11 April 2002

Yesterday's To-Do List:

- Fill out PMP form and turn it in to my manager. PMP stands for "Performance Management Process" but around the office, we generally just call them "pimp"s. This is a Stupid Corporate Trick, whereby I'm supposed to list my goals for the upcoming year, assign each goal a weight (so that they all add up to 100%) and get my manager to sign off on it - my raise next year will depend on my execution of said goals. I didn't quite have the brass to put it in the form, but when I e-mailed it to my manager, I stole a line from one of the innumerable Dilbert cartoons on the wall in the kitchen and said, "I forgot this one - could you add it in for me: I will not punch a hole in anyone's torso, rip out a vital organ, and display it in my office as a warning to others."

- Review the revised SSDD and make comments. Today is Fun With Acronyms Day, kiddies! An SSDD is a System/Software Design Document. It's a bit of official paperwork that we have to generate to keep the pencil-pushers happy while we actually write the code. I found two errors, corrected some confusion on the part of our tech writer about one particular section, and located what I thought was an inconsistency in writing style that turned out to be a company standard that surely would earn someone a whole host of dirty looks from English teachers across the country.

- Call the doctor and make an appointment for my annual physical. It drives me crazy. The doctor gives me a prescription for eleven months of my birth control pills, so that I'll have to call in for the twelfth month - and while I'm calling in for that, they can make me make an appointment for my annual. Look, the prescription is going to run out anyway, and my insurance company won't let me come in until at least a full year has passed. Just give me the whole damn year's prescription, okay?

- Try one more time to do the taxes. Even with the help of TurboTax Online it took me an hour and a half to get all our information entered. And at that, I wasn't really done, because I was missing some information at work, like the precise names of each of the charities to which we'd donated this year. But I thought I'd figured out the one big stumbling block we were having of the Schedule D form for Matt's stock options. But no... Some other confusion erupted. So this afternoon, Matt is going to collect our files and haul them over to an accountant. It galls me to have to pay for it, but hopefully he'll explain to Matt exactly how he got the numbers he did, so we'll know if it comes up again.

- Get some work done on my project. Isn't that cute? Optimistic, even! Actually, I did get some work done - more than I'd anticipated, even. Not quite enough, but more than I thought I'd be able to get to, considering how tired I was. (Note to self: Maybe sleep-deprivation isn't all it's cracked up to be...)

- Meet K.T. and Kevin for dinner. Don Pablo's. Soft chicken fajita tacos. Sopapillas. Enough said.

- Log in for the 7th Sea play-by-email game combat. Online combat is always slow. 7th Sea combat is always slow. Online 7th Sea combat takes forever. This combat went for only three rounds, and took us from 9:30 to midnight. And that was short, because for the first round, three of us weren't able to do anything, and the last of the bad guys went down before the third round was quite over. (And we lost two players to sleep before it was all over anyway.)

I'd been tired all day, and almost literally dragging since about four, so I said my farewells and went to bed despite the nagging sensation that there was something I was forgetting. I still don't know what that is.

Today's To-Do List:

- Get out my Just-My-Size catalog and order some new bras.

- Make a shopping list for this evening.

- Do some actual work on my project.

- Review the code for the code-review on Friday.

- Do the shopping.

Luckily, I don't have much on my list for after work. I'm thinking I might even be able to get to bed early. Absurd, I know, but I can dream, can't I?

--Liz