I THINK I GOT THE JOB!!!!!!!! HOLY CRAP! The woman I interviewed with wants me to come in next week to discuss the job! HOLY CRAP!!!! I can’t believe my luck sometimes!

So today I decided to not be soooo negative about my job. I have to, just in case I dont get the job I want. Today my employer asked me how my replacement was working out. And I could honestly say that she is doing really really well. My employer also asked me if she should give my replacement a raise. HELL YES! She is doing the work, and she is doing it well. Yes, she deserves a raise.

On another note. I found the solution so that my knee won’t hurt after running. I started wearing my knee brace. I also found that from running I have gone done an entire pant size. And not just a “maybe I fit in the next lowest size”, but a true pant size. I wish that I still played volleyball and racquetball on a more frequent basis because then I would be losing weight like crazy. I have to get back into that routine. My goal is to lose 20 pounds by the end of the year. Which I know I can do, because I have before. I just need to exercise more and eat a little bit better.

Today I am just feeling like I can accomplish pretty much anything I put my mind to. I like feeling that way. I wish it happened more often. It is a nice change of pace from the past two weeks where I lost my confidence in everything I did.

I just read my reviews from the lab I taught last quarter. I have three bad reviews. Ironically, I also had three students who were completely incompitent. Wonder why that works out so well?

The rest of all of my students thought I was knowledgable, though one said not enough in the field of enology (which is true, by all means), friendly, and helpful. Several thought I talked too fast, which I know is true. I talk fast all of the time.

But my favorite was the student who said I was sometimes surly. Apparently this person didn’t know that surly is defined as “a person who is sick of answering questions that you would know the answer to if you just read the damn text and didn’t act like a freaking pigeon-brained drone.”

Because if I were to review the students in the class, I would say that 80% of them were great to work with, 10% were fabulous and I didn’t even need to be there for them, and 10% are not only going to be a shame to the program, but they are the ones that will know how to work the system to always get things they don’t deserve handed to them.

How’s that for surly?

I am going to have to run away if I am going to get anything done. No really. I mean it. Tonight I am driving out to Santa Rosa because tomorrow morning I am witnessing my first o-chem class. Thursday I teach my first class. Thursday! Oh my goodness. That is going to be CRAZY!

And my dissertation is in disarray. And my spell checker still isn’t working, so I don’t even know if I am spelling disarray correctly. I don’t know if migrating my blog to another server will help, but I really don’t know what to do at this point. I am not getting any info from Blogomania about the siuation.

Anyway. Instead of my dissertaion I have done the following things:
1. Washed glassware for a project that I have to work on even though it isn’t part of my dissertation.

2. Update iTunes even though I hate that I can’t strip my music with JHymn because I have iTunes 6.whatever. If anyone has a way of converting the strange iTunes music into mp3s, please let me know.

3. Walked over to the MU to get a cup of coffee and a croissant.

4. Blogged twice this morning.

5. Actually went to other people’s blogs and read.

6. Made up this list. And I would keep adding to it, but it seems that maybe I should finish my Eminem compilation for a friend of Winemonkey’s and then get back to writing.

All three of us are here in our 10×12 foot office this morning. And one of my officemates starts playing music. I don’t really care, she has pretty good taste in music. But then I hear my other officemate say to her, “Hey, do you have your headphonese plugged into the mic jack?” And I look over and for the past ten minutes she thought she was listening to her music through the headphones.

To me, that is ridiculously funny. Mostly because we ALL do it.

I hate my job more than a person should. Granted I am not shoveling cow dung or anything remotely disgusting, but I am still none the less repulsed every time I have to go into work. I went in today….on a Saturday…. to run some data, make some graphs, and finish up a presentation. When confronted once again with the moral dilemma of displaying “non-trustworthy” data, I have been told once again to “not stress out about it, make it quick and dirty, it doesn’t need to be perfect, these are just estimates.” Ok, for any other line of work I might buy that, but I think it has slipped everyone’s mind that reliable DATA is the reason people contract with us. They expect real numbers, they expect real results, they are not paying 100+ dollars an hour FOR FREAKIN ESTIMATES and a “quick and dirty process”!

I am at a loss. I don’t think I have produced anything real in the past year. I am so burned out that I don’t really know where to turn. I hate when I have to fudge numbers, or in the words of my employer, “massage the data”. I HATE MY JOB! I am not stressed out about if the work will get done, I am stressed out about how the work is getting done. UN-FREAKIN-ETHICAL. When did I become a morally upstanding citizen?