I had a semi-interesting weekend. I attended a fundraiser for an acquaintance and wound up striking a conversation with this cute blonde whom I was really attracted to. She was from out of town visiting her sister and during our conversation I noticed her engagement ring so I shifted gears from flirtation mode to innocent question mode so I wound up asking about her fianc� who was in boot camp for the Marines and asked her when the date was and a few other questions such as how do you like Chicago? and that was pretty much it.

Afterwards I mingled with a few other people and wound up having late-night pizza with another friend whom I walked home because she was only a few blocks away then I found a cab and headed home, showered up because it was sweltering that night and finally hit the sheets. Then the dream happened. I was in some amusement park ride, you know the kind where you stand up against the wall in this centrifuge thing it spins around and the floor drops on you but you are sticking to the wall due to the centripetal force? Well I was on the ride with the cute engaged blonde from the night before.

We were next to each other on the ride sticking up against the wall and somehow we wound up facing each other and started kissing. I don�t know if we were still on the ride or not we still had that weird gravity effect where we were stuck up against a wall. She kind of turned around shifting herself around so that we wound up in the 69 position and then I just woke up sometime around 8:00am with some crazy morning wood.

Then I was thinking to myself whoa, what just happened? Like yeah, she was attractive but it�s not like I had that kind of chemistry with her and within a microsecond of seeing her engagement bling I dismissed her as a candidate for my flirtation. I�m not even going to try to overanalyze this whole thing, given that the chance I�m never going to see her again is rather high.

But anyway, enough about all that noise, I�m not sure if I mentioned it before, but I have a 5-day Caribbean Cruise planned with some family. The reality hasn�t quite hit me yet because I�m still trying to tie up loose ends at work so that the person who is left behind isn�t overwhelmed while I�m gone. Oh, I just learned recently that she�s having another baby and is expecting 8 or 9 months from now. I remember the last time she took leave a few weeks after I started about a year and a half ago, man was I swamped. It was a trial by fire of sorts.

I really hope they hire more people in my department before she takes leave again. We are already short 1 person and he barely helped out with the phones because he was busy with all these other projects that we are expected to fill. Oh well, whatever. I also hope they don�t stiff us come review time either because we are doing a lot more stuff. One thing I�m not really digging is our new arrangement. The other person that I work with is supposed to be my lead now, which is cool because she worked in that particular group longer and she does shoulder quite a bit more responsibility than I do.

The only problem with this arrangement is that she acts more like a peer with me than a lead, which again is not too bad, but when I show any kind of initiative outside of my pre-prescribed duties (aka doing the stuff that nobody else wants to touch) the boss above us gets all hissy and tells me to check with my lead before I do anything so basically she gets first pick at whatever comes up and anything she doesn�t want to do she should delegate the task to me.

The problem is I�m not trying to show anybody up. I�m just doing the kind of thing I�ve always been doing before the other person left the company and that is taking challenges as they come along. Now there�s all this red tape that I have to navigate my way through instead of doing what it is I do best and that is solve technical problems. I guess I�ll just have to play along for now, I mean what else can I do?

I respect the other person I�m working with and I�ll do my best to let her be the authority figure that she is supposed to be and just focus my career advancement energies back to my school and the completion of my Master�s degree. But before I do all that I should actually look forward to this upcoming trip, because I�m totally going to need it to decompress. I might even score a tan too so I�ll be darker than my usual self, if it doesn�t rain the whole trip like the forecasts say, because that would be a bummer. Well, there�s always getting drunk and hitting on random females, that and gambling I the ship�s casino.

So anyway, I�m going to be swamped the next few days with stuff from work and doing last-minute vacation preparations and I�m not really sure if I will have net access from the boat. I think they actually have WiFi but I think I�m going to leave my computer home because I spend all day on it and I probably need a vacation from that too, not that I blog regularly anyway, but at least now I have a legitimate excuse for not blogging for so long. So anyway, I should probably catch some sleep so I�m going to call it a night. Until next time�