robotech_master

It started out like any other Monday. Then about half an hour into my shift, my manager asked me to come to a conference room. I went more than a little nervously, my "principal's office" instincts acting up…then you could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather when I found out what she wanted.

About a month ago, she'd put me in for some kind of "job progression" thing. I'm not entirely sure what it means, or if there are more responsibilities that come with it, but anyway, the upshot of it is, I'm getting an 11% raise. Without going into specifics, this is going to mean a salary bump in the low hundreds of dollars per month, the low thousands per year, for me. It's also going to mean the scads of overtime hours I'm currently working are going to become even more lucrative. I started working at the higher pay rate today, and will first see it reflected in the paycheck I'll get two weeks from Friday.

I'm still kind of stunned. It feels like I'm finally starting to win at adulting.

( It's been a hard financial slog for years, but now it feels like I'm finally starting to break even. )

I suppose that when you get right down to it, I feel…at least 80% wealthy. A lot of people wish they could be wealthy just for all the things they could buy—but for the last few years, I've wished for wealth just so I wouldn't have to worry about living from paycheck to paycheck and not overdrawing. And now, at least for now, I have that. I have the thing that was 80% of what I wished to be wealthy for. So, I guess I'm 80% wealthy.

And it's a rich man's world.

Well, it was a decent enough day. Woke up a bit early, couldn't get back to sleep, so I listened to my friend demiurgent's newest project, a podcast. Kind of neat. Not your usual review or day-in-the-life 'cast, this was more a sort of artistic thing, combining writing, delivery, and music. It was about fatigue and its effects, which fit as I was feeling fatigued myself. It was something to think about on the bike in to work, when I had the thoughts to spare. Stopped off for a croissant and shortbread cookie (to go) from Panera, then headed into the office.

Nothing much doing; ticket queue was fairly slow, and boss was out all day on one of his local networking projects. I did a bit of noodling around on the Internet, wrote a LJ entry and a post or two for my essay journal…and accidentally wiped out my entire terrania.us www directory while trying to test something for a client. Fortunately, our ISP does weekly backups, and I hadn't actually updated any of my stuff in a coon's age except for the journal, and it's a blogger.com journal so all my stuff was automatically backed up. In the end I lost about four days of site statistics, and some Motivator images I'd just uploaded from my home computer to have a place from which to link them. (I'll probably post those at some point when I get around to it, either here or in robotech since that's what they're about.)

I picked up my paycheck from work, then I caught a bus out west to the BioKinetics clinic, where I picked up my paycheck from them too. Taken both together, I essentially got about 2 1/3 paychecks today. A nice little influx of funds; now I can pay off my $513 credit card bill (I know, I'm a big spender) and my monthly utility bills and maybe have enough left over that I won't feel too guilty about renting a car sometime soon and going to visit a friend. Biked on home after that, and by the time I got here I was soaked with sweat. Fortunately some air conditioning and electric fan action took care of that.

At the moment I'm sitting in City of Heroes not real sure what, if anything, I feel like doing. Maybe some friends will show up. Maybe I'll watch a movie. Maybe I'll take a nap. Maybe I'll post in my Livejournal. Hey, that's an idea!