Call me the Stairmaster. Or is that taken?

My workspace is on the first floor of a six-story office building. The cafeteria and snack machines are all on the sixth floor, so I typically go up there twice a work day or so. (Bear in mind my work day is slightly more than thirteen hours long.)

I used to just take the elevator up, but now I'm going up the stairs. I've changed by habit not for the exercise, although to be honest I do need all the cardio I can get. No, I'm now walking all the time because with my new job, I get to do paperwork on all the elevator entrapments in the building, and it's kind of disturbing how many there actually are. I'm not claustrophobic, but I still don't want to spend an hour in an 8' cube waiting for the repair guy to show up and free me.

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Who Died and Left Me In Charge?

Exciting news, I'm done with working as a "contingent worker" (temp) for a multinational bank, and now I'm a regular employee of said multinational bank.

About a week after they hired me, I got a call and the manager said "Yeah, we're getting rid of your position. So congrats, you're getting promoted to supervisor! There's no pay raise, but it should give bigger annual raises, for what that's worth."

So hooray, I'm now officially management.

Tuesday, they issued me my company BlackBerry. I'm a little sad about that, it's like a prison ankle monitor. Plus now I have to learn yet another OS and its associated user interface. And I can't even install interesting apps on it.

I don't think I'll give out the phone number to anyone other than my wife, because if there's a situation where I can't be reached on either my personal cell phone or the office landline, then there's probably an emergency already that I'm busy dealing with.

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I'm Up! I'm Up!

Hil and I have gotten in the habit of using our portable electronic devices as alarm clocks. I use my smartphone, while she sets either her iPad or her smartphone. We like how quickly one can change the alarm time. Plus we've always got them nearby anyway.

But Hil's phone is dying, and the iPad's charging port is also giving up the ghost, so last night she needed an alarm clock. I pulled out my favorite one, she set it to the time she wanted to be up (which was an hour before my wakeup), and we went to bed.

When it went off in the morning, I had a rush of memory. I'd bought that battery powered alarm clock back in Georgia. It had gone with me to Afghanistan, Japan, California, two different ships, and more than a dozen different countries. I knew that sound.

And in the Corps it is unwise to be late getting out of the rack, so when that alarm rings my feet hit the deck. When it sounded this morning, my heart rate popped from "resting" to "alert", and my hindbrain decided that despite the lack of light, it was now officially morning. It wouldn't do to be late for 0430 PT, now would it!

While I appreciate the occasional bout of nostalgia, did I mention that it was going off an hour before I had planned on being up? Such are the perils of conditioned reflexes.

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Pale Blue Dot

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Cake Day

Well, it's over. Future references to "my fiancée" will henceforth be "my wife". I was wracked with nervousness starting the night before the wedding, and I am eternally grateful to my best man and the rest of the groomsmen for keeping me on schedule and on track. My bride was a vision in white, and the minister did his part admirably. (A friend joked that he should go to more Methodist weddings, because we started exactly on time and it didn't last forever.) Lovely music was provided by relatives on both sides of the family.

The reception also went quite well. I'm quite glad we decided to hold it at a banqueting hall, because that meant the staff have done about a zillion wedding receptions before and they had it down to a science. My fiancée's wife's family loves to dance, which nicely made up for the fact that my family… doesn't.

The weather was sunny and hot, but not humid, so while I would have preferred it to be ten degrees cooler, it still was preferable to the thunderstorms that came the next day.

The cat seemed glad to see us when we came home, but I suspect she will be plunged into a deep depression when we go on our honeymoon in a few days. We have people coming over to check on her, but still.

Finally, we've got an enormous pile of presents to unwrap and a disturbing number of notes to write.

But I'm glad that so many people traveled so far to support us.

And now, life goes on.

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June 7th

Big day today. Lots to do.

Edit:
 

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June Is Here

I'm sorry I haven't been posting much. The whole getting married thing takes up a lot of mental energy.

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Noah

I wasn't planning on seeing the Russell Crowe Noah, but I must say, this clip has impressed me.

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Shipping Containers

The standardized shipping container is the biggest revolution in logistics since the internal combustion engine. Presented for your education is this video showing how a Chinese factory makes standard containers. It had less automation than I expected.

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Septimana Horribilus

It's been quite a week. In roughly ascending order:

• There's yet more wedding prep work to be done.
  
• Allergy season has started.
  
• My car needs to go to the shop, but I've been working every day so I can't make time. (The same time crunch is effecting the above entry.)
  
• My (future) in-laws are putting down their 15-year old border collie tomorrow. Honey's always been a very sweet dog, but apparently it's time. This is a harsher blow to my fiancee, who lived with that dog for most of Honey's life.
• A relative is not going to make the wedding due to medical treatments.
  
• A Marine I served with died yesterday, in a motorcycle crash. We weren't exactly friends, but we were comrades, which is something both less and more. He had a family, too. I'm going to chip into a memorial fund for his family, which is the least I can do, in a non-metaphorical sense.

And instead of a nice relaxing weekend, I'll be working overnights, and working twice as hard as usual because the colleague that knows what's going on is on vacation and is being covered by someone useless.

So if you'll excuse me, I think it's time to play with the cat and contemplate stoic philosophy.

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