Best Friends seems to be a winner. I've already had as many emails about it as all but a couple of stories, and it has only been online a few days. The "prequel" is going well, too. It won't be as romantic as "Best Friends", but it has its own... impact. More sex than in most of my recent stories, more along the lines of my early writing.
Fall is beginning to be noticeable here. We had a norther come through last night. At least, I'd guess that's what it was, the temperature dropped very quickly, but still we finished cool rather than cold. Not enough to stop Brian and me from spending a pleasant hour in the spa. We'd been promising ourselves the time all weekend, and weren't willing to give up just because the outside temperature had dropped below sixty.
My Cannas are finally failing. They've been a slight disappointment this summer, starting out so beautiful, but with as dry a summer as we've had... they don't need a lot of water, and I've revived them several times by watering, but we've had watering restrictions in place, and working around them has been too much trouble most of the time. Now the flower heads are brown. I'll water them enough to let them rebuild their roots, and I know they'll be lovely next year, but I can't expect anything more from them in '99. That's okay, they were still very pretty for a lot of the time.
Selky the Fat Cat seems to be developing his winter coat. He feels softer now than he has done over the summer. We've had very few thunderstorms to scare him under the covers, though.
I'm thinking about trading in the Miata. It's a great car, and has given me many years of fun driving, but it really is a single person's car. Now it seems that we're completely dependent on Brian's SUV. This weekend, of course, we'd need it... we couldn't even fit our bags in my car. But even going to the grocery - it's fine when you're buying for one and have a spare passenger seat, but it doesn't work for two.
I can afford it. I could afford a pretty good vehicle now. I've really never had trouble living within my means since college, but now being a "dual-income no children" household, and especially after a couple of recent raises, our financial situation is very comfortable. But I worry about becoming dependent on our current standard of living, or at least on the means. What if something were to go wrong between us? Or even if not wrong, something that makes our situation less than ideal? Let's say I'd financed an expensive car before out troubles a few weeks back. Would I have been influenced not to throw Brian out because I'd have a hard time making car payments?
Not that I think it's likely that a) I would want to throw Brian out or b) I would buy such an expensive vehicle, but it's easy when finances are no problem to make commitments that can only be met in your current circumstances, and then find it hard to change those circumstances when really it's necessary.
But I do think I need a new car. I wish there were something as fun to drive as the Miata with at least a sedan's storage and passenger space.
On the subject of buying things, Brian bought us a DVD player a few weeks back. Now, like probably every other young guy with any interest in SF movies, he's been glued to the TV watching Carrie-Anne Moss running up walls in "The Matrix".
Heh. Like I haven't spent almost every minute sitting alongside him doing the same... except that as lovely as Carrie-Anne is, it's Keanu who gets my vote :-) What a movie, and what an experience. By itself I think it justifies DVD...
I haven't said much about my new job since the first few days. Truth to tell, it has been going better than I would have expected. It's definitely higher stress than my IT job - at the time, at least. More on that thought in a moment. Since the problems with Andy, though, we've had a couple of tense moments in meetings, but generally everyone has bought off on what the software group is doing, and we're actually slightly ahead of schedule, which may make us unique in the industry :-)
Brian says the guys who are working on the hardware portion are a long way behind right now, the latest layouts had so many problems they had to be reworked completely instead of just updating the routing, and the next generation prototype won't be ready until next week at the earliest. Pretty soon, I'm gonna have to pull my team off the project and give them something else until they're ready to test.
One casualty of the job has been Brian's friendship with Andy. They were never very close, but Brian says that Andy has been more distant. He doesn't see it as a big problem, but perhaps we'd better try to mend the fences pretty soon. It may be also that Andy has just been under more pressure, not that he is reacting unfavorably to Brian because of me.
About the stress, though... as much tougher as this has been than my old job, it's a lot less than my old job would have become, had I stayed. Darrell doesn't like me, it's painfully obvious, and had I stayed where I was, I'd have that to deal with from a boss. It's ugly enough from someone on the same level, it would have been impossible to deal with there. I'd seriously be thinking about leaving by now. Of course, it's possible that he wouldn't have come on to me as he did at the retreat, but I think it more likely that he'd have been more obnoxious about it.
And that's just personalities, not even considering the hours the IT guys are working right now.
No, I think this job was a good move.
Continuing Education is finished. That link might not work yet, though... I'll probably upload this entry before I've reworked the entry page. It will probably be popular... it has more sex per hundred lines than most (any?) of my other stories :-) but it doesn't live up to Best Friends. But that's going to be hard to match.
My ISP is down tonight, so the pressure of updating the site is at least off. I'll do it from work tomorrow. Now that I'm getting a handle on my new job, I can take a break occasionally. I'm not quite as swamped as I was.
Managing is... different. Especially with this group of eccentrics. Someone said that managing software developers was like herding cats. I think that's a good analogy. A couple of them do seem to resent me, but I get the impression that they would resent any manager. Probably did Terry. I can't really ask, because I don't want to give him the impression there's a problem with them. It isn't anything I can't handle. But they really want to be left alone to work more efficiently at their own pace.
And I sympathize with that, I really do. On an individual level, especially with an intelligent, motivated individual, management of any kind is inefficient. But on a group level, whether it's a team or a department, not managing is far more inefficient, because planning becomes impossible, work is duplicated, and prerequisite work isn't ready. I mean, that's obvious... but to the programmer giving 12 hours a day to his pet project, any time spent away is done very grudgingly.
Mostly, though, they accept me. I'll be going for lunch with most of them tomorrow, Friday seems the day for an unofficial department lunch, then Brian and I will be leaving from there for my mother's.
Oh, joy.
But we'll get over it.
We didn't leave the office until 6pm Friday. We'd hoped to be away about 2, and arrive at midnight. But the network died again Friday morning, I had weekly status updates I'd promised to Terry, lots of last minute extras... when I went for lunch the network still hadn't recovered.
I'd have left anyway if we'd still been down, but Susie got the domain controller accepting logins again at noon, and I returned to a huge backlog of email. So I finally got my desk cleared at about five, by which time Brian was in the middle of something... so I used the few free minutes to upload Continuing Education and Thursday's entry. Good thing I did, I guess, having made the promise in the BBS that I'd have Brian spank me if I didn't upload a new entry by the weekend :-)
Which brings up another subject... and I was even wondering when I wrote that entry if I was going too far. Because the entry was only in jest. That's a form of sex play that I have no practical interest in. I've never tried, and I've never wanted to try. Have turned down offers...
But what's strange is, I can find stories about or involving spanking very erotic, even though I have no interest in it personally. So when I added the link to "Castle Handyman", yes, I admit, it's a site I visit regularly. Charles and Magdala have some great fiction, and I wonder why I've never gotten around to adding the site to my links page. I just wonder if I should have not made that joke in the reply.
'Tis done now, and I'm not changing it.
I drove Mary to lunch Friday, with the top down, of course, and I was telling her about my plans to trade in the Miata. She thinks I'm crazy. She's jealous of the sexy little car, she says... and as we pulled into the parking lot, we got a honk and a wave from a cute guy in a SLK, which she said proves her point.
I told her if she likes the car so much, I'll sell it to her. Split the difference between the trade-in value and the private sale value at Edmunds. It would be an especially good deal for her, because she knows how well I look after that car, and I'd rather give it a good home. She's gonna talk to her boyfriend. She likes the idea.
So, anyway, we left at six for an eight hour drive. We thought at first to drive through the night, but we were getting on each other's nerves for the whole drive, and by midnight we needed a break from each other as well as from driving. So we found a motel - and overslept Saturday morning.
Which meant that we didn't get to my mother's until midday, which didn't suit her, of course. So the weekend was already off to a bad start.
I don't want to get into my relationship with my mother. Maybe one day. For now, though... I used to think that everything had been okay until I decided to stay in Texas while she moved away with her new husband just before I finished high school. But now I realize that things were broken for a lot longer than that. I think if I hadn't made the decision to stay I would never have broken free of her influence.
At the time, I simply wanted to stay with my friends, and I wanted to go to college here, and I thought I was being selfish. In fact, I do think the problem was selfishness, but not mine.
Anyway, since she moved, I've seen less and less of her. Early vacations I'd go see her, but pretty soon I got a job and an apartment and stopped going home. These days I don't go back for holidays. It seems that I've never made a choice that she has been happy with. I warned Brian, but I knew it was going to be hard on him...
She didn't like us arriving at midday. She had been worried about us, she claimed, although I'd called her the night before to tell her not to expect us. Then she griped about us arriving while she was making lunch... well, you get the picture. She was civil to Brian, barely, but started making cruel remarks to me about my lifestyle, and for Brian's sake I didn't lash out at her, though he was probably more hurt than I was by her spite.
Like she's a paragon of virtue. I barely saw my stepdad all weekend, he stays away from her, and he and I have nothing in common... but he's been married to her now for, what, over eleven years? More than my dad or first stepfather.
And she's very clever with her insults. You can't really say, "stop being rude", because any one snide remark by itself will always have an excuse, like the daughter of a friend who lived with her boyfriend and he beat her up, or the "promiscuous" woman she read about who died of aids, or a comment about how my snoring keeps everyone awake. (As far as I know, I don't snore, and Brian has never said anything to the contrary.)
Obviously, by now she knows we're living together, and she doesn't like it, but quite honestly if it weren't that, it would be something else. The only reason this is a more sensitive subject is that when she snipes at me, she also hurts Brian. Which makes it ideal, for her.
Then, partway through dinner, my cellphone rang. That really set her off, starting in on work being more important to me than family, and why I wasn't able to take a break even for a weekend.
It was Susie, there was another network domain controller catastrophe. I tried to talk to her with this constant stream of grousing from my mother, directed at Brian, but meant for my ears, going on in the background. I had to go to a different room, and I had her call me back. She hadn't been able to find anyone else to help her, and Darrell's cellphone was turned off.
I gave her a few pointers, then asked if she could call back, while I finished lunch. I endured my mother's complaints, then worked for a couple of hours more with Susie, we finally tracked down the problem, another system's configuration, probably what the real problem had been on Friday.
Brian was thoroughly depressed by the time I rescued him. We had barely any time to talk without my mother around, but I apologized to him and reassured him as best I could.
Of course, my mother had made up separate beds for us. I did sneak into his for a cuddle, but that's all, we figured a little deprivation was worth it not to give my mother more ammunition, and sure enough, Sunday morning she made a point of checking that both beds had been slept in...
I think sometime Saturday night, Brian must have decided he'd had enough of my mother's garbage. Sunday he argued with her. Politely, but quite firmly. Mom didn't seem to know how to take it, and she certainly wasn't happy... but I was proud of him. We left as early as we reasonably could, and instead of taking the drive all at once, we decided to take it easy, stay in a motel again and get to work a few hours late.
Brian drove most of the way again, and I used the opportunity to write. I've thought about writing a babysitter story, but although I've had a few thoughts lately about stories of big age differences, I'm very uneasy with the typical older guy/teenager thing. I don't mind writing about teenage sex, but I won't touch exploitation, and the middle-aged man and underage girl, I just won't do it. So I had to come up with a slightly different idea.
I tried it out on Brian at the motel, it was still very rough then, but readable, and judging from his reaction, it's going to work. One of these days we need to read Best Friends together :-)
Another busy week <sigh>. Poor frazzled Susie has no clue how the configuration error happened last weekend, but she's been able to keep everything together since then. So I've been able to concentrate on the work I'm supposed to be doing...
I felt depressed early in the week. Spending time in my mother's company tends to do that to me. A couple of evenings in the hot tub helped, and now I'm more irritated with myself that I let her get to me than feeling down.
We're going out with Rob and Clarice tonight, not sure where yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
There's supposed to be a cold front coming through today, so the hot tub may be unused for a while. Weather this week has been perfect, though. There's a mockingbird who has been greeting us each morning, singing its heart out, I don't know how long he's been there, it might be that I just haven't noticed him until now, but he also helped ease my depression this week.