Memory lapses...

Well I always kinda wondered when my lack of a strong memory would become a problem in my working life. Turns out it's around nowish. One of the things about being a DA (at least during the hectic time of September) is that you're constantly switching between different projects/research angles and will often be called back to something you worked on a while ago by a colleague or your boss. Today, I realized I'd lost track of one project from about 3 weeks ago (no real notes or record of what I planned to do - other than the Outlook task that sat overdue in my reminders list for more than 2 weeks). Last Friday was my boss asking me about some reports/queries that I'd been running about 1.5 weeks ago when I had already moved on to another batch of reports and couldn't remember most of the salient details from two weeks ago.

I can and will do better than this, but a key part of that is getting more organized and caught up on my present backlog, and that's difficult to do with such a drive to work on as many things as quickly as possible to ID possible problems and develop solutions before October. So yah, it's going to be hectic month in more ways than 1 since I need to develop a better system of keeping track of things and still work on my actual job.

In more positive news this weekend was awesome. Ann Marie came up again, so Friday evening was her, Steve, Jon Tse, Christie, Tim Smith, and I all hanging out in Davis (the Olin kids had come for a show earlier in the evening). Saturday was Jon, Mikell , and Drew's house-warming party, which was a great chance to catch up with lots of Olin people. Sunday morning (painfully early) was the Race for the Cure with 127 other Olin people (we won largest team!) and the evening was hanging out with Steve, Ann Marie, Emma, and Maruta. Good stuff.

Steve's giant shipment of everything arrived on Saturday morning and he worked like mad organizing everything. I also managed to pick up a computer desk on Sunday for a pretty reasonable price. Now I just need a dresser and a book case - the general clutter/lack of organization in my room is starting to become a bit irritating. I definitely feel like I need more space even if I have a lot more than I did in the previous apartment.

I'm also now taking bets on how long it takes either Steve or I to attempt to kill/main/incapacitate for a long time the other one. Ah personality quirks, how well they clash.

Now it's time to enjoy my last hour-and-a-half before bed - I've got 8am meetings for the rest of the week. Yay athena orientation!

Apartment Rant

Okay, this seems like a better strategy than ranting at Steve or screaming at the landlord. As of tomorrow, we will have been in this apartment in one form or another for a full week.

We still don't have a mailbox key or a second set of keys for our apartment.

There's still work for them to do in our apartment. They seem incapable of returning my phone calls.

Oh and as Steve puts it, "our kitchen smells like death" because there's probably a dead rat somewhere behind the cupboards that they'll probably only be able to remove by tearing our kitchen apart.

*sigh*


On a more positive note, I'm starting to feel useful at work, Ann Marie is coming up this weekend, and Race For the Cure + other saturday stuff will give me a lot of time to spend elsewhere hanging with oliners.

Moving in and weekend update

I thought a brief update might be in order. The previous occupants of our apartment moved out on Thursday (barely), but they left lots of crap and quite a mess in their place. Our new landlords were not exactly happy with them when we arrived. They did a pretty good job of cleaning things before Steve started moving in around 10pm on Friday evening (he finished around 3ish). I went by the apartment around 6ish to theoretically pick up my keys and scout the lay of the land for steve who was busy waiting for his brother, Jason, & sister-in-law, Emily, to show up (they were bringing a bed and a truck and temporary kitchen supplies until his parents' shipment and my grandparents' shipments arrive (hopefully late this week).

I decided to crash at Emma's place because I didn't want to deal with moving (And couldn't get into Steve and Cheryl's on Friday night) and because I wanted to hang out with Tori before she left on Saturday. I ended up Zipcaring out to Wellesley around midnight to pick up Tori and managed to collapse into bed at around 3:30. I don't think I've been that tired in a long time. On a related note, Chris, you can't read maps worth a damn. I was on Cambridge Street walking toward Webster. I have no idea what map you were looking at, but it appears to not have been the correct one - for everyone else: I called Chris to ask him for real-time directions to the zipcar location since I walked by the street once and he couldn't understand how I went from Prospect St. and Cambridge St. to 333 Webster Ave. Probably doesn't make sense to anyone other than him, but the bottom line is that I was right :-P.

I ended up (I certainly do use that phrase a lot) at my apartment around 10ish the next morning. After breakfast, Steve and Jason used their truck to help me move out of Steve/Cheryl's. Then while Jason and Emily visited her family which live nearby, Steve and I took a very very very long trip to a Bed Bath and Beyond (my ability to properly get directions from Googlemaps appears to be far worse than I anticipated) that involved several trips in the wrong direction and circling around a store multiple times before we finally reach it. My critical error was in thinking Mystic Valley Parkway was actually Mystic View road when they're several miles apart...Anyhow, Steve didn't kill me which I'll take as a good sign, but it took us a long time to reach a store that isn't that far from us.

After Steve, Jason, and Emily left for Providence, I managed to unpack basically all my stuff and begin to contemplate how I'm arranging my room. I spent my leisure time watching Season 3 of Monk which I procured from the Boston Public Library (which also has the other 3 season on DVD) - I'm excited about the quasi-rental potential. Yesterday (Sunday) was more Monk, the arrival of my new bed, and a trip to another Bed Bath and Beyond so I could actually decide which sheets to buy. I seem to have a difficult time deciding between two nearly identical things because it took me more than an hour before I finally decided which sheets to buy. A note of advice to anyone planning on being in Boston next September, do NOT go to the Fenway BedBath&Beyond which advertises itself as a back-to-school center unless you have an incredible tolerance for massive crowds. It was just insane. They had people at the door regulating the floor of foot traffic so most people would be moving in the same direction. I was a certified basketcase by the time I finally made it out.

Today was a trip to return my DVDs to the library and then a sampling of one of the local cafes (the Diesel Cafe where Olin prof Chris Morse apparently lives though I have yet to see him here in the 3 times I've been). Anyhow, I'm hear because they have good iced chai and Internet access, which our apartment does not until sometime tomorrow when the blessed cable guy shows up. The good (?) news is that I have my laptop from work at home so I should be able to do some work if I have Internet access and the Diesel lets you rent Internet by the day for only $8 - compared to $5 by the hour). Hence how I'm writing this entry today.

Steve will be back this evening, so my plan is to finish watching my stockpile of movies (I rented Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and borrowed Emma's copy of When Harry Met Sally(which Emma said I had to see a couple of weeks back) before he arrives so we can go grocery stopping. Tomorrow will be working on my SQL exam for work while I'm waiting for the cable guy (and in the process hopefully building up enough hours that I won't need to stay forever tomorrow evening). Hopefully I'll have finished getting furniture and such by next weekend - the desk is still the biggest question mark as I still don't know exactly what I want. The next weekend (~17th) will be my trip to DC to visit Sarah, Joelle and Sean and a much appreciated escape from Boston for a couple of days.

I happened to run into Monica Lewis - one of the Impact Career fair organizers who graduated last year a couple of hours ago near Davis. She apparently also lives around here.

I think that's all there is for now and I think it's time for me to stop writing before blogger freask out again and almost eats this post.

I hope you're all enjoying your long weekend.