The downside of a metal roof
Our building here in Sevierville has a new metal roof – replacing the old asphalt one. They did the work three or four months ago, and other than a different appearance, I haven’t noticed any effects of the change, positive or negative.
But now I can tell you one weird negative to the metal roof: pecan trees. Our office has a beautiful pecan tree over the back garage and parking lot, and with today’s windy weather, I am distracted beyond reason by the banging and clanging of pecans falling on the roof. It took me almost an hour this morning to realize what was going on, in part because of the crazy number of falling pecans that often sound like the firing of a Gatlin gun. Now I’m no longer jumping every few seconds, but I’m no less distracted.
But the new roof sure does look nice. It almost makes me wish we’d put a metal roof on our house when we bought it, instead of the dimensional shingle. Oh well, maybe we’ll reconsider in twenty years or so.
Stay at work dad
I just realized something. There are a lot of stay at home moms out there, and there are a few stay at home dads, too. I’m neither of those. Instead, I bring my baby girl to work with me, and her Mimi does 90% of the childcare.
I think I still qualify as a stay at work dad: a dad who continues to work but with baby in tow. I am a stay at work dad.
First heat of the year
Here at the office, I just turned the heat on for the first time this season. I hated to do it, because usually it’s plenty warm up here by midday, but I did it anyway because it was 60 degrees in here and it’s supposed to stay pretty cold today.
I was feeling really drowsy until the heater started burning off summer’s accumulation of dust. I can tell you that the smoke detector definitely works!
Argh!
There’s no way this (work) day is almost over.
And if my new computer part doesn’t arrive soon, I’m going to go nuts. Having to work completely off of a second monitor is very frustrating, especially because I never know when the new part will arrive and whether the part will work.
I wish so much that I’d had it shipped to the office instead of to my house, which makes no sense, so I would know by lunchtime if the part is here instead of having to wait till quitting time.
Argh!
Downside to the long commute
Even though I have a new car that seems to get an average of about 35 mpg, I still drive 50 miles a day. The gain of 10 mpg from getting a new car only gave me one extra day between trips to the gas station.
So very busy
I feel like I’m behind in everything. Work is piling up on my desk, and I’ve got a ton of stuff to do at home, too. It’s no fun that I missed nearly a week of work just to come back to a broken computer. I don’t know when I’ll find the time to deal with that.
On the upside, the Bug is cuter than ever. Her favorite word right now is “no,” which seems to have several meanings – including “yes.” And I simply love watching this person of thirty inches walking around the house and office.
This weekend, my parents are going to be out of town (again) to visit MS for my little nephew’s christening. I wish I could go, but since Katie just got a new job, and just took off a week for bereavement, taking off more work is simply not an option.
The other downside to their leaving town is they can’t help with the Bug this weekend. Katie and I have let the house go to seed over the last few weeks, and there are some big problem areas that need attending to. So this weekend we’ll be taking turns cleaning and playing with the baby, instead of having sitting and knocking it out in a few hours.
Number one on my todo list is to shave an inch or so off of E’s new bedroom door. Embarrassingly enough, I haven’t found the time to do that in the last month, so E’s had a not-so-private room of late. I find it adorable, though, that he hasn’t seemed to notice or care.
Ok, back to that pile of work on my desk. Ugh.
It’s hard to write when you’re bored
I suspect even lion tamers have an occasional boring day at the office. For me, the boring days are days like today, when I’ve spent 75% of my time entering asset information into the computer. Yawn.
When I have an extremely boring task to accomplish, I find that I spend more time trying to procrastinate. What’s odd, though, is my procrastination takes purely passive forms – reading the paper, for instance, or checking out a blog or two.
I can’t seem to string much of a sentence together when I’m truly bored. Let’s hope I finish here soon.
Not that I’m complaining, really
I’ve got entirely too much work on my desk. Every inch is covered and it’s overflowing. And it’s a big desk.
Like night and day
I can’t believe this, but I’m going to have to wake the Bug too take her home.
For weeks, we’ve been struggling with getting C to sleep at the office. She used to sleep here very well, but that suddenly stopped a few weeks ago. After then, she’d sleep only if you held her – obviously impossible in an office setting.
So Katie recommended creating a new napping room for her. We set up a bed, covered the windows (I’d tried this before but not so deliberately) and made sure there was white noise. We put a chair in there to use for getting her in bed easily – and back in bed easily if she were to wake up prematurely (which she did).
The Bug has now been asleep for two hours, and her father is about ready to clock out for the day. With any luck, I can get her straight from her isolation chamber to the car without really waking her.
This is a Good Thing.
No more neckties!
I began working as an accountant several years ago, and I am still surprised that I haven’t worn a tie even one time for work. I always thought that clients expected their accountants to look “professional” and wear a tie, but in 2008, that’s not necessarily true.
It’s increasingly uncommon for anyone (other than lawyers) to wear ties. According to this Wall Street Journal article from last week, only six percent of Americans wear ties to work. Six percent. Tie sales in the US in 1995 were 1.3 billion dollars, and last year they were little more than half that.
Ties are uncomfortable, they get in the way, and – let’s face it – they’re completely pointless. Good riddance.
I hate Windows
Yes, I’m talking the OS, not the kind made of glass that helps brighten up the room.
Yesterday, I finally got around to running Windows update on my computer. It turns out, yesterday’s update was a biggie – service pack 3, as a matter of fact. And thanks to that lovely update, M$ turned automatic updates back on for my computer.
I hate this. Frankly, it makes me extremely angry that they feel the need to do this without my permission.
Why do I care so much? I’ll tell you. Yesterday, I started working on a new client from Poland, and there’s a lot of stuff I’ve yet to learn about taxation of aliens. Currently, I’ve got a few dozen firefox tabs open and numerous pdf files. I’m running several tax programs and Excel.
But because Windows turned automatic updates back on (and I’ve obviously turned it back off now), my computer downloaded new updates a few minutes ago. Big whoop, right? Wrong. Now that the computer is newly updated, it wants to restart to make the process official. And that means that every five minutes I have to tell the computer that I don’t want it to restart. Grumble. And if I don’t happen to see the notification, it’ll just restart on me. And all of my work and research will be lost.
Grumble.
Because of M$’s penchant for junk like this, I rarely do updates on this computer. I can’t always just restart the computer at the drop of a hat because M$ wants me to. Why can’t it just install the updates the next time I turn the computer off?
Why does Windows have to be such a lousy OS? When will my tax software be usable in an OS that cares about its users?
