And so it begins

I always like discovering a blog in progress (prog blog?) by someone I know, after a nice backlog of posts has accumulated. I sit and read all the old entries at once. Therefore, I intend to do the same favor to my will-be readers by not telling you about this blog until later. So this entry will probably be a bit old by the time you read this. The bread is stale, but hey, I'd rather have a stale slice than fresh crumbs.

My summer has just ended. In an unusual turn of events my days will be less packed as a result. (Well, not unusual for me; all my autumns since I graduated from college have been less packed than my summers. This will be my first September as an employed non-student.) What happened was that I got a software testing job in May that I had no intention of quitting. This was followed by a month of agonizing about my old summer job, to which I have something of an emotional attachment. Unwilling to have my cake without eating it, I switched to the night shift at my job, and took on the summer job for three days a week.

The upshot of having your cake and eating it too is the unpleasantness of regurgitation. My unpleasantness consisted of Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays that began around 7 am and ended on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays respectively. What's more, I had to endure two of these three days on less than five hours of sleep.

Somehow I survived. I slept in on Tuesdays and Thursdays; on the other three weekdays, I fed off the energy of the children I worked with, and afterward I kept myself going with the occasional nap on the bus to my "day job," and the less occasional dose of caffeine and/or aspirin. (I wouldn't do this year-round, but I could do eight weeks of this again. We'll see what my professional life is like next year.)

And now the summer job is over, and I'm back to one job. I switched to the night shift the same day my summer work started, so this will be the first time I can really enjoy the different schedule. I have to sacrifice a thing or two, but I fit better with the 5 pm-1:30 am crowd. (If the times were the only factor, I could go either way, but the environment in the evening is more comfortable to me.)

A new blog (with a new readership of people who are physically present in my life, I hope), and a new experience of work. Here they go.