Cold cold go away

Ok I am officially whining about the cold, I’m sick of it.  We’ve had pretty much a week of temps dropping into the lower 40’s and 30’s, bottoming out at 31 degrees the other day.  A day or two is fine, a week just sucks.  As you can expect, our landscape has taken a huge beating.  Once again I’ll be spending hours tending to things once the cold leaves which hopefully is today.  The long range forecast doesn’t show any returns to these sort of temps thank goodness. 

Even with the week of cold I still have held rigid in my no coat policy.  I’ve worn just a long sleeve shirt to work.  Randall has taken things to an entire new level. He refuses to turn on the heat in his house since he lives in Florida. As a result as you can see the temperature in his condo has dropped to ridiculously low levels. 

I can’t imagine letting our house get that cold.  If the thermostat temp drops below 70 both Ali and I really mind it.  It’s supposed to be up to the mid 70’s by Friday.  I’m ready for it.

I finally scheduled my Microsoft test for Friday.  I have been studying off and on for the test for over a month.  I’m at the point where I want to puke if I look at another practice question.  I haven’t done any certification testing for a couple of years.  I heard they have upped the difficulty level of the MSFT tests so hopefully I can keep my perfect Microsoft testing record intact. 

These cert tests are really mostly a waste of time since many of the features that they test heavily on are used in very large corporate environments and will never see the light of day in my network environment.  However in the IT industry if you don’t push yourself to keep learning you are setting yourself up for trouble if for some reason you find yourself back out there looking for work.

I remember when I first started in the business and was doing integration of new systems a tech that I worked with gave me some good advice.  Never be afraid to take on stuff you never did before, never stop learning how to do stuff.  The more you know the more valuable you become.  It was ironic that this guy gave me the advice as he regularly caught hell from the boss for being unorganized and a poor communicator.  However he also was the only guy that knew how to do a bunch of stuff so it didn’t matter.

I still have  a small bottle oil from Jim.  It was jokingly referred to as the “magic Studs oil”.   Once he left Entre I kept it as a good luck charm. So far it’s worked out for me, thanks Jim.