i love my new job, i love my new office (even though i tend to work from home most of the time), but i do not love my new desk. it is the worst desk ever made. some demon from the fourth or fifth level of hell made this desk especially to punish me. what's wrong with it? ok, well, part of the problem is that i use my laptop at the office and this desk was made for a desktop. it's diamond shaped with a fixed keyboard tray. the main desk is too high to type on and the keyboard tray is too low and small to put my laptop on. so either i cramp my hands while typing on the low tray or i stretch out all awkwardly and dig my forearms into the desk while typing on the high part of the desk. IT DOES NOT WORK! stupid desk.

thankfully, a new desk has been ordered. speaking of which, i need to bug our office manager and find out when it's coming. heh, it's funny to say office manager because the most people in this office at any one time, not including her, is three. most of the time it's just one. we're tiny. we'll the San Francisco office is anyway.

um, what's new with me? the job's the big thing and i'm pretty much in love with it so far. could use at least one more project, though. but i hear there will be more than enough work on my plate soon.

Corinne's good. she's resigned herself to take part time shifts at various hospitals around the area after residency. i think she'll be quite happy with this but i also think it's not what she expected after four years of medical school and four years of residency. she kind of expected a big shiny job at the end of all of it. like a parting gift or something. the reality hit her hard. but she's a real trooper. she has grown so much from all of it.

even though the rest of us have gone through many job searches (good and bad -- mostly bad, i imagine), she really hasn't had to do that. for her, it was college, medical school, residency. and, yeah, she had to apply and get into each of those places but while it's easily as hard to get into a good medical school as it is to get a good job, the paradigm is different. if you're good enough, you'll get into medical school. but if you're good enough for a job, even if the place you're interviewing wants you, you still might not get the job. i can attest to that. this place where i'm working had to decide between me and someone else. one position, two great applicants. the first time around they took the other person. thankfully, they found a spot for me anyway but most of the time that doesn't happen.

i guess this is kind of a tribute and comfort to all of you looking for jobs. be good, be professional, be on top of your shit, but don't be discouraged if you don't get your dream job. it doesn't necessarily mean you're not good enough. sometimes it means they couldn't see how good you are, sometimes it means you weren't quite right (you may have been too good) for the position, and sometimes it just means they had to decide between you and someone else, and for some reason they chose the other person. but you'll get yours. don't worry.

uh, hm, i was supposed to be talking about my goings on and instead went off on that tirade. well, anyways, things are good here. the weather's beautiful, the house is ... oh, the house! i forgot to mention that we did some really good stuff recently. it all started with a trip to that great particle board depot in the sky, IKEA, to get some additional shelving for the office. since i'm going to be working from home a lot, it's imperative that i keep my workspace organized. so shelving it was. while there, though, we found silk-like (they're polyester but look like silk) drapes that were uber cheap and big enough for our windows. we've seen drapes that were actually silk but looked exactly like these for $150 a piece. these were $50. $50 for what we thought was one. but when we opened the packages, it was $50 for two! yowzah.

anyways, we hung them up -- after several attempts at a good curtain rod, which you'd rather not i described in detail, trust me -- and they make our bedroom look fantastic. it went from clean but austere to warm and soft and inviting. and then, i found this, only it was at least 5-feet by 3-feet. probably larger. and the best part? i got it framed, at that size, for $135. that's absurd! i couldn't even buy a frame of that size for that much. there's a bit of a gap between some parts of the frame that i can easily fix and, frankly, you can't really see, so i got a huge discount on the piece. it was a big surprise and now the bedroom is truly a thing of beauty.

so that's it. life's been quietly good. lots of pie and ice cream.

oh, and i'm almost a level 44 on World of Warcraft. :)