christmas time is here

Since Laura blogged, I figured it was only proper that I update too.  

The government audit I was on finished up about three weeks ago.  It feels like a lifetime ago.  I have been sitting around in the office or at home, doing nothing really, but getting paid for it.  And I love that.  I have four weeks of bliss in exchange for three or four months of hell.  Not a bad deal, I suppose.  I start at a new client in January and I'm kind of nervous about it.  The client has a bad reputation for not caring about anything, and there are a couple of team members I'm not too excited about.  Plus, I don't really know anyone on my team and can say I've probably never even heard the names of most of them.  But it's always hard starting something new.  Hopefully in a few months I'll be able to call some of these people my friends, or if nothing else, my "work friends".  

I'm going home next week.  I think we are leaving Monday after work.  It changes depending on my sister's mood.  I'm looking forward to hanging out with my family for a week and just not working or thinking. 

In keeping with holiday tradition, I have once again baked more cookies than I know what to do with.  I come home from work at a reasonable time these days, and since I have nothing else to do, I just decide to bake another batch of cookies.  They're spilling out of my freezer to the point where I have to start getting rid of my frozen vegetables/other freezer items that have piled up over the years.  It's like I imagine giving trays of cookies to all of my friends...but when the time comes, OOPS I don't have any friends.  So once again Andy will probably have to eat most of the cookies.  

I got new glasses.  I've been having headaches more than usual, and decided that I'd rather have my eyes checked than get the teeth grinding issue resolved.  Hopefully with the new glasses I'll only get headaches half as much.  But we shall see.  

I've been thinking about going back to school for my MBA.  It's a tough decision, though.  It's so expensive, and I don't know how much money it will make me in the long run.  I think it would probably be more profitable for me to just take on another client or something here and work my way up the ladder.  But I think personally I would find more satisfaction in going back to school.  First I'll have to decide where I want to go to school (my top choice is $100k--hoooooly) and then I have to take the GMAT.  Which means studying for the GMAT then filling out those dreaded college applications.  It will take a lot of effort on my part, and I just don't know whether I'm up to it right now.  

I'm going to make a new year's resolution this year.  My resolution is that I will try harder to keep a clean apartment.  This year I wanted to focus on keeping a clean kitchen, which I have been doing pretty well lately.  I have consistently done the dishes before going to bed, and have wiped down the counters after almost every meal/cookie/whatever preparation.  It's time that I grow up and start cleaning up the whole apartment, though.  If it doesn't happen soon, my children will be living in piles of dirty laundry and dust bunnies, and I don't want that.

one of my "contacts" at my client has the initials SB. i am sort of a freak with checklists for myself, and every time that i write "requested from SB on 9/15/08" i kind of snort, because i think of the old manager at the place i worked when i was in school. this woman was kind of looney but you had to love her anyway...she had so much energy i often had to avoid her all-together (people with too much energy make me nervous). the place i worked was really into initials, and you had to sign or initial EVERYTHING. so i saw SB's initials a ton. seeing them here in my notes makes me think of SB and TJ and my best friend Laura. we really hated that place sometimes, but we really loved it too.

this is a test.

, originally uploaded by lizzybee122.

only a test.

what's with the strangers talking to me?

last night i left work at about 7:30. my metro ride is usually standing up, struggling to keep balance and read a book at the same time. so last night i was pleasantly surprised when i got a seat on the metro at metro center. i sat down and pulled my book out of my bag, flipped to the book-marked page and got comfortable. at the next stop, a guy got on the train and sat down beside me. he was about my age, wearing a white hat with something on it (i didn't get the chance to actually inspect the hat, i didn't want to stare at him or anything). the second he sits down the following happened:
him: you're starting chapter two, huh?
me: yeah.
him: is that grisham?
me: yeah.
him: is that the bretheren?
me: yeah.
him: oh that one's pretty good.
me: good.
him: in chapter X this happens, in chapter Y this happens, then in chapter Z this happens.
me: (internally) please stop talking to me. i don't know about what happens in chapters x, y, z, that's sort of the purpose of me reading the book.
him: and then at the en-
me: please don't tell me what happens at the end
him: well i've already told you what happens in chapters x, y, z...
me: yeah well the purpose of me reading the book is to entertain myself while i'm on the metro and i'd rather read the book first before finding out what happens at the end

and he proceeds to talk to me all the way to my stop. he asked me whether i thought global warming was true or made up, whether i thought AIDS was a real virus or a bio-terrorism thing, and so on and so forth. people were all staring at us. my only hope is that they knew that i didn't want to be talking to this weirdo. but i think people would've suspected we were friends by the way he was talking to me.

by the time we got to my stop i felt like i had done my civic duty by talking to this person as long as i talked to him and i said "this is me" and started getting up. at first i was a little scared that he might get off at the same stop as me and follow me home. i had already thought of multiple escape routes in the event that he did follow me off the train. but, thankfully, he stayed on the train and i was able to walk home in silence, thinking about telling this story in the future and laughing to myself about how f'n weird that guy was.

a ball game

last night i had a work party at the new nationals baseball stadium. i'm slowly getting used to the fact that the firm no longer cares whether i work there and have accepted the cheese whiz and saltines hors d'oeuvres that they've been pushing at the recent company events.
in case i failed to mention earlier, they gave us a big announcement a couple of months ago and shattered my world. i have been harboring feelings of what we'll call hatred for the company ever since.
to my surprise, last night we had a "remaining few members of our market" event at the new stadium and it was actually really nice. they rented out a few of the club rooms and had a lot of fancy food and as many alcoholic beverages as you could dream of. it felt good to be important again and it felt a lot like old times, back when they cared about us.
i watched about three minutes of the game before getting bored. i spent most of the event eating, drinking, and bitching about the change with my friends. it was therapeutic.
andy is leaving tonight to go to NC for the weekend. i sort of miss him already. he's been traveling every week for the past two months and was finally home for this week and it was so nice to get to see him every day again. he's only leaving for three days and then he'll be home all next week, but still i feel like he's leaving too soon. after next week he is traveling for two months again. it's going to be hard.

"Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for awhile and leave footprints on our hearts. And we are never, ever the same. "
--Unknown