If you’re Christian and home for the holiday, or sneaking on your relative’s computer for your blogging fix, here’s an open thread for you.

I started a serious post. I got bored. I’m going to have a late, late breakfast (slept until 9:30, woo-hoo!) and then hit the shower, and should be seeing a movie later today.

On to synagogue tonight and tomorrow morning. It’s tough to get a minyan in Virginia during this time of year. Virginians go out of state this week for some reason. Jewish Virginians, too. As a former New Jerseyan, I’m a bit mystified. Probably because even though the kids are off, the parents generally are working during winter break there. Hey, my mother always worked for Eastern Airlines on Christmas day. She got doubletime and used it to take off for Passover. Wish I had that choice… I’d have worked today.

Oh, who am I kidding? I’d want the three-day weekend.

They give us breakfast. They have soft drink machines that charge only fifty cents for sodas and water. They give us a snack in the middle of the day. And apparently, Tuesdays and Thursdays are Cookie Day.

They are a serious challenge to my diet.

And on top of that, the class I’m in is superb. The subject matter is all that I hoped for, and the teacher is excellent.

This is the best class I’ve taken since the NJIT Webmaster’s Certificate Program in the late nineties that set me on my career in web.

And if anyone’s in the Reston Town Center area, I’m free for dinner tomorrow night. I’m taking the exam for possible certification/college credit, and will then be sitting out rush hour before heading home.

I’ll be up for air soon.

$43 round trip, takes me to the Springfield-Franconia mall, four-tenths of a mile from the Metro station, which saves me the trouble of taking the train into Union Station and having to reverse course. Also, Amtrak is $57 plus parking. But hm, Greyhound is in one of the crappiest sections of town… parking there would be a problem. Taxis are pretty much out of the question in Richmond.

Damn.

American mass transit sucks, outside of New York, New Jersey, and Chicago.

And they wonder why Americans won’t use it.

Friend: I’d like an apple, please.
Vendor: No problem. Here’s a gardener who can plant apple trees, prune them, and grow them.
Friend: Sorry, I’m only budgeted for an apple. Please sell me an apple.
Vendor: Okay, how about this one? He sets up apple farms, educates your people on how to set up and cultivate apple farms and keep them green and growing for a long, long time.
Friend: NO! I need an apple! ONE apple!
Vendor: How about this guy? He ate an apple once.

About two weeks ago, I got new neighbors: A young couple with two young children, an infant and a four-year-old. They also have a cat with three kittens, and they’re trying to push the orange one on me. (Not gonna happen. Tig and Gracie hate other cats, and at the age of ten, I think it’s unfair to them to bring a stranger in the house.) But here’s the thing: Their four-year-old has been bothering me incessantly. She knocks on my patio door to tell me Tig wants to come in. Meantime, he was sound asleep on the patio until she came by to bother him, whereupon he woke up and frantically tried to get inside to get away from her. She knocks on my patio door to tell me she’s wearing a new shirt. She waves at me through the kitchen window while I’m preparing dinner, because my window looks out on my patio and she is in my backyard area, because she is not, apparently, being watched very carefully by her mother. And to top it all off, her mother knocks on my front door to tell me Tig wants to come in, and I have to explain to her that no, he doesn’t, he wants to sit on my porch and not be bothered, and that he knows how to let me know when he wants in. If he can’t get me to hear him scratching on the door, he will either yowl until I hear him, or come around to the patio door and get my attention that way. Really. I’ve been living here for five years, and my cats are thoroughly adapted to their environment.

Then, for the past week or so, we have the added annoyance of my cats misbehaving. Tig kept waking me up at 5 a.m. by yowling at me to get up and pay attention to him. This happened night after night until I finally woke up enough to start throwing shoes at him. I never hit him. I throw them in his general direction, and he gets the message. So it took two nights of throwing my slippers—no, three nights. He finally stopped waking me up. Now it’s Gracie’s turn. She’s discovered that I work from home now, so that means I can pay attention to her 24/7. Well, uh, no. She’s been yowling at me to come pet her upstairs. She’s been doing this every couple of hours. Two days ago, I got fed up with all of her noise and went to the foot of the stairs and had words with her. She sat on landing at the top of the stairs, eyes growing wide, and listened. She also got the message. I heard a yowl just now as I was writing this post, and yelled, “Gracie!” in super-stern voice, and she stopped.

Finally, yesterday, neighbor child knocks on my patio door—the blinds are closed—in midafternoon. Tig is asleep in the corner, ignoring her. She grabs her shirt and tells me that she’s wearing her new teddy bear shirt.

“What did I tell you about bothering me while I’m working?” I asked.
“But I’m wearing my new teddy bear shirt!”
“Briana, GO!” I said. I pointed. I never point. But she was really pissing me off.
She took off running.

I have not been bothered since.

Ahhhh. That sound you hear is the sound of me getting my privacy and control back.

This time next year, I hope to be working from my own townhouse. I’m going to install a fence.

A big one.

Update: She crossed the line. She squirted Tig with a water bottle. And in order to do this, she had to sneak onto my patio—all the way onto my patio—and get him while he slept in the corner near the door. She did. But I saw the tail end of it. I went next door and told her mother to keep that child away from me, my patio, and my cat. I was not nice. I was not patient. And I wasn’t accepting excuses.

I do not want that brat anywhere near me or mine again.

“What’s ‘nillable’?”
“It means the variable can be null.”
“Then why doesn’t it say ‘nullable’?”
“Because a programmer wrote it.”

I’d forgotten that programmers are on my “Die for what you’ve done to the English language” list, right up there with business-speak creators. (“Bulletize”? “Bulletize”? Stop verbing my nouns!)

Yeah, I know. It’s a living language. But it’s ridiculous to use “nillable” to define a variable that can be null when, gee, I dunno, “nullable” would be so much plainer. More intuitive. “Nil” and “null” have two very different meanings.

/language rant.

Apparently, the situation is this: My manager isn’t the one trying to hire on the cheap. The company has decided on budget cuts company-wide and is looking very carefully at all new hires. They don’t know if they’re going to keep my current job as a contractor-only basis, hire someone for it, change the job description yet again and try for something different, or, well, whatever.

Meantime, my manager says, his supervisor and very few others really get the web, so the big guns don’t think that my job is all that critical or necessary, and, in fact, don’t understand how valuable my manager is, or what he is trying to do. In a nutshell, he is trying to bring the entire company intranet into one look-and-feel, one style, and one set way of doing things. It’s what you need to have on an intranet. One of my jobs was to survey individual intranet sites. I went through 174 sites and saw for myself what lack of standards and practices has done. Just because you can get someone in your department to learn Microsoft Front Page and put up internet pages doesn’t mean you should be doing it. There’s one site that would have been a great candidate for the old “Worst Site of the Day” internet site. I have signed confidentiality agreements, so I can’t really say much about it, but suffice to say that it has scrolling messages, horrid wallpaper, and an animated email gif.

If the higher-ups can’t grasp that uniformity is necessary in a company intranet, someone ought to slap them upside the head. An intranet is a marvelous tool. When I first started contracting, I studied the company history and benefits while keeping an eye on the job postings site. My favorite hit off the home page: The cafeteria menu. It lets me know whether or not to bring my lunch on certain days.

Something as minor as a week’s cafeteria menu is incredibly useful. A well-run company intranet can make it so that members of a department could work from anywhere in the world. I can’t believe that the higher-ups don’t get that.

In any case. The good news is, I don’t think I’m going to lose my contracting job any time soon, after all. And since it’s a really tough thing to get hired at the end of the fiscal year, it will be nice to keep getting my paycheck while job hunting. After I explained to my manager that the reason I was coming in so late these days was because I’m doing job-related work at home in the morning, he said he didn’t mind if I also searched from work. He’s a good guy, but I wish he’d been a little more communicative with me a month ago. It would have saved me a lot of anguish.

In the meantime, yes, I’m still looking for work. Here are my bonafides. Email is meryl – at – yourish dot com.

I don’t suppose a job is going to drop from the sky into my lap, though, so I’ll just remind you that yes, I’m still looking, and no, Large Financial Company in Richmond isn’t smart enough to hire me. So keep those cards and letters coming, folks. I’ve got a 30-day reprieve, but I still need a permanent position, and I still can’t afford to be unemployed.

I really would like to give my nieces and nephews nice presents in the upcoming holiday season. A permanent position will help me do that.

In any case, I can’t thank Scott enough for what he has done. He made a Blogad for me, too.

It’s a tough time for me right now, and it’s great to know that so many of you are pulling for me.

One resume is winging its way to another Large Company in Richmond as we speak. It’s working.

Thank you, everyone.