Well, I’ve reached the end of another week and I’m back “home” in NYC. The past week was a little more intense at work because we’re approaching crunchtime on our project. We’ve got two weeks left before our deliverable is due and it just so happens that my portion of the project is the piece that everyone else’s feeds into. Actually, I should say my “new piece” of the project because I found out last week that my work for first five weeks of the project was a misinterpretation of what was written into the statement of work. What I was really supposed to be doing seems to be less useful than what I’d been working on, but it has to be done, so I’ve switched gears and have been crankin’ like crazy to get it done by the end of the project. As an aside, my manager thinks that there is immense value in what I had been working on, so I’ve got to get that finished so it can be handed over to the client too. It’s going to be a long couple of weeks, but it’ll feel good to know that my input will make up a major part of the final deck.

One consequence of only being at an internship for 10 weeks is that an intern seldom has any vacation or sick leave days. That is about to be an issue for me because I’ve decided to get LASIK and the procedure is happening next Wednesday here in NYC. I had been considering it for years, but optometrists always told me that my eyes were too bad for the procedure, so I never seriously researched it. Recently, I finally realized that those docs have a vested interest in me coming back a very 12-24 months to spend hundreds of dollars on glasses and contacts, so I decided that it was about time to treat myself to some permanent corrected vision. If I’d made the decision to do it earlier in the summer, it probably wouldn’t have been a big deal, but, with crunchtime coming as I described above, my situation is a little more complicated. I would have done it later, but the doctor is going out of town for the first week of August, so I wouldn’t have been able to do it until after he got back and that wouldn’t have given me enough time to have my one-month check-up before heading back to California.

My manager was shocked/miffed when i told him that I would be skipping out a day early next week and would be unable to work for a day, but he understood my situation. He just laid down the law and told me that I’d have to make sure I make up for that lost time by working even harder toward getting my deliverables done. Next Monday and Tuesday are going to be some LONG nights because I’ll have to grind like crazy to put in work because I’ll basically be out of commission after 11:30am on Wednesday. And, then once I get the thumbs up that I’m good to go on Thursday, I’ll be grindin’ late into that evening from here in NYC and likely doing the same on Friday night. This isn’t optimal, but it works out and reduces the potential for problems on my project.

One last update is that some good entries should be coming up in September because I’m going to be heading out to Asia for the first time right before school starts. I’m going to be meeting up with a couple of friends and hitting Thailand and Vietnam. I’ve never been out there before, so I’m really excited about the chance to do so. I have no clue what kind of things we’ll do, but I can tell you that the plane ticket was EXPENSIVE!!! Good lawd! I spent more on that ticket than I do on my monthly rent here in NYC. I’m sure the trip will be worth it, but that didn’t make it any easier to cut that check. Y’all better believe that I’m going to make the most out of this trip…don’t be surprised if you catch me on TV wyldin’ out and causing an international incident. This excursion is going to be off the chain!