Friday, August 12, 2011

Friends, site visit... another week

Every week here seems like a big battle. There's just so much to do and not enough time and energy. This week started off pretty well. The project that we've been working on like crazy finally went through on Monday. Hopefully the rest of it will go through smoothly as well. Our supervisor came back from vacation and we talked about all our projects over lunch. It took quite a while to go through all the projects and he started to realize in earnest that we don't have enough people. I think the rest of us realized this a long time ago but now it's getting to the point where we're not making deadlines and falling behind on everything.

Wednesday was the big day of the week. It was the last day for one of the guys on our team. I guess this happens a lot and is a part of one's career. People come and go all the time. But it's still very tragic, especially when the person is an essential part of the team and is one of your mentors. We miss him already...

That night I left work "early" to meet up with two friends for dinner. One of them is a classmate from Stanford who did her undergrad at HKU. She came back to visit and was meeting up with a friend of hers from HKU who happens to also work at Arup and is in the same group as me (but is now stationed at a site office). So the three of us had dinner and chatted about my long working hours among other things. After dinner, we went for dessert. It took us a while to find the street with all the dessert shops though. Had to go halfway into a dark alley before turning around and starting over. It was a very fun evening. I felt like I even slept better that night and woke up with a pleasant dream. Lately, I've been waking up very tired and wanting to sleep in more. I think it's due to the lack of exercise.

I'm going to try to join a gym again this weekend. Really need to exercise. Definitely getting fat.

Friday morning, I went to on a site visit to a project that I've been working on. The guy who left had been working on the project so the new project engineer hadn't been to the site either. The resident engineer at the site is also leaving to go to another site. So we basically had two handovers for the geotech part of this project in one week. The new resident engineer for this project is from England. He's here on an Early Development Assignment (basically a two year assignment). It might be a bit difficult for him because he'll be the only representative from our company at the site and he doesn't speak Cantonese. I'm sure it'll all work out though. He's survived four months here so far. This will be a new experience though. Wish him all the best. Maybe this will give me an excuse to go visit him once in a while. Although I have to say, I won't be that much more help since I can only pretend to speak Canto...

It's really nice to be able to see the stuff that I've been working on. The walls look a lot bigger in reality than they do on paper. The site is an abandoned prison. There are a lot of buildings and alleyways. I would totally get lost. It's located in a very busy area of HK Island. I wouldn't mind going back to check out "site activities" once in a while. So many opportunities to see things in action here!

Other random news: I have two more friends coming to visit in the next few weeks! Lots of people coming through since it's summer. Our group got a summer intern. He's only here for another two weeks though. I feel like we snatched him from another group. But he's only working for the month of August. Such a quick internship. I can't imagine. That's like settling in and then leaving right after. I just started a ShareBuilder account and waiting for money to be transferred in. I guess I'll spend some time this weekend investigating into stocks worthy of my investment.

1 comment:

Y said...

LOL, "big battle".. nice choice of words. I've actually been loosing weight, but I don't think that's good...

Hm, stocks, interesting! Depending on your view of the market, it's either a great time or a terrible time to buy.