Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Second Tuesday of the month

Also known as Book Club Night or more appropriately what my social life has been reduced to since having a child. Don't get me wrong, it is all excellent, but it is amazing how easily one takes for granted getting together with friends to drink, eat and chat (50% book, 50% what our kids are doing, our husbands, living in this area) when a little one isn't present. Now that Leifer is here, it isn't even that we want to go out and party, but having the opportunity to go out with friends is a treasure nowadays.

Eating out now is a huge deal. Ok, I admit it. We have taken a hiatus from eating "out". We order in because Leif sitting still for a sit down dinner just is way too much to ask. There is one local Mexican restaurant and Leif likes the waitresses because they smile and oogle at him, and he thrives on attention. Lack of attention by bystanders (or sitters) makes him miserable and unhappy. (Is he REALLY my child?) Or is his personality just far more from AB's side than I like to admit? (kidding... sort of...)

Work is going well. I picked up a new project today. Yeah, just what I needed. Yikes. I swore up and down I wouldn't get overwhelmed with projects. But then the *perfect* opportunity presented itself this morning. I am to get an Auger instrument and its associated UHV hardware up and running and able to measure Si. Shouldn't be that hard and this is my ideal task, exactly what I went to grad school for. And hence the real reason I could *not* pass this up. Of course the secondary reason is that it is another one of my division director's pet projects. So declining this would not be a good move politically, while accepting it and making it work could be huge.

I had one of those borderline embarrassing moments today. Lesson learned - read and understand what exactly a meeting is for before attending. It was organized by a woman who I have done some work for last year - I immediately assumed it was for that project. Nevermind that I was surprised that the staff on that project had apparently completely turned over... and that amazingly they were all people who are in my current group (do you think I realized that immediatly though? Noooo...). So we had to do intros and I intro'd myself and talked a little bit about the work I had done on the project I *thought* we were meeting about.

About 5 minutes later it dawns on me that this is TEAM meeting for one of the other 2 teams that I am NOT a member. (Still following?) I was either invited on accident, or I and two other guys who are also not in this team were just invited for the sheer pleasure of confusing the hell out of us. We all left with blank looks on our faces, but with a charge code for the hour (which is what counts at this time of year I suppose). CW1 was thrilled to have a charge code for an hour and stated he would go wherever he was summoned for a charge code. Me, otoh, stared at the minutes tick by that I could have used to prepare my telecon presentation for tomorrow.

Yes, I could have gotten up and left I suppose. But that's rude. And I did know the people there. I must have been invited for a reason... but that reason is still located in the depths of someone else's brain.

Ok, I am leaving so I can go make my boys dinner before abandoning them for a night "out" with the girls!

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