The Holt Blog

Yay! We have had a really nice christmas break so far. Spent Christmas with my family, finally was able to get my mom to sit down and watch Elf. I have probobly watched that movie 10 times this season….my favorite one for Christmas! Then we celebrated Bens bday on monday – 25 – and that was nice and low key, had our friend Ryan over and played some Settlers of Catan. Yay! Then today i made my first gingerbread house with some friends! very fun! other then that we’ve been enjoying movies and reading and plans with friends. Truly a relaxing vacation!

Got back last night from a GREAT trip to Texas! Flew out friday and got to be on the same flight with Brie, the only other traveler from MA! We were actually able to sit right next to each other which made for a great flight We stayed outside of Dallas in Rowlett with friends of Kims. They were awesome….told us that “this is your your house” and really did make us feel right at home. Such a neat couple….mexican and haitian and so so giving and serving. Kim put them to work well with wedding prep and taking care of details….and they never once complained. loved them! Fun first night as brie and I settled into our room and just had fun talking. In the morning we awoke to cold water in the shower….which was thankfully a humorous situation… and you know, i guess i can’t blog about every detail….so…. the wedding was great, in spanish too! And the cermony was so so nice, very special…. so so good to see my friend kim. I miss not being able to see here more often, and it was very special to see here We some sightseeing afterwards, and on sunday too, and i flew out sunday night! Really i kinda felt like i was in Mexico! We were around mostly spanish speaking mexicans and they were all just so nice (and all teachers!) check out pics! Congrats to Mr. & Mrs. Munoz!

My boss called and said I could train after Christmas on a different route. I’m going to give it another try.

I also went and picked up my computer today. I’m transferring many gigabytes worth of data right now to restore what I had before. Among other things, I lost my funny movie collection that I had been collecting over a few years. Little clips, bloopers, and the like. I’ll have to start that from scratch.

I went through two weeks of training for the USPS. One week was just training for the company like safety, the other week was RCA training (specific to my job). I also spent a few hours learning to drive the LLV, or mailtrucks, which are right-hand drivers. I started training with a carrier on Tuesday and that’s when I became disillusioned and overwhelmed.

I worked over 9-10 hours (no breaks) both days on one of the biggest routes at the worst time of year. We had two bins full of packages each day. Yesterday Lee (my carrier trainer) took a separate trip just for the packages while I worked for hours “casing” mail. I delivered 1/3 of the route the first day and 1/2 on the second. The latter took me until about 5:00, which was after dark, and Lee had to follow me around because I had no idea where to go. There is still much of the route that I don’t know, and I was told I would be expected to deliver the entire route this Saturday. Both days I came home exhausted. I looked at the guy sweeping the floors with envy – I would much rather have his job.

Today I didn’t go in. So far, I hate this job. Lee is a pretty good trainer – an older Vietnam war veteran with 17 years experience in the USPS and 20 years in the USAF. But he was trying to train me while getting his own route done – nearly impossible in the first place at this time of year. He had just come back from burying his nephew. My boss put pressure on him not to have me work over eight hours so I didn’t get overtime. On top of that he had to try and train me – the office procedures as well as the route itself. The first day took him until 6 or so, and the second until around 5:30 (I came in at 7:00). I don’t know what management was thinking, but maybe it was something like, “Let’s see how fast we can get the new guy to quit.”

Yeah, it happened to me. A geek’s worst nightmare – the loss of data! Fortunately, I did a backup the night before of important stuff. Getting back to my old state will mostly take hours and hours of restoring, tweaking, and downloading. Future revisions to my backup program will be much more inclusive.

Jill and I made two trips in one day to the Burlington mall to visit the Apple store to get it fixed. I tried everything I could to fix it but it’s just dead. A backup recovery company could probably get the data very easily, but they charge too much. It was much more cost effective to just get a new hard drive. So now I’m using our other iMac and wondering when my other one will be ready for pickup!

This weekend is going by fast! Of course, for me it has really only just started since i work on saturdays and am off mondays. So, saturdays was consumed with kids, as i did 3 visits with students from school. They all went well….just a long day. And i went straight from work to Nashoba for the Raging Cow. Fun times – got to meet new peeps and hear some talented musicians! Ben played some tunes with John wheeler and they sounded really good together! Also, i was definately a fan on Evie (is that how he spells his name?) and Hannah D. Loved the sing along .

Lastly, today….I have let about 3 hours be consumed with online photo stuff!!! yikes…just wanted to get some prints with a little bit of a design on them….and went from site to site…my usual favs didn’t come through for me…snapfish had to order a min of 20….photoworks didnt like my password….shutterfly too pricy….finally i did a search and tried a new one….winkflash.com. Good, had what i wanted, and was like $8 cheaper that all the others! yay wink flash, your my new friend and now, I HAVE TO get OFF the COMPUTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Raging Cow is tonight. It’s at my high school and is kind of a “coffee house” type atmosphere. It was started by our old church and has grown into something a lot of students and bands participate in.

Jon, a friend of mine at Nashoba, is a stellar guitarist. We’re playing some stuff tonight – come down and see!