Drunken Owls and Other Delights

 It came a day earlier than expected but after I came home from work, so I was here to sign for it. Yay! Setting it up will be my project for my day off tomorrow, as today I will be doing the usual 'copy everything important to an external/to Dropbox and write down all the software I know I'll need to download' and all the fun stuff that comes with setting up a new PC...and somehow still get some of the blogs and whatnot updated! Noted, this may also help me reroute some of the wires so there's not as much loose spaghetti under the desk, heh.

It's been a busy week and a half since I last posted. And looking back, I can see I didn't leave this site on a positive note...things have calmed down on the Day Job front somewhat, having had that phone meeting (status: the Return to the Office is still happening, but the schedule for it is currently still filed under No Freakin' Idea). I've also had my midyear conversation with my immediate manager (not the one that irked me previously) and let's just say I let him know where i stood on a lot of things. I learned two things: One, that I am most definitely not the only one on my team that's pissed off about this plan, and Two, he totally understood and backed it up by saying 'whatever you decide, this should be about you, not the position.' I had to appreciate that.

Then there's the news about the mass shootings the last few days, and the Gilroy shooting (80 miles south of us) and the Tanforan Mall shooting in San Bruno (13 miles south and the one we often go to) and wondering just how safe we'll be at Outside Lands this weekend. I'm reasonably certain we will be safe as security is pretty high, but this is probably the first time in my life where I've taken that thought seriously. 

But anyway.

In more positive news: I've already reached the halfway point in this latest revision of Diwa and Kaffi, and I'm looking forward to giving it one more final read before I start submitting it. Still not entirely sure where, as I need to start doing some further research on that, but I'm thinking that I'll be selling this as a sort of YA/New Adult story, and I'll be leaning pretty heavily on the Studio Ghibli comparisons. We'll see where this goes.

Also: New PC coming on Monday!!! Yay! This was kind of an unplanned thing, as A had just ordered herself a new laptop from Lenovo, and I figured maybe it was time to upgrade. I've had this current HP since early 2016 and while it's still running reasonably well with minimal issue, it's getting old and slowing up a bit. I've also ordered a monitor to replace the one I currently have -- this one dating back to 2006!! -- so this will be an all-new deal for me. I've been cleaning out the hard drive and saving things to my externals, and making it a point to NOT save a bajillion backups of the same files this time. Heh.

So! All in all, it pans out. Life can be pretty intense out there, but if I've learned over the years, I can still Make a Noise when I have to, and balance it out with Good.