Holiday Calendar, continued:

December 7: Candle. I did hang out at the Craft Center, where they do have the materials to make beeswax candles, but that’s as close as it got. NOT REALLY RELEVANT.
December 8: My best guess is that this is supposed to be a dog wearing a reindeer Santa hat? Anyway, no idea, but again, not relevant.
December 9: Bells. Definitely not a bell related day. Still not relevant.
December 10: Santa hat. There are so many days recently when this would have applied to my life and/or I actually had a Santa hat on. BUT NOT TODAY. You know what would have been good? A TREE. Or a SWEATER. And I got the wrong HAT. NOT RELEVANT!
December 11: Wreath. I (a) put a dollar store cheap felt pointsettia wreath on my door a while back, and (b) I am working on a sea creatures and coral wreath for Jamie’s present, so ACTUALLY RELEVANT TODAY!!
December 12: Tree. I have tons of them around my house so I’m going to be biased and deem this relevant. Even if I was hardly home today.
December 13: Present. I did get one in the mail yesterday and another today (more or less), so I deem it relevant.

Links!

It’s too late to add this link to The Christmas Chronicles entry, but here’s some special effects videos about it.

Likewise, it’s too late for me to add this to the Holiday Calendar, but here’s another review. I rather agree with her casting assessments.

Why Can’t People Get Enough of Made-for-TV Christmas Movies?

Someone thinks ugly Christmas sweaters are degrading.

This is a nice one for Santa Lucia Day.

On Wednesday I went over to Jamie’s house for a night of cookery. She wanted me to help her make a meat pie and then we watched more of The Great British Baking Show, where she explained to me stuff on that show.

I am not into cooking. My parents are/were terrible at teaching--their method was basically (a) assume you figured it out yourself by watching them and then (b) yell a lot when you don’t do it perfect right off. So basically, I associate cooking with screaming, and judging, and I don’t really find it fun because I’m stressing about how it’s going to be judged, and also, why the hell is it not working when I followed the instructions? I will do it once in a great while, but I get freaked out at say, making dip for the knitting party. (It was fine.)

Jamie is one of the few people (about 3, not counting the parents) who has actually seen me cook. This is because she is sane and not going to judge and knows darned well to give me cooking instructions like I’m an idiot to make sure I don’t bungle things--yes, I told her to do that. So her telling me what to do went very well. I can’t say it was a super tasty pie because it was a pretty generic tasting meat-n-veg pie, but it’s edible, so there you go. I’m still doing better than her dad, apparently, who is a big shot scientist who gets awards and crops up in the media periodically and yet still can’t operate the microwave.

I also gave her this sea creature wreath, which I do not think she was too into (“are you sure you don’t want to keep this?” “Nah, I’m fine, I can make more"). Oh well. Her living room is decorated in sea and boats because her dad is into boats, so I figured it’d fit in. It’s on the hall closet door at the moment.

I am trying to coordinate a trip to Great America’s “Winterfest.” THIS IS A GIANT PAIN IN THE FUCKING ASS, I WILL HAVE YOU KNOW. More on this later, but the amount of agita and “who’s paying for it” and “how are we going to meet from disparate areas of this end of the state and nobody wants to take BART” is making me want to drink or bail on the idea entirely. The way things are going, I bet someone does.

As for Thursday night, the beer bar that the improv classes is being held at was having an Ugly Sweater Party. I got there about two hours into it and there were very few people, I was the only one there in an ugly sweater at all, and there wasn’t much else to do but drink beer, which I couldn’t do both due to (a) it being far enough away I had to drive there and (b) my taste buds do not like beer. I figured I could make ornaments--they did have a table set up for that--but there wasn’t much at that either so I was all “eh...I’m gonna go.”

I wore one of my custom sweaters (the goat one) today to work, presumably because I planned on going to this party right after. Instead I had the following conversations:

(a) One coworker wanting to know what sweater I did this year and her putting in requests to see the newest one and the Princess Leia next week, and also suggesting “fireworks! and champagne!” for a New Year’s panel.

(b) Having to explain to the BigBoss what I was wearing and what the Gavle Goat is (“oh, that’s sad!”).

(c) Having to explain to BigBoss’s second-in-command what I was wearing and what the Gavle Goat is. I ended up sending them both links to Atlas Obscura later.

I think Californians, at least in NorCal, can’t figure out how to dress in cold weather. Everyone in my office is cold and I am spending at least 2 hours a day in even colder meeting rooms and some people are literally hauling a heater with them whenever they go in. Well, I dress sensible: three layers on top and bottom, so I’m fine. Leggings, sweatpants, then pants/long skirt, vs. tank top + T-shirt + long sleeved top + obnoxious holiday sweater all the time. Meanwhile, almost everyone appears to be dressing like it was a few months ago in one layer apiece. I’ve seen bare legs on one person, but she comes from a snowy climate so it’s probably tropical here to her.

Folks, only you can keep yourselves warm here. Put on more clothes. I know it’s like waddling around like the kid in A Christmas Story and also you’re in California so you shouldn’t have to dress like you think you’re in Minnesota, but these days you can’t trust indoor heating to be hot and it’s on you.

At work, I am either being trained in other stuff, or sitting through some very very long meetings with new team, or doing business process analysis. It’s a lot of meetings.

I should probably clarify here that I basically have two specialties at work: Thing A, which I got hired here to do and have been doing pretty much my entire career, and Thing B, which I have been doing for six years and the last two by myself and has far more drama that accompanies it (see previous wanky work entries, most of them involve Thing B). Now that I have been transferred back to public service, I am taking Thing B with me because BigBoss thinks B is too big to do alone and the sharks (i.e. my old work group that hates me*) won’t do shit to help me, whereas public service team is a much nicer and more cooperative bunch. Thing A has had to be partially shared with the sharks for a few months a year because at that point that workload is too big for even me to do alone. The folks on public service who used to do Thing A didn’t like it and weren’t very good at it in some cases, and they are already overloaded as is and NewBoss doesn’t want to add that to their pile. So it has been determined that Thing A is going to stay with the sharks and at some point I will be pulled off Thing A.

* for those of you new to the soap opera: One of them decided she hated me and bullied me for a while. She seems to be over the giant rage by now and is fine to deal with for work, but I need to still regard her as a powder keg and myself as a lit match just in case any more bombs go off. High Horse literally refuses to speak to me unless he absolutely has to, the former shark who got a new job was slightly more cordial but mostly ignored and/or reported on me as well, and the current third shark is new and I don’t think he hates me quite like they do but is smart enough to go along with them in general. All of them hate how I speak and especially how I speak on the phone, I have been reported on a lot, I no longer speak unless I absolutely have to in there. Hence why our shared office is the Shark Tank, I do all of my workload alone, and why I got transferred out of that group. I am still sitting in the Shark Tank until someone gets an ergonomic eval for me to move into the call center. Much as I hate to say it...be slow about that.

I get the BigBoss’s logic for it. This is a passive-aggressive semi-acrimonious divorce between me and the sharks, and since they categorically do not want to work with the likes of me/probably wouldn’t put me out if I was on fire and holding their wallets, this is the best the BigBoss can do to deal with that. But I do think it is ridiculous of TPTB to pull the person with the most knowledge of Thing A, which is me, off of this project. And this seems fairly well evident during these business processing meetings since the sharks are all sitting there like bumps on a log with nothing to say for most of the meetings we’ve had to be in together. They can contribute a bit more for the stuff they have done, but overall it seems to me that it looks kinda bad that they don’t know some stuff whatsoever because we could never do cross training because I am THE WORST!!!! One of them’s taking an interest, which is good because she may end up having to figure out how to do the updates, which are INCREDIBLY MESSED UP to the point where even I don’t know how to deal with the mess.

The meeting today (Friday) should be somewhat of a lulu since we’re having some meetings with the group that works on Thing B before we do (and yeah, the lady I work with there really doesn’t want me gone!) and we’re supposed to discuss the aforementioned “how do we do updates when the site we use is completely disabled for at least the next two years to INDEFINITELY and the “replacement” your group made up is nigh unusable and unreadable for me?” issue. The replacement is literally over a hundred very large PDF documents, organized in a completely disorganized and unstandardized fashion that doesn’t make sense as to why they did it that way instead of the usual way, and make it very hard to find anything I’m looking for, much less compare it to the previous year to find what the changes were. I really won’t be able to do comparisons for shit with this and it could take me months to sort out the mess... which I probably won’t be able to do if I have to answer the phones every day in my future, y’know?

This should be fun. They don’t have an ETA when I will be pulled off the project- they’ll have to make me train the sharks in the stuff I do year-round to maintain Thing A issues first and nobody’s set a date for that. So I don’t know if I am still going to be tasked with figuring out how to handle the updates issue, or if oh well, I guess the sharks will have to figure it out themselves.

Who am I kidding, they’ll probably make me figure it out alone first while I answer phones :P

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