The Super Storm 2010

We've been hammered by a major snow storm that started Friday, Feb 5 around 11:30 am and continued through Saturday, Feb 6 around 6:00 pm. The storm dumped 24" in areas around Baltimore, but our neighborhood got about 34"-38". The local government was having trouble plowing all the snow because there were also a lot of downed trees in the neighborhoods. We didn't see a snow plow until Monday morning, Feb 8, at 5:30 am.

Here are some photos of what that much snow looks like.

This is what the storm looked like Saturday morning while it was still snowing.





This is what our road looked like on Saturday morning:





Saturday evening, just after it stopped snowing, this is what our street looked like around sunset. Yes, there's a road under there.



Several of us neighbors banded together with our snowblowers and shovels to clear the driveways. We found that we couldn't move the snowblowers through the road because the snow was packed down and really tough. The wind-blown drifts were also almost impossible to cut through and had to be chopped vertically with a snow shovel edge. But most of the snow was light and fluffy like sugar. Since we couldn't move the snowblowers on the road, we cleared all the sidewalks in our area of the neighborhood so that we could get the snowblowers from house-to-house.



Sunday, the plow still hadn't come. Here's what one small cul-de-sac did so that the occupants could at least get out and walk about the neighborhood. That narrow walkway in the photo is the road.



Not many of the sidewalks in the neighborhood were clear. The teens were stir crazy after two days inside, but there wasn't anywhere to walk except our rut of a road.



Sunday morning, the roads:



The corner of two local roads. Inviting.



The cars kept trying to drive the road, but only the larger vehicles with high clearance under the carriage were managing. Not that that kept a lot of cars that had no business being on the road from trying. There were stuck cars all over the neighborhood, annoying the rest of us and blocking emergency access. Our family and the neighbors cleared a couple of pull-offs on the road to give the cars somewhere to go if two cars were coming in opposite directions.



Rescue finally came on Monday morning early. Our roads are plowed finally. What I found amusing and tragic is that one of our nearby neighbors was insisting that she wanted to go to the mall yesterday. Their car wouldn't make it out through the road, so they stayed home.

We're cleared off (as of yesterday) and ready to roll:



There's more snow due on Tuesday night. Another 5"-6" according to the news.

The Worst Decade Ever

So, this particular clip struck me as hilarious. It highlights some of the funniest political moments caught on camera from both major parties.

I've been giggling over it for hours now. Hope you enjoy it too:

Christmas 2009: T-2 and counting

I'd like to say that I've got Christmas handled, but no, we don't. There's rumor of an ice storm on Christmas Day.

The East Coast just got through a blizzard that dropped 24" of snow on our house in about 36 hours. The snow at 11 am on Saturday morning was pouring down so fast that Amelia and I were watching our footsteps in the snow fill up before we got across the yard. My biggest regret is not taking a picture of our street during the storm. It was lovely.

Schools in the area just closed up for the holidays early. It's a two week vacation for the kids.

Can I share the fact that my sewing machine has shipped and will be here in 2 days. That's either going to be Christmas Eve or Boxing Day. Color me happy. Norm's Christmas present to me is making me really giggly and girlish. Now, just when should I tell him that I used his credit card to buy my new sewing machine?

Also, I recalculated the number of sewing machines in my house. With the new one, it's 7. Yup, seven. One good Janome embroidery machine, one broken Bernina embroidery machine, one workhorse Janome mechanical sewing machine, one Janome semi-computerized sewing machine, one 1916 Singer treadle machine in cabinet, one 1900's vintage hand-crank sewing machine, and this new Brother sewing machine.

Norm is going to make me burn over this if I don't unload some of these fast.

Amelia went to see the Princess and the Frog today with her friend Tessa. I'm eager to hear how it went. And I hear there is beef stew to be had at home. I think I'm going now.

Went on Holiday, Fell to Pieces, Trying to Sew Them Up

The subject about says it all. I took summer vacation, came back to some awesomely bad news at work (not "You're fired" --they actually like me though we all needle each other constantly kinda like family) but furloughs and departing coworkers and change of office environment of a type that I don't talk about in a public forum. Too many changes.

I kinda went dormant for a while. I dropped about 25-30 pounds since Sept (mainly in Sept/Oct), and haven't been really hungry since. I've been incredibly sad in waves of sad that don't make sense to me. Given that I have an idyllic life overall, and that my sad started to affect my 6-year-old, I hied myself to my general doctor toot sweet and asked for something to adjust the moods. Since I'm allergic or very sensitive to most of the types of drugs that they can prescribe, I ended up on one that is very expensive, very new, but is working out really well. I'm kind of amazed how well it's working.

I'm kinda coming back to life. I had to basically just try to breathe for a while. I'm still in fear over the environment change at work, but I think I can manage it.

It's been terrible, but I think we're past the worst. My daughter was spending a lot of time cleaning her room and then showing me so that I'd see that she was 'being good' and that mommy would now not be so sad because her daughter was being good.

(And that's why I got to the doctor as fast as I could get an appointment. Because things like this rub off on kids, and they can't understand that they didn't cause it. Kids still think they're the center of the universe.)

Christmas is coming. All of the women in our family are just drained this year emotionally, and we couldn't face the gift-buying. So all of us agreed to just buy for the kids. The East Coast also got pummeled this weekend with 24" of snow in one big two-day blizzard, so school has been off for the last couple of days and Christmas vacation is so close that at least one county just threw in the towel and closed until January 4. Our county is closed tomorrow, and then we'll see about Wed, the last day before the holiday break.

I've been half-heartedly cleaning the house. I need to finish soon. I'd like to do some Christmas baking. And something more fun.

I broke down and ordered something decadent for myself. A Brother XR9000 sewing machine from Costco.com. The machine has a lot of stitches, a couple of needle positions, and was $200 with express shipping.

I feel wicked.

It's not like I don't have two sewing machines and an embroidery machine. But my favorite old workhorse Janome, the MyExcel 4014, has to go into the shop to be cleaned and tensioned. It's gotten wonky enough that it's almost impossible to sew with it. Yet when it's cleaned it's a great little machine. It's about 12 years old now, and has been through a war and a couple of teenagers, so I don't expect it to hold up without a cleaning. It deserves a sewing machine spa day.

Then I have the other Janome that I bought refurbished from an online company just this spring with high hopes. They didn't pan out. The machine doesn't hold tension no matter how I adjust it. It loses tension in the middle of a stitching session and requires constant fiddling for just straight stitch and the little back-stitched locking stitch. I sent it in for cleaning to a non-Janome shop, but they took my money and sent it back basically the same. Worked for approximately one hour.

I need to take my machines to the Janome shop. But the best one in the area is in Towson and is only open during the daytime, not evenings. It is open on Saturdays, but I can see a lot of trouble getting the machines there and back.

And, dare I say it, I am lusting after some new stitching features that are on the one I bought. I'm hoping that the tension is good. Since I bought it from Costco, if it isn't, I'll return it. I hope it works out though, since it's cheap.

Here's a picture:

Obama's Amazingly Consistent Smile

Andrew Sullivan coined the term "cardboard cutout" to describe this video of shots of the president with leaders at the UN summit this week. The clip is hilarious:

Barack Obama's amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

Tomorrow's 50th Anniversary Celebration

Tomorrow is my in-laws' 50th Wedding Anniversary Celebration.

50 years. That's awe inspiring. I can't seem to do the same thing for 15 minutes. I've been happily married to their son, though, for almost 10 years, so I guess I do have some staying power.

Our entire family has been consumed with preparation. I still feel unprepared. Today I realized that the dress I was going to wear probably needs laundering.

Unprepared, I tell you.

Dear Zachary

Don't you just wish sometimes that you could be six again and everything could be solved with a simple note of apology?

A Girl. A Serbian-English Dictionary. And a Grammar Book.

Mix all of the above together with a few very poor language tapes, and what do you get? A very broken understanding of a language.

But the language itself is not one conducive to learning once one has left the cradle. And I left the cradle long ago.

For instance, there are 7 cases conjugated for nouns.

I'm grateful --Finnish has 15. No wonder the Finns have the highest suicide rate other than Sri Lanka.

I'm slowly beginning to sight read Serbian Cyrillic. Not to be confused with Russian Cyrillic or Slovak Cyrillic or Ukrainian Cyrillic. This is coming along as nicely as "Thhhheeeee caaaat ....isss jump....ing on the caaaar ....hooooooo...d."

Charming.

Cmnd-F5. Alex and my patience.

Mac computers are very friendly. Sometimes, though, you stumble into something that truly makes your scream build in your throat as you climb upward on the first car of the roller coaster.

Alex is my roller coaster this morning.

I ran an update on the Mac yesterday that got stuck in spinning wheel mode. It was still spinning its wheels this morning, so I had to turn it off. (So locked that I couldn't reboot it.)

When it came back up, the Universal Access voice of Alex was turned on and saying every mote that was typed or moved on the screen. That was amusing for about 20 seconds. Then it was excruciating. And impossible to turn off because the Preferences screen wouldn't come up. After rebooting the computer, I managed to find Alex's OFF switch, and laid him to rest.

Thank goodness. After a few minutes of Alex reciting every URL, keystroke, and folder that I touched, I was getting agitated enough to throw a brick through the very pretty screen of this iMac. It disturbed my ability to focus, concentrate, think, or find anything. No wonder I was thinking of smashing things.

What to Do on a Day Off?

I've got the next three days off before the Romance Writers national conference in Washington, D.C. this weekend. I'm planning on getting some shop time in the wood shop, but also in spending some time doing other things. I'd hoped to have the house immaculate for this week so that I wouldn't fret over cleaning, but that didn't happen. Instead, I'm settling for a few areas neat, and I'll get to the rest.

Amelia isn't happy about going back to summer camp this morning. She's had a week of total attention with parents and loads of cousins, and that's hard competition for the summer camp. Plus, she's worried about her 'ex-boyfriend'. I kid you not. She's six. But she decided that she had found 'True Love' with one of her summer playmates, and then 'broke that love' the same day because 'I knew you wouldn't like it, Mommy'.

Sigh. Why do I have to deal with this now? I thought I had a handful of years before having to deal with the Romeo & Juliet thing.

Really, the true story is that she's in summer camp with two other school friends, and they have chummed up together leaving her out. She's struggling with that clique-mentality and trying to find new friends. However, it seems that even at 6 if you play with someone of the opposite sex then you have to 'love' that person. (Ick.)

So, let me stop procrastinating now and go inventory my wood projects. I need to finish a bookshelf/clock that I started. It's made of jarrah (Australian cypress that's reddish in color), dark walnut, and curly maple. Quite striking, but I think that I need to widen one of the panels. And glue up the base panels. And figure out how to create the clock box on top of the bookshelf.

Plus, I've got the bathroom cabinet to complete. And the transition piece from the bathroom to the hallway needs to be planed down, refinished and cut to size.

I want to do about 2 hours of writing today on one of my projects. And I'd like to spend some time working on getting my studio in shape to make it comfortable.

Virginia Vacation

We had a lovely 4th of July vacation with the family in the mountains of Virginia. Norm's parents, brother, and cousin came down with their respective families.

There's an indoor/outdoor waterpark there at Massanutten, so we spent a few days playing with the kids there. This is what happens after you've been at the waterpark most of the day:



That's me with my various craft projects on my lap. I brought far too many this time, but I just couldn't decide. So Norm graciously let me pack up all of them and bring them. When we weren't out swimming or trotting up the mountain, I was usually caught with a needle in my hand.

On the first full day there, I finished a blanket for Alex.



Here's the blanket folded so that you can see the nice space-dyed blue No. 5 perle cotton that I used to stitch the edging. I really liked the effect of these blues on the edge of the blue and white blanket.



Here's a closeup of the stitched names in English and Serbian. Yes, I misspelled the Serbian, but I did fix it later. The last Serbian Cyrillic letter should look like a lower case Latin 'c':





On the next day there, I finished Phillip's blanket edging. I also started a small bag for Phillip's leapster that I'll post later because it isn't finished yet. By the 3rd day, I finished Phillip's blanket. Originally, Phillip was going to get the blue Pooh blanket, but he's outgrowing Pooh rapidly. So, I gave Pooh to Alex, and found Phillip something a bit more colorful:



I bordered the edging with a space-dyed No. 5 perle cotton also in yellow and peach. But it doesn't show up very well. Here's a photo of the blanket folded to show the edging:



The reason that Alex got the Pooh blanket is that I'd misspelled Phillip's name in Serbian Cyrillic and had to re-stitch it. It took me a while to get motivated enough to fix the mistake. By that time, Phillip had outgrown Pooh. But, I finally got it spelled the right way:





On the fourth full day there, I got a bit crazy. I brought my sewing machine down. That day, I skipped the waterpark because I was sunburned, and stayed home to play with my crafts. I attached a linen piece to scrollbars for my needlework stand --something that I'd been wanting to do for months. And then I started and *completed* 3 identical dresses for the 3 girls. The dresses were simple things --just a tube of the smocking fabric with ribbon straps. But the girls loved them. Except Regan, the other cousin who isn't into 'girlie' dresses. I kept her dress and traded it for a shirt for her that I picked up at Luray Caverns on our way home. I think Lily would adore this dress, so I'm washing it and tucking it into an envelope to mail this week.




Amelia adored her dress. It was hard to get it off of her.







Mia also adored her dress and insisted on wearing it. However, she doesn't like posing for pictures, so we had to chase her down to get a couple:






Getting a picture of both Amelia and Mia together in their dresses was almost impossible. We did manage to snap this pic while Amelia wrestled Mia down:




All-in-all, it was a great relaxing vacation. This is the view we had from our mountain cabin:





On the way home, we visited Luray Caverns with the whole clan. Then we all went our separate ways back home. Norm and I took the scenic route through Skyline Drive. It added an hour or so to the trip, but it was worth it. (Hint: if you are given a choice to take a scenic route that you are rarely near, do so.)




While driving in the Shenandoah National Park, we saw a mother bear and her cub crossing the road in front of our car. Norm slowed down so that I could snap a couple of pics of them, but most of my pics are too dark to see them clearly. I have a good angle of Mama, but it's blurry:



The cub was ranging pretty far from Mama --about 10 feet or so away from her. Mama was about the size of a German Shepherd dog, but rounder. Baby was the size of a small Cocker Spaniel. I got one pic with both of them in the frame, but it's hard to make them out. Mama is the dark shape in the center of the photo. Baby is in the lower right side, but the most visible thing is his ear --light brown outlined with black fur.



Home seems tame in comparison with only 3 desperate cats craving our attention.

Just What Does This Say About Your Approaching Day?

This sight was seen this morning while driving my daughter to her summer camp:



Yup. That's an American vulture making a meal out of what appears to have been a raccoon. When I passed it, it was shoulder-deep in the internals tugging away. Yuck. When I came back to snap the picture, I startled the bird a bit. He was eyeing me up as competition.

We're a few days from our summer vacation in the Virginia mountains with the family. I'm looking forward to having some time to relax, hike, swim at the pools, and probably see more vultures. After the vacation, I'm also looking forward to spending a half-week at the Romance Writers of America National Conference in Washington, DC. It's time to get past this silly phobia about showing my work, and I'm taking steps to do just that.

This past weekend was spent working on the downstairs bathroom in the old house. We laid tile, put the first coat of paint on the walls, and installed the new toilet. There were a few snags. First, here are pics! (Yes, I finally learned how to get photos off the camera and resize them this week.) While we do have 'before' pics, they're on a different computer. I may do a collage posting at the end of the house prep to show the differences. Basically, when we started, this bathroom was bright lemon yellow with 1970s-vintage peeling linoleum tile in white with gold trim. The sink and medicine cabinet were faux French provincial white with gold trim. Unappealing.

Here's what the bathroom looked like after the first day. The tile was mortared down, but no grout applied yet. The walls are primed for painting.




Here's what it looked like after the second day. The walls got their first coat of paint. The floor had grout applied. And the toilet was installed:




We were going to paint the old sink base, put on new handles, put on a new faucet, and put it back in. However, when we started examining it to paint:

The view from the front. It looks ok. (This picture was taken after I'd removed the door frame and doors for painting. The picture of the door frame and doors is here too.)





However, the back of the cabinet was clearly no longer sound. The board that makes up the cabinet floor had gotten waterlogged. Since it is only 1/2" melanine, it basically exploded.



Hmm. The entire cabinet is very simple construction. The hardest part of a cabinet is creating door frames and doors. I have those intact and sound. I decided to build the cabinet again myself. It's a non-standard size, so buying it would be pricey. I have the materials to do this myself. I'll let you know how it goes.

In closing, here's a close-up of the tile that we put down in the bathroom. This is a full bathroom, but it is also the guest bath for visitors. I like the small, bright tile. It's cheerful and makes the room look bigger. The walls were painted a very pale yellow cream color in a semi-gloss. It works well together as the photos above show.

Channeling Berit

So, Wednesday afternoon my daughter Amelia comes skipping out of drama camp (the only summer camp for that week that I could get her in at short notice) and informs me, "Mommy!! Guess what?!! Tomorrow we get to do The Little Mermaid!"

Every day in drama camp is a different movie/play where the kids learn two songs and sing in a little performance at the end of the day for the adoring parents. Amelia's next plea was for her Ariel costume that I'd promised her.

Ok. I can do that. Berit, Susie's mom, used to whip these things up all the time. How difficult can it be to sew a simple elastic-waist skirt and attach something at the bottom to resemble a fin? In fact, since Amelia's best friend is in that camp too, I decided to make two of them so that there would be no fighting.

Amelia and I stopped by the fabric store where I picked up a couple of yards of green tissue lame and some gold brocade. I had a .5 yard remnant of gold sequin cloth too.

After dinner, Amelia went to bed, and I started sewing. First, I had found the blanket that I've been stitching for my niece, so I finished it while dinner was cooking to relax a bit.



Here's a close-up of the stitching of the name and the hand-stitched blanket stitch on the edges:



Then, I started on the mermaid costumes. The first thing I did was have Amelia lay down on a piece of newspaper and traced around her lower body. Then I took a measurement of her waist. I added 2" to half of her waiste measurement and found the center of the tracing. I basically cut the tracing in half after sort of extending out that piece to a half-skirt line. That way I could cut on the fold and have identical pieces. Plus, grain lines are simple to find on the fold.

The green tissue lame was transparent. So, to bring up the green color, I bagged a lining of hunter green lining fabric that I had left over from a skirt. I then created the skirt pieces, and made 'tail' pieces of out the gold brocade with iron-on interfacing to stiffen them. I sewed a hem on the brocade all around the tail to cover the raw edges, sewed each tail piece to the front and back skirt pieces, and seamed everything together. The peplum (that little ruffle at the waist) was done just before I sewed in the elastic band in the waist. I cut 4 pieces of gold sequin cloth, trimmed them to the same shape, hemmed the raw edges, and stitched them to the waist. Then fold down the waist to form a channel for the elastic, stitch the elastic in, and we're done.



I think they look fine for a costume dreamed up and created in one night. I finished them around 5 am. (I would have stopped at 3 am and gone to bed, but I was getting so close. I decided to just finish them.)





Proof that I did the second one too.



She seems to be happy about the costume and the quick turn-around.



But of course, we must make a silly face.



And you know what? This actually satisfies Goal #7 for the year! Not that I'm going to stop there. In fact, I think this year I'll keep a list and a picture of each finished craft item and do a collage of them at the end of the year.

Really. I do finish stuff. I know that it's hard for some of you to believe.

Goals for 2009-2010

I'm late in updating this. My 525,600 minutes are over for the year. I have to update my list and set the goals for the next 525,600 minutes. I've decided to start the minutes at 10:00 am on June 22 rather than June 1. The day after the longest day of the year seems like a good break point.

One thing I've decided is to have a lot more smaller discrete items on the list. The lofty goals are nice, but if it's smaller, I might have a prayer of crossing something off of the list.

Here's the last updated list with commentary. Several of these things on the list were fairly small, but didn't get time assigned to them. I may try assigning a time to see if I can get them done this year.

1. Complete work on old house & determine its fate. - We're still not done with the house. This past weekend we completed the tiling of the downstairs bathroom, so we're finishing it slowly. It's just taking forever. It's like a hobby gone mad. I'm going to break this down to the final list of things to do.
* 2. Find a Chinese tutor for Amelia - (found a Chinese class)The Chinese class didn't work out. I'm still hopeful, but it's getting hard to find a class in our area.
3. Complete the declutter of our new house.
* Main floor done
* Spare bedroom done
This is ongoing. I'm taking it off the list. I've now done every room except the basement and garage, but we need to begin on some of them again.
4. Find the time to start nightly family dinners.This one is close to my heart and makes me weep that we haven't done it yet.
5. Finish 2 of the 7 manuscripts that I'm working on. Truck draft stage, minimum.There's a reason that this one doesn't happen. I am absolutely terrified to let ANYONE see my finished writing. It's phobic. The phobia freezes me cold when I write --especially when I write anything that might be controversial or raise eyebrows. If you can't talk about it in front of the Kindergarten, I can't write about it. I think I need to take baby steps to eliminate the fears because until I do, this goal won't happen.
6. Enjoy Amelia's first school year. Done!
7. Weave 3 items. Once again, I did not weave this year. But if I change 'Weave' to 'Sew', then this one is in the bag.
8. Finish 2 pieces of furniture, minimum. The work on the old house did this one in. It is hard to get anything done other than basic life and that house. It really is the hobby gone mad.
9. Learn enough Serbian to speak to Tanja's mom. I need to work more on this. I've learned enough to annoy Tanja. Now I just need to practice. But Serbian is like Russian. And I would have failed Russian in college if I hadn't dropped it. My pronunciation is appalling.
10. Finish business plan & incorporate. We put this one on hold because of the old house. There's no time to be split among competing interests. Norm is working with me on this one. We have made some baby steps in this direction.
11. Turn at least a slight profit on one of the ventures. Actually, I did on one. Very slight. Don't want to talk about it publicly yet.
* 12. Finish the patents that I'm working on. - (abandoned)
* 13. Build prototype item, evaluate for market fitness. - (abandoned)
14. Submit one item to a publisher. Sigh. This isn't done and goes hand-in-hand with #5.
15. Update will --again. Not Done.
16. Work on regular fitness routine. Not Done.
17. Programming - database and web routines Not Done.
18. MCSE - first four exams OR MCITP Not Done.
19. Sun certification - re-certify on SysAdmin, Network Admin, Security Not Done.
20. Cisco certification - re-certify on CCNA Not Done.
21. Work on that Graduate degree - 6 of 36 credits completed - (abandoned) At least for now. I found that I loathed the degree program. It didn't fit my style, goals, or personal abilities.
22. Work on keeping up my friendships - Done!! And this is going back on the list for next year with more specifics.
* 23. Do something special for Norman - Complete. Do another now.
24. Complete 3 needlework patterns for publication/sale
* Norm's Cafe
Also working on the Rumi marriage sampler, Let There Be Light sampler, and the two Krishna pieces. Darned old house taking up my time.
25. Negotiate licensing Haven't done this yet. The biggest issue here is that I don't know how to go about it from the 'I'm buying your artwork for a purpose' end rather than the 'Sure, I'll let you have my artwork for that' end. And they are different approaches. Plus, I'd like to have the company up and running to shelter this goal.
26. Enter one writing contest See #5.
27. Unpack the garage Not Done.
28. Unpack all boxes from move Not Done.

The new goal list. More specific. Requirements to put things on the home calendar. A lot of lofty stuff removed.

1. Complete work on old house & determine its fate.
--a) Complete the painting, tile work, fixture installation in downstairs bathroom.
--b) Complete the touch-up painting, caulking, blind installation in the upstairs bathroom.
--c) Complete the post repairs and painting of the stairs.
--d) Complete the painting of the hallway.
--e) Complete the painting, floor refinish, and closet installation in downstairs bedroom.
--f) Complete the touch-up painting, trim painting, and radiator painting in the master bedroom.
--g) Complete the carpeting of the upstairs hall, walk-in closet room, and master bedroom.
--h) Complete the painting refresh of the kitchen.
--i) Complete the painting refresh of Amelia's old room.
--j) Complete the painting refresh of the wrap-around porch.
--k) Fix the outside stairs and walks.
--l) Paint the walls and radiator of the walk-in closet room.
--m) Paint the trim in the small bedroom (attached to walk-in closet room).
--n) Fix the windows that need it.
--o) Make window treatments.
--p) Stage the house.
2. Do one Chinese activity with Amelia every 14 days. Put on home calendar.
3. Do one declutter session (15 minutes) per week. Put on home calendar.
4. Find the time to start twice weekly family dinners. Put on calendar.
5. Complete 15 minutes of writing daily.
6. Enjoy Amelia's 1st grade school year.
7. Finish 3 items in any craft technique.
8. Learn enough Serbian to speak to Tanja's mom.
--a) Basic greetings.
--b) Present tense sentences [simple ones]
--c) Food vocabulary
9. Finish business plan & incorporate.
10. Submit one item to a publisher - journalistic articles count!
11. Update will by September, 2009.
12. Complete 30 minutes of exercise 3 times a week. Put on home calendar.
13. Microsoft certification - first 3 classes.
14. Cisco certification - re-certify on CCNA
15. Work on application for a different Graduate degree
16. Do one task a week to keep up my friendships. This is flexible.
17. Do something special for Norman weekly, and thoughtful thing every other day.
18. Complete 1 needlework pattern entirely.
19. Enter one writing contest by April, 2010.
20. Unpack the garage.
--a) Install Amelia's playhouse outside.
--b) Unpack one garage box per week.
21. Unpack one basement box from the move every week.
22. Bring in more bookshelves to house to accomplish #21.

45

I woke up today thinking, "Wow. It's my birthday." Followed immediately by the thought, "Rats, I have to go renew my Driver's License today."

Nothing says Happy Birthday like a visit to the Maryland MVA.

The MVA overlords were quite sweet and smiling today though, and I managed to get in and out in about an hour or so. (New rules say that you need to present your SSN and proof of residency. That's done.) The picture is lousy this time around. Bummer. I really liked the last one.

I'm still croupy, but I'm on my feet this week, and that's a huge improvement. If I hadn't been absent all last week, I'd be taking today off and doing something fun. Ah well, if it can't be fun, at least it can be productive.

The goals list update is overdue. I'll update it in a while.

Plus, I need to post the pics from Amelia's 6th Birthday party at Jump Zone. Quite a crowd and an event.

The Root Canal

I am such a baby. The root canal is done. I'm fine. My jaw is going to be sore for a while, but I made it through without too much pain.

The endodontist used a different anaesthetic on me tonight. I didn't have the violent spasm shakes that I get about 10 minutes after the shots with the other, and this pain killer lasted most of the way through a difficult procedure. I have tiny nerve channels, it seems. It took three separate canals to get to all of the roots. I only started to feel sensation at the very last.

In the beginning, Dr. Ali was checking the tooth for nerve involvement. When he started to prep the cold pad for the tooth, I casually asked him, "So, do they teach you waterboarding too when you learn that?" He laughed. I laughed. (Yup, the cold pad hurt.)

I'm still somewhat numb, but it's wearing off. I could feel about 20 minutes after he finished up. I just haven't got full feeling back. Soup for the next couple of days. I may get measured up for the crown tomorrow. It looks like there's enough to do a crown, though there may be a post under the crown.

But it wasn't anywhere near as bad as I'd feared. The guy getting the root canal in the room next to me had them do a full I.V. anaesthetic that knocked him cold. His moaning had me sort of not too happy before my procedure started (and his took forever tying up my doctor). I ended up getting my cell phone out and calling just about anyone that I thought was up and about to chat so that I wouldn't think about it.

After my procedure started, you could hear the team next door trying to wake the guy up to go home. I was over and done with before he even got up from the chair. Quite frankly, I'd considered doing a full knock-out because I'm such a needle-phobe. But after that show and my own procedure, there's no way I'd ever do the I.V. anaesthetic for a dental. Well, unless they're reconstructing my entire jaw or something.

The needles weren't that bad. I did the "pah!" thing of breathing out and relaxing into it while they were pushing in. Worked like a charm. I took about 6 shots without a problem. Not even much pain from those, and I didn't have the local topical gel anaesthetic before the shots were applied. The hardest part of that procedure was not giggling while listening to the frustrated tech and doctor next door trying to wake the big baby I.V. patient. It was hilarious to hear.

Look up. I just said "The needles weren't that bad." Hmm. That's certainly different.

Going from Bad to Worse

I knew this was going to happen soon. I just didn't want it to happen while I was sick.

I broke part of one of my teeth today. How? While eating a spoonful of Dove Toffee Caramel Moment ice cream. It is NOT the ice cream's fault.

No, this tooth has been on its last 'legs' for a while. It finally snapped off a piece near the top along the line of the huge filling that fills up 1/2 of the molar.

Oh, it's Root Canal time for me, for sure. And I can't stop coughing to add insult to injury. I'm going to argue against a bridge and ask for either a crown (probably not enough left for a crown) or a post and fake. I have an appointment for 6:00 pm tonight with the evening dentist, and I'll probably be getting that root canal this evening.

I'd lay down and cry, but well, I'm already doing that. I'm trying to hold back the sick horror of having to deal with pain drugs tonight. I am NOT a good patient, and the anaesthetic always wears off before they finish leaving me unhappy.

And, I have a new problem to handle. Amelia was scheduled for Vacation Bible School next week. It lets out at noon each day. Mom and Dad were going to pick her up, but now they can't. I can't really take another week off of work after being out sick for a week. It just isn't shaping up well.

Desperate for Tea

I'm sick. Really sick. I went to Urgent Care three evenings ago, and they agreed that I was sick and gave me antibiotics. That aren't working. (Jury is out on that still. I'm giving the erythromycin one more day to start beating the sinusitis before I beg for something else to kill it. Wish I could stop coughing.)

I ran out of half-and-half a few hours ago in my last mug of tea. Since waking up a short while ago tea-less, I am less than happy. I'm running out of P&G pyramid bags too, but the lack of cream is the current emergency. I've already run out of Splenda and switched to Stevia packets.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. I remembered the Christmas baking and ransacked the pantry for canned milk. I found a can of Evaporated milk from Evaporated cows, but no opener. The can is taunting me with its promise of cow-y goodness that I can't reach.

Finally, I took the nut pick and started trying to poke holes. No good. Searching for the can opener to just take the lid off, I found a Church Key (for those of you that don't know what that is --it's a bottle opener with a triangular can punch on the other end). Hallelujah!!

Mmm. Tea. At last. It has a glorious canned cow taste underlying the tea, but my sense of smell is pretty much gone at the moment, so I don't care. I don't know why I just don't like the tea as well without milk despite the fact that I'm taste-agnostic right now.

The New Obsession

Cardboard Furniture and Gomi Styling.

(my poor long-suffering husband...)

I really don't know where this burst of creativity is coming from. For several months, I feel like I'm burning up with the need to create. There are days that I'm so exhausted that I get home from work and collapse asleep on the couch. But on nights that I can, I'm working on projects. The house is a total disaster zone because I'm so fixated on this creation.

Is it because last year was so miserable? Now that I'm really happy at work, it's like someone pulled the cork out of my creative bottle. I'm spending more time with my family, but also working on the old house to get it finished for sale.

And somewhere in that drive to finish the house, I started creating this standing artwork out of it. I've been running the color choices for the rooms, and creating moods from drapery and furniture. I don't have a lot of furniture to work with, so I started saving every cardboard box from every new server that comes into our workplace. And the polyethylene foam cushioning inside the computer boxes. I'm building a bedroom set and other assorted furniture pieces. No, I'm not kidding. A bedroom set.

I've become the wonder of the office. My room at work is filling up with foam and cardboard. I'm hunting every single computer box down for my newest mania. I'm filling the attic up with supplies at the old house. I'm sure that several think that I'm collecting the polyethylene cushioning to create my own padded cell. Hey, I'll have the most environmentally friendly padded cell when I'm done.

It all started with this site in Germany. And the work of Eric Guiomar.

It's cardboard furniture, but it doesn't resemble the brick-and-board bookshelves of our college-age past. It's whimsical, sophisticated and smart. I'm able to jump to a dozen designs that I'd discarded because they simply aren't as easy to create in wood. But in cardboard, I can get fluid lines.

Let's just blame it on the moon, shall we?

70 of 100 Books

Facebook has been passing around one of those lists. This one is the 100 Great Books.

So, I've read 70 of these over the course of my life. And there are several notable books missing. And no, I can't remember all of them clearly. Several of these books are required reading in U.S. high school English classes. Several of them are books that you couldn't pay me enough to make me read them again (drunken dwarves {shudder}).

Susie says: "The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. (I can’t verify this statistic)."

I have no idea, but in my definition, a good book is one that haunts you in corners and makes you remember the emotions that it brought up while reading. Or something that was so lucid and novel an idea that it changed your thinking. 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell fits my definition of that easily.
'Enders Game' by Orson Scott Card is another.
What about Euripedes and his plays like 'The Trojan Women' or 'Iphigenia at Aulis'?
Sophocles' 'Antigone'?
Homer's 'The Illiad' and 'The Odyssey'?
Colleen McCullough's 'The Thornbirds'?
Nassim Taleb's 'The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable'?
John Berendt's 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil'?
Ken Kesey's 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'?
'Don Quixote' by Miguel de Cervantes
'House of the Spirits' by Isabel Allende
Maya Angelou's poetry
Pablo Neruda's poetry
Tales of the Brothers Grimm
Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451' or even better 'The Martian Chronicles'
Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time'
Machiavelli's 'The Prince'
Robert Pirsig's 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'
Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' - though this is another that I'll never willingly pick up.
Douglas Hofstadter's 'Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid'
and,
Werner Heisenberg's trilogy of papers that form the basis of quantum mechanics (1925 - Sources of Quantum Mechanics, 1925 - On Quantum Mechanics, 1925 - Sources of Quantum Mechanics [the 2nd of this title]) though my math has never been good enough to parse these papers. Instead, I've read watered-down laymen versions of them.

Sigh, so many good books. And those are just the heavier reads above. There are a lot of less weighty fun books that make an impact too.

Here's the original Facebook list and my reads marked:
   
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x)

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien ( )

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (x)

4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x )

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (x)

6. The Bible ( x)

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ( x)

8. 1984 - George Orwell (x )

9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ()

10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (x)

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott ( x)

12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (x)

13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (x)

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (x) -

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (x)

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (x )

17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )

18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (x)

19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger ( )

20. Middlemarch - George Eliot (x )

21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( x)

22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (x)

23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens (x)

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (x) --on and on and on..I slogged through this one and Anna Karenina

25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (x)

26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ( )

27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (x)

28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (x)

29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (x)

30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ( )

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ( x)

32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (x)

33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis ( x)

34. Emma - Jane Austen ( x)

35. Persuasion - Jane Austen ( ) --hmm, I don't actually remember. I went through an Austen phase

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (x )

37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - ( ) -

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( )

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (x )

40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (x)

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell (x)

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown ( ) --good lord, why is this here? I can't slog through a Dan Brown book at all. I certainly don't think it's one of the best books ever. I can't get through more than 4 pages of Brown's writing before it irritates me to the core.

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x)

44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving ()

45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )

46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (x)

47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (x)

48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (x)

49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan ()

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (x)

52. Dune - Frank Herbert (x)

53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ( )

54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (x )

55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (x ) --this one rivals War and Peace for world's longest book. The ending irritated me, though I understand the heroine's logic.

56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )

57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens ( x)

58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (x )

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon ( )

60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x)

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck ( x)

62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov ( x)

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt ( )

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (x)

65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (x)

66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac (x)

67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ( )

68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ()

69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( x) --though like all of Rushdie, it was pretty much impossible to get through.

70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (x)

71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (x)

72. Dracula - Bram Stoker (x)

73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (x) -

74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )

75. Ulysses - James Joyce (x) --kind of. I really tried. Joyce is an acquired taste I think. Every time I hear the title my mind flashes this image of a drunken dwarf in a wooden keg. Maybe you really need to like drinking to be able to read Joyce

76. The Inferno - Dante (x)

77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )

78. Germinal - Emile Zola ( )

79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (x )

80. Possession - AS Byatt ( )

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (x)

82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )

83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker (x)

84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( )

85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (x )

86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ( )

87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White (x)

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom ( )

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (x)

90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ( )

91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (x )

92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (x)

93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )

94. Watership Down - Richard Adams (x)

95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (x)

96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )

97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (x )

98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (x) --Hey, if you read the complete works of Shakespeare, wouldn't this be included?

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (x)

100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (x)

Drawrings

Well, the creative well has been tapped once again. I started sketching another original needlework piece last night after consulting about 4 separate painting/drawing books that I own. I'm trying to draw a human figure.

Yup. Not content with just doing cute little sketches of Mediterranean villages or Venetian street scenes or Moroccan walled cities, I've now started the ambitious project of drawing people in my work. I thought it might be trying, but it's been a bit harder than I'd even imagined. I end up after 3 hours of putting lines down, erasing them while looking at the figure and thinking, "Are the feet really that big? Maybe that butt is too small and the curve in the back too defined? There's no chest definition. How do I draw that hand? How big is a hand anyway? Whoa, a hand is almost the entire length of the forearm --or maybe I just have freakishly large hands? The head shape looks wrong. Doesn't mine look like the alien heads in Alien Nation?"

Erase, erase, erase. Hours. Simply hours. And I'm just not happy. I'm finally happy with the feet and lower legs. But the upper body is just grotesque at this point. And I have a squarish flipper for hands because I want to get the pose in before starting to worry about the hand details.

And this part has to be in place before I start drawing in the rest of the pieces above the figures.

Looking at my amateur attempts always makes me cringe. My mom could draw beautifully, but I wasn't in that league. I did try when I was younger, but it got to the point where I hated art class because I could see the differences. Now that I'm older, I know that there's more than one type of artistic definition and style, but back then it was full realism or nothing. I've liked my little landscapes, and liked them even better once I started embellishing them beyond the mere sketch.

All of this for needlework. A craft that is falling by the wayside next to knitting or the other heavy yarn arts. But I love needlework beyond any reasonable way to define why I do it. Yes, I know that it is tedious for some. But it's soothing to me. I find the repetitive nature a nice backdrop. I think about the stitching for a couple of minutes, then I think of something else for a bit and can really chew on the thoughts. Or not think at all beyond the meditative counting.

The creation of my own needlework patterns has led to some internal tension. One of the joys of working on other people's patterns is that the design is fully formed. I don't have to think so hard about every stitch. I do modify many of the patterns that I stitch to suit me or the person for whom I'm stitching the piece, but the modifications are less intensive. In my own designs, charting software only goes so far with creating the right color blends on fabric. I end up changing out about 1/2 of the colors as I go when I'm stitching one of my patterns. I tend to have a lot of sloping edges in my designs and that's hard to chart. So I end up constantly evaluating when I'm stitching one of my own. It's rough and can break the meditative nature of stitching.

And yet, I'm happy with "Norm's Cafe" --the mediterranean village piece that I did. And the Venetian piece is going well. The newest design is for a wedding, and I don't know if I have the talent or time to pull it off. But hey, there's no harm in trying.

Tooth

Well, that tooth is gone. It fell out about 2 days after the injury , and I've shrouded it for the future Tooth Fairy visit. The Tooth Fairy would have come earlier, but Amelia wanted to keep it to show her friends and teacher at school. I've been holding it back because items that go to school never return home.

So maybe the Tooth Fairy will leave one of the gold dollar coins tonight.

Friday evening was the Girl Scout sleepover event. That was a huge success and very fun for the girls. The Daisies did not stay for the night, but came for the badging activities and then left as the rest of the girls were settling into sleeping bags. There was an option to stay, and I may have done so had Amelia not gotten a very poor behavior report from school on Friday. I told her that she could do the activities, but the sleepover was forfeited because of her behavior report. That was traumatic (poor baby), but it did impress her with the fact that potty talk (current favorite is shouting out 'dirty underwear!' when she's frustrated with a task), laying down on the floor and not moving, and disruptive talking in class is not going to be tolerated. It also linked the fact that what happens in school IS known at home.

There was some backlash behavior on Saturday and Sunday, but it calmed down by Sunday night. Monday morning has been difficult. She was terrified to go to school, I think. And that drove her to be a lot more obstinate than usual, climaxing in a bout of tears in the car when I buckled her into her car seat because I 'hurt her feelings.' Sigh.

This too shall pass. Like all of the phases, we're probably at the zenith. Our family has already been given the 'cut direct' by the families that see her as a contagion, but we still have friends. Amelia is a bit more disruptive in class --we're going to have to see if it is frustration with tasks or if it is hyperactivity disorder blossoming. She really has trouble sitting for any length of time. But, when I see the other students in her class in other settings, she seems to be exactly like most of the other girls her age--no, actually, she's a lot like many of the boys her age --always moving and similar levels of listening.

Teeth

What you see above is not the grainy shot of the extended teeth of the alien in the Sigourney Weaver movie "Alien," but a panoramic view of Amelia's teeth.

You see, Amelia knocked one of her baby teeth loose on Thursday (2 days ago) and seriously wobbled a second one. How? We have no idea. Amelia says she 'fell on her backpack.'

After the hoopla, we found an excellent emergency dentist and these X-rays were taken. The nice photo that the tech gave us unfortunately was taken by the dentist and he walked out of the room with it never to be seen again. He pulled a new photo for us when I begged, but it isn't as good because he doesn't work the equipment as often.

The line of Amelia's teeth is in the center. Unfortunately, the loose tooth is not really visible in this shot because it's in the middle of that dark spot (and the picture was scanned into a pdf file by Norm, then converted to a jpg by me, leading to huge losses in data). But you can see the small central line of her teeth. And those tooth-shaped white shapes under that line are her adult teeth waiting to come in. In the good pic, you can see that the adult upper front teeth have the same distinct gap between them that Norm and his Mom have. Unfortunately, you can't see it here.

But, after seeing this pic, I am certain of a few things:

1. The costume designer for Alien was closely related to a dentist. The resemblance is too striking to be otherwise.

2. Amelia is her father's daughter. There's more of him in there than me.

3. Children fall down and hurt themselves no matter how many 'safety' measures that we build around them.

Amelia will be ok. The tooth she knocked out (almost --it was hanging by a thread but now it seems to be firming up again) will just have to come out on its own. She didn't damage the permanent teeth beneath, and she's taking amoxicillin to be sure that there is no infection.

Updates

I haven't been online to blog in a while. Every time I think, 'I should update the friends list with that' then I remember that I haven't said anything about Christmas, or New Year's, or any other event. And that stops me from writing anything.

Sigh.

So, here's an update:

Christmas: The server upgrades kept me tense until about Dec 28th when I was done and everything looked good. Needless to say, it was an issue during Christmas. In fact, it got so bad that the 'can't make decisions about anything else' feedback loop that happens when I'm concentrating on one thing only kicked in and made the final Christmas shopping sheer agony. I just couldn't figure anything out this year.

So I told Norm that he'd have to handle everyone this year. That didn't go over so well.

Christmas day was fine, but I spent it still chewing my fingernails waiting for that upgrade.

New Years Eve/Day: The power went out at the brother's house that day, so they came over to our house around 6:00 pm on New Years Eve. I was delighted to have them over since I'd wanted to ask them over for New Years for ...years. But, the guest room wasn't guest ready, so there was about 2 hours of scrambling to make everything right. We got the kids in bed around 9:00 pm, Amelia in bed around 10:30 pm, and dinner served around 11:00 pm. Then we watched the ball drop together, and I drank about 7/8 of a bottle of white wine by myself. Steve and Tanja went to bed and Norm and I watched George Carlin till Way Late. Then Norm poured my giggling, bed-spinning self into bed at 2:30 am where I was out cold until 6:30 am when the twins woke up and started rampaging.

New Years Day: I woke at 6:30 am to the twins up and heading downstairs. I got up to prevent them from waking everyone (read that as Amelia) up. I made pancakes for them and put on a TV show. Steve got up at one point and got the twins to go 'wake up Mommy.' Which meant that they woke up Amelia too. And then Steve and Tanja packed up and left pretty quick after that.

Inauguration: Amelia stayed home with me and wore her new Easter dress, pearls, tights, and fancy shoes for the swearing in while sucking on her stuffed dog Otis curled up next to me. It was festive. We talked about respect for the office of the President.

There. All caught up.

Well, I do have this stupid cold again. And I've crossed a couple more items off of my grand goal list.

Christmas Eve

And finally, yesterday afternoon, I got an answer to the problem plaguing my server upgrade all week. I can relax a bit about it now. I hate stress.

The task of the day is to madly clean up the house for the break. It's a disaster. But, underneath the skim of clutter, there is decent organization now, so we should have it cleaned up in a few hours.

Tomorrow, the family will come over for brunch. Norm's planning pancakes, ham, and probably large amounts of sugar for the children. Nothing says Christmas like opening up all the toys that you've been drooling over for a year and then not getting to play with them because you have to go spend the day at other people's houses.

Last night, Santa came screaming by on the fire pickup truck and threw candy canes at the neighborhood kids. We were putting up the Christmas tree and decorations, when I heard the sirens from a distance. I rushed Amelia into her shoes, coat, hat, and mittens, and we all went outside. Did I mention that I'd already put Amelia in her pajamas for the night and that it was about 9:00 pm? We stood out there and heard the truck go down every side street in the area before it reached us 20 minutes after we went outside. Lots of cold kids because the nights have been about 18 degrees F lately.

After Santa left, we went back inside. Norm stayed out to finish hanging the outside lights. I finished the rest of the tree cleanup, and the radio was on one of the classical stations. About 15 minutes after coming in, the radio station announced a ticket giveaway for caller #11, and so I called. I was #4, so I dialed back, and WON!! Two tickets to the showing of the Bolshoi Ballet's performance of The Pharoah's Daughter at the Charles Theater on Dec 28th. This is a filmed version of a performance of a 'resurrected' ballet. The Pharoah's Daughter was created in Russia in 1862. It fell out of favor and hasn't been performed since 1905 until the Bolshoi reconstructed it in 2005. There is a review about it here.

Yes, how can you go wrong with a ballet whose main plot crux is opium smoking? That and the blackface on the dancers that are supposed to be Egyptian slaves (love the reviewers quote of 'unfortunate'), well, should be an interesting evening. I suspect that the filmed version used the best of the principal dancers to pull it off because it sounds like there are sections where the technical dancing is going to be rough going for anyone without stamina. There's a darn good reason why certain languorous moves are peppered throughout a scene. Most dancers can't handle non-stop leaping without some sort of breathing space.

And no one does blackface anymore. Why in the world would you? Even for historical purity reasons, it's just tacky. Very 'unfortunate' artistic decision, that.

But I'll love seeing the dancing.

Christmas, T-2 and counting down

I love the 'getting together with family' and 'a few days off to relax' parts. I simply don't care for the getting ready for Christmas part much at all.

No, I'm not ready this year. Typically I've finished gift-shopping, and at least have the basics of a plan for the decorations and activities. Not this year.

Nope, the best that I can do is that gift-wise I have a couple of loved ones covered, and Norm is getting a tree today.

This year has stressed me out. To the point that for the very first year, I've abdicated on the gift picking. Completely. I've got a major upgrade project at work, and a house that we're prepping for market. The last thing I feel right now is Christmas-y.

In fact, I feel like I should be listening to the Melodic Metal Dreams For Christmas album and taking a harder drug than just the Sudafed to handle my Christmas sniffles. No, nothing quite says 'Christmas' to me like a video shot in a concrete block dungeon with a leather-clad vampire dancing on your coffin. Yup, quite Christmas-y. If you never outgrew your Goth phase.

Partibrejkers

I was rootling around in my desk today looking for something to listen to in my CD collection, and found the Partibrejkers cds that my sister-in-law brought me back from Serbia.

I'd asked her to find the CDs from them if she could. She found two albums that were recorded in the late 90's and early Naughties, but not the one I was hoping for. The ones she found are not bad --they sound like bad boys that grew up a bit. But the early stuff that I was hoping for sounds like the boys schlepped out of bed to the recording session after a hard night of drinking after doing manual labor all day. Screaming and angry but with this odd bluesy guitar and a harmonica, of all things. I would describe it as 'punk rockabilly' in Serbian.

My sister-in-law was non-plussed when I asked her for the recordings. "How do you know about the Partibrejkers?"

Hmm, good question, that. There's a summer that's kinda missing for me after I graduated from High School of hard clubbing and lots of music. I was dating a musician. We were all experimenting with sound and noise and style. And we were trading music with others from unknown places and sources. One of those traded vinyl records was by the Partibrejkers. And that album was my favorite. Not mine, and I don't even have a recording of it. When I broke up with the musician, I lost custody of the record too. Shame that.

This is the record that I'd love to hear again.

But YouTube has everything, and here is a copy of the recording of '1000 Godina' from that first album. I've been told that's '1000 years' in Serbian and the lyrics are busy screaming (because the original screams and I remember more harmonica) that even if the singer could live 1000 years he wants to do it all in one night.

Good times.

I leave you with videos. The first is a remake of 1000 Godina. Shot grainy. Probably not listen-able.


Um, this sounds more like the original 1000 Godina. I suspect someone took it off the first album and just cut in video clips and pics.


Partibrejkers & Johnny Depp -- Guess Depp was in Belgrade. (Probably in 1987-88 timeframe, because Cane looks a lot less beefy and Johnny still has that cherubic 'Jump Street' face and haircut.)

The following is 'Hipnotisana Gomila' (Hypnotized Crowd)--a much later piece.

Winter Planting

It's been unseasonably warm here between the cold snaps of freezing days. Last Thursday I went out around 9:00 pm at night after Amelia went to bed and planted flower bulbs until midnight. It was lovely and warm and very still. I managed to get 240 bulbs put in quickly in the flower beds in the front of the house. Just as I finished, it started raining, and the temperature chilled down to the upper 30's for a few days.

Yesterday again you could walk outside in your shirt sleeves. I got home from work, got Amelia in bed, changed into work clothes, and headed outside (without dinner). I got another 240 bulbs in --this time in the back yard where the soil has never been turned. It started raining the minute I stepped outside with the tools, but I decided that a little rain wouldn't melt me. In the process of planting a lot of muscari and Siberian squill in the backyard, I discovered some overgrown crocus bulbs that needed to be dug up, pulled apart, and reburied in a larger area. I also found what appeared to be oriental lily bulbs in an area where they couldn't possibly be doing well (lilies need a decent amount of sunlight and don't do well under tree cover). I mixed them with the oriental lilies that I've transplanted from our old house. I also finally found a good spot to plant the lilac sprouts from our old house. It will take about 7 years for them to bloom, but it's important to me to transplant those.

Norman and I started dating in lilac season, you know. That old lilac tree in the front of the old house is very dear to me. I can't bring the lilac to the new home, but I can bring its offspring.

At some point, I intend to bring cuttings off of the blue hydrangeas, most of the Lily-of-the-Valley that I can find, and a few of the Carolina spicebushes from the old house. There are also some very vivid magenta tulips that I'd like to find this spring and transplant.

I really do miss having flower beds in sunlight. I wasn't always good at weeding them in the high summer, but I do love seeing the spring/summer show. My favorites are lilies (all varieties), lilacs, tulips (especially Greigii and lily-pointed), hydrangeas, daphnes (odora variety), Carolina spicebush, and dianthus. Crocus are also favorites --I'm beginning to experiment with fall-blooming crocus.

I'm babbling on-and-on about flowers, but I've been gardening deprived. And the new house yard is mostly in deep shade. Shade gardening is not my favorite type of gardening. I'm hoping that at least some of my flowers live. Or I'll have to take over the 2' strip between the sidewalk and street and turn it into a big planter.

When a Group Project goes horribly wrong....

Well, three weeks ago I dropped my graduate classes at UMUC. I haven't withdrawn from the degree program entirely, but I will soon.

We were finishing up the group project in one class, and I was going over the edits with the group. The group all was enthusiastic about the project, and everyone (but me) thought it was the best thing ever. I did try to stop the train wreck and at least clean up the most objectionable things and the point-of-view errors.

Let's give a small sample, shall we? To put this in perspective, this was a training manual for managers of a foreign office. We were to maintain professional third-person point-of-view. (I can't get screenshots from this connection now, but I'll edit them in for the text quotes later.)

This is the press release.

The following has been developed for release to the Japanese media:

Group 4 Telecom is an intellectual workforce organization utilized by our customers that assigns the right person to the right position promptly and professionally. Because of its position as a world leader in the telecom industry, Group 4 Telecom has Japan to be our first partner in our effort to globalize.

Did you know that "our" and "your" are third-person? No? Neither did I. And the mythic company is a world leader even though it 'has Japan to be' the first global partner.

(editor's note: 'your' doesn't appear in the project slide above, but it littered the presentation on other slides.)

The following slide is just surreal. Granted, we are answering one of the questions asked in the Organizational Theory requirements of the project. However, it does beg the question, 'Can I work in your organization if I'm a Christian?'

Rites and Ceremonies

Rite of integration: creating a common bond and good feelings among employees and increase commitment to the organization
Ceremony - Office holiday party

Rite of enhancement: creating a stronger social identity and increasing employees status
Ceremony - Annual awards night

Rite of renewal:reflects training and development activities that improve organization functioning
Ceremony - Organization development activities

Norm saw this slide and said, "It sounds like you all dance naked in the woods on the full moon. That's team-building."

And last, I'll provide the slide that put the nail in the coffin of that M.S. degree from UMUC:

Managing cultural diversity

Telecom treats all of our employees with the utmost respect. We believe that if we use our diversity to generate multiple perspectives, problem definitions, ideas, action alternatives, and solutions, then we; as a organization, will function effectively together

By recognizing differences, establishing a vision, equalizing power, creating mutual respect, and giving feedback, we can manage our employees better by using their insights and experiences because it helps the creation of new and better ideas that will help our organization grow, decrease effectiveness, stereotyping, communication problems, and stress

Oh. My.

Words just fail me here. I asked the group several times, "Have you READ this slide? No, really, DID YOU READ IT?"

Oh yeah. They read it. Thought it was wonderful. After all, there we were as a group functioning effectively together by using our differences to decrease effectiveness, stereotyping, communication problems, and stress [SIC.] It makes sense in a surreal sort of way.

But I simply can't go on with this degree program. I can't imagine 3 years of struggling through this degree in class after class just like this one. This isn't grad school level English (or reasoning, but we'll leave that out altogether). In fact, it isn't even high school level. I'm having difficulty believing that someone could make it through a Bachelor's degree with language skills that are this poor. I could pass it. But I'd never give it more than the absolute bare minimum to pass the course. The material and interaction does not inspire me. And getting a bare minimum in this dreck? Oh no.

The game isn't worth the candle.

Runaway Bride

(Oct 31, 2008)

Halloween has come and gone. But we have photos!

Amelia was a Bride for Halloween. She made a nice one.



Her friend Sophia was a cute Bunny.

The Color Blanket

It's Level I - Part 3 - H in the Handweavers Guild of America Certificate of Excellence in Handweaving ratings program. It states:

Weave a color blanket, minimum size of 12 inches by 12 inches, in balanced plain weave, incorporating no fewer than twelve hues of the color wheel. Warp colors are to be repeated in the weft in the same proportions at least one inch per color. Show the yarn colors by finishing with fringe.

No problem. I warped this warp (about 8 years ago) using colors from the Lunatic Fringe color gamp kit in 10/2 mercerized cotton, with a few UKI colors thrown in from here and there to even out the spectrum where I chose to differ. Lunatic Fringe uses the cyan-magenta-yellow color base. I warped up a blue-red-yellow color base warp. So, there are a couple of different shades that I blended in.

I've been pretty sick for several days. I woke up feeling halfway decent today, and in the mood to weave. Since I haven't actually *woven* anything in 9 years, that is shocking in and of itself. (All of these looms just sitting idle for so long. It's been sad.) I sat down at the loom with the color blanket and realized that I had a twisted warp thread. I cut off the tie-on, and re-tied the warp on the loom after fixing the thread. Then I started weaving the first color in. And hemstitched the first edge. And got really excited. The feel of throwing a shuttle just makes me feel better.

I found that the second set of yarn from the same supplier is a different dye lot. And the dye lot colors are radically different.

Oh no.

That's a real problem. If I can't get matching yarn, I have to pull this warp off, toss it, and start again. And I can't get matching yarn.

So, since this warp is a loss, I'm going to practice a bit on it and then take it off and weave a shawl.

No Caribou Barbie

Yesterday driving down one of the major roads in the area, I ran across one of those boxy Scions sporting

No McGrumpy. No Caribou Barbie

written in white fingerpaint on the back window of the car.

When we were side-by-side at the traffic light, I motioned to the guy driving, we rolled down windows, and the conversation went like this:

"Excuse me, but I noticed the Caribou Barbie on your back window."

He said happily, "Thanks!"

"I wanted you to know that that term is very offensive to women. It boils her down to just a pretty face and ignores any other quality."

He said heatedly, "Well she IS just a pretty face! She doesn't have any other qualities!"

"But we don't need to say it."

At that point the light changed and the car drove away with the man probably thinking "There's nothing wrong with it." He's very wrong.

Just because the Democratic Party nominated a black man for President does not mean that the rest of the supporters get a free pass on these discrimination issues. Do you understand? No?

To boil a woman down to just looks, appearance, or sexual possibility is gender discrimination. If that man had been driving around a car with a mild racial slur painted on it like that then the general public would have pulled him out of the car and beaten him with his own arms. Yet, to just toss off a comment like "Caribou Barbie" on the back of a car window shows that the person does not understand how demeaning it is to ALL women, not just Palin.

Does Obama really *mean* that commercial where he says "I want my daughters to have the same chances as your sons"?

If so, why is that offensive title being bandied about for Palin? Take her appearance out of the argument, folks. It doesn't have a place here. Drop the Caribou Barbie and the even more offensive 'MILF'. The lipstick on a pig comment was bad enough.

That set of gender slurs saddens me. The individuals making the comments don't even see the damage they are doing. When Hillary Clinton was being attacked for her abrasive mannerisms, there was an outcry.

Why is everyone silent about this? Where are the feminists?

Gerard Depardieu

I sent my friend Margit a link to a blog entry about one woman's pain in learning how to count in French.

In return, she sent me this little gem from Flight of the Conchords.




I'll be muttering "Gerard Depardieu" in a bad accent for a month.

Thanks, Margit.

Goal List Checkpoint - 339,780 minutes

So my year of minutes is ticking out. At 10:00 am EDT on October 8, I'll have 339,780 minutes left in my year of goals to complete. Let's see how I'm doing. Here's the list:

My goals to complete before next June 1, 2009 at 10:30 am:

1. Complete work on old house & determine its fate.
2. Find a Chinese tutor for Amelia
3. Complete the declutter of our new house.
4. Find the time to start nightly family dinners.
5. Finish 2 of the 7 manuscripts that I'm working on. Truck draft stage, minimum.
6. Enjoy Amelia's first school year.
7. Weave 12 items.
8. Finish 2 pieces of furniture, minimum.
9. Learn enough Serbian to annoy Tanja.
10. Finish business plan & incorporate.
11. Turn at least a slight profit on one of the ventures.
12. Finish the patents that I'm working on.
13. Build prototype item, evaluate for market fitness.
14. Submit one item to a publisher.
15. Update will --again.
16. Work on regular fitness routine.
17. Programming - somewhat better understanding
18. MCSE - first four exams
19. Sun certification - re-certify on SysAdmin, Network Admin, Security
20. Cisco certification - re-certify on CCNA
21. Work on that Graduate degree (sigh)
22. Something special for Norman that I won't put in a public list.
23. Work on keeping up my friendships

1. Complete work on old house & determine its fate. - we're working hard at this. The bathroom is done, the painting is almost done, the floors and some other cosmetic work are still ahead. We're on target to have this done around January, 2009.

2. Find a Chinese tutor for Amelia - this one was supposed to be easy. It's not. I have a friend who has offered to do simple stuff with Amelia, and I signed Amelia back up for classes at Hope Chinese School on Sunday in College Park, but I don't want to overwhelm her with schoolwork.

3. Complete the declutter of our new house. - the main living floor has been decluttered (so far). My studio isn't bad. But the rest of the house and the packed stuff is still ahead.

4. Find the time to start nightly family dinners. - this happens about once a week so far. I'd like to increase it to at least 4/wk.

5. Finish 2 of the 7 manuscripts that I'm working on. Truck draft stage, minimum. - (snivel) No. I'm pathetic. And I've started yet another unfinished manuscript, but I'm hopeful that I'll get that one done soon since there is some energy going into it.

6. Enjoy Amelia's first school year. - 6 weeks in and we are not enjoying it, but we're enjoying a lot of quality Amelia time.

7. Weave 12 items. - I'll settle for 3 items. That's more realistic this year.

8. Finish 2 pieces of furniture, minimum. - This actually might happen in the winter/early spring.

9. Learn enough Serbian to annoy Tanja. - I think I'm there already, but I haven't learned enough to hold a conversation with her mom yet.

10. Finish business plan & incorporate. - No. -ahem. Get moving on this. Now. Really. I mean it.

11. Turn at least a slight profit on one of the ventures. - No.

12. Finish the patents that I'm working on. - No, but it's fun working on them.

13. Build prototype item, evaluate for market fitness. - No, but you should see the rough drawings. Hysterical.

14. Submit one item to a publisher. - No.

15. Update will --again. - No. We're pathetic.

16. Work on regular fitness routine. - No. (she says, reaching for her donut)

17. Programming - somewhat better understanding - No. I should have finished the database and scripts by now.

18. MCSE - first four exams - No. I should have at least 2 down by now. C'mon, the networking one? That should be a cakewalk.

19. Sun certification - re-certify on SysAdmin, Network Admin, Security - No.

20. Cisco certification - re-certify on CCNA - No.

21. Work on that Graduate degree - Yes. 9 credits more taken this semester, if I live through it.

22. Something special for Norman that I won't put in a public list. - Yes.

23. Work on keeping up my friendships - Yes, but barely treading water here.


So, most of the things are outstanding still. Changing the list slightly and adding the needlework patterns that I've been creating:

1. Complete work on old house & determine its fate.
2. Find a Chinese tutor for Amelia
3. Complete the declutter of our new house.
* Main floor done
4. Find the time to start nightly family dinners.
5. Finish 2 of the 7 manuscripts that I'm working on. Truck draft stage, minimum.
6. Enjoy Amelia's first school year.
7. Weave 3 items.
8. Finish 2 pieces of furniture, minimum.
9. Learn enough Serbian to speak to Tanja's mom.
10. Finish business plan & incorporate.
11. Turn at least a slight profit on one of the ventures.
12. Finish the patents that I'm working on.
13. Build prototype item, evaluate for market fitness.
14. Submit one item to a publisher.
15. Update will --again.
16. Work on regular fitness routine.
17. Programming - database and web routines
18. MCSE - first four exams OR MCITP
19. Sun certification - re-certify on SysAdmin, Network Admin, Security
20. Cisco certification - re-certify on CCNA
21. Work on that Graduate degree - 6 of 36 credits completed
22. Work on keeping up my friendships
* 23. Do something special for Norman - Complete. Do another now.
24. Complete 3 needlework patterns for publication/sale
25. Negotiate licensing
26. Enter one writing contest

That's a lot. But if I finish even a part of it, I'll be happy. And it's fun checking things off the list.

Taller

Amelia has been talking a lot lately about taller. We thought that she meant height when she said, "I'm the smallest kid in the class." But she isn't the smallest --she's squarely in the middle of the pack of Kindergartners in terms of height.

Then the 'taller' phrase became even more important for her. She is obsessed by it. She touches other children to see how 'tall' they are. She talks about her frustration with writing letters (hey, Kindergartners are still developing the hand motor skill to handle pencils) and that she's small today. She talks about growing up to be tall and being able to 'boss' others around.

Oh.

This isn't about height at all. It's about status. She doesn't see herself fitting in, and somehow, she's transferred that set of fears and frustrations to a child's eye view of height differences. The adults are tall, so they're the 'boss'. Kids are short, but some kids can be the 'boss' of others and be taller. Kids are taller than cats, and they definitely are the 'boss' of the cats.

Take the social veneer off of all of us, and we adults are no better than this Kindergarten view of how things should be. There's a disturbing out-of-the-norm number of CEOs that are tall. We are all shaped by that child view that the person that you look up to is the one that is best suited to call the shots.

My challenge, though, is to convince my own small one that every person has talents to contribute, but to contribute we must let go of the obsessive desire to be 'tall'. I am struggling to find a path to help her understand that small kernel of truth. Because it is way too adult for her to 'hit' someone that is not cooperating with the 'understood' point of view to make herself taller.

The New Cousin's Name

The new cousin's name is Alexander Reese.

Thank goodness.

Clear Air

It rained so hard last night that the toads crawled out of the hiding places in the grassy lawns and hopped into the street, possibly looking for earthworms that had done the same.

The rain's best effect is that whatever was in the air that was making everyone sniffle has abated. It's cooler today than yesterday with the rain clouds still lurking and making everyone feel chillier than they really are.

Amelia and I went to the local fabric store yesterday and bought polar fleece to make a blanket for the newest addition to her cousins. Still no word on the official name of the newest bean yet. That means the parents are probably still duking it out. (Or that it's not important enough to anyone to bother relating the info) I'm going to start calling him "Terrence" for real. I'm sure that his brother Phillip will approve.

While we were there, I bought sock yarn. They only had 4 possible colors of sock yarn and is it me or is sock yarn rather pricey for a skinny wool/acrylic blend? The bamboo/silk yarns were cheaper! Plus, I think I need roughly 2 skeins for these socks I'm planning as the sock yarn only had 166 yards in each skein.

When I got home with the goods, I put the sock yarn with the wool that I'm planning to use as either warp or weft. I'm thinking now that I'll use the sock yarn for warp, and the shetland wool for weft. A 4-shaft diamond waffle weave on the leg tube, and a simple twill for the foot tube. The heel gusset might be possible on the loom also, but I'll have to sample. I'm sampling with straight shetland warp and weft, with a small sample of shetland warp/sock yarn weft to examine shrinkage issues and elastic memory of the yarn blend.

Last night, though, I went into my studio after I'd managed to get Amelia bathed and in bed, and found that I was so tired that I was swaying in front of the warping board. I bagged the project for the night. I can't do warp calculations when I'm that wiped out.

Today is Rosh Hashanah

To all of the Jewish friends, Happy New Year!!!

Just a reminder...if you haven't registered to vote in your state, do so soon. Many states close voter registration next week. If you don't register, you can't cast a ballot.

(There. That's my only political viewpoint. I'm a true purple undecided right now. I'll decide before the day, but right now and always, the only thing I'll say in public is that "I don't care who you vote for, but take your part.")

(And the other thing...if the ad you hear is 90% about the other guy, then it's a negative ad. I really hate negative ads. It makes me think that you don't have anything to say. Are you listening? Yes, you know who I'm talking about out there.)

The weather has been crazy here. Cold enough that we turned the heat on in the house for 2 nights, then warm and humid enough that we needed the air conditioning. Everyone has a slight sniffle. Parts of me hurt. And I have this uncontrollable desire to pet yarn and stitch. It must be the turning of summer to fall.

And I'm WEAVING!!!!! Not much, but a little bit last night. Ah, that familiar excitement!

Nephew Update

Our new nephew has a name: Alexander or Alexandar, whichever spelling prevails in the sparring parents war. I'm hoping that it is Alexander because otherwise people are going to assume that his parents were illiterate. No one (in the USA) is going to realize that he's simply got the Serbian spelling of the name.

Maybe we can get the parents to just drop the "ander/andar" part and call him Alex instead?

Alex is doing fine at the hospital. He's still in Neo-natal ICU, but a few more tubes have been removed. It appears that all of his major organs and systems are OK. He's just really, really small. I really want to see him, but I've been swamped with school.

Remember those 9 credits of graduate classes? I tried to drop one 3-credit class. And found out that I would owe about $1300 if I do drop it.

Um, ok. Looks like I stick this out.

Basically, I only really care about the passing grade. I've got about 6 irons in the fire right now, and no time period to spend in the leisure of study. However, on Sunday, after finishing more tasks for school, I spent about one hour when Amelia was put to bed doing some needlework. I've almost forgotten how. ;-)

A NEW NEPHEW!!!

Well, he came this morning. He's 8 weeks early (week 32), only 4 pounds, and in the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit for at least the next 10 days.

We don't know his name yet.

But he's here. And Tanja is doing well after her C-section. And all of the family is very grateful that he didn't arrive at week 26, when the first episode happened.

Out of my Mind - Part 2

I finished the 3-page paper and 3/4 of all the reading last night, posted to conferences, and basically patched up what needed to be done. There's a 5-page paper due tomorrow, so I'll be doing that tonight. And 2 new conference posts today. Took me something like an hour last night just to find and print all of the reserved reading for the two classes.

I did it though. I'm holding my head above water. In a week I'll be doing a bit more than just paddling in these seas. One thing that I spent a few minutes on last night was pulling the reading for the next 3 weeks together and crafting a reading/study schedule. (Thank you, Fly Lady) I'll be ok if I stick to it.

The only issue is that I find it hard to come down from a long night studying. We're in gender/racial discrimination/diversity issues in the reading, and it's all hot-button type issues that are designed to keep you up at night.

Amelia called me last night while I was studying at work to tell me that she loved me and that I was the most wonderful mommy in the world for making sure that her favorite dresses were laundered so that she could wear them to school. It made me *feel* like the most wonderful mommy, even if I just don't think that I am most of the time.

Norm took Amelia to the Daisies meeting (Girl Scouts) last night so that I could study. It went well, and the scout moms even threw in a few he/him's to make him feel included in the group. ;-) (We have such an awesome neighborhood.)

Realistically, this class schedule is pretty insane. But I don't have a really big choice if I want to finish the program. When Norm starts his program, I will have to stop. We can't afford to have more than one parent in school at one time. To finish, I will need to do 9 credits in Spring, 6 credits in Summer, and 6 credits in Fall, 2009. And truthfully, I just want it over with.

Out of my Mind

Really. I am.

I signed up for 9 credit hours of Graduate school classes. One 6-credit management class (Intro to Management I & II combined) and one 3-credit Project Management specialty class (Conflict & Negotiation).

I am right now 3 chapters and two papers of assigned reading behind. I've managed to do all of the posts in the conferences (these are online courses), and worked on part of the group projects, but I have two papers due this week. A 3-pager tomorrow, and a 5-pager on Wed. Not a huge amount of writing, but I wanted them done by now, and the reading load tripped me up. (I'm under the delusion that one should read all the material before trying to write a paper on an assigned topic.)

My coworkers are taking bets on how long before I crack under the pressure. I'm betting that I'll make it. It's not that bad, but I need to start setting up a reading schedule with my daily routines. Thank you, Fly Lady.

The house is still clean. Even Norm is pitching in on the routines. I plan on rewarding myself with a bit of stitching time in the new, bright living room once these papers are written.

Let there be Light!!

We broke down this weekend and bought two cheap 150 Watt floor lamps at Home Depot. I put one together, liked the effect, so I put the second one together and placed them at either end of the living room.

Suddenly, the dark cave-like room has become bright and inviting. I sat and did needlework on my favorite chair late last night for a short bit.

Blessed, beautiful light.

A Couple of Days Off

I took Tue & Wed off to enjoy some of the crafts and things that I've been missing for over a year. The problem with taking downtime away from work is that I barely know where to start when I've got a huge list of things that I'd like to do and no set order to do them in.

I finished putting my loom parts together on the Louet David 90. Now I just need to tune that loom before warping it.

I put up the white board and pictures in my office/studio space that I've been trying to get up for a year.

I still haven't found my cables yet for my computer, but I'm working on it. In the meantime, I'm bringing up the new toy server with Fedora 9 Linux and VMware Server for linux. After that, I'll load in the Windows 2008 Server and AD and Exchange as virtuals on the network. But having it to poke at will go far in getting me boot-strapped back up to speed. It feels great to get my hands on something besides Mirapoint/FreeBSD internals. I have a sheet-fed scanner at home that only works with a Mac (that's what I had that had enough firepower at the time to run the editing software). I'd like to virtualize a Mac so that I can run the scanner, but we'll see how that goes in a few days.

The living areas of the house are still clean and uncluttered, the studio is getting less and less cluttered all the time, and I'm searching for good lighting so that I can start using the needlework stands and looms in the living areas of the house. We have the worst lighting ever in this house, and I have been struggling with eye strain since we moved in.

Amelia is still stressing over Kindergarten and the new rules, poor thing. She is being reprimanded often for 'touching' other children. She tends to hug whenever she wants to show approval. Actually, she's a really touchy-feely child (so totally unlike me, but very like her father). She's been waking up in the middle of the night and coming to 'cuddle' in bed with me. I think she's desperate for some approval right now. Norm and I agreed this morning after she left that we're going to curtail any reprimands/punishments for behavior at home for a few days and try to work to make her feel more secure (her incredibly bad behavior on Sat at the restaurant lost her 'snack' money for school (dessert after lunch treats, basically) and her princess movies for the week). In fact, I'm going to pop out early today and go pick her up now.

A Lovely 95 degree (F) Fall Weekend in Maryland

This weekend passed in a blur. I'm over the moon happy about how life is straightening out, priorities that have long been neglected are coming to their rightful place, the house is reflecting the serenity and peace that is reigning.

I muttered to Norm on Thursday that that it feels too good to last. He just laughed and said, "You always do this. Peace and calm really stresses you out, doesn't it?" Well, I can't help but hold my breath waiting for the other shoe to drop. God, I love that man --he knows all of my worst secrets and traits and still loves me.

It was really, really hot here. I wonder if Hurricane Ike to our west pushed all of the warm air East of the Mississippi directly over the Atlantic coast? It's 85 degrees today (Monday) and going to be 72 degrees tomorrow.

Tonight is the Back to School Night at the school. We're going, of course. I need to find out if Amelia should go or not.

By the way, on Friday evening, I bought Girl Scout cookies from a couple of neighbor scouts. Amelia was arriving at that moment, and she was really upset that I was buying cookies from them and not from her little Brownie self. (well, not really a Brownie but she doesn't seem to understand that yet). The outrage that she telegraphed was just funny, but I treated it with deep seriousness and told her that I'd always buy cookies from her too.

I have two days off of work on Tuesday and Wednesday. And the house is still clean. And school work will be done by tomorrow. And basically, I'll have two days to really work on stuff that I have wanted to do for ages. :-D

Sunday in Peace and Quiet

Sunday was lovely. We woke up late, had lunch, and went over to the old house to wash down the drywall dust on the walls (next step is priming the walls...YAY!!!). After working, we came home and enjoyed a few hours without Amelia. While we were getting showered up (covered in drywall dust), our doorbell started ringing and ringing and knocking. We thought it was one of the neighborhood kids selling stuff for school, and I figured we'd catch up with him later --no need to bolt downstairs hurriedly dressed and dripping soap. Turns out it was the parents, Steve, and all of the kids coming by (probably to drop Amelia off), and it's a darn good thing that we didn't open the door. It gave us 2 more hours to relax before we picked up Amelia. After we did get Amelia and got her put to bed, Norm and I watched some TV together (that's rare).

I've really enjoyed having the house back in shape. The routines are back in place to keep it clean, and we've been trying to modify our mail dropping habits. Really, newspapers, mail, and recycling stuff are the pieces that chip away at my clean intentions. It's a delight to have the kitchen clean enough to just invite people over on a whim.

Saturday's Restaurant Disaster

Saturday, we got up late, and met the parents and Steve and the kids at Sakura for lunch. That's a Japanese steak house that does the little show on the grill at the table. It's one of Steve and Tanja's favorites, but I dread going because Amelia does not behave there. I don't know why that restaurant is so bad, but the kids are terrors. Last time, each of the three kids took turns taking all their clothes off at the table. I have to walk Amelia outside for a change of venue and a short talk every single time we go there. This time was no exception. I think that Mia (the 2 1/2 year old cousin) was grumpy, and Amelia had trouble getting her attention. And Grandma was busy attending grumpy Mia, so Amelia was getting very little attention. (I was seated across the table from them. I doubted the wisdom in this, but was told not to worry so much.) Amelia began the running around the table, pouring water into Daddy's food and her own plate, throwing silverware, and generally acting out for attention.

I finally took her outside for a bit, and while I was talking to her, Norm came out. He walked out with, "Hey Amelia, there's a phone call for you!" and handed her his cell phone. I saw it happen, tried to intercept, Amelia grabbed the phone and hurled it down the concrete sidewalk, as I shouted "NO!" helplessly. (Norm needs to learn that you don't give expensive things to angry pouting children. He seems to get that now.) That was it for us. I took Amelia to the very hot car which Norm opened with the clicker, and told him to pack us up, we were going home. He went back in the restaurant as I put Amelia in her car seat and sat back in the front seat. She hurled her shoes (the sparkly pink princess slippers, no less) at my head, so I collected them and put them in the back of the car and told her that they were now Daddy's shoes and that she'd have to ask him permission to wear them from now on. And we sat. And we sat. 15 minutes. Boiling hot. All car doors open, no key, no cell phone to call. And Norm finally comes out. We go. And I get home from the restaurant and have a very strong gluten reaction that knocked me out till about 5:30-6:00 pm. Norm took Amelia over to stay overnight with the cousins, and we planned to work on the house, but I literally could not rouse for hours.

Norm went over around 7:30 pm to work on the old house, and I had recovered so I worked on my Grad school classes. He got home around 1:00 am, just as I was finishing. I'm taking 9 credit hours this semester - two classes. The introductory management class and a Project Management class on conflict negotiation. If work wasn't doing well, I wouldn't be able to do these, but I'm ok. And looking the syllabus for each class, it's heavy, but I can manage it as long as I keep it scheduled. I just want to get through this degree as quickly as possible.

Friday's Popcorn Movie Night

I called Sonia's mom on Friday morning after Amelia got on the school bus. Sonia is in Amelia's Kindergarten class and rides her bus, and I've been trying to set up a play date forever, but the work on the other house just gets in the way every weekend, and through the week we're all too busy. Hina (Sonia's mom) said that Sat and Sun were booked up (see? We're not the only ones. American life gets crammed into two days a week.). But they were free Friday evening (that night). I mentioned that Amelia had just gotten the movie "Barbie and the Diamond Castle" and that she'd been dying to see it so we had a popcorn movie night planned. But would Sonia like to come over to see it too? Yes, indeed. And Hina and her husband and the kids would all come over, let the kids see the movie, and hang out and talk. I was thrilled. We agreed on 7 pm so that everyone could eat dinner first.

Until I hung up and realized that the house was a wreck. Really. Not. Good. I eeped, and mentioned this to Norm who was getting ready to leave for work too. We agreed to come home early and just get the downstairs in shape. I wasn't sure how --the dining room table in the formal dining room (10' x 3') was literally 2 feet deep in mail, catalogs, books, and other stuff stowed from the kitchen table when we needed to eat there. There were boxes of books in the living room where I'd been unpacking for 5 months, and general clutter on every horizontal surface.

Amazingly, it went off well. We met at 1:30 pm, ate something (now it's 2:30 pm), and Norm took the dining room and living room, and I took the entry, kitchen, and family room. And I mixed up a quick cake mix (non-egg, non-dairy), and threw it in the oven while taking swipes at the kitchen counter. We met at the entry after de-cluttering everything at 5:00 pm. Then I scrubbed down the bathroom fixtures while Norm swept and mopped the kitchen, finishing with a mop of the bathroom. All done. And with both of us working on the hopeless case that was our house, we managed to finish with enough time to make a dessert and tea, and take showers and change clothes. Amelia came home utterly excited and pretty much unable to eat a thing at the idea that Sonia was coming to a movie. She ran outside three separate times and screamed, "SONIA!!!" down the street. It was charming. The kids were all lovely together (I must get that picture of them for the blog), and everyone had a great time. I haven't relaxed with friends and chat in quite a while.

My Day Off

Yesterday, Tuesday, I took a day off of work to just stay home and do fun stuff (and go coax Amelia to try the hot lunch at the school).

This is the second week of classes here at the University where I work. Unlike the last four years, this Rush season has been Quiet.

It's been so quiet that I felt really ok in taking a day off. We're past the vacation freeze for Rush. And I completed everything outstanding on my desk so that I could take a day and not feel like there was pressure.

I was so excited on Monday that I couldn't sleep. I looked at 20 different things that I wanted to do that have been shelved until I had more time and less stress. Now that time is here. And I couldn't sleep till after 2 A.M.. I feel like there is an amazing pressure off of me --giddy and light.

The next morning I got Amelia off to school, went upstairs to my studio, and .......

I had trouble deciding. In fact, it was so difficult deciding what to tackle first that I couldn't. I went downstairs again, cleaned the kitchen and the kitchen table, ran a couple of loads of laundry, worked on getting the recycling ready for Thur morning, made coffee, read a book for a while, went upstairs finally to the studio and stitched on a needlework project for a bit, then decided that finishing the Louet David loom fix would get me furthest along. I worked on threading up the heddles on the harness until it was time to go to the school and get Amelia to eat.

It's been a long time since I was in a school cafeteria. It seems smaller when you're an adult. When Amelia realized that I was buying a hot lunch for her, she yanked her hand out of mine, bolted from the line to a table, opened her lunch and started cramming it down as fast as she could. By the time I got there, she told me that she was finished eating lunch. Then came the battle to eat "Just One Chicken Nugget." That lasted until the cafeteria workers called for snack (cookies are made available for purchase in the last 5 minutes of the 20 minute lunch period). Amelia begged for a cookie, so I got her one in exchange for an eaten nugget. She ate three altogether with that deal, and got her treasured cookie. I cleaned up her hot lunch, and headed on home.

I stopped at the grocery and picked up chicken, green beans, and fruit for dinner. My friend Margit came over for dinner last night. (Hi Margit!) I threw it together in the slow cooker, set the beans aside, and...took a nap.

Then it was time to pick up Amelia. When I picked her up, there were Scouts heading to a meeting, so I let her join them. (The previous post) Margit came just as I was heading over to pick up Amelia at the school. I picked her up and headed home to finish dinner. Margit and I just talked and ate and finally it was time for her to head back (I felt bad to take her away from sculpting time because she needed it, but it was wonderful to have the company).

I gave Amelia a bath, and continued cleaning the kitchen and laundry. I finished up around 2 am (deja vu), and headed to bed, to find that Amelia (who was sleeping in our bed) had wet the bed. She hasn't done that in an age, but the timing couldn't have been worse. I woke her up, cleaned her up, changed her into clean pajamas, and put her to bed in the guest room while I stripped our bed, scrubbed the mattress with special cleaner, and blotted up the stain. Our bed does not have a waterproof liner, of course. And this had soaked the mattress pad. I slept in the guest room with Amelia.

Now that the house is clean, I want another day off. I'm really feeling post-stress letdown. I'd like to finish clearing my head.

Kindergarten Musing about Brownies

Amelia started Kindergarten. My big girl is really excited and involved in a dozen activities already. One that I'm having trouble establishing in Howard County is a Chinese class for her. Who'd have thought that that would be a problem in Howard County? They're typically well ahead of the curve.

Last night was the first Girl Scout (Brownie) meeting. We missed the info meeting for it because Amelia has already had a stomach flu and then later a viral cough in the first two weeks of school. Amelia had a great time, really enjoyed herself, and by the time I picked her up was talking about uniforms, cookies, and the Girl Scout oath.

And the Scout Mom pulled me aside and said that she'd figured out that Amelia was 5 and in Kindergarten. And that means that she can't be a Brownie for two more years. Instead, she can be a Daisy but they haven't organized yet. Amelia can't come back to the Brownies.

Sigh. How do I explain this tactfully to Amelia? I can't.

Norm mentioned that we should recruit all the little girls in our neighborhood and form a Daisy gang. We can take over the outings and make it cool and fun to be a Girl Scout instead of lame. If we start early, they'll be entrenched. We can have our Daisies earning their petals on recognizing tree species and animal tracks and colonial history and camping basics like raising a tent. ;-D

The Butternut Thieves

(this is from Aug 30, 2008)

The butternut tree in the front yard of our new house is finally dropping its butternuts. Well, the husks aren't quite ripe, but the squirrel army that descended on the tree are busy gnawing them up.

An army of squirrels. Literally. I have seen about 30 or so of them run up that tree, gnaw off a branch with a butternut cluster (they come in clusters of two at the end of a branch), and then either gnaw open the husk to get the nut, or run down the tree with the large leafy branch in mouth to another tree in the neighborhood.

But being squirrels, they tend to gnaw open a husk and then drop it out of their paws. There are so many butternuts that they don't bother to go down to the ground to find it. They just pluck another.

I've been picking up these dropped butternuts and bringing them inside. I tried gathering a handful and putting them on the porch while I gathered more, but the greedy little rodents found them on the porch and stole them while I was 15' away in the yard hunting.

I have managed to gather about a 2 quarts of nuts (sans husks). I'm hoping to have enough to bake a butternut cake (gluten free, of course), but we'll see.

I love butternuts myself, and understand the squirrels' delight. The nuts look like tiny walnuts and the husk smells a bit like a mild walnut husk (spicy and green). The nuts taste like a lighter, sweeter, milder version of walnut --like a cross between a Brazil nut and a walnut. Butternuts used to be easy to find up in Patapsco state park, but the butternut trees are dying of a fungal blight that destroys their bark. Our tree is not blighted yet, but it does have a problem with anthracnose blight on the leaves. I'll spray it next spring/summer for that.

Cougar caught!!

And it's not a cougar. A surveillance camera caught it on tape, and it's a big, roaming Savannah Cat. One of the wild breeds that I mentioned in the last post (though I put up a picture of a Golden Cat instead of a Savannah yesterday, silly mistake as Goldens haven't really been crossed with domestic kitties yet).

Late this afternoon, a Department of Public Safety surveillance camera observed a large feline at the edge of the same wooded area where the two previous sighting of the suspected cougar were made. A search of the area was conducted and the feline was also observed at close range by a university police officer. Images of the feline were viewed by personnel at the MD Department of Natural Resources and they have confirmed that the feline that we observed and recorded is not a cougar.

The markings and size of the feline do appear consistent with a type of cat called a Savannah Cat. This is a hybrid of a Domestic Short Hair cat and a Serval, which is a larger African feline. Savannahs can grow to be as large as 35 pounds and can be a great deal larger than normal domesticated cats. They have been referred to as the Great Danes of the cat family.

At this time, the feline is still loose. University police will continue their efforts to positively identify the animal. If you should observe this feline, please do not approach it; call the university police and report the siting.

Mystery solved.

I do have a few things I'd love to say to this cat's owner though. Savannah's need special handling and if they are allowed to roam outside, they do tend to go feral quicker than a normal cat. Why would you pay $2500 for a pet only to dump it outside to roam? People 'adopt' cats that are found outside. Roaming cats are also picked up by the local animal control, and they get put to sleep the same as any other stray animal. Whoever you are, you are a total inconsiderate idiot of an owner. I hope the cat ends up in a good home, but not your home. You're the type of person that is going to end up getting laws against wild breed cross ownership on the books in this county.

Have You Seen Me?

The puzzlement just grows here in Maryland over the cougar siting. Besides the 3 or so people who saw it yesterday morning, no one else has seen a hair of it. It ghosted out of the wooded area to the side of the campus (where the tornado tore out a large swath of trees three years ago), and then ghosted back to wherever it came from.

The officials are just confused. They figure that sooner or later we'll all just laugh it off as a fox like many of the coyote sightings. I've actually seen a coyote in Maryland near the Rocky Gorge Reservoir in Howard County, but never on campus.

I really doubt that the report was false, though. Just wonder if the people didn't see a bobcat instead. At a distance, moving in the trees, they're going to look similar. And while bobcats aren't all that common either, we do have a population in Maryland. I swear that our next-door neighbor has a bobcat or a wildcat/domestic cross --it's as big as a German Shepherd. Perhaps that's what people are seeing, someone in the neighborhood may have one of those wildcat/domestic crosses, like the Golden Cat pictured above.

It is possible though. Chicago had a cougar running through its streets that officials think came in by following the railroad tracks from South Dakota. And since this is a former cougar colonized area (roughly 150 years ago), then perhaps they are wandering back.

Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!

Usually at work I only have to worry about an unhappy faculty member or the navigation of current organizational politics.

Today we are worrying about a COUGAR.

Yes, I kid you not. A cougar. In suburban Maryland. About 10 miles from the White House.

Here's what we got in the campus alert today:

There have been several reliable sightings of an animal fitting the description of a cougar on the campus. The description of the sighted cat is: light tan and tawny brown, about 4 feet long with a 4 foot tail, and weighing about 50 pounds. Several sightings have been reported from the area of Cole Field House, near the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, and continuing through the wooded areas to the area of the Comcast Center and Arena Drive Garage. There has been no report of aggressive behavior on the part of the animal, but community members are warned that cougars are a predatory species and that, if seen, the animal should not be approached.

Now, what in the world is a cougar doing out here? We don't even typically see them in the wilds of Western Maryland, much less central Southern Maryland inside the 495 Capital Beltway.

The police are all over the northwest side of campus today. Many police vehicles and two helicopters searching the area.

Affective Forecasting - Why We Can't See What Will Make Us Content

In my rambling to try to find answers to burning questions in my own research, I sometimes stumble across odd eddies and backwaters of someone else's research. The following excerpt was found in an article by Jon Gertner called "The Futile Pursuit of Happiness" published in the New York Times on September 7, 2003:

Much of the work of Kahneman, Loewenstein, Gilbert and Wilson takes its cue from the concept of adaptation, a term psychologists have used since at least the 1950's to refer to how we acclimate to changing circumstances. George Loewenstein sums up this human capacity as follows: ''Happiness is a signal that our brains use to motivate us to do certain things. And in the same way that our eye adapts to different levels of illumination, we're designed to kind of go back to the happiness set point. Our brains are not trying to be happy. Our brains are trying to regulate us.'' In this respect, the tendency toward adaptation suggests why the impact bias is so pervasive. As Tim Wilson says: ''We don't realize how quickly we will adapt to a pleasurable event and make it the backdrop of our lives. When any event occurs to us, we make it ordinary. And through becoming ordinary, we lose our pleasure.''

It is easy to overlook something new and crucial in what Wilson is saying. Not that we invariably lose interest in bright and shiny things over time -- this is a long-known trait -- but that we're generally unable to recognize that we adapt to new circumstances and therefore fail to incorporate this fact into our decisions. So, yes, we will adapt to the BMW and the plasma TV, since we adapt to virtually everything. But Wilson and Gilbert and others have shown that we seem unable to predict that we will adapt. Thus, when we find the pleasure derived from a thing diminishing, we move on to the next thing or event and almost certainly make another error of prediction, and then another, ad infinitum.

Most of their research is focused on behavioral prediction and basically how we humans just don't do it all that well. Happiness and affective reasoning have become two subjects close to my soul as I'm dealing with job stress and fantasizing about running away and doing something completely different with my life. The research shows that the stable but boring job can be more satisfying than a high energy, high profile, but stressfully unpredictable job.

And it brings so many questions to mind. If attaining a goal makes our brain begin to diminish the importance of that goal to our happiness, why does marriage work? We are attaining the goal of getting exclusive rights to the other person, so it should fade over time. And yet it does work, and works well for many couples. I can understand how the research relates to obtainment of things, but in human relationships, there must be a different set of rules.

There must be compatibility factors. Humans need relationships. We're primates at heart and pretty social. But I wonder how technology and the ever-present barrage of advertisements inducing need where none existed before affect our relationships. Are we becoming more lonely as a society? That would drive more psychological aberrations in the general public. And the physically appealing models in those ads make us dissatisfied with our current self.

I don't have answers here, just all questions. If we don't seem to learn what is right for our own happiness, how can we make life choices like choosing a spouse and be certain we are on the path to happiness?

Well, outside of work, my life is happy. After 9 years of marriage, I'd say that I made a good decision. Perhaps it is because we spend so much time talking to each other and imagining things and building things together. I just have a feeling that in 10 more years, I'll still feel the rightness of our relationship.

Dave's Brother & What the Doctor Said

My cousin by marriage, Laura, is married to a really nice guy named Dave. This last week, Dave's brother died from complications with his diabetes. My heart goes out to the family --he was pretty young, 29.

While up in the mountains of Virginia last week, the family heard the news. There was quiet conversation about it because the kids were wandering around, but of course, my daughter of the amazing radio-dish ears, picked up on the conversation and immediately knew someone had died. Being 5 she is of a rather morbid curiosity on the subject. The conversation with Norm and her went something like this?

Did Princess Laura's brother die?

"Yes, sweetie, Princess Laura's husband Dave had a brother who just died."

How did he died?

"Well, he was sick and sometimes didn't follow his doctor's orders very carefully. If you don't follow what your doctor says, you could die."

At this point, Amelia's eyes go wide in horror. And there's a touch of anxiety in her next questions.

Daddy, I ate french fries and some of Mommy's ice cream. Am I going to DIE?!!

"No, honey, you're not going to die. Why do you say that?"

Because the doctor told me that I can't eat french fries!! (At this point, she's near tears)

I should mention here that Amelia went from being in the short group in her age ranges to being solidly in the middle. But at the same time, her weight for height is now in the upper percentiles. It's nothing to worry about yet, but we are cutting way back on french fries and starches under her doctor's orders. Amelia has been very sad about the french fries, and she sometimes wheedles for one taste of Mommy and Daddy's milk-based ice creams. I've also become pretty militant about eating in front of the TV (absolutely not) because mindless eating when watching TV is dangerous. (However we do still have popcorn movie nights together)

After soothing her down for a while, Norm made her understand that unless your illness is something really severe, occasional lapses aren't going to kill you. Amelia agreed that mostly french fries were not ok, but sometimes they could be.

Bias in Jobs in the Creative Fields

At lunch today, a coworker and I were discussing work in some of the creative fields - art, marketing, design. One of her friends is considering dyeing his hair to hide the grey that is coming in so that he can look more youthful. Youth is a high commodity in the creative fields, and there is a large bias against workers in those fields who age.

Experience is held for nought, I guess.

The basis behind it is that the young make up the market, and therefore are more trendy and cutting edge.

Except, as we both noted, the large majority of the United States is beginning to look like us: kinda middle-aged/older, pudgy, and nostalgic for things from our youthful days. I think that youth is a plus because you have so much energy to throw at projects or ideas, but it doesn't trump experience and knowledge of the market.

We both agreed however, that personal body weight (and appearance in general) did count. And that overweight people don't do as well financially. I think it's because there is this in-programmed bias that tells people at a deep subconscious level that if you don't take care of your physical appearance, you can't take care of anything else.

Basically, I boiled it down to the following exchange:

"Well, weight issues are like negative charisma points."

"Careful! Add weight issues to geekishness, and you are terminally doomed."

"Yeah. I'm probably always going to have a -2 handicap on any persuasion roll score."

Oh Good Lord. I Found Another 4-leaf Clover Today.

Three work days in a row that I've found one.

And they haven't been heralding good tidings.

Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease don't make me wanna cry today. Please?

Pager Panic

Yesterday was one that goes down as a rotten day. I realized around noon that I didn't have my work cellphone/pager in my purse. I worked Friday until 12:30 am on Saturday, and left it charging in the office when I walked out all groggy and tired.

When I realized I didn't have it, I got panicky. Norm asked me to do lunch with him and Amelia first, and go get it after. I argued a bit, got family priorities tossed at me, and finally caved and went. We went to lunch at the slowest restaurant in Columbia, MD and then to the Costco there. Got back 6 hours later. And I was getting really feral bitchy at that point because I didn't have my pager.

Why?

Well, Friday morning I woke up to the beep-beep-beep every 30 seconds of my pager. It had been going off all night, but I was over at my sister-in-law's house alone with her, dead tired from the drive up and daily adrenalin, and slept through every page every 30 seconds from midnight onward. I was online and fixing the issue in minutes (a hacked account), but it had been live all night.

Friday, my director asked my manager why I didn't answer my pager despite the fact that work had bought me a different phone specifically so that I could hear the rings and answer (I never could on the old one). It was a "this goes down on your permanent record" kind of conversation. One designed to ratchet up my nerves. And left me feeling so bad that I contemplated just quitting then-and-there and walking out.

I don't think that I have the energy level for 24/7/365 on-call work anymore. Not at this level of pressure. No ability to put in preventative measures, but when things break I'm the one that has to spend hours of my own time fixing them.

I don't know why I slept through that on Thursday night. It could be this flu coming in that had me extra tired. It could have been the exhaustion of the day. And I couldn't possibly guarantee to either of my immediate management chain that I wouldn't do it again. How do I hear something when dead asleep? Set up my vibrating alarm clock (I use one that deaf people use) to wake me at 1 am to check to see if I've been paged? Just writing this down makes me feel trapped and stressed.

The cellphone is not something that I typically used to carry. I would carry it on weekends, but more relaxed about it. Now, it symbolizes the office and when it is on me (and they want it on my person 24/7) I cannot do anything but stress about work. David has demanded that I carry it even when I'm at home, despite the fact that work has my home phone number in at least 3 spreadsheets and the main database. On my person. And take it up to the bedroom at night because two weeks ago I missed a call that came in because it was in the kitchen. I called back in 20 minutes when I passed the kitchen and heard the beep-beep-beep from a missed call, but that wasn't good enough. (I think that if they could embed a chip in my head so that they could interrupt and talk to me whenever they wanted, that would be their ideal. I really felt for that girl in the Devil Wears Prada.)

There's a story that I read once about a girl who wore a charm about her neck to ward off evil while she's visiting estranged family. One day the cord breaks, and she discovers that once it is off of her, she can think clearly and that she's under a malevolent set of orders to destroy the estranged family. But the grandmother who gave her the charm appears to her and tells her if she doesn't get it back on her neck and start following orders again, bad things will happen to those she loves.

That cellphone is my evil charm. I should view it as simply a tool, but literally, I can't. It follows me from room to room. I've started sewing neck pouches to wear it like a necklace so that I don't forget it. I feel the weight of it in my pocket now. I feel the stress like a knotted fist in the pit of my stomach. I'm watching lines show up on my face and white hair come in and wonder if it is the worry.

I really want to do something else with my life. Being the only engineer for an e-mail system for 55,000 people is soul-crushing. If I had other engineers that I could rotate this duty to every couple of weeks, it would make me less burned out. But the constant on-call that never ends that I've been on since June 2007 has shattered my focus. I can focus on nothing but the worry.

Four Leaf Clover Days

The last two days I've found two 4-leaf clovers. That should mean good luck, right?

The last couple of days at work have been pressured. And I've been staying with my sister-in-law until Norm and Amelia get home from the Virginia family vacation that both Tanja and I should have been at the full week but had work to attend.

Tanja's dogs basically tried to yank my arms off while walking them these two days.

I'm glad that I did come home though, because Tanja would have had a lot of trouble managing the dogs by herself with child #3 making its presence known every minute.

They call it Mellow Yellow

Today I had to take our old cat, Spider, back into the vet to check his blood after the thyroid radiation treatment that he was given last month. He wasn't taking too well to having his blood drawn, so Laura (Dr. Kressler) our vet, requested that I give him a small amount of a tranquilizer to calm him. I did so about an hour before the blood draw, and clipped his nails short just in case.

I really needed photos of this. That cat was stoned.

Spider is a pretty mellow kitty, but the tranquilizer that he was given, Ace P-mumble-because-I've-forgotten-the-name, used to be called Mellow Yellow because in liquid form it's pretty yellow. And it zonks you out.

Spider was very calm, but he did let out one growl after it was over. And Laura had a hard time getting blood from him again because he was tranked to the point where his blood pressure wasn't as keenly high as it usually is. But, a quick trim with the clippers, and he got through it very nicely.

Getting him home, well, I set him up downstairs with food, litter, and water so that he wouldn't have to climb stairs. But as I left, he was coming up the stairs anyway --probably to find a good hiding place --and growling at George, the kitten, non-stop.

Spider is still our baby at 13, but he is getting a bit cantankerous. I'm pretty sure the thyroid scan will come back in good shape because lately he's been gaining weight again, and the fur is growing back in.

Still wish I had pictures of the drunk, staggering, grumpy kitty.

Say it isn't So!!! Will Smith a Scientologist?!!!

The news stories are out. Will Smith is supporting Scientology, though he is denying it quietly.

That's the saddest thing I've heard in a while.

I shouldn't care really (personal choice and all that), but Scientology has such a nasty rep for making dissenters' lives miserable.

Traffic Court

There must be something in the air. Everyone I know, even those friends in England, are getting caught in speeding incidents lately. Today was my day in court.

Yes, I could have pled "not guilty" and asked for a trial. But really, all I was hoping for was no points on my license. So I pled 'guilty with an explanation" and showed up to court for sentencing.

Want to see some really grumpy faces? Go to the Hyattsville District Courthouse. Everyone there looks harassed and stressed. Except me. I made sure to get there really early with my cup of coffee (that I had to suck down fast before entering the courthouse), books, and needlework.

The parking garage is one of those metered lots designed to take as much money from the public as possible. Even if there is time on the metered space left, you won't figure it out until you deposit your $.75 minimum in the monitor. To make it doubly frustrating, neither of the monitors were accepting bills --coins only.

One woman in front of me burst out in frustration, "What happens if you don't have enough change?"

"You get a parking ticket," I said calmly, "The county needs to pay for those schools somehow."

She started laughing at that and agreed that yes, it was absolutely absurd but probably true. I gave her 4 quarters for a dollar, and everyone left happy.

I found my court room after going through the metal detector. I smiled at the bailiff, and he was so surprised that he came over to give me a hand at hunting down my name on the lists. I get the feeling that not many people end up smiling there.

There was one fellow over in a corner with his young child that was really upset --turns out that he thought his car had been towed. He had his meter receipt, so he was upset about the car being towed even though he'd paid. And more upset to find out that they don't tow in that garage --they boot the cars instead. So actually it had been stolen from the lot.

Makes you feel secure.

Court is like church. Except that there isn't any socializing or good feeling afterward. But the hard wooden pews are there.

After an hour of sitting there (glad I brought my needlework), the judge arrived. The court was short a judge today, so they'd been shuffling judges. Ours just wanted us to get out of there.

I was in the group that pled guilty, so he didn't bother with the explanations, just dropped the fine to $50 total ($25 fine and $25 court costs) and sentenced us all to 1 day of probation before judgement (read that as "no points" on your license). I paid and was free to go.

I almost wanted to go back in and watch the proceedings. There was one young jackass that pled "not guilty" in a very confrontational tone of voice, with his ticketing officer sitting right there in the pew in front of him. He was pushed to the end of the docket, and the judge went on with sentencing scofflaws like me. I almost wanted to see the judge make mincemeat of him.

A word of advice: Turn off your cellphone when you step in the court room. And don't get belligerent with the judge even if you do feel you were wronged. Stupid young jackass.

Shy and the Family Stone

Most folks I know know that I dabble in writing romance. However, none of them have actually read anything that I've written.

Why?

I'm terminally terrified of writing and publishing anything that someone in the family might see and object to. Seriously. This is one of the silliest fears in the known universe, and yet I have the family millstone firmly seated around my neck. (Not that they are really millstones. It's my own head supplying the outrage, not them.)

And so, I've been stretching boundaries for myself. Forcing myself to write more and more things that are edgy, possibly sexual in nature at times, sometimes funny, often just incomprehensibly stupid. Like Fan Fic. Or the bit I put in my own blog the other day that used to be here in this post that I removed because I worried about putting up that much information about my own family.

Another example is one of my innumerable notebooks that I carry around. I wrote a story in it that is, um, very sexual in nature. I can't even manage to take that one out of the notebook and decently put it in electronic form and encrypt it in three places like the rest of them. No. Instead, I'm carrying around this insecure notebook from place to place. And a couple of months ago I let my brother-in-law actually read something very innocuous out of it from a different point in the notebook. Though the minute he finished he started leafing through it, the sweat popped out on my forehead and I basically tore it out of his hands. He looked at me oddly, but let it go, and didn't mention my rude behavior.

I've been invited to join critique groups, and I can't bring myself to do it. This is really stupid. Why spend this much time laboring over the writing if I never want anyone to read it?

Examining this fear, it's fear of rejection of me as a person by my married-into family. I don't think I can handle that well. It's fear that I lack talent. That I lack creativity. That I'm just not ever going to be good at it.

Well, gee. If I never try, I'll never be rejected. But I'll also never know how far I can go. And I have a strong suspicion that I do have the basic talent and drive to go far.

I just need to get over it. And so the edgy writing lately. But I don't think I can do this on my own blog. And that saddens me intensely because it shows I haven't come very far at all.

New Baby in the Family

(I'm back-posting for a few days of missed posts. This one is for Friday, June 27, 2008.)

Tanja & Steve are expecting their third child in November. Based on the timing logistics of conception, they have been telling everyone that it's a girl.

Well, they had the sonogram on Friday. It's a boy.

And it has Tanja's nose, too.

My Birthday in New York

Wow, it was a *wonderful* birthday. I am married to one of the Greatest American Heroes, but 12 years and busy schedules tend to take a toll. I hadn't realized just how much we needed that weekend together until we were there in NYC without phones, laptops, child, in-laws, house issues, yardwork, etc, to interrupt. Our biggest problem in day-to-day life is that you think you have all the time in the world, and the important little stuff to make each other feel needed and loved just gets pushed to the side because "he/she knows I love them. I have X to do right now." We made a promise to create more than just a simple date night every so often. (those are fun too, though)

Norm and I went up to NYC for a weekend to see the Blue Man Group on Saturday night, June 21. I actually was the one responsible for setting up the getaway simply because (as seen from previous posts) I am burnt to the socket with work, etc. (My attitude at work is almost toxic burnout levels.) I was hoping for some real downtime. To start, I left my laptop locked in my desk at work for the weekend. It wasn't going with me and neither was my cell phone. No temptations.

Norm set up tickets to the David Letterman show for Monday, June 23, so I'd extended my weekend to include Monday too. We set off on Friday night after dropping Amelia off with Mom & Dad, and drove into NJ before calling it a night and finding a hotel. On Saturday, we got into Manhattan, checked into our hotel, went out to play in the street carnival for a while, wandered down Broadway, hung out, held hands, and finally relaxed.

The Blue Man Group was utterly fantastic. It was an excellent choice of show. It plays in a small 300 person theater in the East Village, and is up-close-and-personal. (the cast does interact with the audience) I won't mention anything about the content of the show other than to say that it's unusual, funny, highly entertaining, family-friendly (we're going to take Amelia and Mom & Dad next time), and worth every second in there. We loved it.

After the performance, we wandered around the East Village looking for the Indian restaurant Panna II. We found it, but there are 3 other Indian restaurants in that same building, and one of them hijacked us into their restaurant before we realized that it wasn't the right one. There were barkers in front of each of them, and no signs to speak of. We left, with the owner/manager protesting our departure, and went to Panna II. The food was very good, but Baluchi's is better, I think. Then it was an evening of hanging out in the East Village.

Has anyone noticed that New York City is filled with young Japanese these days? I've never seen so many clustered there before. Usually it's a polyglot of cultures, but this time I noticed a *lot* of young Japanese (college-age). It must be the exchange rate that is bringing so many in. In the 1980's, that was why I went to Australia for a couple of months.

Sunday was a free day. We slept in until very late, went down to see the Statue of Liberty, and wandered around the Wall Street district together. Baluchi's is down there, so we had Indian food again. And we found out that Baluchi's opened a branch up in W 56th Street near where we were staying. Norm asked me if I wanted to see a musical since we were in town, had time, etc. We had found the 1/2 price ticket booth in the Marriott Marquis parking lot. I didn't really know what was playing, so we found a guide and decided that Monty Python's Spamalot sounded fun. That one was sold out except for obstructed view, so we opted for Rent instead. We were sitting very close to the stage, but instead of being a problem with craning necks it was fascinating to have the actors so close. They were feeding off of our reactions, and made eye contact with us a lot. It was a great night. Rent is a great rock opera (there is this heavy HIV theme), and this cast was absolutely amazing to see working with each other. My favorite of the cast was the big girl who really didn't have a main part, but had the most amazing voice. Even Norm mentioned her after it was over. Mimi was beautiful and pert, Roger was brooding and anguished, Tom and Angel were amazing -that first meeting between the two of them had incredible chemistry. Mark kept the tempo and kept you involved. JoAnne and Maureen - I'm waiting to see what the actress playing JoAnne does next because when she was on stage, she really held the attention. Ben was another actor that had so much polish. It all came together very well. Reminded me strongly of seeing an energetic new band that had hit their mark and was flowing into each other effortlessly.

Monday, we checked out of the hotel, stored our bags with the bellman, and headed out for lunch and the David Letterman taping. The studio was taping two shows that day, but we were in the first taping group. They wouldn't tell us who the guest was until we were seated and going through warm-up, but the rumors were swirling that it had to be Will Smith since it was the listed Monday night program. Tuesday's show was supposed to be Charlize Theron. I was crossing my fingers because Will is one of my all-time favorite actors, and he'd been live on the Today show just down the street that morning. So, the odds were good that the taping would be Will.

We lucked out and got Will Smith as the main guest, and Joe Buck (sports announcer) as the 2nd guest. Will was hysterical as always and the chemistry there with David and Will is always great. Will spent time during the commercial break (the show is recorded in live time, so the breaks are equal to what you see on TV) greeting the audience. No wonder his fans adore him --not only is he funny and lively, but he does care about the people who come to see him and spends time acknowledging them. Joe Buck was a mystery to us, and I whispered to Norm as he came on, "Man, I'd hate to have to be the one to follow that up." But Joe was a very funny, very sharp guy and had the audience laughing. He was an excellent follow-on choice because Will is a very tough act to follow. Joe is a baseball announcer, so he's used to spending time in interviews and on camera.

The other thing that happened during the taping is that someone threw up about 3 rows in front of us. We noticed when a pair was hustled out of the theater during the Will Smith interview (that doesn't happen--no one can move when the cameras are rolling). Then, during the commercial break, one of the hapless interns was down there cleaning it up with paper towels and a squirt bottle of cleaner with the beefy security staff telling him to hurry. Biff rushed over at the end of the extended break and indicated that they had to go back to camera, and the cameras were set up to pan the audience, so they told the intern to "keep your head down below the seats." Yum. Poor kid. After the camera pan, there was more scurrying there, then the people next to the pair that had been led out were seated again.

After the show, we wandered over to my favorite NYC cuban restaurant, Victor's Cafe. Then the 4 1/2 hour drive home where we talked non-stop. Really, that drive was over too quickly. We got home just before midnight.

I feel relaxed, happy, and Norm just invited me out to lunch today --a rarity.

525,600 minutes

Well, another full year has rolled around. This past year was actually a 527,040 minute year because of leap day.

This morning I got to work, changed the month on my calendar, and saw "What did you do this year?" written on the calendar.

Bought a house, wrote some things, made an escape plan from my job (12-18 month timeline on that), started the decluttering of my house, worked on finishing the old house for sale. Not bad for a year of change. But next year will be better. Today is the day that I need to state the goals for next year. Written down in black-and-white, they are really hard to ignore and pretend that I didn't decide that at the beginning of the year.

So. My goals to complete before next June 1, 2009 at 10:30 am:

1. Complete work on old house & determine its fate.
2. Find a Chinese tutor for Amelia
3. Complete the declutter of our new house.
4. Find the time to start nightly family dinners.
5. Finish 2 of the 7 manuscripts that I'm working on. Truck draft stage, minimum.
6. Enjoy Amelia's first school year.
7. Weave 12 items.
8. Finish 2 pieces of furniture, minimum.
9. Learn enough Serbian to annoy Tanja.
10. Finish business plan & incorporate.
11. Turn at least a slight profit on one of the ventures.
12. Finish the patents that I'm working on.
13. Build prototype item, evaluate for market fitness.
14. Submit one item to a publisher.
15. Update will --again.
16. Work on regular fitness routine.
17. Programming - somewhat better understanding
18. MCSE - first four exams
19. Sun certification - re-certify on SysAdmin, Network Admin, Security
20. Cisco certification - re-certify on CCNA
21. Work on that Graduate degree (sigh)
22. Something special for Norman that I won't put in a public list.
23. Work on keeping up my friendships

Wow. I'd better get started, don't you think?

That Awful Looming Feeling

There's so much invisible angst going on in my life right now. The change is in motion. And yet, I don't handle change well. It's easier for me when the change is driven from the outside, and not from the inside of my life. It's why I tend to stay in jobs for a decade or more. It's why the idea of social gatherings gives me the hives.

I'm trying to retrain my thinking right now, but over the past year, I've mentally come to refer to my job as "my home release program." Like prison, only they let me come home at night and on weekends, and the pressure is maintained even then because I'm on call 24x7. I'll never get the chance to create anything again. It just won't happen here. But I am safe and warm and dry and can pay the mortgage and save for retirement. All that is asked of me is to follow a few rules --they took innovation away from me years ago. I even remember the situations where it happened --meetings where my boss blithely waved his hand and stated to the assembled outside group "Jill is not a programmer." And I watched any hope of a possible new path whither. I see the new mail system going in, new people hired while I am not trained (after all, we're buying the talent, I'm told), and my knowledge and expertise downplayed and basically negated. I make suggestions in meetings and am aggressively shot down. And with humor I have noted that those same ideas are parroted back at me just a few weeks later by the same people. If I don't talk or interact, it is tolerated better, but then I am not producing anything for the group. There is so much anxiety in our group right now, so much uncertainty. It isn't really just me. All 5 of us are feeling that upper management will keep us on, let us continue plodding, but if we pop up any idea, we'll be strongly dealt with. We think that the upper management thinks of us as mavericks that need to be "managed properly." And perhaps we are. But what is emerging is a pattern of self protection that is needy and pushy and selfish. The smooth interaction of the group was annihilated by the sudden departure of our manager, and now it does feel like every man for himself.

I see a march of 20 years more of this, as I am halfway to retirement, and suddenly I can taste the flat metallic of the steel barrel against the roof of my mouth.

My home release program. It's the only thing keeping me tethered to sanity right now.

So, it comes back to me and change. What do I do about this? I can bellyache and whine and get moody. Or I can adjust, accept that I must think about what I can do, and then make the changes to me to do it.

I am a creative. I have no acceptable outlets of that creativity that others would judge as "worthy." Either they steal too much time from the family or work intrudes. Work has disdained any creative offering that I can give.

My muse handed me this incredible gift a month or so ago. It was incomplete, but if I am too stupid or too inept to finish it, that is my problem. My muse has deserted me for the time being so that I can wrestle out the fear. I have very high hopes for the future in that direction though.

Time to find new work. So, here's an exercise. If this afternoon your boss walks into your office and hands you your pink slip with two weeks notice, what do you do? How do you manage? Sit down, get a few sheets of paper, and start writing any idea for employment or income on the pages no matter how stupid or insane or worthless they may sound. You don't have to show this to anyone, so no one is going to laugh at you or ridicule or point out your errors. Think outside your current parameters. Keep writing until you run out of ideas, your hand falls off, or your significant other tells you it is late and that you need your sleep.

Put the pages aside for a day. Then pull them out, look through them, and see if anything pops to the surface. Take that idea (or plural ideas) and give it a piece of paper and write what you would need to accomplish it. Rough lines on that goal. Think about what would be necessary that you don't like doing. (I don't like cold calling at all. But I did it for two years as a part-time job and found that I was actually damned good at it when I decided that I could do it. I can do it again if I need to.)

And I'm not kidding about any insane idea. One of mine was "Create the Eternal Flame and then dance around it in the parking lot until I gain 50,000 devoted followers." While that sounds like it has absolutely no merit, it gets you to push into areas that you would normally just shut off and not examine because they aren't "practical." And the above insane idea? Well, isn't that exactly what Facebook actually did?

"Practical" is probably what got me into this rut where I can barely breathe. My strength is my creativity, and it can get me out.

Along with the career plotting, sketch out your current earnings and benefits, and how much you'd need per month to replace them.

Now, you've got some ideas, see if any of them could be worked on simultaneously with your current life. I'd bet a couple of them are possible side things that would work within your current life parameters. Take steps to push that rough outlined goal into a more refined product. See if you can "float a balloon" to test the marketability. Don't bother discussing this with people that have shown extreme skepticism right now. You need strong support. This is crazy-making enough without people close to you telling you that you're not going to make it before you even get a chance to see if there is a market for it. Test first on your own. And rely on those that are supportive even if they don't quite understand.

If you can get to the point where you can see reaching 2/3 of your current income, perhaps it is time to examine the unthinkable and walking away from safe and warm and dry. Just don't do it without a plan and a map.

My Sweet Tooth is Bothering Me

I've been desperate enough for pecans and coconut and burnt sugar to start looking at mail ordering pecan pralines. It's getting so late in the year, that mail order from New Orleans may no longer be possible.

It must be birthday cravings starting way early. When I was little, my birthday cake every year was a German chocolate cake with the traditional coconut-pecan frosting. These days, I can't eat most cakes, and making one just for me seems like such a luxury that I don't bother.

But I'm seriously jonesing for some burnt sugar with really fresh crunchy pecans. Maybe I should try my hand at making these tonight:

New Orleans Pralines

1 cup light brown sugar, packed
1 cup granulated sugar
½ cup light cream
1 ½ cups pecans, halved
2 tablespoons butter

Combine sugars and cream in a heavy 2-quart saucepan and bring to boil over medium heat, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon, until mixture forms a thick syrup.

Add pecans and butter and continue to cook over medium heat, stirring frequently. (Hmm, they don't really tell you how long to do this, do they? I think it is 'soft ball' stage --drop a bit into a glass of water and it should bead up into a soft ball. --AJ)

Remove sauce pan to a heatproof surface (such as a wire rack) and let cool for 10 minutes.

Use a tablespoon to drop rounded balls of the mixture onto sheet wax paper or foil, leaving about 3 inches between each ball for pralines to spread. Allow to cool. (or shovel it into your face while it's still warm and melty making you somewhat sick for days after. Mmmmmm --AJ)

Makes about 12 candies.

(Here's a sudden thought. Maybe the sugar cravings and the depression over the last few days are related. In fact, I'd pretty much bet on it. Well, thinking about sugar is better than actually scarfing it down.)

I love Passover

Ah, Passover. I used to look for macaroons and other goodies, but now it's become this big treat time for me. When you can't eat wheat or most cereal grains, you tend to just worship folks who come up with recipes like the Chocolate Hazelnut Orange cake that contains no cereal grain at all. (I have another variation that involves walnuts instead of hazelnuts. But it's still yum.)

"Spring cleaning" is done before Passover, and it's a real bear to handle. Every speck of cereal grain in the house has to be either consumed or tossed during the cleaning. A lot of prepared food is prepped and stored. A friend of mine found flour in her couch cushions, so you can imagine how much cleaning this actually is.

I'm struggling to just make the house look neat before the neighbor girls come in to feed our cats on vacation. And that's quite a distance away time-wise.

But at some point, I am going to make the cake mentioned below. I adore meringue cakes.


This was sent out on the FlyLady list, and I'm putting it up here with all the authors noted. If you haven't seen or heard of the FlyLady yet, please check out FlyLady.com. It may help you. Even for moderately organized folks, some things are very useful.

Jane Marie's Chocolate Orange Hazelnut Cake for Passover

I got this recipe from Rebecca Schwed who in turn got it from Nora Cohen at Temple Beth El. I have modified it and so now consider it my own recipe.

Ingredients

6 large eggs, separated
1 and 1/4 cups sugar
6 oz. Potato starch
5 oz. (or a bit more) chocolate (can use semi-sweet or milk, but use a high quality chocolate with a smooth melting texture)
1 cup unsalted butter plus 2 T milk
1 and 1/4 cups ground hazelnut flour
1 t. vanilla extract (can be omitted for Muslim guests) --or you can sub some vanilla sugar above -AJ
grated peel of one orange (my innovation)
1 T powdered sugar (for decoration)

Tools you will need

Electric beater
Wire whisk
Flour sifter with fine setting
Spring form pan
Glass bowl

Instructions

Grease the spring form pan with butter (do not flour dust if using
during Passover)

Melt chocolate, butter and milk in a double boiler and set aside to
cool to warm to the touch.

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees

Separate eggs, putting whites in the mixer bowl, yellows in the glass bowl

Add sugar, vanilla (if used) orange rind to yolks and beat until creamy

Slowly add in chocolate and butter mixture a little at a time, beating
until smooth

Add hazelnut flour and potato starch (I usually sift them together)

Beat egg whites until VERY stiff

Fold the chocolate mixture into the eggs whites (Here I cheat a
little, and use the whisk and whisk them together, pouring it
immediately into the spring form pan and putting it immediately in the
oven. If you do this quickly it will be fine.)

Bake cake for about 45 minutes, or until a knife comes out clean.
Remove from oven, remove ring from springform pan, and cool. When
cool, slide cake off the bottom of the springform pan, cut off the top
to give yourself a flat top and bottom, flip, and dust with powdered
sugar.

Life is Too Short to Work with Bad Yarn

Ah, weaving. It's soothing to my spirit. Lately, there have been a lot of interesting deals on yarn going on. I keep resisting (see the posts about my stash in previous months), but there's the lure of new horizons. To soothe that, I've started digging out odd corners of my own stash.

Besides, I tend to think better when I weave because it is so relaxing.

So a few days ago I took apart my Louet David loom to see if I could fix the problem of uneven harness hanging and the tension brake issue. I'm pretty far along in fixing the harnesses. I may never be able to fix the tension brake. I'm seriously considering putting back the mechanical braking on the back beam so that I don't have to deal with the tension brake again.

Norm keeps promising to help me hang the warping board in my new studio. I don't know if I can believe him anymore after more than two months of waiting. He's just so busy and getting his own office set up has taken precedence. I bought materials to hang it myself, but he's got some other way to handle it. It goes up this weekend one way or another. Even if I have to just get really long nails and bang it into the wall.

The other main issue is lighting in the living room so that I can see to weave on the two looms that are warped and available down there. There's no light there. I'm searching for the other halogen lamp that's gone missing in our moving luggage.

In a few weeks, we'll be in Orlando to visit the Mouse with Mom & Dad, and Steve, Tanja, and the twins. Norm, me, Amelia, Mom, & Dad are all driving down in the big car. I'm already plotting out a trip bag of toys and things that won't be seen until we start out. Amelia and I will probably finish her summer school work that was assigned out by the Howard County PTA in preparation for her entrance to Kindergarten in the fall. She's beginning to write a lot more now, and recognizing simple words. I think she's quite a bit farther ahead in the math concepts than they seem to be asking of Kindergarteners. That worries me somewhat because a bored Amelia is a really badly behaved Amelia. She does simple addition and subtraction of objects, though not yet with numbers. It seems like all they want her to know is to recognize the numbers and how many of these equal three, etc. And we're pretty worried about her very limited diet and the fact that the heat-up items are going to be eliminated. That leaves us with fewer lunch choices unless we can start getting her to eat more foods.

One Sees Clearly Only with the Heart

Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery

And that speaks volumes for me today. In the last week or so, I've been doubting myself with intensity. How could I possibly be on to something with this idea? There are people who are a lot smarter than me that have been working on things like this for a long time. How could I have discovered anything new?

The self doubt has been agonizing. And last night, I realized that I do see that answer. I feel it with my heart. I know it's there.

Often, I'll have an answer to a logic problem just come to me in a short second or so after seeing the problem. I know it's the answer unshakably. But to work the answer out on paper just takes longer. And sometimes it takes a long time before I can vocalize why my choice was the answer.

This is one of those times. I know it's the answer. I know how to describe it. And I think I know how to pull the bits all together.

I just need to listen to my heart on this.

Breathing Lessons

This morning I woke up at 5:00 am with the idea that's been noodling around in my head for days suddenly solid and clear as a bell. I saw it in all of its awesome complexity. Simple and sweet and sure.

Rather than waste that gift from the muse, I got up, went into my studio, and started writing. Three pages later, I'm looking at a really rough draft of the heart of the idea. About 8:00 am, I realized that the brilliance was fading --it was getting harder to put the pieces together logically but there was still so much to say. I scribbled in another paragraph of bits and pieces of idea, and shut the book for the beginning of my day. It's damned hard to keep that level of intensity for more than a couple of hours, and the fact that I kept it for 3 hours makes me pretty happy. The tendrils that spin off from that core idea have been clouding my brain all morning. Each one pops in, fights for attention, then fades as the next one pops in. I'm getting a very rough outline now of how to implement that core idea.

Yeah. For absolute certainty, turn off your TV and computer during your down time. I've been sort of away from distractions except for reading for days in my off time. You forget how the TV forces incredibly powerful latent imagery into your subconscious. It's impairing. It's distracting. You spend more time letting your subconscious chew on other people's ideas and less and less time on your own ideas. Even if it's just background noise, it's impairing because it is seductive to your subconscious' desire to always be alert and alive for input. (After all, there might be a wild tiger in that TV that will leap into your living room and rip out your throat. Your subconscious thinks like that --always analyzing and categorizing and alert.)

And it's a cosmic waste of time.

It's almost noon, and I'm still feeling that lingering almost-euphoria feel of "getting it right." I'm dead tired right now, pretty hungry, and yet still tingly and happy and glowing. When the pieces come together. When it all fits. Occam's razor --the most complex ideas really boil down to very very simple principles that can be elaborately pieced together.

I feel alive today. Really, really alive.

I showed Norm the pages this morning, and he grasped the idea quickly. So I know I'm on the right track.

By the way, I really love my studio. It's full of light. I'm really glad Norm let me take it over. You'd never think that gray (light and medium shades) could be a color conducive to creativity, but it's soothing and cheerful at the same time. This morning I watched the sunlight come up in there until the room was glowing like the inside of a shell. I wish I'd done this for myself years ago.

All of this Started Because.....

A few months ago, when the Fall semester started, my life went into total overload. Just so it's clear, I'm what they call the "Trailing Spouse" in my marriage. Norm's career comes first. If he has crazy hours, I try to balance my schedule to make everything fit and make our daughter feel less like she's a boarding student in our own home.

But that semester, I couldn't. My weeks turned into nightmares. Norm was busy too with a job that ate his schedule to the point where he was working till 3 am some mornings. I'd just work all night, grab two hours sleep, and then roll out of bed, into the shower, and off to work for a day. I looked like hell. I felt like hell. I know that Amelia started acting up quite a bit probably because no one was talking to her. "Here, kid. Shut up and watch some TV while I slug down some coffee and work a bit more on these account moves..."

In November, it cleared. But somehow, the frustration and the burnout has lingered. My job is 'feast or famine.' Either I have more than 3 people can do or I have just enough to sort of keep me busy during the day. The pacing is lousy.

A few months ago, I realized that Amelia is getting bigger. And school start's soon. And a short while after that, she'll turn the corner to the point where she won't want Mommy to hang out anymore because I'm embarrassing.

I started examining what made me happy. What was working and what really wasn't. I started making some half-hearted attempts to work on the clutter in the house. Not just stuff, but mental clutter too. I looked for what happened to my life and my life plans and my expectations. I started writing, then promptly froze and blocked, then started, and blocked yet again. I know that my crafts make me happy, but yet I don't take time to work on any of them. I'm frozen there too.

It's the fear. Change terrifies me. And while I have one of the happiest lives I know, there are parts that aren't working. I want more of the happy stuff, but to get there, I have to shed some of the defensive stuff and make some hard decisions and even harder changes.

So, I started the "business plan for my life" which includes a lot of things. I started examining work flow at work and tailored it a bit more. I started an Escape Plan which actually is more of a bolster to our current life. I started taking some time to organize and arrange a schedule that I can live with. I started reading and thinking again. I shut off TV and computer time at home for the most part. Too addictive and leads to useless inactivity time better spent elsewhere. I'm examining diet, exercise, and sleep.

I gave myself permission to try new things.

I gave myself permission to Escape.

Information Overload

Signs of the Apocalypse:

#12 - Television makes you complacent.

#13 - Email will make you stupid.


Turn off the screens. All of them. You don't need the noise or distraction. What are you going to do if you can't watch TV?

Make out with your husband/significant other/sweetie. It's probably been a while since you told them that they were really special. They'll love you for it.

Spend time with your kids. Isn't there a board game or activity or book that you could do with them?

Make something. A craft. A hobby. A business. A life.

Start working on your Escape Plan now. I'm working on mine with a vengeance.

The Easter that Wasn't

On Good Friday, Dad's flu took a turn for the worse. The stomach/intestinal elements of the flu basically wiped out the fluids in his system, and he crashed. Norm spoke to me briefly that afternoon as he headed up to Baltimore, and I took Amelia and headed over to hang out with Steve & Tanja and the twins until we heard more news. I stayed until we got confirmation that Dad's blood pressure was headed back up to safe levels, then I took Amelia home.

(Mainly I took her home because when she realized we were staying over and her Daddy wasn't coming home immediately, she jumped to the conclusion that Mom-Mom, Pop-Pop, and her Daddy were all "going to Neaven" and I wasn't telling her the truth. She started to go into a hysterical tantrum, and I didn't want to wake the twins up with her howling. So when I couldn't calm her down, I packed her up to go home. It was either that or give her liquor or valium or hold her mouth shut for 3 hours. None of those options are ethical, so home we went. I still think that I could have handled that whole incident better, but under the pressure given, well, we do the best job that we can.)

Dad spent three nights in the hospital recovering. We all just decided that Easter dinner could be some other time.

Amelia is home today "sick." We thought she was sick, so we kept her home. Sunday she had an allergic reaction to pudding consumed during the two evenings at Steve & Tanja's house, so we gave her Benadryl for the awesome, smokin' rash that developed all over her torso. The Benadryl probably made her extra sleepy because she conked out last night before 8:00 pm, and was a bit wheezy all night. She seemed warm, groggy, and wheezy this morning, so I decided we'd better keep her home. Norm stayed home with her, but she appeared fine today once she woke up and started moving.

And me? I'm still working on my escape plans.