Frostbitten Hoseheads
Here's to you, Edmontonians. I saw Weird Al Yankovic with you last night, and you knew EVERY WORD to
Canadian Idiot. Every single word. And you sang, loudly and proudly, in your cute accents.
Also, when Weird Al sang "Albuquerque," he made himself a
Tim Hortons Employee of the Month.
My only disappointment is that there were no Canadian Idiot T-shirts. I had to settle for White & Nerdy (and who could argue with that?).
Labels: travels
Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong
What a mad, mad, mad year it's been.
If you're reading this and you think nothing in my life has changed since my last post, well, I'm sorry; I've tried to let a lot of people know, but it's been exhausting. Rather,
I have been exhausted. Exhausted, and afraid, and depressed. But now I'm ready to start being myself again.
At any rate, my husband and I separated last fall; our divorce will be final in September. We remain good, close friends, for which I am extremely grateful. I don't care to discuss the reasons in depth. It's enough to know that, as is inevitable when separating after ten years, I certainly own my share of responsibility for what went wrong, and I deeply regret the mistakes I've made. I wish him the absolute best in all things going forward.
A definite factor in our breakup was the insane amount of stress I was under at my previous job as a software license manager at a semiconductor company that kept failing to make a profit. I finally couldn't take it any more and left that job in January. It was a shame, because I really liked the work. However, I've got a job now that I really like -- I'm a software licensing consultant! I work for a software company that is a market leader in licensing systems, and I travel around North America (mostly) advising software license managers on methods to get their costs under control, as well as installing and configuring software to do precisely that.
I've been all over the place since January. Sometimes the locations are kinda lame: Racine, Wisconsin, or Batesville, Indiana. Sometimes the locations are AWESOME: Manhattan!
Australia! But wherever I go, I can generally find some way to make the most out of it. I'm blogging from Edmonton today; I went last night to the
Taste of Edmonton festival, and tomorrow I'm going to see Weird Al at
Capital Ex.
I love what I do, because I love meeting new people, and I love working with geeks, and I love solving people's problems, and I love instant gratification, and in this job I get to do all of that. I'm damned lucky. Of course, a lot of people burn out after six months in this kind of job, and that's the threshold I've just reached, so we'll see.
I'm also in business school, still, and that's kept me out of trouble and off the streets.
I had to go into counseling, though. I felt for a while like I was completely losing my mind. My employer provides a counseling hotline (I'm now seeing a live person through Kaiser), and when I called, they said "you're getting divorced, you just moved, you started a new job with 75% travel that you've never done before, and you're in business school? And you want to know why you're depressed and nonfunctional?" Um, yeah. It's obvious now that you mention it.
But good news: I'm starting, finally, to heal emotionally. I may still be jumping into things too soon, but for the record I'm dating
this guy, and it seems to be working out nicely for both of us.
I won't make false promises about when I'll blog again. Not any more. I know damn well that I have no time. :-) But hopefully I'll drop a line from wherever I go next.
Labels: update
