Back for real?

[bethlakshmi]

So, gentle readers, I have been a long time off this loop.  For those of you who friended me way back when, you may remember that I'm more active when:

• I'm not working
• My work isn't blocking my LJ access

This account started in response to everyone I know getting on LJ, and me wanting a place to annotate my SCA dance life.  Then it became part everyday me, and part SCA me... and the Burlesque me is really spawned over to another account here and a presence on Facebook.

In the meantime, my work locked up LJ, and then I became a manager.  As it turned out, the two together combined to make me remarkably LJ-numb, because the communicative part of my brain got entirely eaten by being a daytime manager who spent the majority of the day reading and writing emails.  Doing more with people on computers in the evening has always been TOO MUCH - at least until I went to India last year and found myself both offline for most of the day and disconnected from all that I knew in the US.

Well, the honest truth is, I don't know whether that's changed or not.

But - the work issue is no longer an issue.  I'm currently blogging from my desk in the office.  Why?  Because I no longer work at my old company. 

Yep.  I think in my last post, I mentioned looking - and now it's official, I've made a move.  I'm still a digital security nerd who manages people, but I've made a big shift.  I've moved:

• From defense to finance
• From development to operations
• From JEE/web development to firewalls and directory servers

I'm exhilarated and terrified, up for a challenge and afraid of boredom, enjoying the change and missing my old comfort zone.  So far, the new digs are 80% awesome and 20% not what I expected.  In fact, I spent the majority of this first week in the office on Cloud 9 with joy as I found, time and again, that my new team is welcoming, my new company is smarter about so many things, and there is so much cool stuff to learn.  Today is the first day, actually, where I have felt a bit concerned that perhaps all is not as rosy as I expected - the scope of the job is slightly smaller than I thought, the team doesn't seem to need me so much, and perhaps there are not as many challenges as I thought.  That sounds aweful when I say it out loud - but the truth is, I believe that this is the natural evolution of every job - the problems we THINK we have are rarely the problems we actually have - and in the first week there's really no way to tell.

I bet you're sitting here thinking "but Lakshmi! you didn't tell me the most important part!  Where the heck are you working?"  Well - too bad - this is my personal blog, not a corporate site, and like any security nerd, I'm leary about postiing that sort of stuff online.  I'll say I work in the financial district in downtown Boston, and if you want to have lunch down here, give me a call.  But if you want to find out where I work, you'll have to make contact with me in person, and not at an SCA event, cause Mistress Lakshmi doesn't give two hoots what I do for a living and I hardly care to snap into digital security land when I'm at an event!

But mostly, this was an FYI post to all of you, since along with being folks crazy enough to read this blog - most of you are also my friends!  And I wanted to keep folks in the loop.

Also - I'll be at the Venetian Event in Carolingia this weekend.

Will I continue to blog?  I really don't know... I want to, but at the same time, blogging takes a lot of time, and I need the focus for my work... so we'll see.