For a week that will end in Burns night, a quote from the Bard of Scotland seems appropriate.
Let me start by saying how grateful I am that my sons now sleep through the night. I’ve realized in the last few weeks that I’ve stopped hearing them while I’m sleeping, instead of the hyper-alertness of the mother of an infant. Mmmmm sleep. (Pity my husband, who still does hear them.)
Anyway, last night my husband vaulted out of bed. In my groggy state, I couldn’t believe that morning was already here… it seemed like I’d just fallen asleep! I heard him getting Thane ready for school and wrapped my blanket more tightly around my ears, wishing he’d closed the door (like he normally does, considerate guy). (By the way, in case you ever think more highly of me than I deserve, let me assure you I’m the biggest, laziest morning-slug you’ve ever met.) Then my husband called for me.
Ugh. Really? I looked at my watch. 12:20.
Hm.
As I blinked the sleep from my eyes, I found a child covered in vomit and a husband struggling with child, bedding, etc. UGH. I’d like to take a moment to think of Grey, who may not have been potty trained by three but who got himself to the toilet/trash can to throw up nearly 100% of the time. Thane, sadly, is not so trained. Thane threw up another three times last night, every hour, just as we both fell back into deep sleep. So instead of my long list of stuff to do, I’m downstairs with a little boy who is quietly watching a personal all-day Scooby marathon. (I wonder if we have enough Scooby DVDs to watch all day long. I bet we do.)
I’m just hoping he’s well enough to go back to school tomorrow. On the one hand, I am annoyed that my precious time off is spent needing to provide childcare. On the other hand, so much more convenient when I don’t have to attempt to work or anything. On the third hand, my husband is also working from home today, and the kid has been quiet and well behaved so far. And of course finally, I love that little ScoobyDude of mine.
There are down sides and up sides to age and experience. I can now chop an onion with a finesse my 22 year old self would never have dreamed of. I seem to grow extra arms as needed. I know how long the wash cycle on my washing machine takes, and I can get myself to nearly any destination not requiring a visa without being nervous about it. I am, in short, a Woman of Experience.
I have this week off. I am between. I am liminal. I have left Old Job and not yet started New Job. I have been EXPLICITLY INSTRUCTED by my new employer to relax and come in rested and refreshed. But this is a once every few years opportunity! Home, alone, without children, not terribly fiscally constrained and without obligation. This, my friends, is the holy grail. And I KNOW that it will go super duper fast and I will only accomplish a small percentage of what I intend in that time.
So here’s the potential list: (bold means already done or in the works)
Crazy complicated dinner (prime rib!)
Video game (Fable II for XBox)
Clean attic thoroughly and get rid of archaic equipment (see also: desktop computer)
Buy new computer
Centralize entire digital life on new computer
Transfer finances to new digital checkbook
Do all the regular chores so my husband gets a bit of a break too
Read several novels
Install a DROID development environment
Write a DROID application
Blog like I always think I would blog if time wasn’t a problem
Sleep in as much as possible
Read the APIs my new company publishes for the app I’ll be supporting
Watch all the football
Do everything in my email inbox so I can close the email
Practice trumpet
Stamp cards
Learn how to use my new phone and totally customize it
Recycle the old computers, having ensured all valuable information has been removed.
Have tea with a friend
Go out to lunches with my former colleagues (this was my original plan, but now I’m feeling so forward-looking I have mixed feelings on it)
Finish up my knee physical therapy (partially there!)
Goof off in all the amazing free time.
Anyone see a problem with this list? Yeah, that darned experience tells me what it tells you. There’s no way I’m going to get through that list. I get so sick and tired of prioritizing, optimizing and being efficient. I come to loathe the down to the minute scheduling and night after night of making good decisions because I know better. This week, at least, that is relaxed and reduced. I’ve actually made some excellent progress.
The key this week, I think, is balance. I need to make sure I neither work the whole time or goof off the whole time. A mixture of accomplishment, long term investment and leisure is the order of the day. I think I’ve done well so far.
Last week I read several novels, working my way through the canon of Sherwood Smith, so far with “Crown Duel”, “The Trouble With Kings”, “Coronets and Steel” and “Blood Spirits” — thank you Kindle for making it so easy! I have played several hours of Fable II. I have gotten my DROID environment working, read half of a DROID apps book, read the first few chapters in a JAVA 2 book and consolidated all our CDs. I also cleaned out the closet in the attic and have my crazy fancy dinner planned. I bought myself my new central laptop, and am currently in the process of downloading a lifetime of pictures to it, as I simultaneously upload ancient pictures from my old desktop. I have had my final knee dr. appointment and been dismissed. I have three PT appointments scheduled. I found a new chiropractor. The dishes have been done, I’ve been careful not to spend too much time cooking (which is what usually happens when I have free time), and I’m watching Dr. Who while I fold laundry.
So far, not bad. Here’s hoping I finish equally strong, and that I’m completely energetic and ready to go back to work in my new place on Monday!
One final note… I am so a teenager. So I’ve been really careful not to get into the “staying up until 2 am reading” trap that I so easily fall into. My natural schedule is bed at 2 am and waking up around 11. I figured if I was careful with the going to bed, the waking up would come easily. But instead, I’ve had several nights where I’ve gotten 11 to 12 hours sleep. I mean, my sleep debt can’t be THAT bad, and I just had a week off for Christmas where I also caught up. I’m left to conclude that I naturally am quite happy sleeping half the time. And it’s not depression – I’m quite cheerful. I just like bed. This explains a lot.
I’ve always loved graveyards. I remember being six and going to the graveyard overlooking Bonners Ferry, and thinking how lovely it was. I am particularly fond of older graveyards. I have taken many a happy walk through graveyards. In fact, I walked through graveyards during labor with both my sons (different graveyards). I love the quiet and peace of a cemetary. I enjoy reading the headstones and wondering about the relationship and lives of the remembered. I’m particularly fond of gravestones that hold some message for those left behind to read.
In the oldest New England graveyards, in New London, for example, the messages can be downright depressing – about how the inhabitant of the grave is in hell and if you aren’t more careful you will be too. One of my favorite classes in college was “Death, Dying and the Dead”, in which I learned that the whole purpose of the “pastoral graveyard” (of which Mt. Auburn in Cambridge is a prime example, and Arlington National Cemetery another) was to invite the living to remember the temporary status of their condition.
Anyway, with bright and fair weather, I took a walk to our local graveyard. It is no Mt. Auburn, granted. It sits high on a hill overlooking a Dunkin’ Donuts and used sports equipment store. It is the second oldest graveyard in town. The town was founded in 1725, so we have had significant history to bury. The oldest graveyard is next to the YMCA childcare center, but we aren’t permitted to wander there because it is (apparently) unsafe. (I imagine falling through an unstable burial chamber, and complain only a little.) This cemetery – Lindenwood – is also not the Catholic Cemetery. That’s further down the road. Lindenwood dates back to the early 1800s. A small stream runs picturesquely through, in a wooded glade at the bottom of the hill. The hallowed ground holds the remains two young brothers, whose mother updates their shared tombstone regularly. There’s a congressional medal of honor winner (WWII, by the dates). One of the last heroes of the now-nearly-forgotten Spanish American war lies there. In a few places, rings of white marble with initials surround large and imposing monuments, marking the final resting place of families. Sometimes this dignified white marble is marked with “Mom” and “Dad” – no names.
In this recent trip, I found quite possibly the creepiest tombstone EVER. Usually, as I tell myself stories about the people lying here (and perhaps more interestingly, the people who stood at their funerals), I can imagine what they were thinking when they made the choices they made. They decorate grandma’s grave with Christmas ornaments because she always went overboard at Christmas. The 30 year old who died in the 80s, but whose tombstone shows an infant going to God? Perhaps he was severely Downs Syndrome and his parents never saw him as a grown man. But I cannot for the life of me fathom what was going through the mind of the relations who placed this marble monument:
At the bottom it says, "Watching and waiting"
I can’t think of a single non-creepy interpretation of that one. It’s straight out of a Stephen King novel.
So how about you? Avoid cemeteries at all costs? Like to wander them? Find it morbid? What’s the creepiest you’ve ever seen? And what possible non-freaky interpretation could there be of Cora’s tomb?
A bit of background is probably in order, before I launch into my most recent adventure. Despite being a language-oriented person, I somehow stumbled into a career in web application development. No one was more surprised by this than I was, but the year was 2000. Even more to my surprise, I turned out to be a pretty good developer. My favorite part is database development (SQL/datastructures), but I’m also strong through the middle tier and display layer in a dissed programming language called Coldfusion. Javascript and I have an uneasy truce much relieved by the introduction of packages like jQuery and PrototypeJS. I spent 10 years as a full time developer.
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.
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.
(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…..
I think as a parent you often hope that your children will end up loving the things you loved. Mostly. I have always loved comics – newspaper, Sunday-morning-type comics. My favorite, along with everyone else is my generation, was Calvin and Hobbes. Before I went to college, I had amassed the complete collection of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. They’ve spent most of the intervening decades near my bed as safe bedtime reading to wash the taste of hard days from my mouth.
This harmless location takes on an entirely new aspect when your own unkempt-haired six year old boy learns to read. Sure enough, when I dared sneak one of the books next to my bed, it was found in short order by my young son. With trepidation, I warned Grey that Calvin didn’t always make good choices and if I caught him pulling some of Calvin’s stunts, or acting as rude as Calvin could, I would be disappointed. Then I let him at it.
He loves them. Loves. They are scattered throughout the house. They are far and away Grey’s favorite reading material. He sits on the heat vents and reads them after school. He reads them while he eats. He lounges on the couch and reads them during his brother’s nap time. His mis-readings are pretty hysterical. For example, the word “heinie” is not in his vocabulary. “Mom, what is a ‘hee-nigh?'”
He has also started sneakily reading after bedtime. He’s never been able to relinquish his nightlight, so his room is quite bright. Many’s the evening lately I sneak in to give him his goodnight kiss and find him facedown on “The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes”. As long as he seems reasonably rested, I’m not going to bust him on it – and it’s making bedtimes much easier since instead of trying to lure us to stay longer he wants us gone so he can read.
I was afraid of the bad influence of Calvin on Grey, but instead Calvin is teaching Grey about a style of imaginative play that’s gone out of style lately. Grey built a tiger trap (tuna fish sandwich). Grey recently constructed his own transmogrifier, and has turned himself into various creatures. Grey made an adventure flip book similar to Calvin’s detailing tiger-food but less gory. Following Calvin’s lead, he’s flipped it over in order to do time travel. He’s begging to experiment whether cereal actually tastes better when hunted and stalked around a corner. He’s requested stuffed monkey heads for dinner, and telling him that food will turn him into a mutant is an effective way of getting him to eat. I suspect that if we get any snow, he’s going to want to imitate Calvin’s phenomenal snow-creations.
For all Calvin’s parents exhaustion, and his own complaining, Calvin had some pretty fun times in his 11 years of first grade. I hope that Grey enjoys himself with some of Calvin’s more enjoyable ideas. And so far we seem to have avoided the less salubrious elements of Calvin’s childhood!
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?
So, here’s a funny story I failed to share with you at the time. As you all know, bated-breath-daily-readers, my son began Kindergarten in our public school this year. What this really means is that we entered the Realm of the PTO Fundraiser. Now, I’m delighted by the Japanese drummers and such that the PTO helps pay for, so I cheerfully forked over my dues. Then there was the big Halloween fundraiser. Every family was expected to sell 12 cash raffle tickets at $5 a piece (or $25 for six). I toyed with offering to swap purchases with our similarly be-Kindergartenered neighbors. But when I jokingly mentioned this “great opportunity” to my mother-in-law, she actually professed a desire to part with money for these tickets and demanded I offer said opportunity to my parents as well. Bemused, I did. And thus I disposed of our 12 obliged tickets, end of story.
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 tackled the memory card issue today, in addition to getting a haircut. I have pictures of our Christmas celebration, and pictures of my brother’s ordination!
Ah, Christmas! We are at the height of the fun and joyful years with our kids. The Christmas Eve service was excellent. Thane clutched a Christmas card from my aunt and uncle with a scene of the nativity in his hands, periodically lifting it to give “cute baby Jesus” a kiss as he wide-eyed and wiggly watched the tableau of unfold before him, punctuated by familiar carols. After the service, the boys laid out cookies for Santa (soo…. many… cookies!!!!) and put on their brand new Scooby Doo pajamas and soft-footed ascended the stairs. Although Grey had expressed his scientific intention to run some double-blind studies around the existence of Santa, he was out light.
Morning dawned bright, joyful, and not unreasonably early. 7 am is a perfectly fine time for Christmas. A vast ocean of glittering gifts was laid out under the festive fir. And oh joy unbounded! Santa had come! The stockings were resplendent and overflowing. He even put three Hershey’s kisses in the tiny little knit stocking for Puppy. He left a note thanking the boys for their excellent behavior over the course of the year. Then the great unwrapping began.
Thane’s most-played with gifts were an astronaut helmet, a sword and shield and a light saber. He also got a bunch of games, books, some puzzles (which have made a resurgence in popularity) and a bunch of other stuff I don’t remember.
Grey got the sword, shield and light saber too. What fun is it to get a sword if you have no one to battle, I ask you? He also got a camera, a DS game, a bunch of board games, books, and crafts.
Adam got an XBox 360 with Kinect, which may require us to do some home renovation in order to get enough room to actually play it. Grey’s really enjoyed it so far. Adam is deep into Arkham City. I’m sure you’re all glad to hear that he’s out there protecting civilization from evil and complaining about how he’s not nearly as good with an XBox controller as with a PC.
I got a book about Peculiar Kids (from Grey), some new pajamas, two new cookbooks, a book on learning German (now slightly less relevant than when I asked for it), and a DROID X phone. Heh. Heh heh. I have joined the digital revolution folks! I’m like the last member of the technorati who doesn’t get email on their phone. I was so ready for this. So now I’m in the long process of configuring, personalizing, etc. I’m PSYCHED.
It was a great Christmas, and everyone was cheerful and no one melted down and it was neither too many nor too few gifties and there was joy and love and coffee and pancakes.
Then we went to church (hey! Did you know that when Christmas falls on a Sunday church is open?! True story!) and the kids sang with us and looked cute and didn’t complain about being there even a little bit.
It was a happy time and will be a happy memory. These are the true richnesses in life. And now I have a week to shovel out the accumulated tasks piling up since I had surgery in September. If I’m far overdue on something for you, watch your inbox.
One sad note amid the cheer, however. On Christmas Eve, I was talking with my mother-in-law about how much we were looking forward to having her here. Half an hour later, my husband tells me that she’s on her way to the ER. She snapped her upper right arm. It’s a clean break – a best case – but a conversation with her orthopedist says she can’t risk her 3 year old grandson until like MARCH. I really like my MIL and her visits are heaven for us, so this is a royal bummer for me, and obviously an even bigger one for her.
One humbug in an otherwise great season.
So… how about you? What great loot did you get? Was it a warm and joyful season? What was the best part?
So bloggers have a well-known trap of writing about how long it’s been since they wrote, and then going into painful detail about WHY it’s been so long. There are a few reasons for this, but the main is that the longer you go without saying anything, the harder it is to say just something. So then you start fretting over saying the perfect thing that makes you readers forgive you for your absence and not remove you from their list of daily blogs they check.
This is a trap. Still, it’s been nearly three weeks, which might be the longest I’ve gone without writing in my blog for like seven years. And it isn’t because I haven’t had anything to say! No, we’ve had an ordination, cross country flight, life-shifting plane conversation, week of solo-parenting, Christmassing, caroling, cookie-ing, play-dating and regular old “Kids say the darndest things”-ing.
I’ve also been interviewing and (breaking news!) leaving my job. I really don’t do work talk on the blog, but most of my silence has been work related – for both time and energy reasons. (Also, for the record, interviewing is also very time and energy consuming.) So… I have this week off, work at my old job for two weeks, and then have a week off to recharge before I start my (awesome, great fit) new job.
This is all to say, I’m back, folks. And trust me, no one is happier about it than I am. So maybe now I can tell you about what’s going on in my life – and better yet, perhaps some of those things will be fun and interesting.
Merry Christmas to all of you. May Santa bring you as nice a gift as he brought me!!!
My Truant Pen 