Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

There was a time, not so long ago, when I used to use this blog as little more than a place to bitch about my job. Day in and day out, I would complain and complain, probably to the boredom and annoyance of my readers. That being the case, I want to make sure now and point out a day like today when things are going well.

Today was a good day because I was kept busy with a variety of tasks. I'm in full swing now (finally) with my new responsibilities in our graphics area, and there was some of that to work on today. Proofreading is still my primary responsibility, of course, and there was some of that as well. It really makes the time pass by a lot more quickly (and more enjoyably) when I'm busy and when I'm not sitting there doing the same thing all day long.

I'm really pretty stoked about the graphics work I've been doing. Granted, it's extremely basic: I have to find or scan cover art for new DVDs so we can use it on our company website or in our catalog, and I do some minor retouching of the images using Photoshop. I went to that Photoshop seminar a few weeks ago, and I have really been enjoying the image manipulation part of my job since then. The stuff I learned at the seminar went well beyond the scope of anything I would ever need for my job, but it's still fun to kind of play around with the images. I'm still learning a lot, but I feel like I've done some pretty good work so far. Today I was given a stack of images to scan, and all of them were pixellated and the colors were washed out. By the time I got finished with them, the pixellation had been minimized and in fact nearly eliminated, and I got some pretty vibrant and natural-looking color into them as well. I was really pleased with that, and I even surprised myself with how well they turned out, given my limited experience.

Some of the extraneous stuff has gotten better as well. There's a fairly regular group of people I eat lunch with each day, and I just generally feel more comfortable with the people there than I did for quite a while after I started. There are still some people I just don't like, but you'll have that. I get along with everyone, and I have a couple of people I would call friends, and that's good enough for me.

There are still a couple of minor irritants, but I doubt there's a job out there with none. The most major one is that I really need to be making more money. In time, that could become more than just an irritant--I am looking for other jobs, and if something comes up that pays more, I'll have to look into it. Beyond that, though, things are pretty good. I just wish our damned satellite radio would stop going on the fritz.