Jammie Cam

It's been awhile since there's been a jammy cam posting, so here's today's jammy cam. The flowers are courtesy of this gentleman:

So don't be asking who the current hottie is in my life. If there is one, it's a state secret; if I tell you, I'll have to kill you. And no, it's not Dick Cheney; I am so tempted to make a really crude joke as to why that would be, but I'm going to take the high road.

Anyway, you might be asking where I got enough President Jackson action to purchase flowers. Let's just say a couple of friends were kind enough to contribute some small amount to my well-being. And flowers make me happy. Happy = mental health improvement = improved well-being. Hopefully, the flowers are edible, in case I run out of groceries ;-)

Soon I'll post some photos of the recent powerless week up in Marblemount. They've still got snow up there, and I am sooooooo jealous!

Bibliophile

I spent yesterday afternoon hanging out in Suzzallo Library on the UW campus. Being a lifetime member of the Alumni Association, I have access to the UW Net setup so I can go to campus and steal wifi internet access. Free wifi is one of my great pleasures in life; being unemployed, I can't exactly afford $100 plus a month for phone, cable, wifi, robotic monkeys, etc. The nice thing about the U district is plenty of wifi. I do miss being able to steal it from the comfort of my own apartment, but still, I don't have to travel very far to enjoy it.

Most of my time there was passed in the stacks where the oldest, mustiest, weirdest books are. It's like a tomb there, and I get all squishy inside every time I walk past them. I do love old books, I really, really do. And this section is chock full of them. Just the spines feed my imagination, whether I feel as if I'm visiting some learned scholar's library circa 1890 and looking for the latest tomes on dirigibles, or looking for a book on forbidden magic and alchemy so I can free my brother from the horrible family curse...anywho, as they say, I wandered the stacks in search of books on whaling, particularly the use of nuclear submarines for whaling. There were submarines in the 19th century; I'm writing a (nuclear) steampunk whaling novel. Get over it.

I was pleased to discover that my friend the mad scientist haunted the very same stacks in his time at University; perhaps he was having fun in the alchemy section, or looking for the lost papers of Nikola Tesla. He called this afternoon when he realized I visiting his old haunts; he invited me to accompany him to a symposium being conducted this weekend by the evil genius/mad scientist community. Of course, this rests upon the assumption that his experiments go well and are concluded in a timely fashion. Hopefully he won't end up with any citations for practicing physics without a license. I wonder if there is a Physics Officer out there somewhere, handing out citations for physics offenses. {Noisy, you may want to expand your jurisdiction...}

Here's a photo of me enjoying myself in front of Suzzallo's famous stained-glass windows:

Of the boni attendant upon being a member of the Alumni Association, the absolute coolest is the library card. Yes, it's even better than the email address and the free wifi on campus. So I also took the time to renew my alumni library card, and brought home four lovely tomes on 19th nuclear whaling practices.


Today I'm making some soup and cleaning the apartment a bit, as soon as I have a cuppa or two. If my evening at the symposium falls through, I'm running down to Nordstroms to pick up a pair of hose - girls night out tomorrow night!

Oh yes - I have to give many Thanks to George Gordon for providing the means by which I was able to acquire my lovely little shuffle. I understand why people love these things! Thank you again, Lord B.

PS - You may recall from a previous entry that one of my regular readers recently suffered a goat invasion at her home. Amorous goats, no less. Yes, they're rather like rabbits - I've seen goats in action many times at the fair over the years. And they've set up house in her front yard, if you will, entertaining the neighbors with their love play. How sweet!

Interesting Interviews

Firstly, I apologize to any regular readers (all .5 of you) for being so lax in getting material up every day. I certainly have plenty of material from the last few days, but things have been harried at work, with all of us having our interest interviews (are you interested in voluntarily leaving the company?). While I noticed no one wandering the aisles rending their garments and and wailing, there were lots of stress, lots of speculation (guilty, as charged - but I've a wager resting on all this) - low level upset conditions.

I had my interview, next to the last one for the group, on Friday. Since everyone else in the department had already heard what I was hearing, I received no caveats about repeating information, etc. I was informed that my job group was a high target group for these layoffs; but don't assume that my manager was threatening or pressuring me. This was a piece of information I'd been telling everyone else in my department all week. I actually feel really sorry for my manager lorenzo (not his real name); he is not the kind of man whose heart gladdens at the thought of layoffs. And like many others, he expects these layoffs to be much more severe and debilitating than previous years' layoffs. I know that I've been working in Corporate America for a long time - too long, perhaps - when I can pretty accurately guess what the company's strategy (or lack thereof) is.

For example, the above-mentioned bet was that I said that the Powers That Be (PTB) were probably aiming to have the 60 days notice period completed by the end of the third quarter so that when the stock analysts give their ratings, make their forecasts for the 4th quarter, the news would be good and the stock value would go up for the end of the year -- all important to justify those boni. Investors see headlines that read, "Company X Lays Off Millions of Employees" and they all jump up and down, yelling 'Woo hoo! More for us!' My coworker Mr T (T for Trouble, that is) speculated that the end of the year was the target date for layoffs, not the end of fiscal Q3. Well, Mr T, you owe me that coffee - in our department, at any rate, our 60 days are up well before the end of Q3. In your face!

Apologies, dear readers - my coffee lust has led me to digress a wee bit. Returning to the interview, I asked my manager a few questions to see if my guesses about how these layoffs were being performed were educated and probably accurate, and at least received some grim satisfaction that I was generally correct. I don't want to get into a great deal of detail about how my Company X is going about things - at least, not until I officially no longer have a job. Poor lorenzo - he looked every bit the unhappy rabbit that he is these days. But don't think to offer him carrots to make him feel better - he much prefers a good donut.