huzzah! blah...

It's been a good few days — well, mostly. Let's start with the good, enjoyable moments. Despite all the good, I'm currently in a bad mood (which I will get to) so I'm going to keep this short and sweet.

On Thursday, I took a half day from work to leave early and go see Justin's show at Weirdo's. From there, Taylor and I immediately drove downtown to see The Strokes for free at Auditorium Shores. I'm not a huge Strokes fan or anything, but it was free and a good show. They even shot off fireworks during their last song, which was cool.

Friday was mostly lounging around, and we were planning to see the Givers downtown at 7pm. Well, turns out they go on at midnight, and that it won't be as easy as we thought to get in. We got there and waited in a line for about an hour. If you're not aware, it was South By Southwest downtown the past week, and people can get badges or wristbands to get priority access to music shows. Badges get first priority (very expensive), and wristbands get in next. Since we had neither, we were in the lowest priority line to get into the show. Despite this, we were moving forward and high hopes, until we got to the front. We then realized that we weren't moving forward because people were getting in, but rather because the people in the front knew they couldn't get in and left. Once we got to the front ourselves, we saw the sad truth that we weren't getting in. We went to the bar next door, had a drink, then went home and called it a night.

The next day, I didn't do much. The Givers had another show that night, and Taylor was determined to see them, so we attempted it yet again. She had a good feeling about it, and she turned out to be right. We got in with no problem. There wasn't a line or anything. They put on a good show.

The highlight of Sunday was the Iranian New Year, which I celebrated with my family in Austin at my aunt's house. I also witnessed the abortion of a game by the Longhorns
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Yesterday, Monday, we had our second flag football game (we lost our first game last week 7-0, by the way). This one turned out a lot better. We all arrived an hour beforehand, warmed up, did some drills, and overall had a good practice. It paid off because we won 48-28. I, myself, scored at least two touchdowns. I feel like I might have scored three but I can't remember. They were both 20-30+ touchdowns, where I just hauled ass and dodged everyone. I was quite proud of myself. It's a lot more fun when you win, huh? Hopefully we can ride this momentum into next week.

Now onto the bad. They announced a reduction-in-force last week (layoffs), and it's going to be primarily engineering and the program office (program management people, don't know who all that includes). There are a lot of rumors flying around, and I honestly don't know if I should be concerned or not. On one hand, I have work and I'm valuable on the program I'm working on. On the other hand, people here in Austin are concerned that we are going to get hit big time, so I'd be naïve to think that I'm exempt. Regardless of what happens, it's got me fairly stressed out. Not only am I worried about my own job, but the morale around here is just bad. It's sad to see so many people worried about their jobs, even if they don't outwardly say anything. This sucks.

Cross your fingers for me. Hopefully I'll be fine. If Austin gets hit big and I'm still around, it might be time to start looking for another job somewhere. Seems like they might be trying to phase out engineering here and focus more on manufacturing.