (think: other duties as assigned) as opposed to a loan. I'm happy, though, there were 27 applicants, 10 were interviewed, and they picked two of us to replace the current person who's been working our nternal audits. We're going into our busy season with gardening and home repair becoming realistic tasks in more of the country than just the sun belt, so they wanted two people on to deal with the increased work load. We review for accuracy
a certain percentage of the fee adjustments on people's accounts, a certain percentage of our opened loans within a given dollar range and ALL of our opened loans above that range. We also make sure people are up-to-date on their "follow-up" accounts and do spot-checks of payroll and other things. Then we make up reports to show how all of that's going. At least we only do audits for Jacksonville's side of Home Depot Credit. Tennessee does their own. I haven't gotten the "oh no, Andrew's here, now what" look yet, but I'm still technically in training, so most people don't know to run and hide yet. Muah hah hah hah hah. Theresa, the current auditor is
efficient, accurate, well-respected, etc, so I'm really not looking to change that expectation.
And, oh goody, I got the ok to paint my living room, which should be fun when a certain guy comes over to help this weekend. Yay :)
No new pictures yet. I'd use the excuse that the scanner is in a box for moving, but I only packed on Saturday.
So I'm moving within Jacksonville from 32217 to 32204, that is, from the sort-of non-descript blur that is west Baymeadows meets east San Jose meets south San Marco to Riverside. Yup, just Riverside. Well, ok, technically, it's Riverside-Avondale, though the two neighborhoods are a bit distinct from each other. The new 'hood is more historic, more walkable, closer to nifty cultural things downtown, and has a higher percentage of 'blue' voters, but is a little farther from work. I had to laugh when I was apartment hunting and I saw a car that was sticker-free, but had in its back window both Tinky-Winky AND SpongeBob SquarePants. But that's not the building I'm moving into. :) I can walk to nifty restaurants and cool little shops and a Publix and a couple of green, clean parks (one on the St John's river, hence the name), all in less than a mile, less than half a mile in some cases. I'm looking forward to the change.
The other event of note, is that on Saturday, I turned 34. This is an event of little note, however, as 34 is not a terribly interesting number. Ok, it's a little interesting, but who's ever heard of a heptagonal number or a nontient? 33 is a double-number, so that's cool. 32 is 100000 in binary, so that's cool. 31 is prime, 30 is a decade-year, 29 is prime, 28 is perfect, 27 is cubic, 26 was my golden birthday, 25 is a quarter-century, you get the idea. Even going into the future, 35 is the tipping point from 30 to 40, 36 is square, 37 is prime, and so on. About the only thing cool about being 34 is that I've lived longer than Jesus, depending on your interpretation of the story. And, in living longer, I've drawn a lot less attention to myself, good thing bad thing? It's safer, but far less interesting.
