Author: Bobbie

Entropy

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For a dyed-in-the-wool control freak, the absolute worst thing you can do to them is to introduce mass chaos into their environment for which there is no solution but time. Welcome to my kitchen remodel.

The notion of this remodel has been some time coming, and after much deliberation and fiscal jiggling we signed papers in July with a contracting company. A dear friend warned me that contractors never, ever, ever come in on time and on budget, and so far we are finding that pretty much true. While the budget creeps are of our own choosing (Let’s do this light over that light! This countertop over that countertop!) the time overruns are not. My cabinets are in Canada somewhere and there they will stay until December, so we’re going with an alternate vendor. The cabinets being stuck meant the countertop can’t get cut according to schedule. The drywall guy has come and gone but can’t finish until the cabinets are in, and the floor finish can’t be sped-up. And so we wait for cabinets.

Meanwhile, seven large boxes of kitchen gear, and two sets of curtains and assorted wall decor, are stacked in the small available space of the study. Another box, a kitchen aid, and stacks of cookbooks impede on the library. Pots, pans, glassware, an end table, a wine rack, and a stack of coats take up the spare space in the bedroom. Dishes are done in a large blue plastic tub in my son’s bathtub. My current kitchen is the male person’s workbench plus a fridge, in the garage.

After I got over my initial meltdown (yes, I had one, get over it) I tried to look at it for the charm. It’s kind of like camping but with electricity, right? I get to really test my recipe mettle. At least it’s not the dead of winter and the garage is a comfortable 60 degrees. The boys can play radio control cars on the unfinished floors. Above all, this chaos forces us to be more organized , more cognizant of where we put things and how we use them.

Yet the change keeps coming. In my head I had a due date of 11/4 — on that date, I had a kitchen again. I had a dining room. My study and library would be cleared and I could get to my sewing machine. Then came the news that after you get your floors finished you must wait 30 days before putting furniture on it.  And so now I’m hopeful that by my son’s birthday we have furniture in place.

Which is not to say that there hasn’t been a bit of change in other areas as well. A recent re-org at work, while ostensibly relatively minor, puts into question overall vision and goals which of course trickles down to those of us “unaffected”. As the holiday season approaches I am reminded as well of all of the dire warnings from friends who had worked in the Retail sector before. At Expedia, things are relatively slow business-wise in November and December, the time is used to plan for the new year. At Sur La Table, the push and craziness starts mid-September and I’ve heard it ends sometime around January.

Layer The Rest Of Life onto this and I’m looking forward to a potential power outage or some other unseen force that will allow us all to take a little break.

AFTER I have my kitchen back.

Tough (-ish) and Clean (-esque)

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Today I went to the gym for three hours.

About three months ago a bunch of (well, call it four plus me plus some outside) people from work decided we should Do Tough Mudder. To which my response was “I’ve just posted how I’m not signing up for any large events, so really? You’re asking? Really? Okay.” And so I signed on. I proudly told this to my trainer, with whom I meet pretty much weekly, and tasked him with getting me ready.

For three months I met faithfully with David (trainer), each Wednesday cursing things like burpees and pull-ups and push-ups and other things whose Official Names I do not know but that doesn’t prevent me from dearly disliking. And about a month before Tough Mudder, we lost a team member.  A week later, we lost a second. A week after that, a third. And then there were four.

Four is not a big team, and four may-or-may-not have been successful in getting us over hills and walls and so forth. Add that to the fact that I was now the only female on the team, and certainly the slowest runner (hello, 10 minute mile!), I was uncomfortable. So I decided to see if I could pad the team. I checked in with my gym, and found someone willing.

Except he was signed up for the Saturday, and I couldn’t do the Saturday (hey, I was snack mom for the soccer game! Priorities!). OK, fine, I put an ad in Craigslist.

Now, I like reading Craigslist for entertainment, and have used it to sell many things, but not really to do something social. I got one response. It detailed the length of some male person’s phallus and an invitation to ride it. I did not respond.

On the Wednesday before my original Tough Mudder–which I have now bumped off to next year — I devised a plan with David. I would chart the obstacles and the runs, and create gym-equivalents. Running is fine (treadmill), but how many pull-ups do you figure equates getting over an 8′ high wall (somewhat assisted — say a push up or a pull up from a team member)? David figured 3 sets of 10. How do you replace swimming? David figured you’d use the same muscles as burpees and knee-bend deadlifts with weights, so 2 sets of 10 of those.  To simulate running in mud he added ankle weights. The only thing David did not compensate for was electric shocks (which I was to skip anyway) and an ice bath. On the flip side, instead of the cushy wait times in front of obstacles that my more mud-laden brethren got, I got one (1) three-minute break.

Two hours and 40 minutes later, I had run just over 11 miles (well, I had run about 9 and speed-walked another 2 because the knee was hurting) and done crazy crawling, push-up, pull-up, weight-lift, balancing obstacles throughout the gym.  I left the gym incredibly icky (not muddy) and wondering if an ice bath would have helped.

There’s a few things I can take away from this experience, and yes, a couple more goals:

1.  No, you don’t have to train running-wise as though you’re training for a half-marathon. But I probably should have run something over 3 miles recently.

2. If you do it alone, or in the gym, or both, you don’t get the event-based adrenaline rush.  You trade that for the “comfort” of controlling your environment.

3. I could have done it by myself in the mud. And I probably should have.

4. I’m training as though I WILL be doing it solo next year, because I don’t want to have to do it in the gym again.

Not that I don’t love David. I loooove David (in a totally platonic, he’s like an uncle kinda way). He is awesome and patient and inventive and he doesn’t let me slide. But next time I want him waiting at the end of the route, standing in the mud, with a beer. And I want that extra load of muddy, muddy laundry.

Smart is Not Socially Apt, per Modern Media

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NB: The Editor pointed out I had an unclosed bracket and offered up a Tropic Thunder comparison that was too good to pass up. Fourth paragraph. Enjoy.

For a few reasons, but mostly because we cannot stomach the idea of paying $80 for what would be about 3 channel’s worth of consumption, the male person and I do not have cable. This is not out of some holier-than-thou quest for a more wholesome home environment as much as an exercise in opportunity cost; we have Netflix and RedBox and so forth. As such, we are “discovering” TV shows that others have long and since discovered, and re-discovering ones we had mucked about with in earlier years.

Let’s face it, most TV is drivel.  Everyone has this opinion, for the most part, it’s just their definition of drivel varies. For example: I think any show featuring the Kardashians is not worth the effort it takes you to push the buttons on the remote control, never mind the time it would suck from your life to actually watch it. I’m sure there are others who would much rather watch the Kardashians than, say, 60 Minutes. You’d have to pay my father to watch a football game, but he happily watches The Daily Show. The presence of 500 channels worth of 24/7 programming means that our tastes are such that we like about 10% of it at best, but that 10% is different for each person. (For a truly excellent podcast on why you have to pay for ESPN, even though you don’t watch it, go here.)

Out of this drivel, though, comes definitive trends in programming. This year it appears to be a slough of “I’m dealing with my older parents” sitcoms, in previous years it has been the waves of Laws and Orders, NCIS, CSI; then there’s the ER/Chicago Hope/House/Scrubs medical vein (pun intended).  And within these aerie are typified characters and situations: the older, hardened cop who’s actually quite sensitive despite his drinking problem, the tougher, young female cop/lawyer who wants everybody to take her seriously, the angsty interpersonal relationships that form between coworkers (because no one on TV has the sense to NOT dip their pen in the company ink), the inevitable will-they-won’t-they that means they eventually do, after 4-5 seasons, but then it nearly immediately blows up because Someone Messed With The Formula And The Ratings Are Down So Please Fix It Now.

Into this context I bring you the recent epiphany I had, which is we apparently can’t have socially intelligent characters with high IQ’s. Let’s take two shows: The Big Bang Theory, first aired in 2007, and Bones, first aired in 2005; one is a nominal comedy with some small dramatic parts, the other is a drama with some small comedic parts. Both feature many intelligent characters, but the most intelligent (based on IQ’s indicated in exposition or comparison) are Dr. Sheldon Cooper (BBT) (IQ: 187) and Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan (Bones) (“my IQ is quantifiably higher than yours”, and the like) .

Social (and other) media have picked up on this (I am not suggesting anything new here) when each character has been individually investigated (e.g., tv reporter/blogger asking the writers/producers) for Asperger’s Syndrome. (Interestingly enough, NEITHER show confirms this for these characters even though the actors themselves admit to playing them that way; in BBT’s case Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon Cooper, has stated he believes Sheldon is an “Aspie” but Bill Prady and Chuck Lorre vehemently deny it). The message is muddled, but constructively: super-smart people are really socially awkward, possibly because of a “syndrome”, but we won’t confirm it because then we are Labeling People. Or, as my Editor points out, “You can’t go full genius“.

As though making a series of jokes around IQ (“I’d have to lose at least 60 IQ points to be considered smart,” Sheldon derisively mentions in one episode) is not a label of sorts.

These are not the only two shows to do this; the new Sherlock Holmes BBC series features an Aspergian Sherlock (again, as characterized by the actor playing him) (190 IQ). Numb3rs featured a brilliant mathematician (“genius-level IQ”) who was hindered, if not completely inept, at interpersonal relations. Criminal Minds also had a brilliant young person, IQ 187 (Dr. Spencer Reid) who is, you guessed it, socially awkward. Message received: we can have kinda-smart, socially normative people, but we cannot have super-smart, socially normative people.

There’s a couple of hypotheses for this: H1 is that we cannot have hyper-smart, socially normative people on TV because that would make them appear cocky, even if they weren’t actually, and that would make them a less liked character (both by their peers and by the viewers). Indeed, it is Sheldon’s awkwardness that allows his friends (even his fellow PhD’s) to feel like they can compete with, or even succeed against, him on some plane. Penny (the non-PhD, “normal” person across the hall) calls him sweetie a lot and tries to explain awkward situations to him (when he’s being earnestly lost) and snipes at him with double entendres when he’s being earnest and coming off as an ass. The other 3 characters (2 PhD’s, one ME) spend entertaining minutes trying to explain on Sheldon’s level (with whiteboards and references), discover  they can’t, and give up/go to the movies without him/let him go to the comic book store/play Xbox with him.

I think it’s really interesting to note that Dr. Brennan’s friends and coworkers take on a more protective role and do not deride or smugly note her awkwardness, they just “try to work around it”. Angela (her best friend) calls her “sweetie” rather a lot and spends time trying to explain how a social situation may be interpreted, most of the lab staff shrug their shoulders and get on with work; her love interest gets to be the Protective Male Person With A Gun and, again interestingly, a lot of time is spent on him not letting her have one (despite her declarations she’s an excellent shot. She’s so learned in other things, including a 3x black belt, that this is not implausible). Maybe if he gives her the gun she won’t need him, so let’s not let her have the gun.

I sit here, looking at as many recent TV characters as I can find, for one who is both very intelligent and also socially competent, and come up dry. Dr. House has a drug addiction and the bedside manner of a troll, of the only other two – people on Bones, one turned out to be a sociopathic cannibal and the other was English and they killed him off (Mr. Nigel-Murray. I liked him a lot.) in order to provide a reason for Bones to feel vulnerable, jump into bed with The Male Person With A Gun, and get pregnant, thus creating another twist in the “will they or won’t they” plot.

H2, and others have suggested this, is the reason our most intelligent characters must be socially awkward is we (the viewer) cannot handle the idea of someone so smart and seemingly without flaws — we will lose interest, we will want to compare ourselves to that character and we will come up lacking. We will close the book, if you will. I think it’s a good point but I don’t know that it is true for all: I would like to see what a good writer could do with an intelligent character that DIDN’T have some sort of crippling social deficit.

To be fair, we have the exact opposite on TV currently too: the Jersey Shores, the Kardashians, etc. — all full of presumably socially “current” or apt people with combined IQ’s equivalent to a bag of Doritos. Clearly someone is watching that. So I wonder what would happen if we could somehow have a brilliant Kardashian?

Hey — I like science fiction, too.

Experiential “Spending”

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Because I have, at one or two points, ordered something online from Athleta, I receive a catalog roughly once every three weeks from them. Because I have, at one or two points, ordered something online from Athleta, I also receive catalogs regularly from Title Nine and assorted other Look We Are Women Who Work Out And Yet Can Be Fashionable In A Really Sporty Way catalogs.

The Athleta catalog arrival in my house is met with trembling perspiration, as I tend to like the cut of the fabric and most of the designs even if I am not the highly-muscled size two twentysomething that graces each page. (The highly-muscled size two twentysomething comes in a variety of skin tones and hair styles but basically if you put them in greyscale and blocked their face and hair they are the same human). It usually results in me rationalizing the purchase of a sweater, a skirt, a top, etc. (usually just “a” thing) that I normally wouldn’t spend that much on. It also serves the same purpose as the gym membership: if I’ve thrown money at it, it clearly must be something I am doing and therefore I too can be a Woman Who Works Out And Yet Can Be Fashionable In A Really Sporty Way, if not a highly-muscled size two (almost) fortysomething.

(Anyone unfamiliar with the Athleta catalog should probably also know that most of the models in the clothing are NOT just standing looking cute. Usually they’re doing instructor-level Yoga poses, sometimes, you know, balancing on their head, or folding themselves into a pretzel. Or they’re actually running on a beach. Even their sweat is cute.)

This particular catalog has sat in askance at my chair side for about six days, with dog-eared pages indicating the latest Shiny Thing I Want To Spend On. And, like every other time, I’m obsessing over what will ultimately be a relatively harmless expenditure (call it about 2 weeks of skipped latte’s). This is because I am remodeling my kitchen.

For the analyst, any home improvement project is an invitation to insanity: you start at the project with very specific quotes, measurements, appliance model numbers, and expectations. And then, as each week unfolds, you find out you need another electrical outlet (so the price goes up) or that particular range does not have the expected rebate (so the budget goes up) or you waited too long to reply to that one email (so the project extends by three weeks) or you didn’t take into account that the flooring needs time to adjust (so the project extends by four more days). You also realize that everything in the kitchen needs to be packed up.

I have a roughly 7×10-foot kitchen, U-shaped, with about 20′ of linear cabinetry (if you add top and bottom), plus a pantry. I have also had a thing for cooking for slightly under 20 years. Ergo, I have a LOT of kitchen stuff: in packing my kitchen up (something not done in 9 years) I discovered I have not one but TWO ravioli rolling pins, a rice cooker (I have been cooking rice on a pot on the stove for the last 9 years), 5 jars of cumin (??), and a truly impressive collection of cookie cutters. That, plus everything else (minus a few plates and a cutting board and basically the kind of reserves you’d make for such a project), is now boxed up in my study. Every item that was packed (for the most part) incurred a fleeting thought of 1. what was I thinking when I bought this, and 2. have I actually ever used this (I have two mushroom brushes, I am not kidding), and 3. what can I do to make sure I don’t actually spend money on something I am not going to use?

I recently read “Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending” and it (like every other book that offers financial advice) pretty much nails non-necessary expenses (e.g., discretionary expenditure) as a permanent exercise in opportunity cost analysis paralysis. I can, for example, obsess endlessly over whether or not I will be buying the super-cute boots on page 48 (I’m not) or what I could do with that money instead. The argument of this particular book is that if you’re going to spend the money, it is better spent on an Experience than a Thing. To wit: you can buy the boots but what kind of experiences will you have in those boots that you cannot have in other boots/shoes/footwear, and instead what kind of experience can you buy for $180 plus shipping and handling? Or, in my case, will it buy me a faster, quieter vent for the kitchen (a thing) that means I can actually cook AND hear my son talking to me (endless experience)?

The problem with a remodeling (or moving) exercise where you are required to look at your past purchase history and review each item (I have enough wine stoppers to stop the wine in an entire case) is that you realize you didn’t have this discipline in your younger years and now there’s a strong urge to hypercorrect in your more mature present. For a consumptive and excessive youth there is a penurious and stringent old age. This is antithetical to what most consider retirement and/or the higher-earning years: in my parents’ generation it was starve now and play later, which has (appropriately) afforded them lovely retirements (case in point: one set of parents is in Europe for 7 weeks).  And suddenly, those words of caution they offered when you were spendthrift in your twenties make sense.

All from a 72-page Athleta catalog, provided for free. That’s an entertaining experience.

A Pluot Principle

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“…And then I heard this guy say, ‘I feel like I’ve missed pluot season’…”

It was a surreal Seattle moment: at a friend’s house for the Sunday before Labor Day, eating fresh, organically home-grown grafted tomatoes from a tomato plant nestled next to kale and squash, with three young urban professionals (not including yours truly and the Editor), one of which we will call John.  (The others we will call K and Margles). John had been on Bremerton for the day, rode the ferry (and heard the above quote), cycled to K and Margles’ house for dinner, and shared the quote.  (Note: my garden failed this season due to rabbits, deer, opossums, raccoons, and possibly a plague of locusts. I’m not bitter.)

There is nothing not Seattle about all of that. From the cycling* and the ferrying and the home-grown tomato-ing and the quoting and the pluot piece, that was all so clearly Seattle it made me ache (appreciatively). It also made me vaguely jealous: somewhere, out there, is someone for whom that is a thing. Someone out there has TIME to worry about whether or not they’ve missed a season of a fruit that is only a recent addition to the fruit sphere.  They’ve worried enough about it that they were talking to someone else about it, like there is some sort of Pluot Appreciation Week or Festival that was missed. (NB: you can get a 12 pack of pluots at Costco. I’m not sure how artisanal they are anymore).

*Not just John who is the cyclist – K and Margles once spent a season doing nearly every long-range ride (including at least two double centuries) the Cascade Bicycle Club arranges. They called this “fun”.

What I am getting at (albeit laboriously) is it seems to me, more often as of late, that there are a wide variety of things out there to learn/do/participate in/obsess on and a diminished resource of time, and that some of the prioritization I have had to make of late (work… obsessive housecleaning…) combat with this time scarcity issue.  I’m not entirely sure if this realization is driven from a burgeoning sense of mortality or if this is something that’s been floating around in my head for a while and now it’s just beginning to gel. I find myself increasingly weighing the experiential benefits of a reorganized library or an extra couple of hours’ sleep on the weekend against a bike ride or sailing or woodworking or such. In effect, the culmination of years of only marginally completed “to-do lists” seems to be weighing in more heavily as I head to 40. This is compounded by the fact that I am the product of four hyper-driven parents, each with hobbies that involve activity and analysis (cataloging, if you will).

I haven’t been entirely a bump on a log this time, and have done a little cycling here and there, for example. But I think it’s time to start a new list and drive a little harder on it.

Item one: experience pluots. Before they go out of season.

Yes, It Was The Right Choice

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Five months ago I accepted a new job with Sur La Table. I had spent nine years at Expedia doing a variety of things, and learning a tremendous lot, but it was definitely time to move on and be the “fresh blood” somewhere else. As I gleefully told my family, friends, and professional associates of my move, I got mainly 3 reactions:

1. That’s great… what do they do again?

2. That’s great… wait, you’re moving from Director to Manager?

3. That’s great… are you making more money?

I can sort of see the first reaction, if you’re talking to someone who’s not in one of the 27 states that SLT operates in, and/or you don’t cook. (I am not judging.  Yours truly has a few friends who know an awful lot about food but you shan’t let them in the kitchen). The other two have been reiterated so often that I figured I’d just answer them here, and then point people to it.

1. Sur La Table (www.surlatable.com) is a store, and site, for cook’s tools and entertaining. That’s it. You are not going to find beekeeping outfits, a large selection of scented candles, ironing boards, etc. You are going to find a wide selection of knives and people who can tell you how to use and care for them, because they know. You are going to find a variety of stove top cookware, in a variety of materials and colors, and any one of the people wearing a Sur La Table apron can tell you, depending on YOUR cooking style and YOUR stove what will work for YOU. In more than half of the locations you will find a roster of classes you can take that will teach you everything from how to use your knife properly to how to make homemade pasta to how to do five recipes on one grill for six people.

2. Yes, I moved from a Director to a Manager. Specifically the course was Director of Business Development to Director of Content to Applications Development Manager. And here’s your first clue why “different” does not mean “downward”: I went from what was essentially inflated project management (with a bit of ability to direct the change that instantiated the project) to Operations management to development management. With each step the skill set gets broader, and deeper. Project management is about managing people you don’t technically manage, Operations management is about managing people you manage and managing by proxy.  Development management is all of the above and now you get to speak two languages: business and technology.

I could go on: development offers a chance to actually BUILD THINGS, the reality that a Director at Expedia is not equivalent to a Director at Microsoft is not equivalent to a Director at Sur La Table, in either breadth of responsibility or in terms of compensation. And frankly, I’m mercenary enough to be happily titled the Hobgoblin of Object Oriented Programming if they pay me enough, which leads us to…

3. Yes. I mean, I can offer the logic that benefit packages from Company A to Company B require careful weighing and measuring, and that there are quality of life trade-offs with commuting time, etc.  But any way you slice it, frankly, the answer is yes. Anyone who tells you that “Retail” is this or “Technology” is that is at best over-generalizing and at worst missing opportunities.

None of this answers the question, four (working) months later, of “Are you enjoying it” and the answer is an unqualified YES. Do not get me wrong, there have been seriously frustrating times. Sur La Table has been around since the 70’s but its growth pattern is such that it *feels* like a start-up, with all that that entails. Development has to run quickly and there is enormous demand for my department, which leads to both the wonderful sensation that “we can DO this” combined with “OMG how are we gonna do this??” There’s a bit of “hey let’s go down this path… no wait that path… no let’s go down the first path” that you see in nascent organizations, and for someone who was at a company that went from start-up (well, close to, it was about 4 years in) to Mature Large Company in my tenure, there’s the urge to be much farther along the development path than we are.

Then again, it affords me (us, really) the opportunity to be there to make the changes that need to be made, and build the cool, fun stuff that needs to be built. That, by far, is the best reason.

Twenty Things

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These days, perusing any news aggregator for “news” is an exercise in defeat. It really is. This evening I found myself on msn.com, and it had a feature, after the court clerk who got fired for helping save an innocent man, and the “latest news” (Hi, NSA!), of the twenty things you should do (EVERYONE should do, it proclaims!). Ok, then.  Challenge accepted.

For the record, they are:

1. Own your own business: check. I ran a freelance business from 1995-2002. Small, yes, but required separate taxes. For the record, I started one six months ago and if you would like consultation on your software choices as a business I have very reasonable rates. And at one point I sold Mary Kay cosmetics.

2. Live in a foreign country: check. Six months in Australia. You can never go home. You realize what makes you foreign, and what makes you accepting.  Further business trips to London, Rome, and Geneva emphasized this.

3. Buy a home. Check. Twice. moving on…

4. Drive coast to coast. Nope. Would love to, as I love to drive. But it takes time. Who’s with me?? Girls trip?

5. Get your heart broken. Bitch please…

6. Be cheered by a crowd: I remember, about 7 years ago, a friend took me to karaoke. I wasn’t good. I wasn’t awful. I was passable, but before I started I pretty much declared my insecurities, offered my apologies, and launched into a Sublime song. My faith in my fellow man was restored, and I remember it to this day.

7. Keep a journal. Hello, that’s what this is. There was another one, it’s under a pseudonym. If you’re friend, and you don’t know, hit me up and I’ll let you know. If you’re foe, or I don’t know, my previous blog is one you’ll not know.

8. Take a leap of faith: again, Bitch please. I don’t have faith. But I’ve attempted a reasonable facsimile when I thought the occasion warranted it. Some instances were not worthy.

9. Give Something Back: yes. YES. I don’t give a (bleep!) what your reference point is, you know of a way to improve your fellow man and/or his/her circumstance. Rewarding.

10. Design and build a house. Nope. Does planning to count?

11. Make a meal with food you raised yourself. Close! so close! Not all of the food, but most! The only human I know who has done this was my Nana (God Rest her Soul!) and my friend the StidBomb. Hey if anyone has seen/heard from the StidBomb let me know, okay? In the meantime, no. The male person won’t let me have chickens. For the record, I’ve caught and cleaned (and eaten) a fish. So, there’s the protein. The veggies are simpler.

12. Buy a piece of art because you love it. ZERO contest. In November, 2005, I was in Yakima with my best friend. We went wine tasting. That wine tasting will remain epic in Yakima because there is still a winery who remembers me, and it’s been 8 years, folks. Anyway, we saw a gal painting pictoral landscapes. And I bought one. Anyone whos’ been to my house?  It’s the one called “the Valley”.

13. Go Wilderness camping. Nope, sorry. Have been camping. Have been camping without a cell phone, and in the middle of nowhere, but I didn’t have to hike far, and it wasn’t the real deal. Maybe…

14. Take a sabbatical… I’m sorry, these words look like English but they’re not. Moving on…

15. Make a piece of furniture. NO! but I’d love to. Chairs are the hardest and that sounds like fun. My idea of “fun” is warped. But no, I haven’t done this and yes, it’s on the list.

16. Go snorkeling or scuba diving. Oh, wow. So for those of you NEW to me, I got certified at 16, I have dove to 220′. I am AOW certified and a butt’s breadth from Rescue Diver. I have dove with sharks, with whales, with whale sharks. I have done a 60′ free ascent, I panicked at 30′. I have wreck dove, cave dove, dove in 5′ vis and dove in visibility as far as I could see on land. I’ve dove the Great Barrier Reef, Hawaii, Cozumel, La Paz/Cabo, and pretty much the major hit points in the Pacific NW. The only lesson I offer is this: don’t dive on ego.

17. Adopt a pet. Have done. Multiple times. My only advice is be cognizant of what you’re getting in to.

18. Do something that really scares you. Again, multiple times. Fear is an evolution, you conquer one and another one comes up, like a weird videogame where the bad guys regenerate. Doesn’t mean you should stop, it just means when you face the next one, grin with the previous ones you conquered.

19. Take a stand. Done, still doing. Washington state (and hi, the US!) needs to properly fund education. That’s straight economics.

20. Do work you really care about. This is an interesting one. I didn’t care about most of my jobs growing up: they were a means to a fiscal end. The first job I really CARED about was at Expedia. I remember sending a six-paragraph email missive to my VP about why a particular person’s view on a report about inventory (Inventory of all things) was messed up. I met with him for our 1:1 and it started with him reading the email to me and asking “what is this??”. And I realized that Dan Pink was right: sometimes it’s not about the money.

Since then I have not settled for a job I don’t care for. I give them the college try: you look like you’re worth it, prove to me you’re worth it. And so far, it hasn’t been disappointing.

So what I take from this is, I need to make a piece of furniture (wait till I tell my Dad about this), go wilderness camping (no idea where this is going to go), design and build a house (okay, I have visio…) and drive coast to coast. And then my life is complete…

…according to a website.

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Plus One To Awareness

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Yesterday 10pm local time ended my 24-hour vacation from any sort of connectivity (including the ability to “google” anything, text anyone, etc.) If you think it’s simple, try it in a place as connectivity-savvy as the Magic Kingdom. There’s an app to navigate the kingdom that includes line times, parade routes and hidden Mickeys. I couldn’t download or use that, no phone. There’s free wi-fi in the hotel and in the parks. Nope. In a line for Space Mountain where every 3rd person is lit from beneath (thanks to their iPhones and in a couple of cases, iPads), connectivity sure would provide an answer to the waiting game.

When I turned my phone off I made an analog list (pen, paper) of all the things I’d use connectivity for if I had the ability to, and the time.

  • At 11pm that night, finding it difficult to fall asleep and devoid of reading material (I had finished it), I really wanted to read my twitter feed to fall asleep, but I didn’t.
  • At 3am I wanted to look up the symptoms of food poisoning (yes, it was), but I didn’t.
  • At 9am the male child asked if he could bring his DS into the park to keep him occupied, and when I incredulously turned to him to explain the whole park was designed to keep him occupied, and discovered that he was teasing me, I really wanted to tweet it. But I didn’t.

And on it went. In the line for Space Mountain I wanted to share the statistical correlation between a person with an iPhone and a lag in line continuity, I wanted to look up the name/number of the restaurant we are to eat at tonight, I wanted to check the terms of the Disney Visa and see if it really was the good deal it was purported to be.

But the thing that really got me was pictures. I couldn’t take pictures.

Pictures of the male child when he finally got his sword (it’s impressive), of the lush greenery that would exist just fine here without the careful maintenance it gets, but would die in two weeks outside in Washington, of the attention to detail this park gives to its art and architecture. “The floors here are *really clean*,” the male person said, as we trotted along in line at Space Mountain. (This was fortunate for the teenager in front of us who, when the line stopped, would sit down on them. Just plopped right down. Even if the line moved again, and then she’d try to scoot along on her ass. Ridiculous, naturally.) It became a challenge to find something out-of-place anywhere.

Therefore, today, fully connected, app-in-hand, there will be pictures, and tweeting, and tweeting of pictures, and Foursquare check-ins, and more pictures.

PS  – for those wondering, my personal email for a 24-hour period counted 74 including advertisements, and 2 for legitimate communications. My work email counted 14, of which 8 were things that were not about me and completely resolved before I got online, 2 were social (one going away notice, one lunch notice), a meeting change notification, and 3 legitimate to the project I was working on.

PPS — Grog the Luddite would like to mention he’s really a sensitive, un-macho, really into stopping and smelling the roses guy and likes technology just fine and even knows a thing or to about it, he just wanted me to realize that there was life outside of it. Point taken.

In a World…

BobbieLeave a comment

Greetings from Florida, where the weather has been 90’s (or slightly less) via humidity or temperature, take your pick. It has been mahvelous, apart from a few work hiccups. (Yes, I check work email; yes, it’s a habit; no, I don’t intend to stop).

Highlights from the last 3 days include staying at the in-law’s fabulous new home, with 3 steal-worthy kitties and an enviable pool. Also, we saw our first palmetto bug (dead) and discovered that there is decent pizza in Florida. A comfortable bed, good company, and great hospitality sure kick-off a vacation properly.

No, I didn’t steal the cat (his name was Barney). But I wanted to.

But! Off we headed, in our Alamo Rental Car (WARNING: super ranty blog post coming on that soon, but right now I’m in talks with their twitter customer service people), down to Orlando. And found ourselves at the Art of Animation Studios.

It’s nothing short of perfect. We have a room separate from the boychild, so he has his own bathroom and his own TV. We are on the top floor. We are in the Finding Nemo themed room, on the building with Sharks on it, on the level with a ginormous shark mural. The poolside food includes sushi. The WiFi is free. The front desk clerk told me to have a Magical Day and SketchYa Later, which from a theme park about animation was so precious and yet cheesy and yet I had a huge grin on my face as I departed check-in. (The only time that has happened before was on late-night work trips when I realized the ordeal was over and I was about to get to sleep).

Instead, we headed down to the pool. Two hours of Mommy reading the Economist and working on the obligatory burn (YES I USED SUNSCREEN MY SKIN DOES THAT OKAY?) and the boys swimming, and we’re back to the room showering and changing for dinner. Our towels were folded on the beds in Mickey Ears and Fish (with the whole Nemo theme). The toiletries are about level 4, with differentiated soaps.  I’m not sure I want to check out.

Tonight we are off to Downtown Disney, where we are to see the Percy Jackson movie (2nd one) in a dining-theater, I’m not sure which of the three of us is more excited, to be frank. The boy just read through all 5 original novels (and three of the sequels) right before summer started, we have seen the first movie, but the trailers for the 2nd look really good and the prospect of “dinner and a movie”, without having to hassle driving or timing (they serve dinner… at the movie), is really comforting.

Especially for someone who has spent 450 words, up to the beginning of this sentence, enjoying things and augmenting that enjoyment by sharing over the internet. Because in less than five hours, I’m going offline. Completely. Internetless, textless, foursquare-less, email-less, twitter-less, Facebook-less until Saturday morning local time. It will be a first in many years. My son looked at me agog as I patiently explained that our wallets, AND our cell phones, were going in the safe. It’s like I told him Aliens would land tomorrow. That said, he too is looking forward to the challenge.

For those of you who know my penchant for the Pirate League, and getting made up into a Pirate Princess (SPECIAL shout out to ExpediaManny), I WILL be doing that and taking pictures — but we scheduled for Saturday, so I could live-tweet it. I know you’re stoked, as I am.

Vacation: it means different things to different people, and mine is going to 11.

Please Stand By

BobbieLeave a comment

Greetings from Chicago O’Hare, and my second time EVER being here not as a business traveler. Bonus points for the food court between K and G gates.

It’s 6:30 in the morning, and we left Seattle at midnight local time “last night”; ergo, we are running on about three hours’ sleep. The reality of flying to a non-major city (hello, Jacksonville) is you either spend your entire day, or your entire night, flying, because you’re going to be stopping over someplace that is not quite but almost entirely out of any reasonable travel path between your points A and B. In this case to maximize our time with family and fun, we are spending the entire night. It’s not completely awful.

If you think about it, one of the most common ways to placate the boredom, frustration, and general weariness associated with modern travel, is your electronic leash. It may be a laptop; it may be an iPhone or a Crackberry. It used to be a book, but books are losing this race. I am sitting at our gate and follow me around the room: teenager across from me on iPhone. His Dad on iPhone. Behind him, lady with full back and arm tattoos (thanks to her tank top) pulling her cell phone out of her bag. Business lady on an iPad. Businessman on a Blackberry. Other businessman eating, iPhone, iPhone while eating, iPad, something-not-quite-an-iPad but not a Kindle, either.

Our connectivity gives us the opportunity to not connect with others. Anyone stuck in an elevator with (shudder) other humans will note two things: 1. The propensity for an elevator full of strangers to be, in fact, an elevator full of strangers looking at their smartphones, and 2. That the people in the elevator, in the absence of interpersonal communication thread active as they entered the elevator, will space themselves out as far apart from each other as possible. (E.g., if there’s one person in the elevator they’re dead center or in the corner. If there are two, you have upper corner and rear opposite corner. Three are usually one in front middle, two in the rear corners. Four = all four corners. Five = all four corners plus one in middle. And so on.) If ever you’re bored and don’t mind messing with other people’s personal space (and yours), deliberately defy this mechanism.

Yours truly is on her laptop, as it is my electronic babysitter as we wait at the gate for a couple of hours. This is wholly unremarkable with the exception that I know, coming up, I will have a day without connectivity.

I tried, the other night, to trace back how long I’ve had some form of connectivity (to the internet, I suppose), and as best as I can figure that started when I moved back up to Washington and started working for Premera. I think we’re looking at Spring 2001. But the connectivity wasn’t all-encompassing, all-binding until I started working for Expedia, 3 years later. I’ve had a blog since 2005 (not this one), “smartphone” of some sort since 2006, a Twitter account since 2007.

Nine years at Expedia trained me to expect emails 24/7 (this is the boon to working for an international company and having international internal customers). Moving  to Sur La Table has meant a dearth of weekend email. After about 6pm on a Friday it slows to a halt, and doesn’t kick up again (apart from automatic job notifications) until Monday morning. Twice now I have sent myself a test email to my work account to verify that it’s still working.

My addiction to this connectivity is starting to get noticed, and, while normally the recipient of a shaking head or an arched eyebrow, has spawned a bet by Grog the Luddite (Grog works with me, sits in what is referred to the “Man Cave Annex”, and does not understand addiction to connectivity. For “fun”, Grog went to Montana to go do crazy physical acts – like carrying other grown men for ½ mile – in high heat). Grog has declared that for a full 24 hour period, I am not to have any connectivity. To test myself. Like an alcoholic preparing for a day without booze I’m already nervous and wondering what my coping mechanisms will be. It will help that the day selected is a day we’re at the Magic Kingdom all day, right? Well no, because then I don’t get to do my Foursquare check-ins. And what about using Yelp reviews to pick the better eating options? And what if something happens at work?

Because that’s the real crux: what if something happens at work, and they need me, and I’m not available? That’s bad enough. What if something happens at work, and they don’t need me – or discover I’m not needed? Ridiculous, yes, but when you love your job that’s the irrational fear that comes with it.

So Friday it is. From Thursday night whenever I hit the rack, to the following Saturday morning when I awake, I will be totally, and completely, offline. The phone will be on to receive calls, but all email accounts will be turned off, cellular data will be turned off, and my phone will just…be a phone. By way of publishing this now, I am that alcoholic putting in place an integrity check: I’ve SAID I’m going to do it, now I have to do it.

I honestly don’t know what my reaction will be. I wonder if I’ll be irritated by the lack of convenience – or if like a mosquito bite I ignore it long enough I simply forget it? I will be sure to blog all about it… on Saturday.