Getting Ready to Till the Ion Farm

What's happening, y'all? I know it's been a while since I've been dropping some verbiage, but I'm not going to complain, and I'm not going to explain. I transferred to the engineering group in my company as a senior engineering technician and I like it a whole lot better. I'm still trying to understand how they do things there, but it's not as bad as starting a whole new job. I'm way happy to be out of Final Test, and it's mostly due to the fact that I like experimenting with things a whole lot better than manufacturing things.

So the winter here's been mild, I understand, but still, I'm feeling all couped up. That and working second shift. Second shift would be better if I was young and single and dating, but right now it's like a giant pain in the ass to me. It feels like I only get half of my time off because half of it is spent in the early morning hours. The 2 hours a day I'm commuting doesn't help either. Believe me, I've been giving that a lot of thought as well. If I could move closer to where I work it will be much better, I know, but the housing here is off scale. This is one of the few places in the world where half a million will buy a shit-hole. Everyone I know tries to put the spin on it, but look it, a shit-hole is a shit-hole, and whether your paying 60 G's or half a mil it has the potential to bust you up real good, like a stampede of fancy cowpokes from Brokeback Mountain.

I have to get my social game up. I thought about that on the way home last night. Enough with the professional patience of a butcher's block thing I've trying to pull off (and quite well, I might add) I need a social component with some real activity. I've been sitting around packin' on the pounds and losing my ever so petite figure. I got an awesome bike sitting in the next room I haven't climbed on since I got here, and Mass is a relatively bike friendly state. I know because I see it in the way people drive. For example, there is an old fellow I see from time to time, looks like Peter Boyle with long stringy hair, always wears a green sports jacket, and dresses like he's a Ben Franklin impersonator on his way to a 4th of July celebration. I see him every time I go to Salem, NH. I know that he can't be quite right in the head, and I surmise that the 60's expended his perceptions to the breaking point, and might have even ripped the elastic a little. Anyway, he walks in the middle of this 4 lane highway, y'know, the kind that divides a commercial area of packed in shopping plazas. I see him on the weekend, toddling through the bumper to bumper 30 MPH traffic. Never on the sidewalk, always in the street. I always give him a friendly toot on the horn as I go by and he shouts some quote from Poor Richard's Almanac like "Early to bed, Early to rise, Jerk!" or "Watch it, asshole! Oh-- and never a lender or borrower be." (I almost wrote Little Richard's Almanac. I bet that book has some funny quotes in it!) I see him all the time and he never gets hit by a car, although he should. That's how I know I can ride my bike any damn where I please in Massachusetts.