Sometimes, I go through periods where I’ll write an entry for this journal just about every day. At other times, a week or two will go by without me writing a thing. I think at this point I’ve gone for more than two weeks. I hope that I haven’t lost my one or two regular readers as a result.

I’ve kept myself busy at work by cracking down hard on those new languages that I’ve decided to teach myself. I have gone through about half of the C book that I purchased, and I’m finding the basic concepts fairly easy. I wrote a small program to do a quick calculation that Jennifer and I are constantly making for Weight Watchers, and it worked perfectly. Spurred on by my success, I launched Code Warrior and began to try writing a version for my Palm Pilot. I quickly found myself mired in forms, in code, events, menus, and so on. I had hoped to finish this program by this weekend so that Jennifer and I would have it on our Palm Pilots, but I wasn’t able to get it done. My next goal is to get it done by the end of the week.

I’m learning Java rapidly as well, and finding it an enjoyable and easy language to learn. Learning to program, I’ve decided, is easy. Learning to program well is hard.

So learning C, Palm OS, and Java have kept me busy for the past couple of weeks at work while the other Sacramento developer and I have sat and waited for something to do. Finally, though, the day before yesterday, we got a new project. One of the developers up in Portland had developed a new template to use for the company’s corporate site, and it fell to B– and me to take care of copying and pasting content from the old templates into the new ones. I’m certainly not expecting that every task at work will be an exciting one, but this is kind of ridiculous. This is the kind of work that companies hire temporary employees for. My title in my company is Senior Web Developer, and it’s gotten to the point where I’m embarrassed to use that title in internal business; copy-and-paste is certainly not senior level work. I’ll happily use that title on my resume, though. My boss told me, "Do a good job on this project and keep volunteering for new projects; that’s how you’ll get out of doing nothing but HTML." I was a bit too frustrated at the time to remind him that I’d been working on just that for nearly a year, and that I’d been involved in a number of projects before the corporate restructuring that went beyond this level of work. B– and I have decided to implement the code to the strictest levels of HTML 4.1 specifications as outlined at the W3C, if for no other reason than to make this project at least a minor challenge for us. According to the initial sizing of the project, it will take about two weeks to finish this one up; I expect it will take a lot less time than that. In the meantime, I have updated my resume and I’ve posted it and put myself back on the market. I’ve already received a couple of calls, and I expect that I will be able to find myself a more challenging position soon. And this is the primary reason I have for wanting to leave my current job: it holds no challenge at all for me anymore, and the level of work that I’m being asked to do at this point is almost insulting.

On a much more positive note, though, it’s now exactly two weeks until the wedding. In fact, I’m writing these words at about eight o’ clock in the evening, and in exactly two weeks from this moment, Jennifer and I will have been husband and wife for about twenty minutes. There is still a lot to do, a lot to worry about, a lot for Jennifer to panic about. Will the groomsmen all have their boots in time? Will my scabbard show up in time? Will the Christmas lights provide enough lighting for the older folks to be comfortable in the social hall for the reception? And so on and so on.

And there’s a part of me which still feels overwhelmed at the whole thing. I remember breaking up with my last girlfriend before Jennifer and thinking that I would be perfectly happy to be single for the rest of my life. I also remember, though, those times when I knew that there was something missing from my life, and when I knew I would never find a soulmate or someone that I could share my life with.

And here I am, two weeks away from being married to my best friend, the most wonderful person I have ever know, the best thing that has ever happened for me. These next two weeks, as we deal with marriage licenses, rehearsals, and so on, are going to be busy and hectic. I just hope that it won’t be another two weeks until I get to post again!