Organized chaos

First day at my new job. They're getting ready to move the admin offices to a building across the street and everyone is getting ready to be uprooted from their old places. The guy doing IT was in trying to make sense of a system he hadn't been in charge of for a year. Details of my job trickled in to me in bits and pieces as I sat at a borrowed desk and worked to create a budget and set up the ILS. There was a window next to my chair and through it I could see children playing on the blacktop in a makeshift play area. There must be a day-care nearby. There was one little girl wearing a floofy pink tulle skirt, like something from a costume.

Everyone was very friendly and very busy. The director is energetic, gregarious, does things fast. Quick at all things it seems. She's determined to move as fast as possible on this project and I hope I'll be able to keep up. I'm rather the opposite but I think I'll have to be less systematic and slow than I normally am.

I have a parking tag now so maybe I'll be able to park closer. Not that the walk to the shopping center was unpleasant. There are a number of affordable lunch choices close by, much more so than at my last job. There's a barbecue place next door and an Italian-Australian deli across the street, then Chinese, sandwiches, and noodles nearby.

I've been reading Kahout's The Widow Killer. Takes place in the Czech Republic right at the end of WWII. A Czech detective must work with a member of the gestapo to find a serial killer. Buback, the German, has been charged with inserting himself among the local police to discover any resistance as the Reich starts to disintegrate in a last ditch effort to keep control. The front is getting closer and Buback is starting to question his loyalties. Morava, the Czech officer, has to watch his back as things start to come undone and he worries about doing his job and protecting his mother and lover as the front sweeps towards them.

It's, again, an interesting look at another segment of this major world event and how different people might have viewed it depending on their circumstances. The mystery in and of itself isn't much. A man is killing widows because, basically, he's a crazy momma's boy. Who has far too much luck. I mean seriously over the top amounts of luck. The relationship between Morava and Jitka is a little too gauzy-romantic based-on-true-hearts-as-one for my taste. They're good people and they love each other and that's it. The affair between Buback and Grete at least shows progression and trying to fit together although it's still a little unrealistic. It might just be me. I have little patience for relationships that don't show real development or that try to be things they're not. Anyway, lack of human qualities makes me not care when one of them dies (due to setting up one of the stupidest plans to catch a killer in police history). So, the story and mystery is so-so but the atmosphere and the plights of most of the characters are interesting.