Just a Pause

Let me pause here for a moment at work and write a little something.  It is a beautiful day outside today.  The sun is bright, the sky is very blue, and it’s a wee bit cold out there. I am just back from a brisk walk around the building. I had intended to go for a longer walk, but it is a little bit brisker then I expected! I do love this time of year though - the cool and crisp weather that is slowly burned away by the sun, so it is balmy in the afternoon and cool to cold in the night.

Work has been its usual immensely chaotic self. I spent all day yesterday chasing a data anomaly in circles and I still haven’t managed to close the loop on it, though I can now at least clearly see the conditions under which it is occurring.  This is just an aside, but I have watched the ACA website debacle with amusement - being partially in that world, I can relate to the challenges they’re facing and trying to work their way through.  I can point to the whole thing on TV and say - “see, that is what I do for a living”, and then add “and about that chaotic too”.

I finally finished reading “The Name of the Wind” last night and I enjoyed it.  It was an interesting story, though I would say that, mid-way through the book it seemed to bog down, as if the story was trapped in a circle where the characters where telling you about things that were happening/going to happen - but it wasn’t really engaging.  It did pick up by the end and I am going to give the sequel a try.  Hopefully the writer will get a little better at pacing.

Then, I started a non-fiction book that interested me - “Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico”.  Probably because I had just finished watching “The Fountain”, which includes a sub-story about a Spanish Conquistador, I thought it might be interesting to see what sort of non-fiction books there were out there about the subject.  I think it has been a while since I’ve read any pure non-fiction.  I am looking forward to it.

Okay, as for today at the office, I have two simple goals - first, I want to make an entire sweep through my email to clean it out and update it.  Given the chaos of the last couple of days/week, it is a wee bit out of control.  Then, the second thing I want to do is take the time to write some peer performance reviews in our system. Then, if that doesn’t exhaust me, I need to write my own reviews.  (I’ve never liked the process of writing your own reviews - that is, to me, just stupid. I am actually not a fan of performance review systems at all - I think they all fall woefully short of what they are trying to do.)