Weekly Round Up: Catching Up

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  This weekend was Boy Scout camp weekend, which means that the menfolk went to the woods and I went on an out of town adventure!

Eats

At home - nothing memorable

On the road -  I had a busy Saturday and was STARVING at dinner time.  I went to a local brewing company and absorbed an amber ale and a burger.

Workouts

For the next few weeks I'm going to work my way through a bunch of "one week" Caroline Girvan series.  This week I did the Complex Series, which was based around 3 minute blocks of alternating exercises.  It's a tough format, but I liked the workouts.

I've gone back and forth on her Sunday HIIT workouts - (1) I'm not a big fan and (2) I don't have Sunday mornings consistently open for workouts.  My current plan of attack:

• If it's a workout that for sure I know I'm going to hate, for example pretty much all of the no equipment workouts, I'm skipping it.
  
• If I have something better going on - for example this Sunday I was traveling and yes I coulda brought weights with me and I coulda worked out but I would rather enjoy vacation - then I'll just skip the workouts.
• If I'm home on Sunday, then I'll do one of the dumbbell HIIT workouts, and I'll choose them from the pile of workouts that I've skipped so far - specifically the final Beastmode workout and the final Complex series workout are on the list.

And guess what, it just so happens that the place that I went to for my long weekend getaway is known as a bike friendly town, so I took Bikie along for the ride.  On both Friday and Saturday, I spent the day exploring, walked from the Airbnb to dinner, and then walked back to get my bike and went to the biking trail to close out the night.  It was a fun routine.

Watching

Oh my, The Last of Us started good and then got even better.  I'm on episode 7 of 9.

This weekend I caught a few movies.  When I travel, my goal is to be in the Airbnb for as little as possible but also I don't want to be out at night, so there's a natural movie watching slot at the end of the day.  Both movies were repeat views.

First up - I've been seeing a lot of noir stuff on Youtube, which is making me want to rewatch all the noirs plus catch the ones I haven't seen.  I started with a rewatch of This Gun for Hire.  Alan Ladd is a hitman who gets double crossed by a client and wants to send the message that it's not cool to screw over your hitman.  Veronica Lake is a nightclub singer who's been recruited as an agent by the police to investigate the same client.  Their paths cross, their missions are compatible, they have hella chemistry....

Second up - Blazing Saddles.  I saw it when I was a kid and thought it was hysterical, and then saw it as an adult on a day when I must have been in a mood and it didn't register with me at the time.  It was back on my radar because a few weeks ago when I was teasing my Champaign trip I was looking for a short clip of "I Get a Kick Out of You" and was surprised to see that it had been used in Blazing Saddles.  Then I saw that the Unspooled crew were doing an episode on it, so I felt it was a sign from the universe that I needed to take a fresh look.

Wow, I really must have been in a mood the last time I saw it.  I remembered everything that was hysterically funny when I was a kid and enjoyed it on an adult level now.  10/10 recommend.  Fun fact that it was the first US movie where farts were heard on screen.

Reading

All done with Trespasses, which had a "did not see that coming" ending.  It was a good 'un.

Next up: I started Before We Were Innocent.  Between you and me...I have no idea where I heard of this book but for some reason I put a Libby hold on it, and it finally came in.  So far it's "two friends who are adults but when they were young Something Bad Happened".  I've only just started it so we'll see if it takes.

Werkity Werk

FINALLY FRICKIN FINALLY I GOT A JOB OFFER!!!!  And made the easy decision to turn it down.

The backstory on The Good Fish Co is here.  I had a panel interview with the coworkers on Tuesday.  I liked them, but they kept mentioning routine parts of the job that required waiting for information to come in late in the day.  They also really liked that I was on Eastern time because that would be a huge help to them on Pacific.  There were red flags popping everywhere that this job meant working both Eastern AND Pacific hours, so that gave me my answer.  Actually I already had the answer, because the more time I had to think about it the more I realized that I really would not enjoy the daily workload for this job.

On Friday as I was getting ready to leave for my trip, the recruiter emailed to ask if we could have a call.  I emailed back that I was free for the next 10 minutes or that we could talk on Monday.  She called right away and said that I had gotten the job.

They were nice enough to have put a salary range in their job description, and when we'd talked on my first call, I told her that I was making the top number.  Their offer was for $5k less.  I asked her if I could have the weekend to think it over and also to have a call with the supervisor to discuss work hours - the purpose of doing this was to get the job offer in writing for my trophy case and to keep the fish on the hook for as long as possible just in case I changed my mind.

The two things that I didn't like in the offer letter:

• The bonus amount wasn't stated and the way that it was written was confusing
• Their PTO was mediocre

Here's how they stacked out in the end:

If I had wanted this job - I would have asked for the extra $5k, asked what their merit increase process was (a big mistake that I didn't do for my current job), asked them to spell out the bonus and if there were any weird conditions on it, asked for more PTO, and big time would have asked for clarification on the time zone difference and work hour expectations.

As it was - nothing changed in my thinking over the weekend and no one at my current job did anything to piss me off today so I sent them a Dear John letter and said that it was a very difficult decision for me.

The plan from here - ima put my search on the back burner until late June.  That gets me through vacation and my next stock payout.  If something fabulous pops up I'll change my plan accordingly.

That's all she wrote!  If I get time later this week I might write more about my trip.  I think it might be too far off the beaten path to be of interest.