Work has been awesome this past week. We've finally reached testing, not just me testing but users acceptance testing. This stage will last 3 months. I love it. As test lead and portal admin, I get to work with the users and record the bugs they find and also help them through using the system. I wrote the test cases and the user manual. I feel like I've come into my own during this past week, taking a real stab at making a name for myself with the team. I dunno, I guess I've always been part of the team, but now taking a more active role is pretty exciting.

I had this interesting conversation with one of the testers, he basically told me that if I wanted to, I could probably be a City employee for the rest of my career. I was telling him about how I felt that once this project is over, my contract would end, and he was say "No, they'll just put you on another project, and another. Besides, this project is going to last at least another year or maybe more." It made me think about all the notices I've seen in the elevators about someone retiring, and how it'd say so and so has been with the City for 30 years. 30 years, that's crazy. But if I were to stay til I retired, that's 40 years..

If I were to stay here for another 38 years, I guess I'd expect to be no worse than Director of IT. I mean, that's what I would push myself for.

Onto the bigger picture is why God placed me at this job. It's just that keep hearing about people who are unhappy at work, or overworked, who never have enough time to do other things. While I have plenty of time, I work hard and some days it's pretty rough, overall I am completely satisfied with it. So it brings me to the question, of all the time I have that others don't -- I should be using them more wisely. What is it that God wants me be doing with my time?

It's like back in highschool one year I had the oddest timetable where I had a spares from 10 til 2 every other day. Those days sucked, because most of my friends were in class so the "spare" was wasted. I'd ended up going home every time to play computer. I mean, what a waste!