A New Beginning

I suppose, when I started a blog, it was going to be just thoughts about my hobbies. I've realized I needed to put something more into it. I need an outlet for all my thoughts.

There have been several things going on in my personal life that has caused considerable havoc. The first happened at the end of January, beginning of February. My last remaining grandparent had a couple of massive strokes. It left my grandmother a shell. She can't do anything and is being fed through a tube in her stomach. I've been waiting for the rest of the family to decide that's its time to let her go and last weekend they finally made that decision. As far as I'm concerned she never came back into her body after the second stroke. Its been a long 6 months of family indecisiveness. The doctors tell us it will take anywhere between 1 and 3 weeks once they remove the feeding tube.

The second we had been planning since last year and that was to go to my cousins wedding in the UK and make a really nice vacation of it. We went and it was fabulous. But all the planning and then the trip itself caused no small ripple in my day-today schedule. I plan to share photos and my experiences in several subsequent posts.

The next is work itself. I work for the State of California. We are currently on 3 furlough days a month and the threat of a fourth come August. Normally, I work what they call a 9/80. this means 8 days of every 10 I work 9 hours, one I work 8 hours and the last I have off. With the furloughs in effect, managers in my department are considering putting everyone back on a regular 5/40 schedule and forgoing any alternate schedules since no one will be working any Fridays. I'm enjoying the time off but it does nothing for my morale at work. I'm already doing the work of a Senior position, but getting paid only for top Rank and File. The extra income would be good, but I'd like the responsibility more. As it is, I answer to several people, not just my official supervisor and I can't get anything done without all of their concurrence. Very frustrating.

So, in between all of this I work on things around the house or mostly play WoW. I've managed to really neglect the backyard. Being away from the garden for more than 2 weeks didn't help either. The weeds and grass are almost hip high. We've started a little on getting that under control. My knitting project is just a little further than where I left it after my vacation, so that's only been neglected for about 2 weeks or so. In addition, I had almost run out of yarn and needed to purchase a little more before I tried to finish it up. WoW, well, raiding has been rather lackluster lately, so I've been working on my achievements. I'll put up a later post on how far I've come.