This weekend I attended two halloween parties and had a great time. The first was hosted at a gigantic home in Belle Meade and there had to be 200 people there by midnight. I went early to this party and left around 10pm to go to the other party, knowing I would want to return. Anyway, NiT has a link to some pictures. Alas, I am not in any of them, but they do capture some of the controlled craziness that ensued. I actually only knew the host and one other party guest, so I walked around the house countless times looking at costumes and made friendly conversation with some other guests. Open bar + yummy food + lots o people = good times!!

The second party was hosted by one of my Actor’s Bridge friends, Pru, and it was great to see all my theatre buds in their goulish getups. I opted for a nondescript costume combination of a black satin dress, some black wings, and a black halo. I was hence referred to as a “dark angel”. Worked for me.

Last night, although it wasn’t a halloween bash, I participated in a work function at 100 oaks mall. Vanderbilt is going to be moving some clinics and opening up some new ones out there starting next year. This was kind of a pre-party for tenants of 100 oaks as well as lots of employees and donors. I spent the whole night demonstrating some parts of our EMR and socializing with co-workers. Not a bad way to spend a “work night”.

One thing I love about my job is that I make my own schedule/priority list. At any given time, I probably have my pick of 12 things I could be working on. Some of them are just small edits to forms, others are projects that affect the entire clinic.

So it pleases me greatly that I can just say, “I don’t feel like working on this anymore” and move on to something else for the time being. Of course, I think I’ve earned this right because I do generally get things done on or before the requested time frame. But I also realize I’m lucky that I don’t have to clock in and out, or tell someone when I’m going to lunch. In short, I really do love my job.

A few weeks ago I took Jason to see my office for the first time since I moved in the spring. It has a great view of 21st Avenue, as I’ve demonstrated through some of my weather pics, and it is the biggest office I’ve ever had. But was that what Jason noticed? No. He was most impressed by the collection of dress shoes I have available at my disposal everyday. See, I thought it made much more sense to wear flip flops to work, and then pick which pair of shoes I wanted to wear when I actually got to my office. That way, I could choose to wear flats for certain meetings and heels for others. Jason thought this was quite clever and urged me to post about it. So, here’s a picture of my small shoe collection. And yes, I organized them just for you.

So today I discovered that I am not receiving support tickets I am supposed to be receiving because my name is not valid in the ticket system. When I called to find out why, they told me that it shows I was “terminated without pay” a few months ago. Wow. Who knew? Glad they told me.

Turns out when I changed my name, it created multiple instances of my name and all my tickets were being split amongst the different accounts. To solve that, it sounds like they had to say some of them belonged to someone who was terminated. Guess they did it to the wrong one.

As I was looking at the support ticket client, they tell me I don’t have an account. I’m like “Uh…then why am I able to log in??”

Their reply? “We’ll call you back”. Nice.

Meredith left yesterday and its back to reality for me! We had a great weekend, enjoyed some great food, and just had a great time together. Mere – you should still move to TN, even if you have that free school thing working out for you in LB. :P Love you!

Do you ever feel like there are times in your life when you are on the verge of something great? And the anticipation of reaching that point kinda drives you insane? Well, I can honestly say I’m there right now in multiple arenas of my life. First and most superficially, my best friend is flying in from California to see me this weekend. It will be the first time I’ve seen her since my wedding and I’m so excited. Jason is going camping all next week, so she is going to keep me company this weekend.

Secondly, we are sooooo close to beginning the work on our house. We believe we have selected a contractor (we’re giving one other guy a chance to pitch his bid tomorrow, but we’re pretty sure who we’re going with) and we have secured the finances we need to begin (and hopefully complete) the job. Next week I plan on packing up a lot of the things we will need to move in order for the construction to take place and try to find appropriate places to store them. Jason and I have succumbed to the fact that we’ll be eating with paper plates and and plastic utensils for a few months. Wow. Thank goodness we have a spare bathroom and ample living space downstairs. We can even pull the futon out if we end up needing to sleep down there.

Lastly, my job is taking an exciting turn (I hope) toward becoming a Project Management position. My boss has been working on the change for quite a while, but it is finally official and we’re going over the details today. Basically, now my job title will reflect the work I’ve been doing, but also give me some added clout to take charge over some of the projects I’ve just sort of been helping with. It means more responsibility, but also a greater level of focus, and fortunately a promotion.

:)

At a work luncheon today we started talking about the unknown sex of the pregnant woman’s baby and I just knew I should’ve been covering my ears. I am the only one in my work group who does not have a child, and two couples just recently had their first child, so there is always talk about gross baby stuff. Well, today they were talking about how the pregnant woman and her husband are choosing not to find out the sex of the baby until the delivery, but how they were going today for the appointment that would tell them the sex, if they were going to find out. Then they started talking about the first baby and how they couldn’t really even see the sex on the ultrasound, even though the doctor was able to identify it.  She described it to them like this: “It either looks like a turtle or a hamburger”.

[pause]

For some reason, I was okay with the turtle part, but the hamburger part made me a little queasy. That visual just doesn’t sit right with me. And why did we have to talk about that at lunch??

Yesterday I was recognized for some of my work with the perioperative services in the children’s hospital as well as my services as a volunteer. There were two awards ceremonies back-to-back (but totally unrelated, which was all very coincidental), one at Vanderbilt and one at the Frist Center.

The first one was for the “Perioperative Innovation Center”, which awards nominees based on peer recommendations. I was awarded in the category of Process Improvement for my work on an electronic surgery scheduling program for Pediatric Urology. Basically, I helped create an electronic form that not only requests a surgery date and time, but also automatically faxes a letter to the referring physician letting them know their patient is going to have surgery at Vanderbilt. It was quite a big deal and will soon be rolled out to other Pediatric Clinics (which of course means more work for me, but oh well). Anyway, they gave out these really nice glass awards and I was very honored to receive one:

After that ceremony, I headed over to the Frist Museum for the “Volunteer Recognition Celebration”. It was a buffet dinner, but was mainly pasta, of which I’m not the biggest fan. It also included open admission to the museum, which has a Picasso/Matisse exhibit going on right now. It was very beautiful, as you might imagine, but after going to Paris and seeing all that artwork, almost nothing will compare to the variety I saw there. The actual ceremony was nice, but they could really only recognize a few people because there are over 500 volunteers. Although it was pretty crowded and I had to pay for parking and run to my car in the rain and still buy dinner after I left, it was still a fun event.