judyonthenet

(My mother, who works at my ex-employer’s main competitor, always referred to them as “X”.)

Yesterday was my last day at work. I spent most of the day (the entire week, really) not thinking about the finality of it all; I managed to not cry, but came close when my manager walked me to my exit interview. This was my first job out of college, and I’d been there for four years. I wasn’t happy with my work (to the point where it was affecting me outside of work), and I was beginning to feel stuck (I felt the same last summer, and the summer before…), so I felt it was time to move on. Plus the company direction and corporate attitude has changed quite a bit since I joined. I still feel sad to be leaving the routine I’ve been used for the last few years, and I’ll miss the faces I see everyday. I really liked everyone at work (okay, there’s ONE exception, but besides that person). I feel silly whining about something I chose to do after much consideration and determining that it would make me happier. I just hope I’m doing the right thing (especially in these crazy economic conditions), this whole moving-on-to-whatever-makes-me-happy thing.

Whatever that is. For the moment, I’m actively a highly-and-technically-educated housewife.

You mean, apartmentwife!

First day out of work, and I’ve already been demoted :\

btw, since everyone always asks, Kelvin absolutely approves of this. I think people expect me to be married to some uptight “Asian” person, but those who know Kelvin well know he’s a do-whatever-the-hell-you-want kind of person. He just wants me to happy, and I’m incredibly lucky to have such a supportive guy. It probably doesn’t hurt that he’s fairly stably employed and adequately paid at a company he enjoys working at, and I’m sure the fact I’d come home and whine constantly to him didn’t affect his feelings on the matter either.

I took pictures of my cube before I packed everything away.

As I am a very messy person, my cube was a very messy cube. I drank a can of Nestea almost everyday. I’m not the best at finishing drinks, so once in a while, I’d have a can with liquid inside, left there overnight. I wouldn’t want to drink it, and I couldn’t toss it into the recycling bin with liquid inside. Yet, I was too lazy to walk over to the sink and dump the liquid, hence the buildup of Nestea cans. I put honeymoon pictures behind my monitor under the hopes it would cheer me up at work, being constantly reminded of paradise with my husband. Meh. Across from me sat Hoang, who I talked to the most from my cube because of where we sat. Carl sits next to him, with his cube oriented in a manner where I could see him when he’d bang his head against the edge of desk in frustration/exhaustion/idunnowhat. Mike sat next to me; sometimes I could hear him humming/singing quietly.

Remember that protesting bear Krang got for me for Daffodil Days 2007? As you can see above, he’s still there. Because Krang gave him me, I refuse to give him away. However, he seems needed at my ex-employer’s more than anywhere else, so I’ve decided to leave him at X, on loan. That way he can continue to protest (rather lazily as he always does), and hopefully the team will still get donuts and bagels that appear out of nowhere. He’s going to hang out with Mike or whoever else stays with the group… until no one I know is left to take care of the bear, at which point I will claim him back. I will also claim him early if I find myself in need of a protesting bear. In honor of his protesting, someone left him a donut on Wednesday (the day after I sent out my official email to the group).

When I saw the donut, I was like, that’s nuts! Hello Panda cookies on a donut? Hoang said it’s probably from Psycho Donuts, and it turns out it was (“Psycho Panda”). I still have no idea who gave me the donut, but major thanks to whoever gave it me! It was sweet (literally and nonliterally)!

The donut was also… weird. Crunchy and soft are conflicting textures. I think I’ll stick to the regular stuff…

My group took me, at my request, to Buca di Beppo for my farewell lunch. Our group was big enough that it need to be separated into two tables, but we were right next to each other in a separated area, so it wasn’t bad. I got to take a bunch of pictures of my coworkers eating, much to their annoyance.

Going slightly off topic, this is a reminder of how I’m getting old and turning into my mom. I remember as a kid (and as an adult, actually) how I found it really annoying that my grandfather would take pictures of us while we’re eating. My mom (his daughter) does the same thing. Pictures of people in mid-chomp with food everywhere generally aren’t flattering. Yet, I’ve come to appreciate this sort of picture, and I much prefer to have pictures of people eating than just pictures of food. (I care more about the people than the food.) Now I’ve come to acquire this special skill, so I’m thinking it’s genetic.

After lunch, we took a group pic outside of Buca. I’m gonna miss these people. *sniffle*

btw, did I mention that I live, like, 1 mile away from X company? I know I complain like I’m never going to see these people anymore, but I could get over there in less than 5 minutes. I’m such a whiner. Speaking of whining, the first thing I thought of when I saw the picture was, “Everyone looks so nice!” The second thing I thought of was “Damn, I need a haircut.”

My exit interview was at 4, so I moped around at work until the time came. The exit interview was brief, so it was a quick transition from full-time employment to unemployment. I spent the rest of the day at home wondering when it’d hit me that I’m not going back to work anymore. I’m still waiting for it.

Kelvin and I had dinner with Ravi and Jess at Grill’Em in Campbell. Pretty decent, tho I’d still prefer professionals to cook my steaks. (No offense meant to Kelvin. I’m positive I would have charred our steaks.)

The guys grillin’

Diggin’ in

The rest of the night I spent working on this blog post. I know I’ve been out of the blogging groove for a while, so hopefully this is the start of me getting back in.

New thing I learned today: Glassdoor.com is a website that collects anonymous reviews and salary information on specific companies and jobs.

I never heard about this website until my ex-coworkers showed it to me today. You can’t see everything until you post your own anonymous review, but I can tell just from the headlines of the reviews, a lot of people feel exactly the same as I do about the change in company culture. (It used to be very employee-oriented, but now has become more bottom-line-oriented.)

I gave my two weeks notice yesterday. I know it seems crazy to do such a thing with the way things are at the moment. Today makes it four years since working at the same company since I graduated college. I’d been pretty unhappy for a long time, so I’ve decided to move on. On to what? Ermmm, no comment… (It sure as heck won’t be product engineering.)

New thing I learned today: Blazblue is pronounced like “Blaze Blue”, not “Blahz Blue”.

July was a pretty sorry month for posting, my apologies to whoever is still left reading. The truth is, I’ve been concurrently busy and lazy. I’m dealing with some major dissatisfaction with life at the moment, and I’m not dealing with it very well. (Just to be clear, my personal life is fine. Actually, married life is quite fantastic… so far. So, not everything sucks.) I’ve been very unproductive in many respects. With my unhappiness, I really should be motivated to do more and better myself, through self education or more productive hobbies. Like sewing. Learning a new programming language. Doing chores. Making ice cream. Blogging. Instead, I find myself staying up past my bedtime playing Team Fortress 2 (a game with no ending), leaving me an even-less-productive zombie the next day. I’m trying to figure out how to be less of a crybaby, figure out what to do with my life, and do something about it. Options seem limited these days, so I’m considering some drastic actions. Any suggestions or advice on changing my life without doing something I might regret is greatly appreciated.

On the upside, I finally took my sewing machine in for repair. I haven’t blogged about it, but I did some major sewing before the wedding. Our rehearsal was on Halloween, so we made it a costume-required rehearsal. Kelvin and I decided to make our own costumes. And of course, we did it the last possible second (along with making a sash for the flower girl), so the sewing machine was heavily used the week before. The day before Halloween, the sewing machine got misaligned and wonky and began eating itself (as in, it’d suck fabric and wads of thread into the bottom and starting puncturing itself with the needle, making horrible grinding noises). I took it in for service at an authorized Brother repair shop, which was ~$100 (enough for a new sewing machine). But it’s working again, so I don’t have an excuse to not sew now. Since the repair shop is in the Evergreen area and I rarely ever go there, I figured I’d try a couple pho places highly rated on Yelp.

When I dropped off the sewing machine, I had Popeye’s instead of anything Evergreen (even tho there actually was a Popeye’s in the shopping center of the repair shop). Later in the week, Kelvin had a lost filling replaced with a crown, so we ate noodles at Beef Noodle #1, close to the repair shop.

Not sure what’s so “exotic taste” about this place.

I like the meaty rib-eye steak pieces they use. The noodles were okay, but ours were all stuck together and hard to take apart. Broth was decent, but dark. The place is next to some ridiculously popular seafood place called Boiling Crab. Hoang tells me it’s new to the area, so it’s kinda a trendy place to be. There were lots of people waiting outside on a Thursday night, and occasionally people would walk out with bibs.

When I picked up my sewing machine today, I went to a different pho place across the street called Pho Y #1 with Kelvin and Andrew.

Plenty of people late Sunday afternoon lunchtime.

They have thinner beef pieces, but they offer to have the rare steak served on the side. I guess some people consider the meat too well done after soaking in the soup for the 20-second trip between the kitchen and your table. Thinner noodles (but not stuck together), and the broth is “clean” (best way I could describe it). They have a cute flow chart for pho on the back of the menu. Both pho places are decent, tho pretty generic. I’m still partial to Dac Phuc.

We also spent some time with Andrew at his dad’s summer party on Saturday. His dad was rockin’ out with his band, the Mojo Hounds.

Did you know Ikea has reserved parking for hybrid vehicles? Awesome way to increase my smugness. Not so awesome is that 90% of the hybrid spaces were not taken up by hybrids.

New thing I learned today: Modern windshields are made of laminated glass, which is two or more layers of glass with thin sheet of vinyl in between.

Video games and other gaming related purchases:
5 Goozex trade tokens – $5.00
The Elder Scrolls IV: Knights of the Nine (PC, used) – 100 Goozex points and 1 Goozex trade token
Fraps (PC) – $37.00
Total cost: $42.00

Not much in the game spending area this month. I had a couple close calls, though. I contemplated getting the SF4 Tournament Edition Arcade Stick along with BlazBlue (both for 360) when they were both on sale at Amazon, which would have been ~$180. I didn’t act on my impulse initially, but later decided I wanted it. Of course, by that time, the deal had just died. I also missed out on getting Rhythm Heaven (DS) for $13 cuz I was too busy doing actual work instead of surfing internet FOR ONCE.

The majority of my month’s gaming was Oblivion and (surprise) Team Fortress 2. So I used my Goozex credit to get Knights of the Nine, which has the Knights of the Nine expansion (already included in the GOTY edition of Oblivion) and all the numerous tiny expansions (not included in GOTY). The tiny expansions were kind of stupid. Instead of toiling through the game to earn 2000 gold to get a POS house, you could pay $2 (of real life money) for this mini-expansion and get some uber mansion that has awesome crap in it. For example, the Wizard’s Tower is this kick ass castle for a mage with all the nifty mage equipment included. Usually, you’d have to go through the Mage’s Guild questline to get access to this stuff. Feels like cheating. I got it since I had nothing to use my Goozex points on, and there was some evil stuff in some of the mini-expansions in case Kelvin and I felt like going evil. The most criticized addition is the Horse’s Armor, which is super dumb for a $2 mini-expansion. What was dumb for me was that, right after I got the armor for my horse, I lost my damn horse.

I’ve started to record demos during my TF2 sessions, as has Kelvin. I figured Fraps was a good investment, since I want to blog more about my gaming (since I clearly have nothing else interesting going on in my life worth blogging about). It’s been working pretty well; Kelvin has some videos on his Youtube feed. The only dumb thing about Fraps is that there’s some issues with using a USB headset, so you have to kind of mess with audio settings on your computer to get it to work. Anyway, here’s an example video from Kelvin:

Games I beat:
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (PC)

Like I said, the only thing I played outside of Team Fortress 2 was Oblivion. By “beat”, I mean I finished the main quest. I also finished the Thieves Guild questline, along with many other sidequests. There was still plenty of stuff left to do, plus I didn’t do any of the expansions. I’m sick of Oblivion at the moment, so I dunno if I’ll be doing those anytime soon. I’m going to do a blog post soon about my issues with Oblivion, but overall, it was a decent game. (Fallout 3 is better.)

New thing I learned today: Basic is a 2003 thriller film starring John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson.