But I always thought to myself, “I have a windy tongue! I am a people person! I therefore cannot really be a coder.” And so I got a job that used all my people skillz and none of my technology skillz. I thought with a pang at how hard I’d worked, but this seemed the way to go.

Now I’m leaving that job, and going to one where I will be much, much closer to the technology. My new boss already sent me the APIs, and I’m extremely and muchly excited to get back to technology – much to my surprise! I mean, who knew I really like code and technology and programming?

In the lull between jobs, in addition to reading novels, taking naps, and cleaning the attic… I thought I would crack open the ol’ development tools and remind myself of the problems and delights of code, if only for a few days.

So our heroine began here: http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/hello-world.html

Here’s a secret: the very hardest part of starting to do development (if you are not already a developer) is getting your development environment up and running. I mean, I am a programmer and the computer I’m working on used to be my dev environment. But I needed a new version of Eclipse (free & not so hard), a JDK (very very hard – I have a 32 bit Windows computer and you have to KNOW which JDK will work for a 32 bit computer and everyone who writes stuff for programming assumes that you have this perfectly obvious to them piece of knowledge and Google was failing me and I even ordered a new computer because then I could get 64 bit Windows and plus I need a new computer anyway but its not here yet and my time is running out and my husband who is of the programming cognoscenti finally helped me identify a sufficiently up to date version of the JDK I could install – but it still took several days) and the Android SDK. And you have to pray that you configured them all correctly so they can talk.

GOOGLE KEYWORD BREAK TO HELP THE NEXT SCHMO:
What is the right JDK if I have 32 bit Windows?
The right JDK for 32 bit Windows users is Windows x86.
(http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javasebusiness/downloads/java-archive-downloads-javase6-419409.html)
Windows x86 76.81 MB jdk-6u29-windows-i586.exe
Windows 32 bit JDK for JDK 6.0 is Windows x86
END GOOGLE KEYWORD BREAK

(I mean, isn’t it perfectly obvious that you need x86 if you have 32 bit Windows? No? Yeah, not for me either.)

Once you’ve done all that, three lines of code take a base application and turn it into “Hello World.” With no further ado, I give you:

Hello World!

Yay! I have an app in mind (A Christmas list manager, to help you figure out who you’re buying for, what your budget is and how you’re doing vs. budget. Also to help you so you have equal number of presents per child and do not find a bag of presents in your closet a month later… WHICH I JUST DID.) I do not believe this app will take the app world by storm, but at least it’s a quasi useful something to work on with a very simple first stage and a lot of opportunity for me to muck around. Actually, in all truth, I do not believe I will ever finish this app but I MIGHT! And if I did, I could actually use it.

Now all I have to do is figure out what mobile app developers use instead of databases. I’ve spent my entire professional life clinging tightly to databases, but I think it’s different out here in the wild wild west. I need to figure out a whole new paradigm for display – I’m REALLY hoping it’s easier to make an average looking app than it is an average looking website. I am not so good at making pretty stuff online. Also, DROID app development is based on JAVA, and I’m not really a JAVA programmer. I mean, some of my best friends are JAVA and all. Coldfusion is written in JAVA and some of the advanced development is more or less JAVA… and I took a class on JAVA 2 in college which introduced stuff like inheritance… but yeah. I’m not a JAVA developer.

But hey. I got my development environment working after five days of intermittent effort, so how hard can the rest be?

Now that the half of you who are my developer buddies are rolling your eyes at my naivete and the other half of you who read for cute kid anecdotes are completely lost, I will leave you there. Because the next stage is to use XML to handle my layout instead of doing it directly in the JAVA. Ooooooohhhhh…..

Yours in supreme geeky bliss,

Me

More happy memories

I, more or less, have the life I want to have. I am married to the right person. I have kids I really like. I have friends, hobbies and fun activities. I have a career that is well positioned for the present and future, and which I (usually) enjoy. I like my house. I’m somewhere between liking the way I look and being at peace with the way I look. I do meaningful things in my religious life, and in a more limited way in some volunteering activities. I would not want to make sweeping changes to my life in this new year.

But, as always, it is a time for reflection, readjustment and readiness.

The very biggest thing I would want to change, I have changed. I sincerely hope the new job waiting for me in January will be even a portion as well-suited to me as it seems from the interview stage. I believe this will have cascading effects on my energy, enthusiasm, cheerfulness, attention and other areas that have been lacking of late.

That one big one out of the way, here are my mores and lesses.

More: paper art. I have this huge collection of stamps and papers and brads and fun things. I believe that rubber stamping is somewhat waning as an “in” art, but I never did it because it was popular. And in truth, I could scrapbook and stamp for years without having fully utilized the complete extend of what I already own. I want to make and send cards. I want to scrapbook big events. I want to sit at my desk and feel creative.
Key constraint: time & attention. It requires 15-20 minutes where I have no supervision over my children whatsoever. The stamping stuff is, by necessity, physically distant from the main living space, so it requires intention to find myself doing this.
Next step: Clean off stamping area and make inviting.

Less: fussy meals. I’m a good cook. I cook several full big serious meals a week. I like to think that my children benefit from meals with real ingredients, and that I do too. But the prep, fighting over “yes you must take one bite” and cleanup afterwards consume a tremendous amount of my already limited discretionary time. Time spent chopping onions is time not spent playing Quirkle with Grey, reading Scooby Doo to Thane for the umpteenth time, or modelling that reading is a thing our family does by sitting on the couch and reading instead of making dinner. This one is a hard one because cooking good healthy meals is generally something one aspires to do more of. I still want to have that outcome, but somehow magically spend less time doing it.
Key constraint: Habit & preparation. I would need to identify “lower prep” meals and make it easier to make those meals – this would require test driving some more recipes. I need to quash my instinct to add “just one more thing” to the menu, which invariably makes the meal 15 minutes past what I wanted. And I need to not take this too far — this is a striving to moderation.
Next step: Perhaps a list of 30 minute or less recipes? Add a “Friday forage” night to the weekly menu? Challenge myself when I think, “Gee, I don’t have anything planned this afternoon, why don’t I make moussake” with a “Or I could make pork tenderloin and stamp three cards instead”.

More: reading & video games. Sometimes I feel like our lifestyle is a hot air balloon, and one by one I’ve dropped all the “fun but not really productive” activities like bags of sand off the side. Each choice was valid and necessary, but all work and no play makes Brenda cranky. I suspect that this feeling has a lot to do with the massive push that always happens to me in the last quarter of the year, with birthdays, Mocksgiving, Christmas, etc. and this is a somewhat self-correcting problem. Still, I want to feel as though it’s ok to waste time and goof off and not do something useful, and I think that I need that. The Economist recently had a series on video games, and talked about the ingrained human need for play. In an attempt to maintain altitude, I’ve tried to ignore my own need for play. That’s ok in short durations, but I do not think it is durable.
Key constraint: Time. Both of these are absorptive activities – this is an area where I have weak willpower to stop, which means I can be afraid to start. For me, opening a novel at 9 pm is a very bad idea, since long experience has taught me that the most likely outcome of that evening involves 1 am and a very cranky husband. This is also time I’ve used in the last year or two to be social (yay neighbors!) which is also a really important and valuable thing to my mental health.
Next step: Well, I just got a co-op game for XBox (my poor husband must be all like, “I thought this was MY present?!?!”). With the reading, I have yet to solve this problem. Audio books have helped a bit, but I’m not sure that’s the entire conclusion.

Less: clutter. Time, once again, to take a hard look at the objects that inhabit my living space and question their right to exist and take up the rays emitting from my eyes. Perhaps a few visually distracting areas can be redone to be more contained.
Key constraint: energy. Just looking around now, the last thing I want to do is to start tackling some of those rats nests, and it’s relatively early and I have tomorrow off. If not now, when?
Next step: Discrete periods of time. Saying to my husband, “Let’s take half an hour and go through the china cabinet” has proved an effective strategy in the past.

Other mores:
- Playing music
- Going to concerts or musical events
- Healthy and fun exercise (no longer mutually exclusive with video games!)
- Seeing friends I rarely see
- Do all my pt for my knee

Other lesses:
- Fewer empty calories
- Less conflict with my three year old (and I want a pony too!)
- I would love to in general be less rushed and less efficient… a little more leisurely and less hard on myself

So, what about you? What do you want less of in 2012? What do you want more of?

Or not. We left the Halloween party prior to the great unveiling of winners, but not being the optimistic sort thought nothing of it. Until the day my mother-in-law arrived home to find a $500 check. She was the grand prize winner!

Now, long time readers of the blog will know that one of my mother-in-law’s favorite hobbies is home renovation. Namely: our home. It started with painting the basement floor the week we moved in. Then we had Thane’s prenatal bedroom renovation (she painted), our bedroom repainting (while I was gone one day), the kitchen repainting, the hallway repainting (she’s a genius with paint), the entry-way transformation early one post-Piemas morning, and the infamous “I’m sure the tile under the carpet is in fine shape” bathroom renovation just this September. All this she has accomplished despite living 1000 miles away and weighing 90 pounds wet. (To be fair, my parents helped demo Thane’s room and repainted the living room 3 years ago this week. But they don’t daydream about our attic the same way Laureen does.) And I’m sure I’m forgetting one or two more minor renovations she instigated or executed. So she decided what she wanted to do with her money was to “update” something in our house – generously leaving the choice of what up to me.

"Before" picture... from before we painted the living room

Watching how hard it was to use the XBox Kinect in our smallish living room as currently configured, I finally decided it was time to pull the trigger and get rid of the ancient CRT media center we had gotten for free because they didn’t want to move it when we moved into our last rented house. So Thursday was planned as a trip to IKEA.

Both boys are now old enough to go to “Smaland” – which was great. It gave us just enough time to scope out the available options, attempt to decide if glass shelves were advantageous or disadvantageous, and put together A Plan. We blessed our larger vehicle with the roof-rack as we vibrated home up I93. Then we had dinner with friends, put the kids to bed, and sat down with massive amounts of cardboard, Swedish instructions, hex wrenches and the Mythbusters. Half an hour past midnight, the pieces were all assembled, but we were too tired to put them in place. So this afternoon, we attached, wired, organized and otherwise prepared for our new configuration.

I confess I’m pleased as punch about just how nice it looks. Here it is in daylight:

Daylight demonstration

I just took this one, so the light’s different but you can see more:

I can hardly express how much BIGGER the room seems!

And as a bonus, here’s my husband hard at work:

He actually has a hex bit for his drill

So I think I whine here sufficiently about how I have no time for anything, ever. But somehow, I sneak a few things in. One of my sneaky additions is a humanities book club run by some friends of mine. I first argued I didn’t have time. But I thought about the reading list. And I thought about my intellectual starvation. And I decided that I would aspire. I would try.

I recently read a very interesting blog post about intellectual obesity, talking about how the same cultural influences that lead us to eat too much of the wrong food also lead us to the easiest forms of entertainment. As the author says, “Given infinite choice and no fabricated pressures, you will consume the least effort, most enjoyable information.” This resonated with me. After college (actually, after reading the entire Canterbury Tales) I decided I had nothing to prove. I knew I could read the hardest literature and derive pleasure and knowledge from it. So I piled up the fantasy novels and YA literature. And you know, there’s nothing wrong with those. Nothing at all. But after Grey was born, I began to feel the effects of intellectual malnutrition. I subscribed to the Economist, but was still hungry. At the same time, I have so little leisure and reading heavy literature is, well, hard. It really is. I have the skills, but they’re rusty.

So. I have tried. I missed the first book. I read the Odyssey (for the first time!) on my own, and became enraptured with Homer. He’s good! Who knew!!! I read significant parts of Plato’s Republic, and was completely underwhelmed by it. But by golly, I got through all 800 pages of Herodotus’ Persian Wars. I even read many of the appendices. (Note: if you’re reading hard literature in your precious precious slivers of free time… go for the very best version you can find, not the cheapest.)

I must confess that this gives me, in addition to more intellectual grist for my poor starved mental-mill, a tremendous sense of satisfaction. I did a hard thing, not because I had to, but because I chose to. I did something challenging with no external validation or reason. It was a lot like running a race after being a couch potato for years. It felt excellent.

And I’m doing it again. I’m well into Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, which has rather more good speeches and rather fewer digressive stories.

So, for those of you who are curious, here’s our reading list. We’ve been at it for about a year. At this pace, we should get through our curriculum by, oh, 2020 or so. But that’s ok with me.

Humanities Book Club Reading List

Homer, Odyssey & Iliad (Homer is good and quick!)
Plato, Republic (Ugh. Historically important. Needs a teacher. And an editor. You begin to understand why they killed Socrates for being annoying.)
Aesop, Fables (We skipped this one)
Herodotus, Persian Wars (Hard, but I did it!)
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War (Next up)
Aescylus, Oresteia
Virgil, Aenid; Caesar; Conquest of Gaul
Plutarch, Makers of Rome
Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe; Cicero on Duty
Old Testament, Selections*
New Testament*
St. Augustine, Confessions
Two Lives of Charlemagne; Song of Roland*
Memoirs of the Crusades
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight*
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy (this is the guy I tried to name Thane after, but that was for his De institutione musica)
St Francis, Little Flowers
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales*
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Cellini, Autobiography
Shakespeare, Henry IV*; Hamlet*
Descartes, Meditations
Gibbon, Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire
Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Scott, Ivanhoe*
Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution
Parkman, The Oregon Trail
Newman & Huxley, Selection on Education
Dostoyevsky, Crime & Punishment

*I have already read

It’s like one of those daydreams you have, “What would you do if you suddenly had $100,000?”… the object of my fantasies has become reality. Better yet, it comes at a point where I’ve caught up on sleep, have no laundry to do, the dishes are done, the house is clean, the pictures are uploaded, the church web site is up to date and I’ve gotten clean through my backlog of blogging ideas. Bliss!

Although I’m at the snot-phase of a cold, I’m actually feeling quite energetic. So I did get up with my husband (instead of moaning inarticulately and covering my head with pillows which is my standard method of pleading with my husband to please let me sleep in just this ONCE! — I do this at least once a week.). I hied my sons to school. Thane looked trepidatous to return, but Grey was delighted. As I left he was busily comparing t-shirts with Nicholas. (Nicholas had gotten a Mario shirt, for the record.)

8:15. I was home and awake. So… I broke my fast, made a pot of coffee, made the bed (I NEVER make the bed, ever), checked my email upstairs, called two financial planners to talk about financial planning (I’m hitting the point where I need help, I think) and my OB to schedule my annual. Then, I tackled the attic.

Ah, the attic, repository of all that is not needed! As part of my energetic New Year’s burst (it’s astonishing how much energy I have when I don’t have to work!), I went through all the boys’ toys (with at least Grey’s help) and we set aside the ones that aren’t played with, or have been outgrown or broken. I called Salvation Army to schedule a pickup, so now its open season on “things I really don’t need”. And the attic figures prominently in that role. But there is a catch.

Bats. You remember when I said that “I know there is a population of bats in our area”. Confession time: the real reason I know is because they live in my attic! Such a welter of conflicting impulses there. The homeowner is all “BATS OUT! NOW! NO BATS!” while the environmentalist argues, “But their habitat loss is sooo bad you wouldn’t kick them out would you?” and the mother argues with herself “I don’t want those rabies and histoplasmosis vectors in the same building as my children, but I won’t kick them out until after hibernation and baby season is over because that’s just mean.” The mom voice is winning here. I set up a bat house to give them a place to go, and I MEANT to evict them (gently!) in the fall… but I got busy. Plus, all the bat eviction places I googled looked… histrionic. “Bats, the great bug scourge of the skies!” (Extra credit for getting the reference.)

So, I cleaned up all bat-related evidence, fixed the temperamental light fixture, plugged a few more holes (not so it would prevent them from getting outside, but prevent them from getting further inside) vacuumed and rearranged the attic. That’s as good as it gets until fall! I worked up a sweat going from attic to first floor and back again, moving the outgrown baby things to the porch!

Then I showered. Don’t worry, I had a mask on for that work.

A “what I did next” list is probably boring (well, if it’s not already too late for that!), but let’s just say my errands involved EIGHT different stores in three different zip codes. Then I came home and started a batch of bread.

Because I am a domestic goddess.

I’ve noticed a trend on Facebook and Twitter so far that points to 2011 getting off to a rocky start for many of my acquaintance. Although I have a small and unrepresentative sample so far, let me just be a voice of dissent to that trend. I’m totally digging 2011 to date!

It’s also interesting to see how much I like myself when I’m not incredibly tired and busy. It took me 10 days to get to this point (with significant help from my MIL who was primary child-carer, cook, maid & chauffeur for 9 days!) but this sense of energy and enthusiasm is very pleasant. I’d like to have it more often. I don’t know how to do that.

PS – SCORE! One of my 8 errands was to our local used bookstore, The Book Oasis to drop off and acquire new books. I brought the list of books we’d be reading for the humanities book club I belong to, and having struck out, I gave them the list and asked them to keep an eye out for the titles. I just got an email from the proprietress who did research on the best version of Thucydides and is working to get it for me. WIN! Now to make it through Herodotus. Not light reading. Even with all the leisure time (see above) I only made it through to Book 4 this Christmas!

Labradorite, flourite and jadite necklace

This week of the year is an excellent one for projects. Like 80% of the other people in my company, I took the week off. I hied to my mother-in-law’s house, where I’ve been royally spoiled. So here I am, with my brand new camera, and a promise to my mother-in-law that I would help her get her jewelry online. If you’ve met me in person, you’ve likely seen some of my mother-in-law’s jewelry. She spent about 30 years gathering beautiful things from around the globe. Now she is putting them together into works of “wearable art”, and is ready to sell them.

Carved jade with rough unakite and coral beads

If your mother-in-law had gorgeous hand-crafted items for sale, where would you tell her to sell it? Of course. So we set up an Etsy store for her called Jeweled Dreams. She’s got about 12 of her items up now. And I’ll have you know that while I helped her set up the store, she’s done all the posting all by herself! I’m very proud.

Jade pendant

But then comes the great labor. So…. I have this brand new camera I’m learning to use. She has about 75 completed necklaces. And heaven help me, I took pictures of each and every single one of them. Practically, I think they look pretty good – at least up to standards for Etsy. It was also frustrating. The second day, I simply couldn’t get the lighting right. I know enough to mess up the settings on my camera, but not to make it obey me. I can see progress on the photography, but I am also starting to see just how far I have to go to accomplish what I want to. On the other hand, it was probably excellent practice to take a gazillion images of beautiful jewelry for practical reasons. With the number of pictures I took, she should be all set to make postings to her store for months.

So I am feeling very proud of myself and very accomplished. I’m also feeling like I have a lot of room to grow. Finally, I’m really really hoping she actually sells something at her Etsy Store. She says she needs to sell them to make room to make more. I thought she was exaggerating until I had to take pictures of all of them!

So… if you know someone (or are someone) who loves beautiful, exotic, one-of-a-kind jewelry, consider browsing through her store (or pictures). Valentine’s day is only like 6 weeks away!

Carved turquoise and silver

I spent this lovely hour today: my husband was watching Tron, the boys were down pretending to nap, the Christmas music was on, the fireplace was roaring and in an extremely unexpected turn of events, it was snowing. I sat on the couch, quiet, and read “The Dark is Rising”, which is my favorite Christmas book. It was an astonishingly lovely moment.

Anyway, for Christmas Santa Husband bought me a Digital SLR camera. I bought a photography book a while back and read it through. This permitted me to know exactly what my point and shoot could or could not do. It can actually do a lot. I use ISO all the time and I think it immeasurably improved my pictures. But there were things I couldn’t do: anything with detachable lenses and most importantly f-stops. I thought about it for about two years. But I decided: I wanted a real camera. So I told my husband and left him to do all the research on which one was best yadda yadda. My new camera is a Pentak DAL 18-55 mm F3.5 – 5.6 AL.

It’s my first non-point-and-shoot, so I’m probably not well qualified to review it. But I have spent, oh, about 24 hours with it now and taken over 300 pictures. It’s a leap of faith to record Christmas morning on your brand new camera (do you know how to take the lens cap off?) but we did it. Here are all the pictures, but let me call some out:

This here explains why I needed this camera. In a point in shoot, usually, most of the picture in the camera is sharp. That’s great – it means Aunt Agnes isn’t a blur (or everything is) – but it also leads to flatter pictures. Snapshots. Nothing wrong with that, but I wanted more. So here is a “non flat” set of the same pictures:

Rear focus - front blurred

Forward focus - blurred back

And for your viewing pleasure, here’s a full set of Christmas pictures!.

PS – I have totally not figured out how to work my camera! But I’m looking forward to doing so!

My family has made a number of small changes to bring ourselves to a more sustainable style of living. Some of them simply influence our purchasing — our cars were both selected with gas mileage in mind. Many of these changes serve a dual purpose. In cold New England, we have had insulation blown into our 19th century walls to reduce our heating bills, added insulating curtains, replaced incandescent bulbs with compact flourescents and put in a timed thermostat. We’ve switched from plastic grocery bags to reusable ones, and I’ve discovered that I much prefer the reusable ones. We keep the doors closed in rooms we’re not using.

But there are three fun, photogenic things we’ve done lately to lead to a sustainable society.

The Bat House – as you may or may not know, New England is in the throes of a bat crisis. Many of our species are being devastated by white nose syndrome. This may lead to extinctions. It’s also likely to lead to many more mosquitoes, which in addition to being annoying are now a threat to health since Eastern Equine Encyphalitis and West Nile Virus landed on our shores in the last decade. One of the big challenges for bats is habitat loss. I know there is a population of bats in my area — in part because I’ve seen them at night and in part because there are no mosquitoes in my lawn! So my family has installed a bat house to provide safe habitat for local bat populations.

This bat house is on a South-Easterly wall to keep it nice and warm, on the 3rd floor.

2) The Worm Bin. I’ve always liked worms. Like bats, they’re extremely useful animals, recycling waste into fertile soil and creating space for plants to grow. About seven years ago after reading Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof, we bought an indoor worm composting kit and populated it with some worms. Since then, it’s been a thriving ecosystem living on our food scraps. As long as you don’t add milk or meat products, there is virtually no smell. The worms are more active and hungry in summer, when there are also more produce by-products, and nearly dormant in winter. Once or twice a year, we harvest the extremely rich worm soil to add to our gardens. “Worm tea” — the liquid byproduct — is a top-notch fertilizer when diluted with water. Of course, this also means less of our garbage ends up in landfills, especially since we use egg crates and packaging as bedding.

On the left is finished worm dirt, in the middle is the active bin, and on the right is some worm tea. The bins stack.

The worm bin in its assembled state, in my basement. There really is no smell.

These are all small things. But added together, I hope they reduce the burden our family places on our world’s resources. All of these things also carry other benefits: lower heating costs, fewer mosquitoes, free fertilizer and better health (and taste!).

Cheese!

Anyway, I have pictures for March and April, including lots of playground stuff, pretty much every nice day in the last 6 weeks, Piemas, grandma, Easter, and many silly faces by Grey (which represent only a small portion of the silly faces that have pictures taken).

Enjoy!

http://picasaweb.google.com/fairoriana/April2010#

But I’m really well rested. I’m the best rested I’ve been in years. In part thanks to that darn stomach bug on Monday, I’ve gotten more sleep this fortnight than I’ve gotten since… I don’t know when. Maybe since puberty. Nah, there WAS that stretch of unemployment in 2001. Still. I slept in until 10 am this morning because hey! Gather you snoozes while you may for time is still a-flying!

And then there’s my to do list. Do you remember that long list? I’ve done the taxes, done the budget (that took ALL DAY yesterday, for reals), cleaned the carpet, cleaned out our clothing for donation, gotten recycling stickers (although not put them on the cans), applied for a HELOC and was told that one needs EQUITY for a Home Equity Line of Credit. (Who knew!) I got the cat food, bleached the comforter, cleaned off the front porch, repotted my ivy, made a turkey dinner, did the old company offboarding, the new company onboarding, got sick, took care of a sick kid, and tried to make sure that our evenings and weekends were unusually chore free.

I did not order pictures or update the baby book, but the day is not yet done.

On the fun side, I read several books (not enough), watched the Olympics, beat Torchlight, got to an end point in Fable and slept in. I probably did a little too much work and a little too little goofing, but even when you’re not working, there isn’t infinite time.

This moment is a little frustrating. I look at everything undone (why does the pile seem none-diminished?) and think, “Wow, it’ll be hard getting around to that.” There are still things that I’m not willing to give up, but that I know will be a challenge to get done. I realize I’ve been thinking of starting my new job as the complete loss of all free time. While for sure I will not have as much free time as at my last month or two at my old job, or this lovely break, my life will not cease because I have a job. (If so, it’s the wrong job for me. I don’t think this will be the case.) I wish there was some way to channel the restedness of my current self to make life easier for me in the future. I suppose that’s what doing the taxes now was all about.

It actually helped TREMENDOUSLY to have that interim meeting with them. I can imagine where I’ll be sitting, what kind of work I’ll be doing at first, who my coworkers will be. Instead of a black box onto which I project my worst fears, I have a filled in outline of my opportunities. It’s a great company.

I admit that I am afraid for this blog. I’ve worked really hard at it. I know that may not always be obvious from the quality of posts: “Today’s random collection of cute kid stuff and witty complaining”. But some of the posts have been hard work, hard writing, and stuff I can be proud of. Writing a blog post is a little like buying a lotto ticket — you keep hoping that this will be the one that launches you to Internet Fame and Advertiser Fortune! But that hasn’t been the case for me. The few I thought had a chance to do that have settled down into obscurity. In fact, the one posting of my that is most hit is from a Google search of “today sucks”. (Sorry mom! You taught me to use better language!) It’s exactly the kind of whiny post I write on days when I have nothing to say. The only redeeming fact is that plenty of people click through for a link of “Gives Me Hope” that I added after noticing all the traffic.

So what does the future here hold? Gradual drying up? Guilt for not posting? New, rich posts because my brain has all this new, rich material to process? Once a week catchups? I don’t know.

I love variety. I struggle with change. I’m not nearly as confident as I appear in the movies. I just have to have faith it’ll all work out.

Oh, before I forget! I didn’t do my big “order prints for great-grandma and baby books and a non-digital future” but I DID get the latest pictures up on the web. There are three sections:

The goodbye party at Chuck E Cheese: aka why I should be nominated for sainthood

My church’s potluck. Probably not interesting to you unless you attend my church.

Family photos from February

And finally, I did something new. For Grey’s second to last day at his old preschool they were supposed to bring a picture of something they loved. I let him loose with the camera. When he was done, I made a collage on Picasa (fun and addictive!) of some of the things he loved. I made one mistake, making it too much about the things I love, but hey. We’re all human. He didn’t notice.

Things Grey loves