Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

More than a month! I should really begin making this a more habitual thing. Even a sentence or two a day - but that would make this more like Twitter or Tumblr than what it is, with the benefit of course of having a somewhat better and more consistent record of the days of my life. A quick gloss over the last month: shortly after the last post, there was a great falling-out between my then-manager and the GM, which ended in the then-manager leaving his post with immediate effect. This had a few effects; for one, my responsibilities immediately expanded to cover whatever he left behind, and for another, the command structure of the department shivered a bit and settled down into its current form - though, of course, at the moment it's changing a bit to accommodate the new manager. For some time during the in-between period I had a houseguest three days out of seven; the CEO has a son who was waiting to be drafted into the Singaporean National Service and so was drafted into the co...

I looked over my last post, and... oh dear. It seems I'm still in the same poor situation I was in then, except even worse. Well, let us begin where I left off. That incident with the car led to a bit of recrimination - I still haven't taken it in for a servicing of the front wheel, which is squeaking a bit, but nobody is worse for wear. The workload on the other hand is still there, and hasn't abated a bit - if anything it's only increased. It's having an effect on me, of course. People have started pointing out how I rarely if ever smile anymore - it's particularly evident because my scan-card photo was taken awhile ago and is all a-beam with happiness - and how I answer the phone as if it weighed a tonne, even when it's first thing in the morning. I mildly disagree: I do still smile, but only with the right half of my mouth. I suppose that makes it more a smirk than a smile. But then I don't really have anything to smile about when it comes to wor...

It's been awhile since my last post, of course it is. I don't have the time or willpower or energy on weekdays - I haven't had that for a long time -  to do anything other than quickly browse Facebook and play a short Flash game or two before sleep, and my weekends are just as tiring and full of things to do - errands to run, cleaning to be done -  and somehow I simply never get around to a few personal projects I've been putting off forever. But this week has been particularly bad, so I'm putting it down because getting the words out might help me fix a perspective on it and calm myself down. Well, not this week in particular. If I were pressed, I'd say it's been the entire past... two months or so, with the past couple of days as the cherry on top. That's how long I've been away, hasn't it? It's been an exhausting time... Well, we'll begin with November then. November itself wasn't so bad; I had NaNoWriMo going on, and I managed...

I'm in a rather tumultous sort of state of mind at the moment; there's just so much on my mind and it's quite impossible to get everything nice and clearly set down where it'll stay before it gets up and wanders around and then I have to go chase after it again. So let's start with... well, for once work isn't the Big Crazy Issue dominating my mind that it usually is; or at least right now it's only one of the Big Crazy Issues. Which is not at all a good thing, of course, but one learns to look for the small blessings in life. At any rate we will begin with my personal life, because that one at least is easy to describe. I've been having dreams again - my dreams are always weird, I'm not sure why. It's as if my subconscious looks over my shoulder when I'm awake and chatting on MSN and it sees all the horrible things I type at people in jest (today, for example, the prevailing topic of conversation was "horrible things I will do to yo...

Good heavens. It's been a long time since anything new appeared on this page, hasn't it? But then it's been a long time since I wanted to write the way I want to at the moment. I don't know why, but words and sentences have been churning in my mind for awhile... maybe it's just that a lot of things have been percolating and now they're brewed and I might as well set them down somewhere. It's better than letting them stew in my mind. And yet now, looking at this blank page, my mind wanders and cannot be pinned down to write of anything. It's very annoying, but it does show the state which my self-control has fallen to. I'm not very good at reining in my thoughts or impulses, and that's a great failing in me. But let us then impose some kind of order on things, and I will cover the main spheres of my life. Work is going somewhat well. We had audits some months ago, and the findings are still being responded to because the auditors apparently we...

It’s been a rather terrible week; or at least, last week was. I’ve been tired all weekend just thinking about it, and having to go to work tomorrow and face it doesn’t help. I can only hope this coming week will be better, but I don’t expect it to be. Last week was the preliminary audit week (for lack of any better descriptor); our main customer sent an auditor to wander the place for three days asking questions and so I spent all of the previous week frantically trying to get everything in place. My boss had, quite nicely, set out a number of requirements and I just ticked them off as they were accomplished or at least set in place to the best of my ability. All the same it was quite frustrating seeing things happen so slowly, partly due to the strange placement of the work breaks and partly due to my subordinates not being terribly enthusiastic to finish all their tasks on time because getting to work overtime gets them paid time and a half, so assigning any task within half an h...

It turns out that I’m quite capable of going a full day on quite little sleep. At least, I’ve managed to do it today, though it’s quite uncomfortable and I don’t plan on doing this often. But then it’s not quite been a normal couple of days. It’s not even been a normal week—although, I must admit, normalcy is not a quality often found in the time that I experience. Which is a good thing according to my GM, but then his views on a lot of things are alternative to put it mildly. To put things simply most of this week has been rushing things out to prepare for audits next week; somehow every time I think we’re quite ready, I go explore a little bit and check or some issue comes up and then it turns out we overlooked something and now we have to start a whole new task. On the upside it does mean less things overlooked now than before, but the obvious downside is that I keep wondering what I’ve overlooked during the latest check. And Friday night there was a birthday celebration and the...