Yes, indeed. The year is coming to a close and I’m in the middle of my “must get everything done before January” month. There are many reasons that I like the fact that I was born when I was, but the December crunch is not one of them.
I got my driver’s license renewed last weekend. Also received the letter to renew my tags, which I put off dealing with until today. Other fun things included paying my auto insurance, renewing a couple of domains, doing year-end reviews for all of my direct reports (save one, who’ll get to go through that on Monday), and I don’t know what else.
As I said, I pulled out the registration letter today and logged on to pay for my 2019 registration, only to realize that I’ve forgotten to get my emissions checked (must do that before registering). So I guess that’s on the docket for later this morning.
The X-company Christmas party was last Monday. I did not attend. Not a fan of 1}hanging out with the people from work, 2}hanging out with the people from work when there’s an open bar. Not to worry, though. The X-company gives out really nice Christmas presents to everyone – even those of us who don’t go to parties – and I scored a drone yesterday. This is cool, because I’d been thinking about buying one anyway to take camping. From what I can tell, the company saved me about $700. I’ve been there for nearly two years and I’m not a huge fan of the job, but there are perks.
The GBB has a Christmas concert next Tuesday night, which should be fun. After that, we’ll take a couple of weeks off and then start getting serious about NABBA rehearsals (we’re going in the Championship Section this year) and about the inaugural Southeastern Brass Band Festival, which was the idea of our board last summer and which – surprisingly – is shaping up to be a pretty good event. I believe we’ve got 6 bands signed up for it and a great hall in which they can all perform. That takes place in, I think, May.
It has been rainy and quite cool for the last month, and I must sing praises to my Nest Learning Thermostat. Picked it up in late summer and have nothing but good things to say about it. Since switching over from cooling to heating, it’s done a really good job of keeping the house comfortable and – from what I can see – saving me quite a bit of the green stuff.
Forgot to mention that I had my own annual review at work last week. The first one I’ve had since I’ve been there, and I got “exceptional” marks all the way down the board. First time that’s happened in about 30 years. Granted, I think it’s the first time the X-Company has even done reviews, I’m in the first class of Team Leads they’ve ever had, my boss is the first-ever Director of Service in the company’s history, and I don’t think anyone really knows what they’re doing…but still – I got perfect scores and a raise and I’ll take it. Also had a talk with my boss about restructuring going forward and there’s a decent possibility that I’ll get a bump up to some sort of capo di tuti capi role (floor lead/lead of leads) in the next year. It will take my one level further away from technology and one step closer to full-time people administration, which is not an idea that I relish; but it is sort of what I had in mind when I took the job and told the hiring manager that I guess I’d start a completely new career with the X-Company.
I’m getting more comfortable with my current role as lead – kind of shocks me at times to realize that I’m basically doing the job that my bosses used to do, but I also have the ability to take a step back if I need to clear my head and just work on technical problems. I have two seniors on my team, one of whom I’m grooming to be a lead himself, so when I want to work on computer problems, I just tell my team to go to Matt with their questions for a while. It’s working pretty well.
And I guess that’s about all I’ve got to say for right now. The featured image for this post is of my kitchen in the Cheboygan Cabin last month. I’d meant to use it for one of the posts that I wrote while in the cabin, but my phone apparently never uploaded the shot. See how rustic I am!