Certainty.

25 minutes of happy chatter and contented silence with the bondmate, immediately upon departing work. I was left with a solid surety of the bond, after I teased him gently about his communications skills, he got a touch defensive about never having claimed to have good ones, and me reassuring him with the quiet gravity of soul-deep truth that I know and I don't mind; that's why I make a point of keeping communications open for the both of us.

I got him up to date with the workplace gossip (oh, what a clear thinker that co-worker of mine is! Thinking with which head now?) and expressed shock and glee over the whole ten-to-five Monday-Friday work week thing.

I do need to pick up a copy of the memo that has the job posting on it. I quite honestly might have thought it a bit out of my range, but evidently someone thinks it's a great written portrait of my applicable skills.

Hacking the Prius

http://www.wired.com/news/autotech/0,2554,68101,00.html
http://calcars.org/priusplus.html
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/06/edrive_plugin_p.html

Beguiled.

Lois McMaster Bujold continues to raise the bar on what kind of material is considered worthy of a Hugo. If you haven't yet read The Sharing Knife: Beguilement and you trust my taste in fantasy novels, go out and get it. If that's not in the cards, then beg a friend to borrow their copy.

I'd read it for the fantasy even without the love story; I'd read it for the love story even without the fantasy.

I'm a bit too bouncy to avoid spoilers, and anyway it needs a second read-through before it'll sit tight in my head enough to stay put. I bought it the other night on errands and then completely evaded reading it until I knew I'd have a good solid chance to sit down with it. I managed to put it down long enough to drive from the plasma place to the store, read it while wheeling around the cart getting groceries, put it down again to drive home, and just now finished it.

Office Girl, Day 1

Showed up bright & perky at 10:30, wanting to know if Pink Shirt Guy had intended for me to start training this week, or next. He was not expecting me, but said, "Well... tomorrow..." and then had a second thought and said, "What the heck, let's start right now." So we did.

The training involved a lot of spreadsheets, some of which were familiar, and some of which were not. We were interrupted partway through for a meeting of his to go over his numbers. I remained in the office and did some figuring by hand and played a little more. Of course, my concept of "play" involved making my former team's one spreadsheet more powerful, with plans to make it do even more stuff easily.

Then there was a meeting, with cookies. Consequently, it was a very quiet meeting -- everyone had their mouths full! There's a new random manager around. However, the former top manager, she above Management, she with the shiny corner office with the curved window? Her position was eliminated, effective November 8th. The official word is that it was a sound business decision and there is angst all around. Unofficial word is that the sound business decision was driven by her vision and the company's vision not meshing in addition to the other stuff. Someone probably could have found work needing doing with her name on it otherwise.

There were more spreadsheets the rest of the afternoon, with some copying. I was out of there by four, since there wasn't enough time to work on the one report that he hadn't had the data for until too late to do it. Pink Shirt Guy works all right with computers, but he prefers paper. He and I do share several common points of philosophy, especially the ones about multicolored pens and high-lighters, and color-coding things. I, however, prefer my paperwork on the computer most of the time, with as few printouts as possible. He likes paper.

Oh, yes, these spreadsheets have my name all over them. (Figuratively.) Whee!

Tomorrow, 7:30-8 am.

Things are flexible enough that I'll be able to get out of there by 4:30 on Wednesdays, especially as I can come early to make up for that. Then I will probably be there on time (10) on Thursdays, so as to get enough sleep...