The times they are a-changin'!

I actually have a reason for not posting lately. I started a new job 2 weeks ago now, and so things have been fairly crazy leading up to that and since. But the dust seems to be settling a bit now, and it's all good. So far, anyway.

I'm a computer geek, and the company I worked for sold the software product I've been helping develop for the last several years. I liked working on what I was working on, so I went with it and now I work for the new company that bought the product. I'm still doing basically the same thing, and with most of our old development team intact, which is a good thing. And now I'm at a much smaller company than before, which is a very good thing. I started my career at a 12 person company and my last company has over 1000 people, and I can tell you that size does matter! And you may disagree, but I say smaller is better.

So after 2 weeks now we pretty much have the key people we need to move forward with this, and I'm in a new building that is easier to get to, and I still get to wear jeans and a tee shirt to work any damn time I want to. And I no longer share a building locked in a war of wills with that cadre of insane women who spent all summer whining about how hot they were and cranking the thermostat down to 69 degrees. Hello... maybe don't wear a sweater to work when it's over 100 degrees outside! Especially when other people (me) are wearing summer-appropriate clothes!!!!

The only issue with the new situation so far is that I'm now in a fairly high-profile position. Impressive, eh? Except not really, because what I really mean to say is that my cube faces out onto the corner of 2 main walkways, and everyone walking by can see my computer screen. There's no rule about surfing or anything, but I'm still pretty self conscious about how much time I can spend reading blogs while I'm at work. That's all I need is to be known as that new guy who just farts around on the internet all day. But the good news is that our little product group is a seperate business unit from the rest of the company and so we will move into our own space in a few months. Then I'll either be back in my own office or at least a less-travelled cube, and then I won't be so visible, and can read all your blogs without paranoia. But fear not, I'll still work, too.

It's not like it was 300 pages a day!

Our 4th grader, M, loves to read, and is very into the Harry Potter books. But we have this rule that she can't read them until at least one of us reads them first. Because, you know, 4th grade is pretty young to be reading about murder and death and even worse, dating, which I hear he starts in the later books. Not ready for that talk, yet!

She plowed through the first 4 books last year in 3rd grade and they started to get more violent, so we told her we wanted her to wait a while before she read any more. You can guess how that went over. We were thinking like 2 years or so, but she browbeat us all summer so finally we caved and Momster started reading the 5th book. It's pretty thick, and Momster's a busy gal, but she read a few chapters when she could and after several weeks or a month or something she finished it. Every morning during this time M would look at the page number Momster was on and tell me how many were left. Finally, last Thursday morning, M came pounding at the door when I was taking my shower and hollered in, "Dad, Mom finished it! I can start Harry Potter 5!!!!"

So today M finished it. 870 pages, 3 days. And yes, she did go to school Thursday and Friday, so I'm not exactly sure when she did it, but she did. Now I guess we'll see how long it is before we start hearing about HP #6.