Almost Spring

I am nearing the end of my second week on the new job. All things considered, it's going well.

Between learning new products, new customers, and new systems, I sometimes feel like I trying to drink from a firehose. It'll all come together in time, and no one is putting any undue pressure on me, so I think everything will be fine going forward.

Most of the friction I have encountered is getting all of my newly issued gadgets up and working together. The laptop I am working on is a refurb. It's a temporary until one of the new models comes in and gets set up for me. This one is pretty slow and has a few ... quirks.

I have it set up where I can input in either English or Japanese. The trouble is that it tends to switch modes randomly. I might be typing up a storm and end up with a page of hiragana encoded gibberish.

I had installed my favorite Japanese - English - Chinese dictionary, Wakan, on it. While going through some of the many parameters I could customize, I accidentally changed the language of the menus, and controls from English to Polish. That was interesting. I tired uninstalling the program and re installing it. That didn't work. When I re installed it, there must have been a file left over somewhere that insisted that all the menus remain in Polish.

I finally crawled through it and changed it back.

The wireless doesn't work that well. At home right now, I have a 50' ethernet cable strung from my home cable modem, over a railing, and down to the family room where I am right now. I just can't maintain a connection to my wireless access point.

But all of this is getting smoothed out. I got a new Blackberry today and was able to get my contact list down from my Yahoo account and onto my laptop.

Taiji practice is going well. We've been working on the 54 Round Form in class. I'm now 2/3 of the way through learning the sequence. It's certainly related to the 108 Standard form whose sequence I recently finished learning; but it's ... different. Different enough to cause me some confusion when I work on one, then work on the other.

Wu Style Taijiquan has a LOT of material and I'm already wondering how anyone manages to practice everything, and I'm only at the beginning.

My oldest daughter is going to graduate from college next month. Right now she's down in Florida for a few days. It just so happened that after she had planned to go down there, she got a call on a resume she had submitted to a Florida company. So she's not only going on vacation, but on a job interview as well.

I had hoped that she would be able to find work locally, live at home and save some money. However, jobs are slim pickings here in Michigan right now. If she ends up in Florida, I guess we'll just have to visit her. A lot. Especially in winter.

It's snowing again. We're supposed to get another 2 to 5 inches over night. However it'll be well above freezing the next ccouple of days so it won't stick around. If it's not sticking around, I'm not shoveling it.

I've read that this has been the snowiest winter in Michigan since they've been keeping records. We've haven't really had a huge amount all at once, but it just keeps on coming. I'm ready for spring.

Almost Spring

Lone Goose
making his way
over a frozen lake
through a snowstorm, wearily
in March.