A day in the life of a bean counter

Where are you stayin' at?

2005-07-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm in Houston. Land of hot weather (it's like the surface of the sun), space shuttles, dangling participles, and very complimentary homeless people (good morning, cutie). So far, the work is easier than I was expecting, but also very boring. The people here are either really really nice or really really rude. I would only describe 2 people as really really rude, the rest are very nice and hospitable.

Living in a hotel for the majority of the week has its perks. I love having my bed made for me. The housekeeper leaves me candy (andes candies and peanut m&m's). Room service rocks, and they don't judge me for ordering a glass of cabernet with chocolate ice cream. Being away from home (my hubby, my bed, my animals) royally sucks.

But I made a conscious decision after week 1 to keep a positive attitude while spending the rest of my summer in H-town. My first week down here was very miserable. I hated every second of it, and was nearly in tears every night when I talked to Steve. But 8 weeks is going to feel much longer if I spend every second miserable. So now, at nearly the end of week 3, my new attitude has made life bearable here. I still can't wait for it to be over, but I'll live.

Despite my new positive attitude, airports have become one of my least favorite places on earth. I used to go to the airport and be bursting at the seams with excitement. Mostly because until I got me a REAL job, the only time I ever traveled was for some fabulous vacation. Montana for snowboarding, New Mexico to visit friends, Mexico for some sun, etc. But now I dread every second I spend at the airport.

I especially hate the Houston airport. Only because it reminds me of how alone I am. I stand at the baggage claim alone, surrounded by reunited couples, families, friends. Then I politely ask those happy people to "pardon me" so I can grab my luggage and catch a cab to the hotel.

Once I get to the hotel, however, I'm okay again. I can watch TV, work out, read Harry Potter, and order a nice cabernet with a side of Haagen Daz chocolate ice cream.

I'm a travelin' (wo)man

2005-06-23T06:32:00.000-07:00

A few days after my last post, I went to Atlanta, GA for training. My friend Jamie and I were the only two people from the Milwaukee office to attend the training, so we tricked the powers that be into allowing us to share a room. That is my biggest gripe about going to training is that not only are we all forced to share rooms, but they assign us roommates. So most people are roomed with a stranger from another office. But Jamie and I discovered a loophole. When you register for the training, there is a box on one of the forms for special requests (if you are disabled or a vegetarian or something) so the coordinators can arrange your accommodations accordingly. So for our first training, Jamie put in her special request (she just had a baby and was having a bout of post-partum, and would like to room with me). And it worked! And during our subsequent 3 trainings, she's either been pregnant or just had a baby, so we've been able to share a room for all 4 training seminars. Granted, the coordinators in charge of training think she's a bit touched in the head, but it's well worth it to share a room with someone you know.

In other work-related travel news, I've been asked to spend two months this summer in Houston, TX to help out with a big client. My first instinct was to run screaming from the conference room and burst into tears of self-pity. But a few months ago, I turned down a 3-month engagement in Princeton, NJ. Therefore, I felt obligated to take this engagement. I don't want to go. I'm very much a homebody. I love sleeping in my own bed and cooking dinner in my own kitchen. And I love walking across the street to see my in-laws, and driving no more than 5 minutes to see my parents. But it will be a very good learning experience, and this is a promotion year for me, so I need to make the extra effort, blah blah blah... So I'm going to Houston. In July and August. It'll be about 100+ degrees and humid. The hotel I'll be staying in is only 2 blocks away from the client site, and all of downtown Houston is connected by underground walkways. I could theoretically never step outside the entire time I'm there. I'm gonna try it!

Happenings

2005-06-09T08:38:00.000-07:00

Sorry, it's been a while... The trip to Colorado was a smashing success!! I got to Sioux Falls at about 5pm on Wednesday (May 25th), and we had a mini-WSU reunion. Just 3 of the former residents of 227 W. 4th Street. Thursday, we left Sioux Falls at about 7:30am. It took about 12 1/2 hours to get to Colorado Springs.

After checking into our lovely hotel, we got lost on our way to Danka's house due to a faulty map provided by Google Maps... Thanks for the lousy tip, Emily!! Google Maps failed me 3 times that weekend, although one of the failures arguably could have been my own fault... At Danka's bachelorette party, her father was passing out shots of what he called "plum juice", which in actuality were shots of 140-proof Serbian plum brandy. I swore it gave me a heart murmur... And possibly instant cirrhosis of the liver. We also went to a local boot scootin' boogie bar called "Cowboy's". Surprisingly, we discovered that Cowboy's was a line dancing country bar!

Friday, Andrea, Janna, and I did some exploring in Colorado Springs. We visited Garden of the Gods, which is a beautiful park. Then it was time to get ready for the rehearsal. On my way to the rehearsal, I was talking to Steve on the phone and got lost. I truly believe that if the Google Maps directions had been clearer, I would not have gotten lost. After the rehearsal, we had a lovely dinner at the Phantom Canyon Brewing Company, and imbibed in the best weiss beer I've ever had.

Saturday was the wedding, and it was beautiful. The mountains in the background, the setting sun, it couldn't have been more beautiful. Then on Sunday, it was time to head back to Sioux Falls. We didn't get back until about 10pm, and then Andrea (the hostess with the mostest) made me some thin pancakes (her specialty, kinda like crepes).

Monday I returned home to a SPOTLESSLY clean house, courtesy of my wonderful hubby!! He has this awesome habit of wanting to surprise me when I get home from out of town. I think he gets it from his dad. When his step-mom went out of town once for a quilting retreat, she came home to new flooring. Steve and his dad had installed laminate floors in the kitchen, dining room, and hallway while she was gone. She immediately started crying, she was so happy. Since I'm leaving for Atlanta on Sunday for a training seminar, I'm excited to see what he gets done while I'm gone.

99 Problems

2005-05-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered VH1 Radio (http://www.vh1.com/music/radio/), and was listening to a song by Jay-Z when it struck me how hysterical this is. I'm sitting in the middle of a sea of cubicles filled to the brim with conservative accountants, listening to rap ("I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one."). But before I could even recount the tale to my cube-neighbor, the song was over and Matchbox 20 came on (which I quickly skipped - I may be an accountant, but I'm still too cool for adult-contemporary music).

What a wonderful weekend I had! I wish it weren't Monday. Friday night Steve and I went to a car show with his parents. We ran into my step-dad's brothers, but had missed my step-dad by about an hour. Saturday we went to my cousin's housewarming party in the middle of nowhere. If you think Hartland is in the sticks, I triple-dog-dare you to visit Watertown. Hoo-boy, we were miles from civilization!! But my cousin's house is really nice, and we had a nice time. Sunday I met my cousin and my co-bridesmaids at the bridal shop so we could all try on our dresses together. Then my mammy and I went to a jewelry party, but we didn't buy anything because it was ridiculously overpriced. Then we made up a bunch of errands to get out of there (fast!). Instead of our ficticious errands, we just went to Kohls so mammy could return a few items and get into a fist-fight with customer service. I escaped to the card aisle because fist-fights make me anxious.

Speaking of anxious, I can't type or say that word without thinking of the 5th grade spelling bee. I thought for sure I would win, because spelling was always my strong point. However, the word anxious ended my spelling bee career much too early.

Welcome to the age of technology!

2005-05-16T11:07:00.000-07:00

Steve and I bought our very first home PC this weekend. I've always had a laptop for work, which I would bring home on weekends so Steve could search eBay and Amazon for muppet figures, pocket bikes, woodworking plans, etc. But we've never had a computer (a decent computer anyways) of our very own. The computer we currently have is about 5-7 years old, pieced together by my brother-in-law who happens to be a computer expert, and has the operating capability of an 8-digit calculator. So we bought an eMachine which came with an LCD flat-panel monitor, DVD-burner, CD-burner, AMD Athalon processor, 2.0 GHz, 500 somethings of RAM, and a "kick-ass" ATI video card. Please please PLEASE do not ask me what any of this means. We still need to get internet access though, and then we'll really be welcomed into the age of technology. I don't want to spend more than $10-15 per month (seriously), and I'm not too good for dial-up (obviously - given my cost restraints), so if anyone has any suggestions, please speak up.

I also got some gardening done, which I don't enjoy doing. I hate weeding, because I don't like bugs, and I don't like getting my hands dirty. I'm kind of a princess that way, I suppose. I'm not opposed to the work, and I do enjoy the results when everything is blooming and pretty and smells good. I especially like sitting on the deck, overlooking the backyard, and drinking a cup of coffee or tea or something. Yesterday I was doing dishes, and saw a really pretty bird at one of our bajillion bird feeders (Steve loves bird feeders, he's developed a sort of obsession, so we have about 5 of them all in the same crab-apple tree right next to our deck). Anyways, I saw this pretty bird and decided to make some hummingbird and oriole nectar. In the meantime, Steve decided to put out some grape jelly for the orioles, to attract them to the feeder. But he emptied the whole effing jar of grape jelly into a bowl. I love grape jelly, and he used it all up on the birds!! He said he didn't think I even used it, he thought it was all for the orioles... Grr...

It's been a while

2005-05-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I haven't posted in a while. I haven't had anything interesting to say in the past couple of days. I work, I go home, I watch TV, I sleep, and repeat. My favorite show's season finale was on last night, which kept me glued to the TV for 2 whole hours!! My neck was stiff by the end! I just love the Amazing Race. And my favorites, Uchenna and Joyce pulled it off last night! Hooray for them!

My friends from college and I are planning a little road trip to Colorado at the end of the month to attend the wedding of another friend from college. I'm so excited about it that I've been printing maps for every combination of destinations we might need: hotel to the rehearsal, rehearsal to the rehearsal dinner, rehearsal dinner back to the hotel, hotel to our friend's house (just in case), and hotel to hospital. Well, I'm kidding about the hospital. But now that I think of it...

All my excitement about this trip is because I feel a serious lack of female relationships in my life right now. I have Courtney and Jenna, of course, and they're wonderful, but I don't see them often enough, and when I do see them, it's with our respective spouses. There's something about getting a big group of girls together, talking, having a few cocktails, getting silly, etc. It's probably the biggest thing I miss about college. I feel like I took it for granted when I lived in a house full of girls, and every night was a slumber party. Of course, I'm conveniently forgetting the petty arguments that were caused when two people were PMS-ing at the same time, and the normal roommate annoyances like not doing dishes, leaving a mess in the living room, etc.

I graduated 3 years ago this month, and I've only seen these girls 4 or 5 times since then. Each time I've seen them has been for only a weekend at a time. And now we're driving to Colorado and spending nearly a week together. So what happens if we've all changed, and this isn't the spectacular girls-only trip that I'm gearing myself up for? I guess I'll try not to worry about that right now. No use in worrying about something that hasn't happened yet. And in the mean time, I'll just put together my mix cd's, get out my old photo albums, and keep printing off maps.

I hate bees, I hate bees, I hate hate hate bees!!!

2005-05-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

Ugh. Worst post ever. My sister (http://crunkypopjoy.blogspot.com) posted a picture of a big fuzzy scary bee on her website, and I can't erase the image from my brain. I hate bees. It's a totally irrational fear, which makes it even more frustrating. I feel like I'm a semi-intelligent person, I shouldn't be paralyzed by something so irrational. So what do I hate more, bees, or my fear of bees?

As far as I know, I'm not allergic to bees. I've never been stung though (well, I may have, but I'll get to that later), so I could potentially be allergic to bees, and not even know it! So maybe it is a rational fear!

I may have been stung last summer. I'm not sure. I noticed a bee on my hand once while gardening (which could explain why I hate hate hate gardening -- more on that some other time), and after I shook my hand to rid myself of the bee, I noticed a red dot where the bee was and it kind of hurt. It could very well be phychosomatic. So if I was stung, and it didn't even hurt very much, I shouldn't be scared anymore, right? I've (possibly) been stung and didn't die of a previously unknown fatal allergy to bee stings, so I should be okay.

However, my parents have a neighbor that nearly DIED from a bee sting. She had grown up by a lake and was stung hundreds of times before and never had an allergic reaction. But one day, only about a year or two ago, she was stung in her backyard and collapsed. Her doctor husband had to perform CPR on her for about 15 minutes until the ambulance got there with their adrenaline shot. All this in front of her two kids, ages 9 and 12. Her heart had stopped beating, she had stopped breathing, and her 12-year old son had to call 911 while his dad performed CPR. For about 15 minutes.

That's super scary. Scary enough to keep my fear of bees firmly planted in my psyche. If anything, I'm only more afraid of bees as I get older. But that's okay, I think I'll decide to be okay about this fear, even if it seems irrational at times.

Strange Cars

2005-05-05T07:29:00.000-07:00

I've had an unusual number of strange car sightings lately. Yesterday morning, on my way to work I saw a cutesy little Jeep Wrangler (or maybe it was a Cherokee, I'm not so good at this) with tinted windows, a chain link license plate frame, and huge lettering across the back window that said, "My jeep... My attitude". I was trying to figure out what those two statements have to do with each other, and as I passed the jeep/attitude, I got a look at the driver. It was a dude! Not only a dude, but a huge, burly, mustached dude! He looked better suited to be on a Harley, not in a cutesy little Jeep!! I suppose, he could be driving his girlfriend's jeep, because his "hog" was in the shop or something, but he looked awfully comfortable driving it.

The next strange car sighting was on my way home yesterday. I was passed by a Lexus SUV being driven by a gentleman in a suit and tie. He looked like a lawyer or something. Once he passed me, I saw that he had a "Misfits" bumber sticker (with a skull and everything) on the back of his fancy-pants SUV. I had to ask Steve what the Misfits were because a) I'm not hip to the punk rock music scene, and b) I thought for sure the Misfits must have been some sort of professional organization for lawyers or rich people or something like that. Nope, Steve confirmed that the Misfits were indeed a punk band. Steve didn't seem to think it was as strange as I thought it was. He likened it to having a Rolling Stones bumper sticker or something like that.

The third and final strange car sighting happened this morning. The car itself was not strange at all. It was a blue VW beetle (the new kind, not the old 70's model) being driven by a youngish guy wearing Rivers Cuomo-type glasses. The strange part is that I see this car at least once a month on my way to work. I always see it in the same area, and I know it's the same car because it has a vanity plate, vegeta. I know I take the same route to work every day, and I go to work at roughly the same time every day, but so do thousands of other people, and I don't ever remember seeing the same car twice, much less several times! I don't even know what Vegeta means. How is it even pronounced?

So these things might not seem strange to some people, but to me, a boring accountant, they're quite an event.

A weekend in NYC

2005-05-02T07:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I didn't really go to New York this weekend. But I felt like I did. I discovered this wonderful, magical channel called HBO onDemand. An entire season of Sex and the City at my fingertips (along with other HBO series, documentaries, movies, etc). I camped out on the couch and watched the entire season 5. Steve sat down in the living room during one episode, and after it was over I switched to something else (he's not a fan...). Then he fell asleep, so I took my cue to resume SATC.

I hated that show when it was on. I thought it was a waste of time to watch 4 girls sleep around and spend way too much money on shoes. After the series was over, they started showing "clean" episodes on TBS, so I tuned in and discovered that it was actually a pretty funny show. And now I'm hooked. I try to limit myself to 2 shows at a time to be obsessed about, But this is show number 3 (Deadwood and the Amazing Race are my other two shows). I think I can rationalize it though. Because, maybe my rule is to obsess about two current shows, and since SATC has not been in production in over a year, it shouldn't be included.

Aside from watching mass quantities of HBO, I had a pretty good weekend. Friday night we went to the Brewers game, and although it was freezing cold, the retractable roof did it's job and kept us warm. Saturday we ran errands and pissed away $15 on another dog bed, which our dog chewed up sometime Sunday morning between 7:30 (when Steve got up) and 9:30 (when I got up). She also barfed sometime during the night. We heard her hacking, but couldn't find the result, so we assumed she just had a bit of a coughing fit, and didn't get anything out. But Steve found a pile o' puke near his side of the bed. Totally grody.

We also went out for the best Chinese food in the area (Harvey Moy's) and later argued about the amount of time I spent watching TV this weekend. I don't care if he is right, it was cold outside and I didn't feel like leaving the couch!

The Big Red Dot

2005-04-29T13:28:00.000-07:00

This is the most fun I've had all day:
http://fun.drno.de/flash/BigRedButton.swf

It's Friday. It's payday. It's "go to a Brewers game in the freezing cold" day. I asked my hubby why we were going to a Brewers game when it's going to be in the mid to upper 30's tonight, and he said, "Lisa, it's half price tickets tonight!" How silly of me, of course it's worth saving $12 to sit in the freezing cold!

Yesterday, the kids that attended "Take Your Child to Work Day" formed 4 "companies" and were selling cookies they had made (actually, the cookie itself was store-bought, but they decorated it themselves with frosting and sprinkles), with the money benefiting the charities of their choice. Two kids stopped by my desk to drop off a flyer for their cookies. One kid didn't say anything, and just handed me a flyer. The other kid, who was wearing a sandwich-board type thing made out of pipe-cleaners and orange tagboard in the shape of circles, stared at his feet and muttered, "I'm the mascot; I'm an orange dot." I started laughing and said, "You sure are!" I'm not sure what an orange dot has to do with cookies, but I think it has something to do with Deloitte's logo being a green dot.

Either way, it was an effective marketing campaign, since I stopped by their place of business (aka the 14th floor conference room) and bought $5 of cookies. Strangely, $5 only bought me 3 cookies. I think I could have gotten a better deal, had I shopped around like my stingy co-worker did. She seriously asked the kids how much their cookies were, then said, "I think I can find a better deal." And she moved on to the next company.

The cookie companies collectively raised $800 for charity, which I was rather impressed with. Two teams chose to donate their profits to the humane society, and the other two teams chose the Ronald McDonald House. The group I bought from were donating to the humane society.

Ironically, I later donated to the Ronald McDonald House when I met my dad, step-mammy, and brother at a new restaurant. The restaurant was having a raffle for the Ronald McDonald House, and I purchased a raffle ticket. Even more ironically, the raffle ticket was also $5. Hmmm, that's quite a coincidence!

Bore Boring Bored

2005-04-28T11:27:00.000-07:00

Wow. Today is the most boring day ever. Have you ever surfed the web so much in one day you feel like there's nothing left to see? It's Take Your Child to Work Day, so my office building is overrun with children. The age bracket for bringing your kid in is 7 yrs old to 13 yrs old. The little kids are cute, the 12 and 13 year olds are really starting to wear on me. Each one is trying to be a bigger smart ass than the one before him/her.

We also had a going-away lunch for a co-worker that is leaving the firm. My friend Jill and I rode in the backseat on the way to the restaurant and sang along with Diana Ross and the Supremes. Jill is normally very quiet at work, so I was surprised when she started singing loud enough to hear. I was also surprised that she wasn't intimidated by my bird-like singing voice. "Maybe a crow-like singing voice," said Steve (if he were here).

Now I'm full from lunch and too sleepy to work. Not like I was getting any work done today anyways!! It's hard to work when my two main bosses are out of the office this week.