Vocation motivation

While I know that I really should be motivated to work for the sake of being productive and doing something worthwhile, the fact of the matter is that given the choice, I wouldn't work. The thought of doing whatever the heck I liked all day is really quite appealing. The thing is though, that I work so that I can provide for my wife and child, and make a life for us that keeps us happy, healthy and safe. Money is a big contributor to those three goals, so I work, and that keeps things good.
But recently, it's been a bit different. My wife is a stay at home mum by choice, but recently our son has become quite a handful. So she spends her days getting progressivly more tired and stressed, until I come home of an evening, which is a time she builds up in her mind as being her point of relief and respite. However, I come home tired myself, and would love nothing more then to sit down and have a rest. This makes her not happy. Meanwhile, valuable time I could be spending with my little boy ticks away while I try and recouperate from the days' work. Not that my job is particularly harsh - it's just a full day of work each day. My wife isn't interested in doing anything, because she's cactused from the day with our son, and so we all are generally unhappy until we go to bed. We then get up, and do it all again.
Why am I doing this? We were a heck of a lot happier when we were living off Centrelink while I was at uni. We spent most of our day together each day, and so I could help my wife through the tough spots. True, we didn't have our son then, but imagine if money was no object for a second. We could divide the stress of caring for an almost 2 year old between us, and get to the end of the day happy and not overly emotionally drawn. He'd be better off, we'd be better off, we'd just have a lot less money. Instead, I come home each day to a woman who would be happy to see me if she could muster the energy, and who is disapointed because she can immediatley tell that I'm not overly keen to spend the entire evening minding our son while she sleeps. I was alright when I was working a job with short hours, but now that I'm working a normal day, I just don't have the facility to come home and be our son's only source of entertainment. Couple that with the stress from a new job and trying to buy a house, and I'm just about ready to check myself in for a few weeks at the sanitarium.

Anyway, that'll do. I'm just having a smallish vocation crisis. I'll be OK shortly I'm sure.

Best. Quote. Ever.

Being an IT person, the above-linked quote makes me feel like I'm part of a group. A fraternity, if you will, of nerds, geeks, and the occasional rabid Mac user who understand that it's better to spend a lifetime automating a relativley short task as long as you know that next time you need to do said task, it won't take you any time at all...

悲しい

Do you ever have those days where things are just wrong from the outset? Today is that day for me. It's weird, because a lot of good stuff is going on: house, job, etc. It's all fine and dandy. However, there's a couple of things that are not, and of most importance is the fact that I'm not fine and dandy. I'm kanashii. Sad. Miserable, in fact. I can't shake it, because there are a number of those not-good things around me which are imminent enough to bring me straight back into it.

So yeah, that's it. Justin is unhappy. I'm sure you're all excited to be in the loop.

Speaking of being in the loop - for those of you who may not have heard, I'm actually a home owner now. I've signed contracts and all that, and the only thing really left to do is hand over $250,000 odd on top of the $15,000 odd we've already left and we can move in. It's a tops house, I'm really quite happy with it - if only I could get back to "OK" so I could be happy about it. All in good time I guess.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the free-media pool...

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
RRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

{gasp, pant, pant, choke, gurgle, splutter, wheeze, inhale...}

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
RRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

This is the sound of me, today, as once again our server had a conniption. To be fair, this time it wasn't anybody's fault other then perhaps the manufacturer of our RAID controller, who should never have put external SCSI ports on the back of the thing if they weren't intended to be used. Meanwhile, I have a cactused Exchange organization once again. I've heard of this magical thing called "brick-level backups" with Exchange, whereby you backup each individual mailbox separately. This would be a stupid waste of time, except for the fact that it's the only way to actually ensure that no server disaster is too great to recover from. Bloody Exchange. Bloody Microsoft. Bloody stupid fricking tape library that is supposed to make life easier but instead has made me stay back at work until stupid hours yet again.

In a strange turn of events, it turns out that I am Exchange's biatch.

PS: The only plus to all of this broohaha is that my boss shouts us pizza once again. Mmmmm... pizza... there's nothing like cheezy lard in a disaster recovery situation. I love pizza far too much.

A short follow-on...

As of this afternoon our Exchange server is back up and running, sans all data created prior to today. Databases will be going to at least one data recovery company, and my final 5 days of work at St Paul's begins tomorrow. Life is peachy.