Visions of Fridays Dance in My Head

I think I've said before that I like Thursdays as a general rule. I find them akin to Christmas Even where you know the 'big day' is next but the anticipation of that is almost as sweet as the actual day of Christmas itself.

In this case, the 'big day' is simply Friday. While we still have to work on Fridays, they're like the reward at the end of the week. Things are a little more relaxed. People talk more on Fridays. The day goes by quickly, mostly because I have a lot of meetings on Fridays for some reason.

As not a huge fan of meetings, I don't mind meetings on Friday afternoons, particularly when they involve my boss. He's very easily distractable and clearly has a case of the 'wanting to escape early and start the weekend off right.'

So, pretty much, in a way, Fridays are part of the weekend because you know how matter how rough they are, there are two beautiful days of freedom just beyond the rise.

Today was a good Thursday. I had a couple of meetings which weren't too bad. I find that I tend to doodle a lot more in some meetings than others. Doodling, for me, is almost like meditation. I have to doodle in order to listen. As my pencil sketches odd designs and things on the page, my mind is listening to what people are saying.

Today, my doodles were off odd things. I drew a superhero who was an owl, two large evil looking pumpkins. Then I attempted to sketch a piece of corn. I don't mean the sweetcorn you buy in the supermarket, it was the type of corn that looks like wheat, that they make into flower. In England, when you see a corn field, there's no sweetcorn to be found. Instead it's rows and rows of green or golden sheaves, depending on the month, waving in the wind.

This is the corn I grew up with. My older brother used to go off to the corn fields to get up to mischief with his friends. They'd play in the fields, hiding from one another when the corn was high enough. When it was harvest season, they'd use the haystacks made from the dried corn stalks as objects in which to dive.

In our art classes, we'd have to draw pieces of this corn, capturing each kernel just right. Nowadays, while I remember in my mind how it looks, my pencil can no longer remember how to sketch it. It was sad. I used to know how to nest each kernel so it actually looked like corn. Now it looks rather bloated and more like a Christmas tree.

I was a little worried about this, whether it meant I was losing some of my Englishness. I compensated by making sure I could still remember how to make the pound sign. I don't mean that crosshatch thing you see on phone keypads, I mean the UK monetary type of pound sign. Fortunately, I could without any thought at all.

Thus, my meetings passed quickly. I like it when that happens. Doodling is good for making sure you're not so bored you start visualizing stabbing people in the eye with your pencil.

In addition to my meetings, we also had cake. I'm not a big fan of cake but today I was in the mood for a piece. My piece had plenty of frosting on it and clearly, I was in the mood for that more than cake because I realized that I'd slowly eaten all of that and left part of the cake. That's unusual for me. I'm not usually a cake eater at all.

I also had a meeting with the man who interviewed me last week. I was offered the job I interviewed for. At the moment, I'm 98% sure I'm ready for the change since the salary and benefits package met my requirements. All I need is the formal offer from the company which I'm supposed to get tomorrow.

The prospect of this change is both exciting and a little scary. I like this new company. People there seemed genuinally to like their jobs. Having been involved in a series of candidate interviews for a programmer position we have at work, I've had the chance to be on both sides of the interview process over the past two weeks. You can tell when someone is genuinely excited about their job. I don't think many people in our company are. In this new company, three of the four employees have been there over ten years. That says a lot.

I may change my mind but it's a lovely feeling to go into my Friday with this opportunity on my mind. It will help me focus on my current job and truly decide if I want to leave or whether the new opportunity is too great to pass up. I suggest the latter but I want time to sleep on it and make absolutely sure it's the right thing for me.

For now, I have that and the pleasure of it being Friday tomorrow. The weekend is wide open at the moment with no firm plans. It will give me plenty of time to do some serious thinking so that, by Monday, I will know for sure.

Then again, I have several meetings tomorrow. Maybe I should use those as my thinking time instead.

We'll see how it goes.

Happy Friday!

Evil Strawberries of DOOOOOM!

It's not so cold this morning. As I was coming in to the office, I saw three deer scamper off into a nearby field. I miss the deer. I used to see them all the time in my apartment but now, living in a more urban area, I never see any. I see plenty of squirrels and the occasional bunny but no deer.

I woke up in a bad mood this morning. Don't you hate that? I've been trying to be in a good mood but it's the type of day where I just feel like sniping and being crabby. It'll wear off in a while, I hope. I just can't help it. Sometimes, we just wake up in bad moods. I realized I was in a bad mood when I was yelling at my toast for popping up too soon even though it was my fault I hadn't adjusted the darkness level. My toaster is not a good toaster. In order to get the bread to pop up, you have to turn the dial all the way to the left. This is fine until you make toast again and you forget to readjust it. It means soggy toast. Soggy toast doesn't make me happy as crispy toast.

It's still toast, however and I am not a Monkeypants who turns down toast, even the soggy kind.

I am going to try to pull myself out of my bad mood. The problem is that I stay up too late. I plan on going to bed early and then when it's time, I realize I had intended to get a lot more done with my evening so I don't end up going to bed for at least another hour. Nevertheless, it could have been worse. Fortunately, I don't have any meetings today so I can stay at my desk and be bad moody by myself.

Wait, correct that...I do have a meeting. Bugger. Oh well, I'm always complaining I never get invited to meetings while my coworker, supposedly my 'equal' goes to about five or six a week. She's the one that gets put on the project teams. Me, I get to stay at my desk and make sure everything else gets done. Not that I'm bitter.

Oh, who am I kidding?I am bitter today. It's a result of my crotchety mood. I don't even get to go to this meeting today by myself; my coworker is going to join me because heaven forbid I actually get to do anything on my own to show that, you know, I actually have skills.

Still, I quite like meetings. I've taking to doodling and making origami. Yesterday, I made a large pencil topper origami thingy that I called the quadopus. It's an octopus with only four tentacles. Hence the quad part. That's the latin word for four, right? It actually more looks like a circus tent but in my mind, it's a quadopus. I think the origami might have been a bit distracting so maybe I should keep to my doodling.

Lately, my doodlings have been odd. It started with a little picture of fruit that I called "The Evil Strawberry of DOOOOM!" I then drew a sad banana that I labeled, "The Sad Banana." I also drew "Boomer Blackberry." For some reason, I seem to enjoy doodling fruit. I'm not sure why. Yesterday, I drew "The Great and Awesome Pumpkins", "The Raincloud of DOOOOOM!" and "The Squashed Strawberry." Clearly, the strawberry had done something in my mind and had passed off its dooming mantel to the raincloud. Don't ask me, I just doodle.

It's ok until my boss asks me what I'm doodling. I think he thinks I'm not paying attention. The thing is that if I don't doodle, I can't focus. I need to be doing something like that so I can listen. I rarely take notes in meetings anyway unless I deem it necessary. If I doodle, it streamlines my brain so that I can actually listen to the exciting talk of WAR files, API's, server switching and XML files that really doesn't affect me that much. I showed my boss one of my doodles the first time he asked. It was a picture of the Kool Aid Jug Man as a vampire. My coworker was wearing a shirt with the Kool Aid Jug Man on it with a caption that said "Oh, yeah!!!" Apparently, this is something I should know but the only exposure I've had to the Kool Aid Jug Man is on "Good Eats" with Alton Brown on the food network. He was making some disgusting frozen pickles that he flavoured with a 'drink mix' that he wasn't allowed to name for license purposes. However, he gave us a 'clue' by having a Jug Man crash through a wall and say "Oh, Yeah." I figured it was Kool Aid but I had to Google it to see what the "Oh, Yeah" thing was about. I'm still not sure except it was part of the advertising campaign way back when.

I seem to make a lot of things monsters in my doodles. Aside from making the Kool Aid Jug Man a vampire, I made a pine tree into a Frankenstein. In our conference room, we have one of those paintings with Indians in it (meaning the Native American kind, not the Asian kind). They're on a trail in the snow and there are pine trees all around. So I drew a tree and it turned out crooked so I made it into a Frankenstein.

I suppose my corruption of normal-seeming objects into monster-type things speaks of some psychological misfire on my part. I'm not sure. All I know is that it's quite fun to draw Evil Strawberries of DOOOOM! Actually, it's just fun to say DOOOOOOM!" which is probably why I always label my Dooming objects.

I'm not sure what I'll doodle today. I'll let you know if it turns out interesting. I consider it a stream of consciousness thing. I rarely plan my doodles. I just go with the flow. Which, now that I think about it, might not be something I should really admit because that may make me seem a little twisted.

My boss just came by to see how things were going. He does that from time to time. He's not in the office much lately; he's too busy trying to get our new building up and running. We just found out that we'll now be there by the first weekend of December. Two days ago, it was "definitely by Thanksgiving." I know our lease in the current building expires at the end of December so we have to be out by then. As long as the weather cooperates, I can live with it.

My boss is gone now, obviously. He doesn't really have a clue what I do. I think he tries to but he'd rather do the more technical stuff and I can see his eyes glaze over when I tell him what I'm working on. Also, he doesn't really know how to talk to me because he thinks every thing I say is sarcastic which, actually, is not true at all. Still, he doesn't seem bothered with how I spend my time as long as I am working. For the most part, I am. I just think I need to get in a better mood.

Maybe I'll doodle some more evil fruit.

Happy Tuesday.