Things have been very busy for me the last few weeks, haven't hardly had the chance to get out and shoot. Things are only going to get busier then next couple of weeks for me too.

This upcoming weekend I'll be attending Gateway Fur Meet, my first [furry] convention. I'm super excited, looks like the convention is going to be a ton of fun. This will be the conventions first year so I'm sure it's going to be on the small side, and there may not be as much stuff to do as there would be at some of the larger more established conventions, but I'm sure it's still going to be a blast. I'll be taking plenty of photos, and I might even try my hand at video too, but since I've never messed around with that I might not...

On April 24th I fly down to Arizona for a business trip. This is a big deal, largely in part because a promotion is now depending on the outcome of this trip. Lets back up for a minute, I've have been getting jerked around on getting this promotion for over 2 years now. I've been passed up for someone else once, my boss got fired once (which meant basically starting from square 1 proving that I deserve a promotion from my new boss), and my company "re-aligned" our teams and I wound up on a different team with a new boss once too. I've been told that I'll be getting the promotion so many times I've lost count, I've heard every excuse for me not getting the promotion that there could possibly be. It's to the point that I told my boss point blank that he either needs to just give me the title and the raise and keep me doing what I'm doing now until it's convenient for him to change up my responsibilities or I'll transfer to a different part of the company or seek employment elsewhere. I do carry a lot of weight on my team, and I've pretty much got my boss by the balls, cause he doesn't know shit about my job and he knows it too. So that brings us up to this business trip, a person in my position would not be eligible for this under normal circumstances, generally they wouldn't even let people in the position I'm trying to get promoted to go either, they would under normal circumstances only take the people one rank above that or higher. My boss told me he pulled a lot of strings to get me in down there and that he's going to use this to get me certified for my promotion, if all goes well... I'm more than a little stressed out about this, partially because I really don't want to go out of town for this crap, I'm only doing it because I can't say no to an opportunity to demonstrate my skill and ambition... Then there's the other reason, while I'm down there I have to train someone new to the company, and I have to do it in 10 days. Allow me to add some perspective, the normal training program for my company is 7 weeks. 35 business days. Sometimes if a person shows promise and they can't pass the demos at the end of the training period they can get up to 2 extra weeks to complete their training. In very rare cases some people (such as myself, and only 3 other individuals that I know of) complete the training at the end of week 5. So, I have to somehow teach somebody 7 weeks worth of stuff in only 10 days. I don't even think my ability to teach somebody is going to matter, I think the limiting factor is going to be that persons ability to learn, and to be quite honest, they're going to have to be a god damn savant to learn everything about my job in that amount of time. On one hand I feel like I'm being set up to fail, on the other I realize that I'm going to be surrounded by high ranking people in my company the entire time and I'll have a lot of opportunity to prove my worth with them directly.

This business trip is a major double edged sword... I sincerely feel this will be my sink or swim moment with this company. Win lose or draw, I'm going to do everything in my power to make this my time to shine