Groovymarlin.com

So thanks to my friend Creeva, I realized I hadn’t posted in a WHILE. Sorry about that. (BTW I love Creeva’s new layout, it looks really slick.)

Anyway, yeah…what HAVE I been doing?

1. Working, which is still going really well.
2. Buying a whole new HVAC system (two new AC units, two new coils, two new furnaces). Was that expensive? YES.
3. Dealing with the vagaries of my daughter’s pre-school and summer school schedule. Real school starts in just a week! She’ll be in kindergarten (all day at the Montessori school though, not our public school’s weak-ass half-day thing).
4. Playing WoW occasionally (log in, do dailies, poke around a bit, maybe some crafting, reorganize bank, log out).
5. Playing Left 4 Dead 2 occasionally (log in, shoot a lot of zombies, get frustrated at lag on Steam servers, log out).
6. Catching up on various TV shows – this summer I’ve watched all of the currently available seasons of Parks & Recreation, Boardwalk Empire, Nurse Jackie, and Game of Thrones, plus I’ve caught up to the latest on True Blood. I watch almost all of these shows on my iPad, which ROCKS.
7. Reading. Here are all the books that I’ve read so far this summer:
- All three of the Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins
- All five of the Song of Ice and Fire books by George R.R. Martin
- Dead Reckoning (the most recent Sookie Stackhouse novel) by Charlaine Harris
- Anno Dracula by Kim Newman (I understand this is part of a series too but can’t find the others on Kindle)
- Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner
- Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman
-  Eifelheim by Michael Flynn
- Already Dead by Charlie Huston (just started this actually)
I also started Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris, but I just can’t get into it. The topic is interesting to me (American movie industry of the late 60s), but maybe it’s the prose? Anyway, it leaves me cold and I suspect I may not finish it.

I still have  a backlog of maybe 20 or so items in my Kindle that I want to read, so I’m not buying ANYTHING new until I’ve finished all of it. This will help me save some money too, which is a good thing (see that painfully expensive new HVAC system, noted above).

And that’s what I have been doing!

Prepare to receive my unsolicited opinion on Hulu Plus, Hulu’s $7.99 a month streaming service that is supposed to compete with Netflix:

IT SUCKS.

My husband signed up for the one-week free trial, so we tried Hulu Plus out on our Roku. I was NOT impressed. The interface, compared to Netflix and even Amazon VOD, is clunky. But most annoying were the commercials. TONS OF COMMERCIALS. I tried to watch an episode of Parks and Recreation (Season 3, Episode 1), and before the damn episode even started, I had to watch FOUR commercials. Two straight minutes of irritation right there (at least when I’m watching something with commercials on my computer, I can do other things and ignore them until they’re over). Then there were another two commercials at every normal commercial break in the program.

I guess I’ve gotten spoiled by Netflix, where there are NO commercials at all, but watching an episode on Hulu Plus was so annoying, before it was over I’d decided I would never do it again. $7.99 a month to watch commercials? NO THANKS. For $7.99 a month I can stream shows and movies from Netflix with no commercials, and for $2 more I can have one DVD out at a time too. Yeah, I get that Hulu Plus can offer more recent seasons, but so what? I’m pretty sure Season 3 of P&R will be on Netflix Streaming by this fall when it comes out on DVD. If not, I’ll just get the DVDs as part of my 1 DVD at a time plan. Or I’ll pay $38.99 and stream Season 3 in HD right now from Amazon VOD. It is worth it to me to watch without annoying commercials.

So my summary of Hulu Plus is: TOTAL WASTE OF MONEY.

(By the way, if you have no idea what a Roku is, you really need check it out. IT ROCKS.)

I was sick of my hair, sick of blow-drying, sick of fussing and still not liking how it looked. Growing it out from my previous pixie has been easy, until the last month or two. Something about endless blow drying EVERY DAY in the summer is just such a drag! So I got a perm, and I don’t care how out of style or retro it is, I LOVE IT. In fact, I like the retro-ness – it’s rather 80s, even a bit 70s in its retro stylishness. It’s VERY curly and very boho and I enjoy the way it feels on my head. I especially enjoy the fact that I wash it and let it air dry, and spray some stuff on it, and that’s about it. Furthermore, I only have to wash it every other day at the most, which means that even though I just tortured my hair with chemicals to get the perm, it will be better for it in the long run.

Side effects: it made my bob look a LOT shorter (I don’t mind). It made my hair lighter (I don’t mind). Depending on what I wear, it makes me look like a crazy old lady who doesn’t care how she looks (um, I kind of am a crazy old lady who doesn’t care how she looks).

Look at me, the middle-age hair and fashion rebel! LOL!

You know how sometimes you don’t realize you had a good thing, until it’s gone? I’ve discovered recently that there’s a corollary to that theorem: sometimes you don’t realize how bad things are, until you get into a better situation.

Of course I’m talking about my new job, which makes me so very happy that I might not have to go on Prozac after all. (My personal life is still incredibly stressful right now, parenthood and what-not, so having a job that thrills me really helps balance out the misery.) Here’s a short history of my work morale that will help to make sense of these observations.

Way back when, in the early 90s, I had just graduated from college and got my first real job. My first job was awful, I hated it, and I shortly quit. My next job was not so great, but I found it interesting, so I worked to make it better – and it worked! My job activities, responsibilities, and relationships got a lot better, and I was very happy (although I was not fairly compensated for everything I was doing, but hell, there was a recession at the time).

Then I moved to Columbus, and had a job in civil service which was both a.) boring and b.) low-paying, with a side-dish of demeaning for extra measure. From there, I circulated through a few jobs, some civil service, some not, most for non-profits, and dealt with my share of psycho bosses and managers and VP’s. When I finally got my first real IT job, I hit my stride – loved my work, loved my co-workers, loved the regular promotions I started getting. Life was good! That was my first taste of what a big difference true job satisfaction can make in your overall life.

After we moved to Northern Virginia, it took a while to find my next “perfect” job, but find it I did, and I happily spent seven years with that company. It was my second job in software testing, but I really grew and learned a lot in those seven years, developing my skills and dramatically expanding my knowledge and experience. Things weren’t perfect, but they were close. Unfortunately, I left because the contract I was on was ending, and I didn’t want to have to work on a different project with a long commute. That’s when things went downhill. I can honestly say that since then, 2006, I haven’t been truly happy at work…until now.

After five years of working in places where the morale was in the toilet, I’m finally working at a company where people are happy, including me. My skills are being used and developed again, and I really enjoy going to work. Maybe most importantly, the work/life balance is very important at my new place, and it’s made a big difference in my stress level. Whew!

The funny thing is, I never realized the full extent of how unhappy I was at my last job, until I started this one. My last job was not challenging at all, and in fact it was pretty boring most of the time. I certainly never had to take it home with me. Some of the management were buffoons, but I was able to avoid the worst of them. And there were always the really generous benefits to comfort myself with – and generous they were, extremely generous for our industry. But while I wasn’t exactly stressed, I also wasn’t fulfilled. My brain wasn’t being challenged, and my emotional well being suffered due to the low overall morale. I think I had some inkling of this, but I kept telling myself I was getting paid an obscene amount in salary and benefits to basically sit around, so why should I complain? And that worked for a while. But now that I have a job that I truly enjoy again, I can see how wrong that was.

TL;DR: Groovymarlin took a 14% pay cut to leave her last, dismal place of employment and go to work at her shiny new one. And hasn’t regretted it for a single second.

I’ve cut way back on my Starbucks latte consumption, but I still indulge occasionally. I usually prefer to use the drive-through specifically so that I don’t have to deal with the annoying customers in Starbucks, but there’s not always one available. Have you seen these customers in the wild? I saw most of them just this morning.

Annoying Cell Phone Talker: Has an emphatic and very loud conversation on cell phone all through ordering, paying, and picking up beverate. Usually involves things that are personal and make strangers who overhear the conversation kind of uncomfortable. Loudest thing in the whole store and seemingly oblivious.

Giant Order Ninja: Chick who gets in line all by herself, usually right in front of you, and then orders five very complicated drinks at the register. Bonus points if she spills one of them all over the pick-up area (I have seen this happen). Extra bonus points if she attempts to pay for each drink individually, using a different payment method such as cash, check, debit card, etc. (yes, I have seen this happen also).

The Mix Master: This is the person who orders a plain coffee and then stands at the condiment bar for 10 minutes turning it into a masterpiece ghetto latte or whatever.

The Draper: The person who orders, then drapes himself or herself all over the tiny little pick-up station, as if there’s NOBODY ELSE in the entire place who has ordered a drink and will also have to pick it up there. These people turn the pick-up counter into their own personal condo while they wait for their drinks. Seriously, what is WRONG with these douchebags?

People: in general, I hate them.