When it rains it really pours, doesn’t it???

Last week I found out that my biggest client is moving most of his business elsewhere, because elsewhere is cheaper. Now, there are all kinds of ways of handling this situation… let’s just say that as far as I can tell he has handled it in close to the most integrity-free way possible. It could have been worse, but not by much. For one thing, telling me at the last minute shows not only a total lack of respect for me, and concern for the fact that he knew this would turn things upside down here, but also a lack of trust. What did he think I was going to do, abscond with his data? Take the old site down before he was ready? I have no idea, but I do know that it says more about him than it does about me, because I would not do *any* of those sorts of things.

So what am I going to do now? I’m really not exactly sure. In the short term, it means working a whole lot more hours than I used to, and scrambling to find more work if I’m not keeping busy enough. In the long term it really means looking at the whole thing and deciding what I want to do. This has been a great business to be in because companies have been willing to pay a lot for high-quality hosting, but those days are going away. I’m not entirely sure I want to run a business that needs constant feeding, in the form of a steady stream of new clients. If it comes to that, it might be time to go back to working for someone else. But I’m not sure yet.

This does mean my plans to move are on hold, at least for the moment. Even though I might be able to rent out my house for more than I would pay for rent, even in NYC (keeping in mind that I’d be paying the same or slightly less for a studio apartment there that I pay for a 5 bedroom, 2500 sq ft house here), I’d still be risking losing my tenant and having to make both payments for a while. Probably not a risk I should be taking right now.

More as I figure it out… the next few months should be very interesting, probably in the Chinese curse style.

Last weekend I went to a course called Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women. I’m not sure I’m either celebrating or satisfied just yet, but it was an interesting course.

The basic idea is that we (women) tend to judge men by comparing them to what the ideal woman would do, but they are not women. So we criticize and poke fun at all the “stupid” things men do, when sometimes they are not stupid at all, just not the things we would do.

There were various strategies shared for getting men to do what you want – not of the manipulative variety, but more the right way to phrase requests so they appeal to a man’s natural tendency to want to do things for us, instead of sabotaging ourselves with our word choices as we so often do.

We aren’t allowed to share our class notes, so I won’t go into more detail, but as time goes by I may share some stories of having tried the techniques and how well they worked. I can already say that I’ve had some success with this in getting a certain person who often doesn’t reply to email, to reply to the ones that really matter. That’s progress already.

Sorry I’m a bit late posting this – it’s been a busy week (and it’s only Tuesday!).

I went for my mammogram and ultrasound on Monday, and they didn’t find anything wrong. The best guess is that the spot has been there all along, and my having lost weight over the past year just brought it to the surface.

*whew*!!!

Sorry about the silence; I’ve been a bit busy lately. A quick overview of the last 10 days:

• I spent the weekend up in Washington visiting my friends Hollie and Greg. A great time was had by all, and Hollie got a new desk! I bet she is still in storage cubby heaven.
• Mike got married. Not much to say about that, but it’s a milestone worth noting.
• I went back to the orthopedic surgeon and got told I have to suffer through another month of physical therapy before he’ll even order an MRI of my problem knee. This is getting very old… I don’t think I’ve written much about my impressions of PT, guess I should do that.
• Mark left for Iraq. He’ll be working there for at least a year, and possibly as much as three years. I’m going to miss him… we had a lot of fun together, and it was nice to have someone around to do date-like things with even though we weren’t actually dating.
• This is potentially a little scary – I went for my annual exam on Friday, and the nurse who did the breast exam said she felt a spot that’s a bit firmer than anywhere else. She’s “not worried about it”, but I’ve been sent to get a mammogram with extra views of that side. This is *just* what I need, with health insurance uncertainty coming up and potentially moving and all… so everyone cross your fingers that it’s really no big deal.
• Moving planning continues, but slowly. I’ve been researching all kinds of things, but no conclusions reached yet.
• November is going to be a busy month! I’m already booked for all of the following, and Thanksgiving plans are still to be made:

San Francisco – Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women (I know this sounds a bit hype-y, but I know people who say this workshop changed their lives)

Denver – iPhone Development Studio

San Jose – iPhoneLive

The pet sitter is going to have a good month…

I think that’s all the news that’s fit to print for the moment.

I heard this one in the car on the way home from voice class last night. I’ve heard it many times but never paid much attention to the words; for some reason this time it grabbed me, so I went and looked up the lyrics, which are posted after the jump for posterity.

(more…)

No, not in that way… :)

You may not want to read on if you have a vivid imagination and/or are easily grossed out…

(more…)

My car has these really cool rain-sensing windshield wipers, that adjust their speed depending on how thick the drops are on the glass. One of the many things I’ll miss when I sell this car, but I digress….

Tonight as I was pulling into the parking lot of the Fred Meyer (grocery store) I noticed that for a few short moments, the wipers were keeping perfect time with the B-52s singing Love Shack.

Just one of those little things you notice and go “hey, that’s cool”. And then it’s gone.

The iPhone doesn’t take great pictures to be sure, but when it’s all you have at hand it gets the job done:

An awesome sunset near my house. I couldn’t decide which I liked better, so I’m posting both:

And a rainbow over the freeway, which seemed to end right at a downtown office building (though you can’t see that in the photo):

Well, so far I’ve talked to a rental broker in New York, and a real estate agent and mortgage broker here. Next step on that front will be figuring out if I should try to refi now or wait and see what happens; it’s a pretty sucky time to sell (no surprise there) so that’s probably not a good option any time soon.

Right now I’m thinking of keeping the house and renting it out. If I stay in New York, home/apartment prices are so high that I’m not likely to ever be able to purchase one, so it’s not like I need to sell this one in order to buy one there. So my next stop on this train is probably to talk to one of those services that will manage your rental for you.

I think the next big task to tackle is changing my last name. I should get that completed before I start signing things in my new life, I suppose. So one of these days soon I will be Janine Anne Rivas once more!

Technically my name is already changed, because it’s in the divorce decree, but it’s not real until I start using it and have everything changed to reflect it. Which means not only the basics like Social Security and the DMV, but all the credit cards, utilities, and everything else. What a pain in the behind! I don’t think I’ll ever change my name again, unless it’s really important to the guy. But if he’s the right guy for me, he probably won’t care.

I’m not busy or overwhelmed enough yet, so I’ve taken up something else – I’m teaching myself Spanish, with the help of the Coffee Break Spanish podcast.

I should already speak Spanish; my dad was a native and he tried many times to teach me, but he was too impatient and I rebelled. Then I took a couple of years of it in high school and did fine, but I never used it after that so I forgot it all immediately.

I’ve been meaning to get back to it for years, and now that I’m thinking of going to live in a place with a huge Hispanic population I thought that maybe now is the time to get serious about it.

The cool thing is that I can do this while I walk the dogs; multi-tasking at its finest! The downside is that since you have to repeat words along with the student in the podcast, I have to find places to walk that are outside of the neighborhood, so I don’t scare people by walking down the street talking to myself in a strange sounding language. They’d probably think I was a terrorist, or these days I guess maybe I’d be a witch…

The dogs are strangely uninterested in the whole thing. I guess that just shows now not-focused on me my dogs are, which is something I had, sadly, already noticed. They just let me babble on, with no noticeable concern about not understanding a word I say.

Next I need to figure out how to type Spanish-specific characters on an American keyboard…

Hasta luego, todos! (see you later, all!)