Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Catsitter preparatory cleaning

I’m going to Denver this week. We booked a four-day weekend – flying in on Thursday morning and back on Sunday, although I won’t actually believe that we’re going until we step on the plane, given our insane work schedules and demands as of late. I’m always worried that days off and trips won’t happen, because of some last-second work screwup. I had Friday off, in exchange for working a Sunday a couple of weeks ago, and up until I left the office on Thursday, I was fully expecting to come in.

It was nice to have a Friday off, too. I spent the day running errands, getting my oil changed and going to the eye doctor. It reminded me of last summer in LA, how relaxed things are during the day, when I’m not working. It was one of those days that made me mentally tally up the 401Ks and wonder how possible it’ll be to cut out early and do something other than fill out TPS reports for twelve hours a day. There was this discussion at work, because something like ten years ago, the company had such a good year that in Korea, they paid out the typical mid-year bonus (which can be roughly a month of pay) and then because there was a record year, they additionally paid out another THIRTEEN months of pay to everyone working there. The discussion among coworkers was pretty much about what car people would buy with that kind of cash. But I was thinking about how much closer that would get me to quitting the rat race and buying a sailboat to live on forever.

Anyway, Denver. It will be weird to vacation in a place where I’ve previously lived. I don’t think I’ve done that before, unless you consider going back to Indiana a vacation. I haven’t been back to Seattle or New York since I left. I did go back to LA for work, and Denver for work a couple of times, and those were all pretty weird. We’re going to two baseball games, and I think the rest of the time will be spent going to restaurants we miss, which pathetically sums up our time in the city. Most of our year there was spent going to the Target at Stepleton mall. I always wonder if we both had better job situations going on back then, and if we would’ve met more people, if Denver would have worked out in the long run. I always kick myself for being reluctant to take a job in Boulder because of the driving distance, given that my current drive is roughly double the commute. But I do like seeing water.

I’ve been tearing up rumored.com for the last few days. I’m in the process of moving all of my pictures to gallery2, and it has temporarily broken a lot of images across the site. I’m also trying to tear up old pages and make them somewhat more XHTML-compliant, so there will be broken stuff everywhere for a while. I also recently bought a 1-TB NAS drive, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to set that up and back up my machine remotely, so I’ve had a lot of screwing around with config files in the last week.

Otherwise, a quiet Sunday morning here. We have a catsitter coming over, and I need to start cleaning soon. I had high hopes to write something more interesting here, but I keep wanting to get back to the monotonous fixing of every image on the site, so I will get back to it.