Aurora Borealis

So our little town weekly newspaper arrived today, and there’s an article about MARTA’s upcoming plans to eliminate many bus routes — including the one Mr. Tldz uses to get from here up to the other bus route that services his office.  Great.  One of the great features for us about this house was convenience to that bus route.

So we’ll have to be looking into this more.  But a quick skim of the routes listed in the article to be cut suggests that routes are being cut heavily in areas where the population is not primarily African-American.  Even if that means leaving an area without bus service to a major train station, as is what happens with the elimination of “our” route.

The article even quotes the head of MARTA as saying that service cuts like this could start a “death spiral” because ridership is expected to decline drastically as a result.  Yeah, so, ummm….  do something else?

So it turns out Mr. Tldz will be going into the office every day this week and next week, too.  At least there’s the holiday on Monday!  He’s been very busy. He didn’t get home until 7:30 Monday or last night, and Monday night a co-worker of his came over in the evening and they worked some more, from about 8:30 until almost 10:00. His boss says he’ll be able to catch the 5:20 bus tonight so he can get home in time for me to go to the MOMS Club book club meeting. It seems like they’re getting a lot done, so hopefully things will settle down a bit after these two weeks.

Mr. Tldz is officially Team Lead for his group, effective yesterday.   Hooray!

He’s been acting as Team Lead unofficially for quite a while, because the guy who had the role wasn’t really doing it. D. has very good technical skills, but he has myriad health problems, complicated by some personal issues, and probably doesn’t have much interest in managerial/administrative tasks, if we’re being honest. He finally came to the conclusion that he was doing his career and job security a disservice by doing a poor job as Team Lead; so he asked Mr. Tldz about switching roles, to which he agreed and their boss approved.

It looks like Mr. Tldz will have to go into the office every day next week, as there is lots going on.  He hopes over the long term to keep the going in to 2 days per week on average.  We shall see.

He’s excited about the new challenges, and the chance to finally get the team moving in the direction it should go. We are proud of him!

Other than out of necessity bringing the fall clothes up from the basement a couple of weeks ago, I’ve kind of stalled out on the unpacking.  Still have a few boxes in the garage to finish dealing with, and all the stuff in the basement to organize. And I’m starting to get a little restless about hanging up some pictures and stuff.  I’ll have to figure out what items I’ve more or less identified placement for.  I guess after having lived in a rather barren house since listing in April, I’m ready to have things look a little more cozy again.

Had a few more things done on the house by the contractor who lives up the street.   They finished up this morning installing the cell phone signal booster gizmo we got.  So far it seems like it’s helping.  But the biggest thing we had done was putting a railing around our front porch with a gate.  It looks cute, and will even more so when the wood has “aged” long enough to be painted.  Now the Agent and The Dog and I can go out and sit on our church pew and I don’t have to worry about anybody dashing off!

Mr. Tldz has been working to get his team at work on track to go back to their shift coverage.  The whole crew has been on first shift with on-call coverage since the beginning of October with the goal of getting all the policies and procedures in place that this new group needs.  (That was only supposed to be a one-month arrangement.) It’s been tough for him because he’s not officially the team lead, but he’s had to try to function as a shadow team lead so stuff will actually get done.  The boss seems to be recognizing him as something of a co-team lead now.  Anyway, the date is set to go back to shift schedule on November 23, which will leave just Mr. Tldz and the team lead on first shift; and Mr. Tldz should be able to start to work from home pretty regularly then.  We’re looking forward to that.  He has a nice, private office setup in the new house, so it’ll be good to get to use it!

Mr. Tldz is looking, since it doesn’t seem like the issues he’s been having with his boss will get any better, despite his attempts to address them.  A couple of weeks ago, he found out about a position that seemed like a really good lead (working with a former co-worker) and he applied for it.  Then nothing happened.  Nothing.  Nothing.  But I just heard from Mr. Tldz that he has an interview scheduled for Friday morning.  Hooray!

Mr. Tldz is in the middle of a big release at work, so he had to put some hours in this weekend.  It wouldn’t have been a big deal, but his boss is being a total a%$ about a lot of things, so the weekend felt like a huge saga.

Yesterday, was a floating holiday for him, which given their current work requirement, he’ll schedule for another time.  But MARTA treated it as a holiday, so the bus that gets him to his office wasn’t running.  At least being able to work from home made it feel a little like a holiday.

There was supposed to be a meeting this morning with Mr. Tldz, his boss, and his boss’s boss to (hopefully) resolve the issues he’s been having with his boss.  But the boss’s boss came down with food poisoning and isn’t coming in today.  Hopefully the meeting will be rescheduled soon.