osheas::blog

<bitch fest on>
It has been a really, really, really busy couple of weeks. Did I mention how busy it’s been the past few weeks? It has been. I feel like I haven’t been home in a month. The office has been in a state of remodel for the past month, which definitely contributed to my overall sense of discombobulation. But then there’s been the work, and the work, and the work. Consulting, as it happens, is hard work! I had to give a presentation in Ontario last Friday, and it required a lot of prep. Then there was a report to write, and a grant to help provide background information for, and then there are all of the various trips we have coming up that needed planning and reservations. Today I’m in Sacramento attending a three-day workshop (for which I had to do all of the event planning and don’t get me started on how time-consuming THAT is).
<bitch fest off>

I am sooo ready for a break. And happily there is one on the horizon! We’re running a half marathon in Santa Ynez on May 13, and are going to make a long weekend of it and go wine tasting. But the really super exciting travel news is that our applications for the Medoc Marathon were accepted! We’re going to France in September!

I’ve been in Las Vegas since Wednesday attending LMS 2007, a conference on Learning Management Systems! The topic is just about as scintillating as it sounds, too. Actually, it was pretty interesting, as LMS’s are a part of what I do for work these days so it pays for me to be up to speed on the industry. We were mighty small potatoes, though, so a lot of what was talked about had little relevance to how we use our LMS. So it goes.

The really cool part of all of this was that the conference hotel was the Red Rock Casino, Resort & Spa. Call me a rube, but this place was mega-awesome. Admittedly I haven’t been to Las Vegas in fifteen years, but wow! this place was very haute! The rooms were huge and luxurious with plush beds, all marble bathrooms, muted lighting, plasma TVs, two mini bars in each room (and if you lifted any item up for more than 45 seconds you were charged for it), and a 25,000 square foot fitness center for which we all paid an additional $19/day to use while we stayed there (not going to use it? tough! you still pay.). They had gambling too, on the entire ground floor. If you wanted a good workout you could just do circuits of the casino level. It must have been a quarter mile to cover a single loop. What really jazzed me was that the cigarette smoking was confined to the casino level and the outdoors. The last time I was in las Vegas I stayed at the Stratosphere which at the time was really divey and rundown and every corner of the place reeked of stale cigarette smoke. I now have a completely revised opinion of Las Vegas. I’d like to come back and see the Wynn and Bellagio and all of the other crazy huge hotel casinos that have been built over the past decade. The Red Rock Casino is several miles from the Strip, in an area that is undergoing huge development.

It’s all quite obscenely capitalistic and fall-of-the-Roman-Empire hedonistic and yet - fascinating. And fun. And a little addictive.

Gotta go and play the $2 that is burning a hole in my pocket in the airport’s slot machines now.

Man, my life is such a grind. All I do is work. Work, work, work. From sun up to sun down. Let me describe my day and you’ll see what I mean:

7am: Roll out of bed
7am-7:30am: Shower, eat Cheerios, take vitamins
7:45am: Leave for LAPL where I have been assisting Chuck with a class he’s been teaching since yesterday (he hasn’t been teaching non-stop, he got to come home yesterday with me so his morning looked a lot like mine, except his included Sudafed for a little head cold he’s been fighting)
8:30am: Arrive at LAPL, stop for some coffee, then go to classroom. Hook up laptop to free wireless network (LAPL ROCKS!)
8:30am-12 noon: Surf Internet and read blogs
12 noon-1pm: Lunch
1pm-3pm: Surf Internet and read more blogs
3pm: Class is over! Time to pack up and go home!

See? What’d I tell you? It sucks to be me some days. As I was whiling away my day, I did encounter some awesomely funny stuff, like this entry from Boing Boing, and this one, too. The hardest part of the whole day was trying not to burst out laughing when reading this stuff. Then a friend sent me this picture. Really, I earned my pay for the day by not falling on the floor over that.

Like I said, it was a tough day. Tomorrow it’s back to the real world, sad to say.

Wow, is it Sunday already? We’ve been home for a few days now, but it feels like we’re still moving, that’s how busy we’ve been. We spent five days in Sacramento at the California Library Association’s annual conference doing mega-booth duty in the exhibit hall. I was also doing some podcasting so attempted more than once to be in two places at the same time. As has been shown in several sci-fi movies over the years, time travel is very tiring. The conference was a lot of fun, except for the cold I caught right before we left. Popping Tylenol Cold & Sinus tablets kept me semi-snot-free, but a little foggy at times. I tried to avoid hoicking in public as much as possible.

We had to drive as we were taking a - there’s no polite way to say this - SHITLOAD of stuff with us, including a four foot tall stuffed gorilla named Adam, and an equally sizeable tiger named Tony. Also in our humongous rented SUV: four computer trunks, two large projector screens, several boxes of brochures and handouts - oh, and us! Packing the SUV was a Chinese-puzzle-box challenge that took Chuck more than two hours to solve. I took a movie of the final push. Once on the road we could never back up and Chuck had no rear visibility at all.

We came home with less stuff as most of the brochures were handed out and the tiger was raffled off. Adam came back with us, as did all of the computer trunks. A bunch of stuff was mailed so we had visibility out the back! We stopped in Watsonville on the return to visit my aunt, then continued home. By the time we got home my cold had turned into pretty much nothing (yay!). The day after we got home, all of the stuff we shipped caught up with us, which was unfortunate as we had returned the massive SUV and had only the Accord and the MINI to transport stuff to the storage locker. Luckily our neighborhood UPS Store is the friendliest, best place in town, and one of the owner’s dads has a pickup truck and took a load over to storage for us. The MINI once again proved itself up to the task of carrying surprisingly large loads (and now I have bungee cords to tie things down). So by Friday we were officially done with the heavy-lifting portion of the conference. Then it was time to catch up with work, which we’ve been doing ever since.

Meanwhile, Adam the gorilla has been hanging with us for a few days, before he heads to his new home next week. He’s not too much trouble but he is large and our dog has shown an unfortunate desire to rip out his throat so we have to be a little careful where we put him. Currently he is sitting on top of our wine refrigerator. As we have been carting him around basically everywhere we go for over a week now, I started documenting his travels. Here’s the story of Adam, told in pictures.

We’re off tomorrow bright and early for points north, as in Sacramento. It’s time for the annual dog and pony show we call the California Library Association’s annual conference. It’ll be three days of hard work, but it’s also a lot of fun. Our job is to man the booth, give stuff away, and generally do a whole lot of good old-fashioned PR. After the conference, we’re driving back by way of my aunt’s for a visit, then finally heading for home next Wednesday.

I’ll try to post photos along the route. I expect we’ll have Internet access most of the time. The road trip up should be fun what with the iPod, the Roady XT, and the Garmin Nuvi loaded with audio books on its SD card. All loaded into the big behemoth Nissan Armada we rented for the journey because we had SO MUCH STUFF to take, including a four-foot tall stuffed gorilla.

Don’t ask.

We left home last Tuesday for Sacramento, to tape a webcast on Wednesday. That went okay (there were some technical glitches due mostly to our newbie-ishness), but still mission accomplihed. Then it was off to the airport to catch a flight to Albuquerque for a two-day conference. Once that was done, we headed to Snata Fe for a few days of R&R. So far, so good. We brought our computers, figuring this would be a working trip. That was until we arrived in Snata Fe, to discover that the condo-like place we were staying had no Internet connectivity. Nada, zilch. The dt’s started almost immediately. Ack! What to do? We decided to go cold turkey - no Internet for the weekend. We made it to late Sunday before we had to find a connection to check email. That stretched into an hour or two of work, then we were back today for more work.

The moral of the story? Well, if you really want to take a break from computers, leave them at home. Duh! And with that pearl of wisdom, I’ll end.

We’ve been working pretty much non-stop for the past couple of months on a website redesign. The birth was Monday, thank goodness. It’s meant we have had very little time to do anything but work, sleep, and eat except for the odd party.

I knew things had reached a bad place when A.C. Nielsen (the ratings people) called about a week ago, and asked if I had been to the movies in the past two months. “No,” I answered sadly. “Has anybody else in the house been to the movies in the pst two montyhs that I could speak to?” the lady asked. I looked over at Chuck, sitting on the couch staring at the TV, shellshocked after working a twelve hour day, and said, “No, sorry.” “Well,” she said brightly, “You can’t help us then! Have a good evening!” and hung up.

A new low: rejected by the Nielsen people.

Well, after much hard work on the part of the fab graphic designer we hired, and much back and forth between ourselves and everyone we showed the designs to, we have settled on a graphic identity for our company, CEO Consulting. In the end, we decided to go with a whimsical look vs. a corporate look. We’re calling the little bread guy Bob for now. He’s so cute, I immediately went and opened a CafePress store where you can buy cool stuff like hoodies and mugs with Bob’s cute face plastered on them. Pretty neat, huh? In the interests of full disclosure, we do get a teensy cut if you buy our crap. But if you do, not only do you get a new t-shirt, you get, I do assure you, our hearty thanks!

I also ordered business cards from a very neat online store called cheaprint.com. They aren’t kidding about the cheap bit, and they do banners, stamps, magnets, you name it. You can upload your custom graphics lickety-split. I set up an account, uploaded images, and placed an order in all of 15 minutes from start to finish!

We came back from a short work-related trip to Sacramento today and in the mail was (drum roll, please) my LAST PAYCHECK from USC! Yes, kids, it’s official, USC and me, we’re finished. I’m feeling a little bit sentimental, but not too much. It’s amazing me how busy I am in a day now. My average day at USC went like this:

6:30am: leave house for van pool
7:30am: arrive at USC
7:45am: arrive at office after stopping at Starbuck’s for nonfat latte
8:00am-8:30am: call sister or friends to kill some time
9:00am-10am: open & read email, check news on My Yahoo!
10:00am-noon: read blogs
noon-2:00pm: hit the pool for noon workout, go card shopping, walk around campus
2:00pm-4:00pm: read more blogs, maybe write an entry, read more email
4:30pm: leave for vanpool
5:45pm: arrive home

My average day at home has been going like this:

7:00am: wake up
7:30am: workout (run or gym)
8:30am: start worksday, checvk email, return/make phone calls
9:00am-noon: work on websites or write/research for projects
noon-12:30pm: lunch
12:30pm-6:30pm: more project work, email, deal with house stuff, mail, repair guys, etc, etc, etc
7:00pm: wrap up for day

Life is good! And what’s really great is that I no longer have to manufacture poor excuses as to why I can’t make it in to work on a given day because my consulting work calls. My guilt-ridden Catholic conscience is heaving a mighty sigh of relief.

Well here it is, the first day of the rest of my working life. My resignation from USC is official today. I am completely, utterly done with them. It’s been a long, strange trip, my leaving.

When I graduated from college back in June of 1981 I had one goal: travel the world (or as much of it as I could afford on a $25/day budget). So I took all the money I could scrape together and headed off for Europe. For two months my best friend and I backpacked and Eurailed our way across Germany, to Austria, to Italy, to Greece, back to Italy, then on to France, then finally to England and Scotland. I arrived home dead broke but happy. I took the job at USC to fund my next trip. 24 years later (where did all the time go?!?), I find myself a little sad at leaving. It’s what I’ve done with my weekdays for so long I can’t really remember what it was like before. The reality of never going back hasn’t completely sunk in yet: that will take a month or two I expect (one of the cool things about working there was that I always had very long vacations). Now I have entered the brave new world of the self-employed. I was thrown into such a state of mental trauma as I approached the end that I was struck dumb, at least writing-wise, for the past month. I had nothing to say, literally - well, maybe it would be more accurate to say that I couldn’t put words to the flood of feelings and emotions that swept over me as I left the only fulltime job I had ever held. Suffice it to say, it was a weird time and I was in a very weird place.

I am happy to say that the worst is over, I have weathered the storm and arrived at calmer seas. We also have health insurance (the biggest stumbling block to our both taking the path to self-employment was health insurance and our ability to get it). For anybody thinking about doing what we’re doing, I have this to say: it’s a jungle out there, but there ARE options, even for folks who aren’t 22 years old in perfect health (though we’re in pretty darned good shape for the shape we’re in). The option we finally chose was a Blue Cross PPO small group plan. it’s not the Cadillac plan we had with USC, but it’s good insurance, and we can actually afford to get sick and get well with a doctor’s help, which I’d consider one of the goals of any decent health insurance package. Best of all, it’s a price we can afford. if you can, set up a small business (2 people but less than 51 qualifies, and the two can be co-owners) and go that route. It’s darned near impossible to get approved for individual plans.