I had over four hours of meetings today at the office. I’m hoping that tomorrow I can settle back into my normal routine and hopefully get some real photos of our trip posted. Below are a few photos I took on the iPhone throughout the trip.

Cool mountains as seen from the plane.

Kim on the cold but awesome tour of Kenai Fjords National Park.

Tasting all of the brews at St. Elias Brewing Company.

Kim chilling at our campsite on the Homer Spit.

You’ll have to forgive me for the delayed updates these past couple of days. We’ve been playing some musical chairs in the office, with nearly half of the employees switching to new cubes. I’m actually really liking my new cube, but it’s been a bit hectic and noisy, making it hard to concentrate recently. My old cube was on a big thoroughfare for people getting to and from one of our break areas. So I was happy to move away from that into something that is a bit more private. Well as private as four foot cubicle walls can be. However there are a lot more people around now, so the background noise has picked up considerably. Another positive thing is that this new cube is closer to the windows, so I can now stand up and see the mountains as I feel necessary. And one of our IT guys dropped off a new 19″ wide screen monitor for me this morning, so things are definitely looking up. Now if the moving could just be finished and we could all go back to our hard working days.

What a day of work! I don’t think I’ve been this stressed in a long time. Hopefully that’s the end of it and tomorrow turns out to be back to the normal swing of things. It’s amazing the amount of work that we put in at times to prevent losing a client.

I was supposed to have jury duty this morning, however my number was not in the range of those picked to report. I’ve found that most people are relieved to hear this news, but I actually wanted to go and see what it’s all about. I’ve yet to report for jury duty in any city I’ve lived, even after receiving the notice at least twice. How can you argue against a day off from work, yet still getting paid?

Earlier this week was my official five year anniversary for my current job. The time has flown by! I was able to select a gift for my years of service from a website catalog and chose a globe. I figured I would use it more than some fancy pen. Now I just need to find a good spot for it in the home office. As far as work goes, things are continuing to improve after a recent shift of our organizational groupings. At first I was not very excited to be back to quality assurance testing full time, but I am slowly taking on more advanced testing tasks. Hopefully things continue to improve.

This day has really crawled by. What weird is that I’ve been swamped with work, so typically that makes the days fly by. But not today. I still have over an hour left, so hopefully the pace picks up a bit. Apologies for the boring post. I promise to add more pictures on Monday. Have a nice weekend.

I’m stuck at work today in the office, so I haven’t been able to keep up with the DNC events as well as the past couple of days. What would have been really cool to see is Rage Against the Machine’s concert that is going on now. I used to love this band, and have never seen them live, though I’m sure it’s full of energy. Instead, I had my yearly review, and despite receiving the highest marks possible, received another mediocre raise. I guess it could be worse, the amount equates to 8%, but still I always expect more. I’m really curious as to when I’ll get my next promotion from level two up to level three. There is always next year, I suppose.

As if the office weren’t already distracting enough, I arrived this morning to see that we now have a popcorn machine less than 50 feet from my cube. So, not only do I get to hear constant popping, I also get the constant smell of popcorn. The smell obviously isn’t all that bad, it just makes me want to eat popcorn all day long! I think the worst part is the noise, not only from the machine, but also from the people standing around it talking about the machine and whatever other random office talk they choose. I just don’t understand why it wasn’t placed in the big break room with all of the TV’s, stainless steel appliances, and constant noise.

Our company has started a new on-call system and today starts my first shift. For the next week I could potentially be called to work if a problem arises during non business hours. Yippee! The program started a couple of weeks ago, and I don’t think anyone on the team I work on has been called yet, and I don’t anticipate we’ll be called very often. However, the thought of them calling when I’m out hiking, or catching a show, or even out of town is really bothersome especially since I don’t have a laptop to work from. Hopefully all issues will be resolved before they get to the sixth and final level, which is where I am now sitting.

I just got into Kansas City and into the office here. I haven’t been back for work in nearly a year, so I’ve got lots of catching up to do. More from me tomorrow…