Vacation is over. I'm back at work. Today marks 2 years of being with this company. And for the third year in a row, I start work on the earliest possible work day of the year: January 2nd. In fact, I remember my manager asking me to start my first day on the job even earlier, but I said no way. I wanted at least a week's vacation in bewteen jobs, especially when I hadn't really taken any vacation time in 2000. So when the hell is January 2nd going to finally fall on a weekend? And the question on everybody's mind: will I remember to write "2003" and not "2002" on all those checks for the next couple of months?

I start with checking my emails. That's always the first thing I do at work when I come back from a vacation. No sense in jumping right in with the real work you were doing before you left. Hell, who can ever remeber what it was? You need to get back into the groove of things first. I get an email dated the day of my vacation start, from a friend asking me for my snail-mail address to send a gift. Whoops. I read company-wide reminder emails about the sexual harrassment policy, another one about how to properly resign, a report of a mouse stolen from our QA lab, and our rules about work-unrelated email. That was weird. Did a line of exciting thigns happen when I was away? I get a "Merry Christmas" message from Hari (who my manager insists on calling "Harry"). I'm not Xtian, but I digress. He came back from his 4 week trip to India and brought me a little Ganesh statue. I'm not Hindu, but I digress -- Ganesh statues are cool.

New Year's Resolutions? I usually never bother to make them. I don't see why projects and goals have to be declared in the month of January. But this time I have one resolution: to finish that damn CD project.

In the mean time, I'm glad to be starting off the new year with a newly exchanged working monitor, the new DVD releases of Beavis & Butthead, the rare music stuff I bought on Ebay, and for the first month of January in 5 years: a girlfriend.