It’s not often that I have a *great* day at work. I may have enjoyable days, satisfying days or good days. But today? I had a great day.
It started with the realization that today is “my Friday” since the kids have no school tomorrow. To be honest, Denis and I royally failed in our parenting duties and had no idea the kids had no school tomorrow until Cootieboy informed me that today was their last day of school for the week. Had he not told me, I totally would have woken them up in the morning to get them ready for the bus. *lol* So that started off the day right – knowing I would get two days off for Thanksgiving instead of one.
I got to work and at some point during the morning I logged into the company website to see how much I was getting paid on Friday. Since I’m an hourly employee, my paycheck is different everytime. I logged in and as I was clicking into my paystub I noticed ANOTHER paystub in my list. The date was weird, as was the amount. It looked like a severely discounted paycheck. I clicked into that instead, and found that my boss had awarded me with a small monetary bonus this year. It came by complete surprise mainly because she hasn’t told me yet. As I said a few days ago, my review was at the beginning of the month. All I can think is that she didn’t mention it then because her boss hadn’t approved it yet. And she’s out this week for vacation. So she probably doesn’t even know that it has gone through and been approved. But *I* know, and I’m very excited about it.
Another great thing? Peppermint hot chocolate from Starbucks. Those are great things.
In other news, this morning as I was walking with a co-worker to the Starbucks on campus, she told me that one of my bosses had been gushing about a project I did for him. This man is not prone to gushing, but she assured me that he did, in fact, gush. I was very pleased to hear this. A few months ago he sent an appreciative email to me during a week when I felt I had been doing a horrible job, and my main boss was cc:d on it. I had just acknowledged to her that I knew I was having a bad week. When she saw the email, which he had written after hours from home on his day off, she said, “You are no longer allowed to say you are doing a bad job.” So to have him gush again about a project that I did for him was a nice additional boost today on top of an already great day.
In still yet other news, I’ve sort of been on sabbatical from freelancing the past several months. However, one of my clients contacted me in October with a project for which I said yes. It was a good project and paid well (hello, Christmas shopping!). As soon as I was done with it, ANOTHER client contacted me with a project, but I said no thank you and passed her along to a friend of mine who is looking into extra work at home and has years of experience doing transcription. I’m hoping that client will begin going to my friend exclusively since I quite possibly will turn my sabbatical into a “no more freelance” situation come January. I was proud of myself for saying no, since I tend to feel bad for saying no and end up killing myself trying to make deadlines I can’t make.
Not only that, but tonight I earned a bottle of Malibu Rum just by heading over to a co-worker’s house to act as her own personal Help Desk to clean up her laptop and get it to run faster AND enable her to save her iPhone photos directly to an external hard drive instead of her laptop.
So yeah, today has been a great day.