First off, a huge, huge thanks to Miranda for taking over last week. I hope you guys enjoyed her entries as much I did. It's been a little hard going for yours truly as of late. Without going into too much detail, there was a death in Hubby's family. I had declared 2011 as a wake/funeral-free year, but obviously there were greater, more annoying forces at work. I spent the majority of last week trapped in my own head, trying to get past the lump of sadness lodged in my brain like a freaking blood clot. I only realized in the last few days that the death hit me harder than I thought*. But it's a new week and I'm this much closer to vacation where I'll experience The Real World: Cape Cod for a second time. I'm excited for it, moreso than last year and I have some great things planned for myself while there. In the meantime, I'm going to get resettled with my blogging and writing schedule. I'll also have to work on the feng shui situation of my new...

As the 9-5 job changes by fiscal year (no lie), I find myself searching for different things. Last week was no exception. The task: Find where one purchase book props. Pretty easy task. Of course, since the current incarnation of my 3 week temp job* is only a few months old, I'm still learning. No problem. Amazon has everything, right? Oh yeah. When searching "book prop" under the Office Products category, I get the following suggestions by Amazon. Just in case I didn't mean "book prop" of course**. So tell me: what kind of office would need the iPad case and two axes ? * Longest temp job in history. This month marked my four year anniversary. ** I know what I'm looking for Amazon, thanks. ______ Last.fm hit of the day : Hail Murder by Dark Funeral

First off, Happy Friday! I've never had a week that dragged as bad as this one, so I'm glad the weekend's finally here where I can read, go to the gym, and have some marathon editing sessions. But right now, I'm still locked into my desk with my brain too hopped up on caffeine to concentrate on anything. What did you think of the Beta Battle yesterday? I hope you checked out what the other ladies had to say on Sarah's piece. What was interesting to me was seeing where we all commented on and where our comments differed. I learned a lot from it and hope everyone else did too. I see I got some new lurkers this week. Welcome aboard and please comment often. Have you ever gotten so pissed at your laptop you just wanted it to meet it's fiery end? If you scroll down, you can see what happens when you pretend your laptop is a dozen cookies. The keys loosened enough to fall off during transport. Due to the melting, the cover no longer shuts properly. Her...

I just love this, don't you? Just an inch past 30 days since my last week in review , we're doing another one. Sad to say, I did have an awesome post lined up, but work being work exploded and made a very sticky, nasty mess all over my workspace. So without anymore bullshit... Alicia's Week in Review  Work Hubby left on Monday morning for a not fun-filled week worth of business trips. Since Hubby snuck his luggage out of the house when it was kitty-cat nap time, it took Lucky longer to realize that he was down one human. When he did realize it, that meant that I had to deal with a grieving cat . Monday also saw me scrambling around the office to get an RFP out. I won't go into too much detail, but it ended with me leaving after almost 11 hours of work and my boss showing up to the UPS warehouse to drop off our package. RFP Hell took up the majority of my week, the culmination was today with the bonus RFP. By 9 this morning, I clocked my forty hours of w...

Work has exploded all over my desk again, so this was not the blog I was planning for today. (Maybe this is the blog gods way of telling me to blog ahead of time? I didn't think so either.) Confession time: I work for a big publishing house. Before you get all excited, no I can't help you with that. I'm not anywhere near the book end of things at said house. I work in sales. As an admin. As far away from literature as possible. I'm in the technology division. In the technology division, I do such wonderful things as learn about new products and get software installed on my desktop here. I get advance notice of some things and have sometimes even get freebies from the book-side of things. (Also, I walk to work - how awesome is that?) I spend more time than I ever imagined in Excel, but I rarely get to use my creative streak. That's been changing. Last month, I got to wear my editor hat and help out the marketing department. Today I get to use the writer hat...

  Alicia's Week in Review Image compliments of verydemotivational.com My brain is fried after an extremely busy week. To be fair, it's been a busy week since January 1. (Who knew that the sales cycle picks up after the holidays?) Monday Holiday. Birthday lunch with good friend and blog reader, D. Tuesday My work Monday - the busiest day of the week. Also trying to finalize a 3 day orientation schedule that by today completely got thrown out the window. Wednesday My actual birthday. New hire orientation at day job. This translates into "Alicia, please host the new hire." Downside: working on birthday. Upside: complimentary lunch. Birthday dinner with ICE CREAM. (I will always take ICE CREAM over cake. The exception, as always, is ICE CREAM cake. Take note.) Thursday Continuing new hire orientation. Today Completing new hire orientation plus wrapping up end of week stuff. Birthday dinner number two tonight. This time with Hubby. Through this a...

In continuation of last week's celebration of holiday tacky, I'd like to examine reindeer decorations. The reindeer has sort of become the new staple of holiday tackiness. We see it on our cars. People used to just put a wreath on the grille of their truck, but now we have the reindeer car kit. (If you click the photo, you can go and see that they are sold out for 2009, that's how popular these kits have become.) We see our pets become them. Even though, it's usually dogs that get suckered into wearing the holiday outfit, Lucky the Snowcat is the size of a small dog. That justifies him wearing antlers, right? Of course, there are those light up reindeer lawn ornaments. No photo is required for those because EVERYONE knows about them. They're like a staple of Christmas. I do have a new tacky reindeer to present. I think it will become the new holiday office chick. I give you the light fixture reindeer. He fits in any office environment and takes ...

About a year ago, I worked part-time as a customer service representative where I now am full-time. Even though I'm full-time, I'm still a temp. If you've been a temp at a big company, you know that things have a way of not always working. This thing in particular was my email. HR had forgotten to approve my extension so my email had been locked out. Of course, I was still working at the office, and I needed to email. The workaround was to use my personal email address. (This address doesn't have my name in the handle and was created back when I still kept my Aerosmith fan contract in my back pocket, so you can imagine that had a definite non-professional angle.) Regardless of how collegiate-centric my address was, my name did show up in the 'From' field and the email was sent. Fast-forward. Starting this September, I started getting emails with really vague subject headings like 'Open House' from a name I sort of recognized, but not really. Let...

First, a big thank you to Miranda for yesterday's guest post . I hope you all enjoyed it. This post originally was going to be about how different musical genres work with different writing genres, but now I'm thinking it should be about food. That I'm thinking food isn't surprise. At times, it runs my life. This week is a prime example as it seemed I announced to Hubby every time I saw him "Am hungry. Want food." This is bad because 1) I don't need to eat that much and 2) Hubby and I work together. (Note: when you work in the same office as your husband always request to sit far away from him. I did.) Also, the office has an affinity with food. I found blueberry pie in the kitchen earlier this week and we had waffles this morning. Waffles. And not those frozen out of the yellow Eggo box kind, but the kind you need a waffle iron for. When this happens and the entire space smells like a good and proper pancake house, it's hard to resist. And with...

The product development and QA department in our office in populated by rabbits. Because of this, we've had to get creative with space. Stage One of Create-a-Space was taking our 4 person cubes and making them capable of holding 6, but only in certain spots. When all was said and done, we acquired maybe 10 more spots. What you see on the right is Stage Two, or a corner of it. Yesterday they took our loungey area and added a rabbit run. Erm, I mean additional desk space. Behind this piece is the outside. And doors that lead to the outside. This series of desks are close enough to the door that you can't walk behind it. I'm wondering if this is actually a secure option for our breeding developers, or maybe a Darwinesque attempt at filtering out some of the staff. In recap, the office is currently in Stage Two of Create-a-Space, Rabbit Developer Edition. I'm afraid to see Stage Three. Update: Various work people have assured me that this blockade is fire chief co...