Wednesday, January 24, 2018

field clothing closet

I have recently moved to a new place, and now I finally have adequate closet space for all of my clothing (fieldwork, office, casual, fancy)! I also inherited closet organization systems that I have no interest in changing or upgrading.

So here's how I've organized it:

Full-size closet #1 (field gear):

1. top shelf: field sweaters, hats, and non-bib style coveralls
2. 2nd shelf: bandanas, lightweight pants
3. 3rd shelf: bras, socks, mid-weight pants (like regular carhartts)
4. hangers underneath 3rd shelf: all the shirts. So many shirts. long-sleeve tees acceptable as outerwear, long-sleeved underlayers, short-sleeve tees acceptable as outerwear, short-sleeve tees only acceptable as undershirts...
5. hangers with more space beneath: all outerwear (pants, tops) and jacket-like items (vests, fleeces)
6. floor: everything else that I don't really use and bib-style coveralls on top of/in field duffel bags

Hall closet

Non field coats, hats, gloves, miscellaneous sporting items (snowshoes, trekking poles, skates, etc) 

Little closet (regular clothing):

I took this one over so I could get ready for work without disturbing my sweetie. It has almost all of my standard office and hanging around stuff, including underwear, socks, etc, with a few exceptions that are in...

Full-size closet #2 (formal stuff and miscellany):

Jeans (because I ran out of room in the little bedroom closet), pajamas, all the shoes that aren't in the pile close to the front door, suits, skirts, dresses, and my sweetie's entire wardrobe.

I remember squashing most of this stuff into a single closet and under the bed when I was in grad school, and I am so glad I don't have to do that any more.

Monday, January 15, 2018

ride-sharing?

The comments on this Ask a Manager post, from someone who was uncomfortable using Uber/Lyft and preferred taxis, ended up going into four digits. Most of them were anti-taxi.

I've mentioned quite a few times that I am not exactly an early adopter of anything, so it probably won't surprise the reader to hear that I come down on the  side of using taxis. But hear me out.

For a while, I lived in the downtown core of East Coast Big City and also did quite a bit of long-distance travel to other cities.

To start my trip, I'd call the taxi company, have a 20 second conversation with dispatch: "It's Short Geologist. I need a taxi at (my address) at 6AM tomorrow. Going to the train/airport... yes, you can use this number as the contact number" and that would be it. The only problem was that the taxi was invariably 10 minutes early and the dude (it was always a dude) would be impatient. I said 6AM, and I meant 6AM, damn it! There were a million taxi companies I could call, but the first one I ever called was fine and so I never tried a different one.

I'd arrive at my destination city and there would be a long line of taxis at the cab stand for the airport/train station, and I'd walk up and just get in.

I stayed at a hotel close to where I was working, so I'd just walk (or take public transit) during the week - no need for a taxi or ride-sharing.

At the end of the week, I'd go back to the hotel, ask the front desk to call me a taxi, and head home. Go to the cab stand at the train station/airport and get home within 15 minutes (it helped that I was always getting back long after rush hour).

I get that flagging down a random taxi can be uncomfortable, but that's never anything I had to do for work travel. And in my years of living in the city, I ended up using a taxi that way only a handful of time (coming home from a bar across the city) because we usually either walked everywhere or drove to a friend's place where we had an "in" for visitor parking.

I don't have any particular animus against ride-sharing, but I never saw the point of it for myself.

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

New Year, new start

I sort of lost the thread of this for a while. It was the usual hiatus: have a few (or more) long/rough weeks, and fall out of the blog posting habit. After those rough weeks, I kept busy doing work that was hard to anonymize and not particularly relevant to this blog, which I keep to certain focus areas (see labels!), so I didn't have immediate new post ideas.

But I'm still hanging in there - hopefully I'll be able to more consistently post in 2018!