Anybody out there?

Time to shake the dust off this here blog, I guess, largely because my new job leaves me a lot of time to kill.

Yes, I have joined the realm of the "grown-ups" and have acquired a real desk job. I have my own cubicle in an office and everything (I have my own phone extension! Wow!).

I've been here for three weeks now and have yet to decorate the cube at all. I only actually think about it while I'm here, staring at the blank walls hued in various shades of white and grey. The woman in the cubicle next to me has plants and a lamp and a little office supply organizer (pens and pencils and scissors, oh my) and photos of a cat, presumably hers. I don't know how long she or any of the other employees have been here; I just know it's longer than I have. I suppose I could spend some of my downtime shopping for office decorations and supplies on Amazon... but I digress.

So the new job is actually only part time, and is actually an assistantship. Which means although my average hourly wage (according to my time sheet) is $3.06, they're paying for six credits of graduate tuition this semester (which would bring the average up to -- well, I don't know, but a lot more than $3.06). I work for technology services, which sounds really fancy, but thus far has meant spending a lot of time in my cubicle, at my computer, waiting for assignments which involve making small changes to the university website. For example, I added a question mark to an FAQ entry which lacked one, and added the second "M" back into "commuter" at the top of a title page.

Yes, some (most) of my assignments have been more involved than this. But I still have a lot of downtime. I've invested some of that time into learning Adobe Illustrater (and by "learning," I mean "becoming frustrated by") from a book. So far, this is what I've made:



A priceless gem waiting to be discovered by the design world, I know (wow! A flower in the sky!?). The book itself is actually rather helpful, despite being two versions behind the 5.1 I've been given (I've also acquired a couple of new skills in Photoshop, but those were mostly by searching the "Help" box and wading through a lot of useless results).

So anyway, I'm at my own desk in my own cube with my own phone (which never rings) and I've met most of the other people here (thanks to my boss, who is actually pretty cool) but they're all roughly a decade older than I am, and they often have important meetings in the conference room nearby (which means I got to snag some of the leftover candy afterward) and I try not to spend too much time on Facebook since my computer screen is visible from the doorway.

So, you shall be privy to my time-killing activities via this blog.