We had a fun game last night. Lots of silliness.

But boy, am I glad we're not doing much of anything tonight. It seems silly, because just about everything we have on the schedule this week is social and fun - but I really do need some downtime, once in a while.

Work is very busy just now. I'm trying assimilate all the things I have to learn - forget about actually learning them; it's work enough just to figure out what's on the list! And about every other day my supervisor dumps another job in my lap.

So now I'm reviewing documents before they go out to the customer, and I'm making a schedule of formal reviews we need to do over the next year, and I'm doing the periodic QA status report, and I'm compiling and analyzing data for a "defect prevention cycle" (and if you know what that means, I'm terribly sorry), and I'm taking our paperwork and entering the relevant bits into the QA database and then sorting and filing all the papers, and oh, while I haven't got anything else to do, I'm going through our published procedures and our published QA checklists and trying to figure out what's actually necessary and useful, and what can be chucked, and what needs to be added, and where the procedures contradict themselves (because there was a major overhaul of the primary document late last year and all the sub-documents haven't been caught up yet) and how to fix them.

In a weird way, I kind of enjoy it. Some of it's tedious, but every job has tedious bits. And right now, this is all new enough to me that it's not routine yet.

And I like my boss. He reminds me of some of my favorite grad school teachers, actually. He gives me some information and a job to do, and then expects me to come back to him with questions if I need to. He gives hints and suggestions ("You might want to print out a copy of Document X,") without laying out every step or telling me how to do everything. It's been a while since I had my intelligence overestimated.

And he's got a good sense of humor, though it's kind of understated. He told me a story yesterday about a guy he knew in the Army who could communicate perfectly well with nothing but an assortment of inflections on "hua."

And just to be contrary, the Particle has decided it doesn't want anything to do with food this morning. I don't feel sick, but I certainly don't feel hungry.

Ah, well. Hunger comes on without warning. My oatmeal might make a nice mid-morning snack when, around 9:30, my stomach suddenly threatens to climb out through my throat and go foraging on its own.

--Liz