Surely not!
I have been remiss, readers mine. I have been neglecting this blog of mine as I've focused on my personal life. Anyone who's spent any sort of considerable amount of time online will agree: RL comes first.
But RL has sorted itself out, it seems. The climax?
James has quit his job.
Yes, you heard it right. On Friday, he tendered his resignation. Am I pleased about this?
There are no words. :)
Unsympathetic me
I, probably unfairly, have been having a hard time conjuring up sympathy for people who tell me stuff like: I'm tired. I was at work last night until almost 9PM.
I cannot wait until this is no longer the case... someday. ;)
Edit: That said, things are better around here. James came home at 7:something last night, even. Woohoo!
Busy busy
It's been a hellishly busy week, which is why I've so callously neglected my blog. Sorry, bethlet.net, hopefully it won't happen again anytime soon.
Mostly, I've been working. That's not very interesting, is it? Oh well. The money will be nice, anyway.
Of note was a wonderful evening at Sandi & David's on Monday night, complete with a gorgeous garden to take pictures of. You should look at them. They're here
| www.flickr.com |
I actually uploaded a few from the other day with Jess & Tim, too. They can be found on flickr as well, but I really must share my favourite, here:
Yes. We put the Dom in an ice bucket with frozen broccoli. Can anyone say Ghetto Fabulous? I know I can.
This weekend: bank holiday and the slightly belated celebration of my anniversary. Yippeee! Claridge's for dinner tomorrow night - hopefully foie gras will be on the menu. Mmmm foie gras. I need my fix. James will be working at least some of the time (though I know he's taking Saturday off... it's silly, isn't it? That he has to take Saturday off?) and I will hopefully spend that time wandering around the city playing with my camera some more. As is my wont. (When I'm not doing my own work, of course, Sandi.) :)
Cult Movies
As I posted months and months ago (July 8 '04 to be exact), I'm trying to get through the 100 Greatest Cult Movies. I started at 44 and am now at 59 and working on number 60. Repo Man.
I'd just like to say I'm completely loving the generic labels all over all the cans. 'Drink' is my favourite.
Interesting Tobacco
Not very recently anymore, James went to Sweden for a business trip. While he was in a meeting, he saw a guy reach into his pocket, pull out a little container and take out a little teabag looking thing. The guy then proceded to stick it in his mouth between his gum and his lip.
James thought: What the hell is that?
It turns out it's a type of tobacco. In a little teabag looking thing. Sort of cool if awful for your mouth (it erodes the gums after a while). He brought me home some just to show me because I thought it sounded really funky and had never heard of anything like that (though I am not, in fact, a tobacco connoisseur so that might just be my own ignorance).
I'm getting ready to throw this thing out, but I figured I'd take a few pictures for posterity. The brand is General.
Recent Things
I haven't posted in a while, I know. I've been sort of busy and sort of enjoying the weather and sort of lazy. Dangerous combination, yes.
So what's gone on in the past few days?
Well, to start with we sort of have a surplus of caviar. I know that sounds sort of obnoxious, and it sort of is, but it was also, hmm... not so much a mistake as, hmm, a misjudgement. We went out to J. Sheekey recently (very good seafood place) and James (enabler that he is) suggested very strongly that I try caviar. He also rationalised that if I was going to do it, I should try the good stuff because then I'd really get a good sense of it.
I was powerless to his logic. And, of course, I loved it. James sometimes says if you put a bunch of food in front of me (or clothes, or gadgets or whatever) and tell me to arrange them in order of preference, I will always like them in price order. This has been true since I was like five. Just ask my mom. Anyway, caviar good. Price of caviar bad.
James has a Russian co-worker who was going to be in Moscow last week so he gave him some money to get me some caviar (note: without me knowing). Judging by what 35g cost at J. Sheekey (and the fact that they mark that up), I think he was expecting probably about 200g worth. Ish.
Except that actually, the money he gave his co-worker bought 600g. Yes. I was surprised by more than half a kilo of caviar. Whoops. Or, really, not whoops. Yum. Just... it's a lot. Like, really a lot.
So we had a caviar party. A champagne and caviar party. A champagne, caviar and Settlers of Catan party, even. I guess that last means we're big geeks... which we are, but whatever. There are some pictures here with some other pictures of Cori &Ash, who have been in town for the last week and who we have had the pleasure of visiting with a couple of times. Which is another thing I've been up to.
Last weekend saw a 29-hour workday for James, which was sort of excessive (he came home at 8AM on Sunday morning to shower, then went back to work - BAH!), so Matt and I went to Hugo's and hung out for a while. The camera was brought there, too.
James did join us after a while. This is my favourite picture that was taken that afternoon. Woohoo, go Matt!
The camera comes a lot of places recently, because it's new and I'm trying to get used to it. We got a nifty digital SLR in preparation for our trip to he US (a trip whose itinerary does not include Chicago, for once). We'll be leaving in a month. WOO!
Vacation. Nice.
Thanksgiving & Berlin
I have a rant in me, but, for everyone's benefit, I'm going to abstain. Hopefully my latent irritation won't seep into this post. Okay, I'm over it, now.
First: Thanksgiving. I never really posted about Thanksgiving, which was just wonderful. Usually, James and I do our own Thanksgiving and invite lots of expats and Brits and sort of share the tradition around. Pass it on, if you will. This year, it didn't really work out, primarily because James had a project due on Monday and it was crunch time and there was just no way he would've been able to do it - and I didn't want to do it alone.
So I went to Jessica and Tim's (they're the friends of mine from h.s., you remember, who wound up on an Air Force base near Cambridge). It was really a fantastic time, too. Tim was actually not supposed to be there - he's in Stuttgart attending meetings for the A.F. and didn't think he could get leave - but somehow he swung it! Basically, we all gorged on turkey (on the barbecue - yum!) and all that other Thanksgiving food and could barely move for the rest of the night. Which, if you ask me, means it was very successful.
Friday, I went off to Berlin, as I mentioned. Lydia had to work a couple of the nights... which meant I got to see two operas: La Traviata and Sweeney Todd. The former wasn't so great, alas. The soprano didn't have the part in her voice, and the staging was pretty awful, though the chorus was fantastic. Sweeney Todd was a much much better show, but I didn't see it on a great night. Still, it was nice to get to the opera, something I've yet to manage here in London.
We also made it to two Thanksgiving feasts: Blonde's and Lydia's boss's. So there was even MORE turkey and even a pecan pie (very very tasty). And of course we went to the Christmas markets. These were lots of fun (though it was cold) and full of lots of neat stalls with Christmas stuff and wintery stuff and really really tasty food like sausages and glühwein. Mmmmm glühwein.
As usual, I wished I could spend much longer there. Lydia's going back to the States in March and I'm going to miss her like crazy. Bleh.
While all of this fun and games was happening, James was at the office. Pretty much continuously. He didn't end up going to Singapore.
Now, I have the exciting job of building our new superking size bed before bedtime. Wee!
DB_Spouse?
James works a lot. Like, really. A lot. Last night, he was in at midnight, and up again at six to go back to the office. Deadlines are inflexible things. Especially when the meetings for which you're preparing are on the other side of the world, and not easily rescheduled.
I'm looking at all of this ea_spouse foo, and can obviously draw a few comparisons. Not as many as I thought, but a few. Unlike a lot of the developers at EA Games, James works toward a yearly bonus. Nor are there any illusions about the hours put in at investment banks. There is much work, and, sometimes, the bonus makes it worth it.
What does interest me is this Mercury News article about the class action lawsuit that's being filed against EA. To quote:
But Jamie Kirschenbaum, a 26-year-old lead animator at EA's Redwood City studio, is not a happy elf. In July, he filed a class-action lawsuit against the world's largest video-game company, alleging EA drives workers to exhaustion without paying overtime.
Around the same time, game programmer Neil Aitken filed a similar suit against Vivendi Universal Games in Los Angeles. Aitken claims he and his co-workers regularly worked 12-hour-plus days without being paid overtime and then were asked to falsify time sheets.
The lawsuits have opened a window into a long-smoldering controversy in the $10 billion U.S. video-game industry over the widespread practice of "crunch time," or working long hours to finish a project as its deadline nears.
Obviously, I don't expect any such litigation to crop up in the banking industry. These jobs are generally accepted with eyes wide open. Don't like it? Well, go get another job. (Actually, the fact that these guys are gullible enough to be duped over and over again by EA, be screwed royally in the process and not quit is amazing to me.) I am interested to see what will happen with this - who knows, maybe it'll change labour laws. Or perhaps other companies will take a hint so that this doesn't happen in other industries.
For now, though, the term "DB widow" is probably more apt than I'd like. There is a fun sort of challenge about it, though. How much stealth together time can we sneak in in a day? More than you'd think. :)
[Note: If we still lived in Cheshunt instead of the new flat (1 hour door-to-door on the train v. 20 min door-to-door walking), my attitude would likely be very very different!]
Edit: At the risk of saying something very controversial, this litigious attitude is something I find uniquely American. It's the "I'm not going to take care of myself, I expect you to do it. If you don't, I'll hold you responsible." (This can also be found in suing fast food companies, among other things.) Nevermind that employees leaving the company when they realise they're being mistreated would be a more proactive way of getting the same 'you work us too hard' message across. AND probably screw EA more. Whatever happened to looking out for ourselves?
Singapore
In other travel news, James just sent me the itinerary of his Asia business trip next week.
He will be gone from Monday to Friday, be hitting Singapore, Seoul and Hong Kong... and only be spending one night in a hotel. All others will be spent on planes.
For the record, I do not miss business travel at all.
