Birthdays and PTSD

In the years since my dad's passing, I have not wanted to celebrate my birthday. Too many painful memories, and it has resulted in a PTSD type response when anyone would want to wish me a happy birthday or want to celebrate. 

However, this year my birthday has fallen on Memorial Day, and I spent the day performing in a Memorial Day ceremony with the band I play with. The City of Sugar Land invited us to perform in their event, and Jeff, Mom, and David all came to watch the event (and us perform). 

It was a good day. No stress, no issues. 

Dinners, Get Togethers, Work...

Around the beginning of this month, I met a couple of friends for dinner. We found a really interesting Italian restaurant that has parts of Fiat cars in it. It was a really fun experience and we had a great meal out of it!

On the flip side of that coin, it continues to be super stressful at work. We've had a couple projects go live at work, and both got botched because the person leading the projects did not know who all needed to be involved and therefore not everyone was notified of changes to processes. 

On one of the projects, we estimated that we would be able to cut out 25-30 routes a week, which is exactly what we are doing. Now the transportation director is saying that he wasn't aware that was going to happen, and he now has drivers without loads...but he was the one who led that project and was told about the reduction in loads.

Cannot win for losing. Trying to get everything together correctly and still getting yelled at.  LOL

On another note, the managers of my department said that they want the supervisors to start leading the departmental meetings each week. They asked me to go first, which I did...even though I was very nervous. I decided to have some fun with it, and came up with nicknames for each f the supervisors, based on the areas that they supervise...We'll see how the other supervisors do.

Projects, Work, Oh My!

We have had a lot of projects going on lately at work. I'm not upset at that per se, but it seems like everyone is trying to get their ideas in of how it should work...and none of them are the right way of working correctly. Both have been delayed multiple times...now we are supposed to go live with one of the projects this coming weekend, and one more next week. No one really knows what is going on with either of the projects, so we will see, I guess. 

Bi-Polar Weather

We have just started February...within the last month, we have had 2 very cold spells (one of which included actual snowing in Houston), a tornado, and now weather in the 80's...with some areas of Texas getting into the 90's this past week. Heck, within the last year, we've also added to the above a second tornado, a spring storm that knocked out electricity for days, and a hurricane.

The weather is getting absolutely ridiculous!

New Year New Travels New Weather

Jeff and I are finishing up our long holiday work weeks. We've been working mostly straight through since the middle of December. We'll soon be finished up and back on our regular schedules at work, but after we take a few days vacation to recoup, relax, and decompress after the busyness of the season. 

We have booked a room at a casino resort in Louisiana, but are also aware of a polar vortex heading our way around the same timeframe. While we are looking forward to getting away for a bit, we are taking extra precaution to secure the house for the freezing weather. 

Not something I wanted to plan for while trying to recoup and relax, but we will survive!