Greg

semi-new beginnings

I have a new job! 

OK, not a new job at a new company or anything like that.  I'm not even changing organizations - I'm still at Microsoft and I'll still be in serviceability...  I'm really excited about it.  One of the things people have been asking when they find out is "Why do you want to move?" (particularly people on my team)...  I wasn't unhappy with the position that I was in or anything like that.  There are a number of reasons - some of them boil down to that I've been with the company for four years now (as of a couple weeks ago) and wanted a change - and the position I'm moving to seems like it has some really good opportunities for me.

There are a couple really weird things about the way things work if you interviewing in your same group that I hadn't thought of until I was going through it:

• you have to hope that people don't notice that you look a little bit nicer than usual and make the "what, are you interviewing?" joke.
• or see you in someone's office with a 'send mail - interview' sticky note on the door :|
• for the last week or so I've known that I'm going, but my manager wanted to break it to my team only once the final transfer date was settled, etc. so I couldn't tell any of them.  But, I didn't know who all had worked it out or had had to be told to get things moving so I didn't know if it was going around the org at all that I was the one filling the position...  Kind of a weird situation.

I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing that people I've told (or have heard from my manager) are all really suprised that I was leaving the team.  Hopefully that was a "wow you were doing great in your current job" and not a "wow, somebody else would hire you?!?!?!" ;-) 

close, but no cigar

Progress on the kitchen.  No, of course it's not completed but it is more usable. The countertops were installed on July 1st - in time for the 4th of July party - with the exception of two pieces of backsplash.  No big deal there.  BUT, they weren't really sure when the counters would be there - if they were going to make it before the holiday or not - so we couldn't call the cabinet dude back out to be ready to re-connect the sinks and dishwasher.

And it turns out that that was OK, because the cabinet people are on vacation until the 18th.  :(   Finally I caved and got a plumber out yesterday to hook up the kitchen sink...  Yes, it doesn't seem that hard and Clodagh was in favor of us trying it ourselves but it worked out that we wouldn't have known what we were doing.  Because some of the heights have changed from when the pipes were originally installed, they were cutting pipes differently and had to 'reverse the p-trap' and a couple of other things that would have thrown us for a loop.

So at this point, by the time the cabinet people come back out to finsh up it's guaranteed to have been at least 9 weeks from the first cabinets being removed to the whole thing being completed and nothing being left to do.  Seven months since we first started thinking about doing it and looking into the options and picking out cabinets, etc.  I had heard that remodeling takes longer than you would think, but until it happened to me I thought "nah, surely it'll be done in a month, tops."