Rider withdrawals!

I am soooo ready to start riding again and soooo sick of winter. I can't wait till it warms up so I can ride again. We usually are able to ride in early April, it's just around the corner and still no sign of good weather yet.

In need of rest

People all around me have been sick with colds. People at the office and at Corp. It finally caught up to me. Yesterday at work I elected to just do prep work knowing I was not functioning at full throttle. My last night in Dallas was not good. I hardly slept because of a sore dry throat. I had another ruff night last night and had a difficult time getting up for work. No dinner tonight, between the reflux and the cold, I'm just not interested in eating. Hopefully I will feel better in the morning. I am thinking about going into work to try to get caught up after my trip. Probably will be a better idea to just stay home and get better. I can always work next Saturday if I need to for closing. Since the last day of the month is a Sunday, I have till Monday.

Last night at the Westin.

Early check out tomorrow. It will be a short day, leaving corp at 3pm. We will be taking our luggage with us in the morning for our last meeting so we can go straight to the airport from the meeting.

A couple posts back I mentioned that my chest pain is back. I did finally get to the Dr. and he said I am on the strongest medication on the market for reflux and gave me a second medication to take 12 hours after the first. It worked for a few days and I'm having problems again. He said it could be the stress from work and hopefully it will calm down once things get normal. I hope so, it's not fun to be in pain all the time.

I'm as packed as I can be for checkout and looking forward to a good night sleep.

Dallas

The weather is soooo nice here and I hear they got freezing rain at home for the morning comute. I'm in heaven.

The training is going well. I found out today that I will have to come back late April or early May. We go live with the new software in June. Time to sleep so I can think tomorrow.

Packed and ready.

What can I say...I'm a planner. I'm completely packed. I've never traveled for work before so I'm excited about my trip to Dallas. Sounds like they have everything covered. Breakfast and lunch at Corp and for dinner we are all dinning together where ever Corp chooses to take us. I am hoping for some alone time after dinner.

I'm excited about the training and getting a look at the new software before having it launched on us and also the new title. Hopefully it will come with a raise. Since we are a large publicly traded company, the pay scale is based on your title and job category. Your pay is based on levels of experience and top out making it impossible to ever go higher unless you make a  move to a different position. The bright side of that is equal pay regardless of who you are. From what I understand, even if my current position is a higher pay scale, I will not take a pay cut. It will just be a long time till I get more money. My hope is that the new position is in a higher pay scale.

The position I have now was created and Corp had nothing to compare it to. I will no longer be a Billing Analyst, I will be on the financial team. The analyst part of my title is based on the fact that I have to determine what was sold, sometimes not so easy when you sell allot of tech based marketing with so many variables. Also we sell to dealers and agencies, making it difficult to know who exactly gets charged, the dealership or the agency. Sometimes the dealer does marketing on their own and sometimes they take advantage of the agencies marketing offers. Then we also have some being billed to the dealers manufactures marketing accounts, all being billed in different ways depending on the manufacturer, mostly by entering job information and then exporting information into reports that are electronically sent to the corp offices for payment.

Now that I have bored everyone reading this to tears, time for some fun news.

We are going to a St. Patrick's day dinner and dance tonight. We have not been dancing in so long I am really looking forward to it. We used to be so good together, that people at the club tried to get us to give lessons. Now, I'm sure we will be stepping on each others feet and laughing it off. Rich used to like to push me to my limit and spring new moves on me. A long time ago, he put me into a third spin and I surprised him by keeping up. Some of the other women would ask Rich to dance with them because he danced better than their husbands. They would always tell him, "JUST NO FANCY TRIPLE SPINS!" He would just wink at me like it was our special step. They never had allot of chances to dance with him. I was a little selfish with my dance partner and only let others have the privilege when I needed a break.

For dinner last night we went to a local biker friendly place. Rich told me there would be allot more riding this year now that he is feeling better and pain free. He was in pain for over a year and finally decided he'd had enough when he could hardly do anything any more. He was very worried about the surgery because of the nerve involvement and was worried about the chance of loss of use. His surgery went so well, he only has a little numbness in two fingers. It's hard for him to feel things with those two fingertips like he used to. He said that if he needed to do it again he would not hesitate. He feels like he has his life back. It had gotten to the point that he could not ride without increasing terrible pain and numbness all the way up his arm. He said the numbness was so bad that he was not confident riding that his hand and arm would always have the strength and feeling do what he wanted it to do, not to mention the pain of having his arms up to ride.

Looking forward to a fun filled riding season.

Oh and for those who have been following...I know spring is coming...I had a dream about hundreds of bats pushing the bedroom drywall in and flying frantically around the bedroom.

Jury duty notice in the mail and the Dallas training crew paid us a visit.

As if things aren't hectic enough, I was chosen to report for jury duty in April. I hope I am not chosen to sit in on a trial. Been there, done that. It wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't so busy at work. It's not likely I will have to serve since I or a family member has been victimized by most any crime you could imagine. I'm definitely too bitter over my brother's murder to ever sit for a murder trial.

Last week the company had a training crew of four here from Corp in Dallas. They were training our production team for the new software. It's cheaper to fly 4 people here than to fly 16 there. They take one person from each job title and train them so they can train the rest.

I  have a better idea of what to expect now that I have met with some of the TX team and talked to some of our people who trained with them. I had no training from their visit, just meet and greet and some questions answered.  They have different teams training each department. I will be trained by the finance team since I will be reporting to finance starting May 1st.

It's pretty much what I had expected. I will train on the software and then try it out to see if it will do what we need it to do.

It was funny because we had a significant snow fall while they were here and none of them have ever driven on snow. She asked the day before if the company would be closed for the snow. My boss told her we are here rain, shine or snow storm. When she got in the next morning, she said that people were passing them looking at them like they wanted to say "WTF". She said she wanted to tape a note to her rear window that said, "Go around, I'm from TX."

We do tend to get a little impatient with slow drivers. We figure people should be used to it and if you're driving real slow you're just a wuss. She said, "You guys act like it's nothing." I told her just because we're used to it, it doesn't mean we like it. It's home, what can I say.

Crazy at work!

Things are really starting to get crazy...Good crazy! I am now officially in on the testing of the new software. I have been very busy with end of month wrap-up, meetings, and scheduling travel, putting in 10 and 11 hour days.

As of May 1st I will have a new boss and a new title and on the 7th of March, I have a meeting with Corp in Chicago. Then I will be flying down to Corp in TX for software testing. We are going live with the new software in May...hence the new job title. Positions are being realigned to conform with SOX regulations. (Government accounting regulations for all publicly traded companies). I will be there 3 days testing the software to make sure it has been created to do what I need it to do. I will be learning it, then trying to break it. It will be meetings and training for 3 days. I am very excited and I hope I am up to the challenge.

My trip is finalized and I have my itinerary. I will be flying down on Sunday afternoon with a co-worker. My new boss and another co-worker will be arriving the morning of the first meeting. Jan and I wanted to fly down the night before to get settled. This way we don't have to deal with rushing to O'Hare Airport VERY early in the morning to get to TX, then a 20 mile drive to Corp for 8am meeting. It's a 2 1/2 hour flight and I would have to allow for travel time to O'Hare, not to mention the fact that you have to get to O'Hare so early to get through security. Leaving Monday morning is insane, I would take nothing away from the meeting under those circumstances. Leaving the night before will make getting to the airport here much easier and less stressful. My departure and arrival back to Chicago will both be at reasonable times for Rich to drop me off and pick me up.

I am so glad I never got the other jobs I applied for. I feel like I can actually get somewhere with this company. Blessings do come to those who wait!

I went to see the Gastric Dr last Wednesday and he has given me more meds and asked if I was under any stress...well! I do feel slightly better with the new meds, Now I am taking one type in the morning and a different one with my evening meal. This too shall pass.

It will be so nice to go someplace warm and get away from the cold here. Now watch, it will snow in Dallas and it will be in the 70's here.