Reporting for Duty

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I’m travelling, which means I’m captive in a long metal tube going an insane speed that contains about 300 other people, of which at least 2% are crying babies. Thank you British Airways.

Today’s blog post is brought to you by the reason I’m travelling, or part of it: I’ve hired someone new, and I’m going to meet her (in person) for the first time.  By Expedia standards I took my sweet time – I got notice in September; she just started last week.

Part of the delay was that I was hiring in the UK – where to give 2-3 months’ notice is typical. I am pleased that I was able to get away with about six weeks, which I looked at as a positive sign from the Employment Gods. This means I spent two and a half months looking through CV’s and phone screening people and having lots of disappointment. The fact is I’m picky.

This does not engender you to your coworkers as much as you’d think.

  • For the four people on the interview loop (not including the executive member), this meant interviewing about 8 or 9 people. One actually approached me and asked me to “just pick one already”.
  • For the 20-odd FTE’s and extended contract staff this person would manage, this meant waiting an interminable four months for a local manager, having to deal with me by email and conference call, and having to run things and try things and just deal.
  • For the three internal candidates who were not accepted, this meant wondering just WTF was I looking for anyway, Ms. or Mr. Perfect? (Well, yes…)

Because I was.

The duty of a hiring manager is not to get a warm body into the job – I don’t care how hard the employment market is. The duty of a hiring manager is not to be convenient to him-or-herself, or to his-or-her extended staff, or to his-or-her coworkers on the interview loop.

The duty of a hiring manager is to pick the person best suited for the job.

I have, in my employment history, hired two people in haste. The Scots have a saying that’s relevant – “Marry in haste, repent in leisure”. The two times I hired in haste I had to repent – then put on a PIP (performance improvement plan) – and then “manage out”, as they say.

This is even less pleasant than it sounds – you take a morale hit in your team for hiring someone who is not effective and needs babysitting, you take a hit as an employee of the company because there is this outlying question of “Why did you hire that person, again?”, and the company takes a hit because you just spent resources – hiring resources, placement resources, HR resources, team resources, that-person’s-worth-of-resources on what ultimately finds itself as a failed experiment. The first time I hired in haste I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to fix the problem, the second time I recognized it for what it was and followed the appropriate procedure. Hiring in haste is an expensive, expensive mistake.

You know, as a manager, when you’ve made this mistake. It’s like that first date, in the online dating world, where everything looks pretty much okay and then you get to day 1 (aka, first date) and discover they aren’t what they said they were and aren’t capable (or willing) to do what you need them to. And then it becomes the exercise of “do I try to fit this square peg into this round hole” or “do I cut my losses”?

You also know, as a manager, when you have made the right choice. On day one they are asking the right questions (and there had better be questions). They are asking “why” in the right places, and they are doing things without babysitting. You find they insert themselves exactly where and how they need to be inserted, you don’t have easy answers to every question, and they don’t require an inordinate amount of babysitting.

So no, I wasn’t going to “just hire someone already”.

Some companies go to great lengths to avoid the temptation a frustrated Hiring Manager may face – recently I talked with a friend who works at Amazon about this very topic, and he pointed out they have this person who is, in effect, the Bar Setter. This is the person on the loop that is not in your team and would have only cursory excuse to work with you should you get the job, and that’s the whole point: they are there because they have no skin in the game, other than to see if you’re a good fit for the company. They will not be given to the frustration of “just hire someone already”… unless perhaps they’ve been dragged in on too many loops for the same position (which, it should be noted, could be an effect of the job description not actually describing what you’re looking for).  It’s an interesting solution for the problem, and should I find myself in this bind again I may use it.

Although I consider my lesson learned.

A Did Not Equal B. I Don’t Know Y, Either

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Someone very dear to me told me about a year ago that I kept succeeding and succeeding at things, and one day, I was going to fail at something, and it would be interesting to see how I took it. Sad to say, that time has come. I bombed my Calculus test. (Please do not read a Perfectionist’s “I got less than an A” into this). The fact of the matter is I went IN to the midterm with a 98.5% cumulative grade in my homework assignments and discussion groups. (Yes, you can have discussion groups in Calculus. Yes, they’re about as stimulating as you may think.)

I left the midterm with a 74% in the class.

You don’t have to have taken Calculus, or anything other than some very basic Algebra, to know that I bombed the midterm. Here’s the rub: math is cumulative. So how could I get all of the homework *right*, but the test so very, very wrong?

“Taking Calculus online is probably the hardest way to learn it”, my teacher had warned us. Still, I went in feeling confident, I left the test thinking I may have gotten two (2) problems incorrect, and so the grade was a shock to me.

I withdrew from the class.

The numbers are thus: I could have stayed IN the class (I’m taking another one), been a metric stressbunny, and possibly toiled enough to bring that grade up to a B –*if* I aced the next Midterm, *if* I aced the Final. Statistically speaking that would mean one thing would have to give in my life — and since I can’t give on motherhood and work pays the bills, school had to give. I’m still taking my other class (that one still have my A, thanks, the midterm isn’t until this Wednesday — I’ll be taking it from Rome) but, given current conditions, I can’t take a class where the context is not intuitive… or at least not right now.

Many friends recommended Khan Academy, which I will likely play with as I get a little more time; but quitting and/or failing at something (it amounts to the same thing) was a huge disappointment and I didn’t take it well. It got bad enough to where I was wondering if I was having a midlife crisis, then I realized at 39 I am in fact, mid-life, and things really got ugly for a couple of hours whilst I wallowed in self-pity and the belief that I wouldn’t amount to anything.

It’s been about five days since my reality check and I am feeling better — a lot of peripheral stress died down and I realized that I can still take classes and still toddle on to the goal — just perhaps a bit slower, and without the ability to phone it in.

I took it as a sine.

Pride (?) of Ownership

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I have once again ventured into the land of Personal Training (receiving end). This is the third time and I hope it works like a charm, as the first one I worked with 4 years ago seemed disinterested (possibly a reflection of my attitude of “I’m paying you so my work is done here”), the second one found all the things I didn’t like and increased them in proportion (I hate kettle bells).

Up until now my ventures into physical activity consisted of the following process:

  1. I need to lose weight.
  2. I don’t make time for the gym.
  3. Unless I have paid for an event.
  4. If I’m going to pay for an event it should be a “big” thing.
  5. Which event has enough credibility and pressure?
    1. Half Marathon
    2. 200 mile bike ride
  6. Register for event.
  7. Feel pumped about event.
  8. Figure training schedule for event.
  9. Skip some days but don’t worry I’ll make it up.
  10. Train in earnest.
  11. Injure myself during training because I didn’t ramp properly.
  12. Ignore or marginalize injury because I’m in denial.
  13. Do event. Maybe whine a lot. Maybe get a little irrational.
  14. Injure myself during event and/or exacerbate injury from training.
  15. Go to Physical Therapy. Go Directly to Physical Therapy.
  16. Have PT person:
    1. Shake head
    2. Remind me of the last time We Were Together, Ask if I’ve Been Doing My Exercises
    3. Hand me New Exercises
    4. Graduate me 2-3 months later
    5. We both know we’ll see each other again.
  17. Celebrate my newfound physical wellness by “taking a break”.
  18. Gain weight. Go back to #1.

The part of this cycle I’m trying to break is numbers 2, 9, 12, and 17.  Hence, Personal Trainer.

My Personal Trainer’s name is Dave. Dave is a former Marine Corps Drill Instructor and acts like it, which is good, but he’s also pretty cheerful at points and is sensitive to the random pains that come with arthritic knees. Dave managed to work me out so hard the first two days that I was actually sore in my armpits. Did you know you have muscles there? I did not… until they were sore. Or there was the time I coughed and my stomach muscles hurt…

This process started about three weeks ago and it’s fairly predictable – while I’m using MyFitnessPal to log all of my food (for the most part honestly), I’m typically tracking more calories than I ought to have, and usually due to the end-of-day meal. I’m also (theoretically) increasing my muscle mass, and since muscle weighs more than fat, my weight hasn’t gone down materially. *

The part that I’m proud of though is that, for more than 21 days (23 as of yesterday) I have made it to the gym 6 days out of each week – at least 3 runs and at least 3 weight workouts. My knees have managed to make it through 32 minutes of running with one, 1-minute break; there’s only minimal swelling and it’s gone at end of day. I’ve also noticed if I don’t run or work out (e.g., that 7th day) I’m a bit of a princess crankypants. I am taking all of these as good signs and hoping the adage that “21 days  makes a habit” is true.

And I haven’t signed up for any events, thank you.

*Actually muscle does not weigh more than fat, any more than a pound of gold weighs more than a pound of feathers, because a pound is a pound is a pound. However, the DENSITY of muscle is higher than that of fat, so the VOLUME required to make 1 pound of muscle is smaller than the VOLUME required to make 1 pound of fat – which is how come the inches go away long before the scale registers anything.

Solving for X

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It’s been some 20 years since I last messed with PreCalculus and I was apprehensive as the quarter started. I mean, do you remember how to factor a quadratic equation?

Most of the last six days I’ve spent pouring over my online textbook, doing the requisite problems and watching the requisite videos, trying to get back into the hang of things, mathematically.  Part of the problem is that the first time I took this in school it was to satisfy a separate need: as a Marine Biologist, how often was I really going to need to use trigonometry? Or create mathematical formulae to describe something? You never saw Jacques Cousteau whip out a Texas Instruments graphing calculator, so I spent four or five quarters of advanced math thinking, “yeah, yeah, but this doesn’t really apply to me”. I studied long enough to get the grade and not one moment longer.

Here we are 20 years later, I’m in the same class (in the same school – although not with the same teacher) doing the same work, and have discovered two things:

  1. It’s a lot easier to do the work if you understand the theory and are studying to that rather than the formula itself – if you get the “concept” you can back into the “formula”, it doesn’t work so well the other way around, and
  2. The newer textbooks have pretty much accepted you’re going to rote-memorize some things and probably don’t care about the formula.

Yep, you read that right. For example, one of the things I find now in my text are handy “tables” that tell you the “standard answers” for common mathematical functions. Twenty years ago, we had to demonstrate mathematically WHY, for example, the sin(pi/6 aka 30o)=1/2.  You got out your quadrille paper, you graphed a unit circle, you labeled stuff, drew your arc, and did the math. Now, you have a table. This helps, right?

Not really. Sure, you have a handy table, and you go and apply that to all of the problems in the homework. Or you leverage your graphing calculator to tell you that sin(30)=0.5, no problem. But when it comes time to use what you have learned so far to apply it to a new concept, or to solve a problem where there is more than one missing value, you’re hosed until you get another table or some set of instructions on what to plug into your TI83.

As I’m actually going to USE this math in Economics – first quarter Microeconomics shows you enough graphs and charts that you immediately understand the significance of Understanding What The Graph Is Actually Telling You and How To Derive a Formula For It – I wish the textbooks actually worked to have you get the theory as much as they do the application. This is like when you’re at work and your boss asks you to provide a presentation and then hands you the template and tells you exactly what to write – that’s great, but I’d really like to participate, please.

The Cobra Effect

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Once upon a time in India, in a village (so the story goes), there was a problem with cobras. There were too many of them.

Cobras, those freaky little reptiles, have a bad rap but the unfortunate truth is they *can* kill you, so it’s understandable that the village wanted them gone. And so the village leaders instituted a bounty for every dead cobra. This would surely be successful, as everyone likes money, and no one likes cobras! Couldn’t miss!

Sure enough, tons of dead cobras were brought in…. but the overall cobra problem didn’t seem to subside. This is because just outside the village were people (you guessed it) breeding cobras, so they could kill them, so they could collect the bounty. Naturally the government didn’t want to pay for purpose-bred cobras, so they stopped the bounty. And the breeders, with no more financial incentive to breed cobras, let the cobras loose, thereby increasing the cobra population.

This would be the precise opposite of the desired solution of the bounty, and this sort of circumstance is called the “Cobra Effect”. You can read about it here (Wikipedia lists the village as the city of Delhi, but I’m not sure I buy that). Another example is the famous pigs of Fort Benning.

Essentially, the Cobra Effect is when your proposed solution actually makes the problem *worse* than it was to begin with. It doesn’t always have to be economic in nature, as I am seeing at work currently.

Fourteen months ago I took my current job and in the first couple of weeks I volunteered to work on a given project. The given project had been languishing for a few months and was on someone’s radar again, so it needed attention. The basic idea was to take 200,000 records and consolidate them into about 6 or 7 thousand, with minimal disrupt. We crafted a comprehensive plan to get the project done, executed it, and…

…it blew up in a horrific, ugly mushroom cloud. Everything that could go wrong did: bad data meant some emails went to wrong people. Emails that went to the right people invariably succeeded in pissing them off, and emails that had been declared not necessary to go out turned out to have been rather necessary, after all. Data was updated but not correctly, thanks to an artifact in code knowledge no one remembered (so the after effect was, “Oh, that’s why that was there.”). 112 Hours later it was fixed. 

After six distinct debriefs and detailed postmortems (“Fix the contact information”, “Vet it with this team in this other fashion even though they originally said the first way was fine”, “Avoid Excel”, “Use Excel”, “put a PM on it”, “Take the PM off of it”, “Let’s start from scratch”, “Let’s use what we had before and refine it”, “Take it out of this team”, “Give it back to that team”) it looks like the current plan is to…

… do nearly exactly what we originally did. Only now, we’re doing it with 30% more records, because the first reaction from the first go-around that went awry was the recipients of the new format/data/project went into the system and… created more records. 

Points:

1. Unintended consequences are everywhere, and the best intentions often create more of them, and

2. The Cobra Effect doesn’t just apply to economics, although given a few minutes I could probably monetize this project and it would make me cry, and 

3. You can have a fancy name and anecdote for something, and even have it written about in many management books, but it won’t prevent people from making ill-advised choices (despite best efforts at education).

Brand New Year, Now, With More Crazy!

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As much as I’d love to blog about the FiscalCliff, Cliff 2, Cliff 3 First Blood, Child of the Fiscal Cliff, Return of the Fiscal Cliff, Fiscal Cliff Revolutions, etc., I’m not going to, as others have written much better prose and admonishment of it than I could ever hope to do. Suffice it to say that the “deal” currently discussed in the house (and passed by the Senate) doesn’t address any of the problems that need addressing, and the cliff itself is largely a fabrication of this broken legislature we have and so applauding any sort of garbage-pile-at-the-bottom-save they’ve managed to create is an exercise in self-delusion. I’ll save my self-delusion for better use.

(For really excellent writing and explanations of Why This Isn’t A Save and In Fact Is a Huge Ream of BS, Regardless of Which Side of the Political Spectrum You Are On, see: this and this and this. I also recommend following Heidi Moore and Ezra Klein on Twitter. Their play-by-play is excellent.)

Fiscal-political brinksmanship aside, I find myself as many do, the first day of the year, wincing in readiness for the email onslaught as brought by January 2nd; in full knowledge that school starts tomorrow (for both the boy and I, I get Macroeconomics and the last PreCalc class); bracing myself for the inevitable deluge of resoluters at the gym. All the classes will be full and the instructors will be randomized.

I’ve used the past few days off to catch up on my OCD; my rock collection is now digitized (I can look up rocks by family, size, or color), the undercroft is organized (2 thousand plus books are packed up to go to my parents house), the fridge is cleaned out (literally and figuratively), the study is reconfigured, I finished two knitting projects. In typical fashion, this is because I’m avoiding something.

I am avoiding my annual review.

Every year I am asked to write a series of paragraphs (or oblique sentences) about my performance, and every year I’m startled by two things: 1, how much I (and my team(s), when appropriate) have done, and 2, how it bears no resemblance to what we thought we were going to do. At the onset of each year we craft goals based on the plans of the company, and, in the form of companies everywhere, things change. Constantly. It’s got to the point where we should have t-shirts that say “the only constant is change” or “entropy always increases”. I may do that with my morale budget.

There has GOT to be a better way. 

This year, we have attempted to frame our goals in the context of the purpose of the exercise rather than the exercise itself; instead of talking about creating XYZ report or accomplishing ABC task, we’re focusing on the end result: how do we make the company more successful, which thereby (frankly) increases the bonus pool, which thereby (frankly) makes its way into our own microeconomics. That is the part of this exercise the company wants and needs, and that’s great.

It occurs to me however that a lot of us are thriving off of the variety, the change, and the volume of things to do for the sake of the variety, change, and volume. Each new email brings a challenge, almost baiting you: are you up to it? Some crisis has erupted, can you handle it? Can you delegate it? Can you deal with it? I’m happy to say that in the ensuing year I am confident I can do all of those things, this is the rare comfort of someone who has really excellent people to rely on at work. 

And with that, tomorrow officially brings the crazy for 2013. School, school, work, home, and all the entropy that can increase. There is no room for triskaidekaphobia, there is no room to wallow. And so I will write my review, take a deep breath, and acknowledge 2013.

Bring it!

So You’re Going to Get a Lawyer

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It’s happened.  Something has happened that makes your current situation untenable and you need advice or action from an attorney. Congratulations in making this important decision! Now don’t screw it up.

As previously indicated, I’ve just spent the last (temporal period) in the murk of family court, and learned a few things about how to select an attorney, how to work with an attorney, and how NOT to work with an attorney. NB: This advice is built out of my own personal observation and experience, so it’s entirely possible you may find exceptions to the rule.

 

Step 1: Find a Lawyer

This is so easy, right? There are tons of attorneys in the phone book; just pick one, right? Wrong. Things you need to look for in your attorney: 

  1. They should either have been in practice for ten years, or be working directly with/for someone who has. This is because the first five years of post-law-school is spent in the fog of “Holy Crap I Need To Remember All This Stuff” and it takes some getting used to. Doctors have residency, attorneys do not (formally). You do not want a newb.
  2. They should specialize in the field you need. This does not mean they do this sort of law and that sort of law and some other sort of law. If your attorney says they do tax law, family law, disability law and criminal law, for example, this is not a good sign. For one thing, it’s nearly impossible to keep up on all the legal precedents that change in those fields, and some of those fields operate so wildly different from one another they would serve you WORSE if the attorney switches methods. Case in point: in criminal law, if you have a warrant to search a house and the address is one digit off, or the name of the street is misspelled, or the name of the recipient is misspelled, it can be (usually is) grounds for dismissal. In criminal law, the exception drives the decision. In family law, the court looks down on attempts to draw exceptions based on a misspelling or single unchecked box.  The practical upshot is you wouldn’t go to a cardiologist for your brain tumor, and you wouldn’t go to someone who says they’re a cardiologist and oncologist and gastroenterologist for anything because there’s no way they’re an expert in all three. And the rules of the game are interpreted differently.
  3. They should be honest. I know, right? Honest attorney? Like any other public practice there is likely a certain finessing of some truths, or dramatic characterizations, to prove a point. Fine. But if your attorney lies in big, easy-to-detect ways (e.g., “I’ve been in practice 30 years!” when they were admitted to the bar in 1991), it’s not a good sign – because they will lie as easily to you as they will to the court (or others).
  4. They should have a publicly available reference. Use sites like Avvo or Justia to see what former clients have said – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Avvo has a ratings systems for attorneys provided by clients, along with reviews and testimonials. (Full disclosure – Avvo was built by expats of Expedia, the company I work for as of this writing).
  5. They should be able to give you full alternatives. That is to say, there is no guaranteed legal outcome, ever. A good attorney will have a game plan going in, and you will know what it is. The discussion goes like this: If they do X, we will do Y, because of this and that reason. If they do A, we will do B, because of this and that reason, etc. Remember, it’s your dime: you are paying them for professional services, to advise you, and a good advisor is always aware of alternatives and should have contingent plans.
  6. Speaking of dimes, they should be able to tell you how to minimize your fees. For example, in my case, I racked up some fees early on in the process by sending an email for every little question I had; instead of saving it for a fifteen-minute phone call (despite warnings from my attorney, who in her defense tried to train me out of this habit). The time it takes to read the email, formulate the response, and send the response (to multiple missives) is typically longer than you can get the same information via phone. A good attorney will point this out to you.

 

Step 2: Get ready for some discomfort.

Once you’ve got your attorney, there are some things you should know and understand about the process:

  1. Attorneys are expensive. Rates vary from $200/hour to $500/hour (or more)– and typically the more experienced your attorney, the higher the rate.  Here’s some basic math: let’s say you hire an attorney to help you go to mediation. S/he sends 2 or 3 letters, preps for mediation, goes with you to mediation, and then does the clean up. That would run you about $7-10k, not including the mediator fee (which is usually attorney rates as well). Take a long look at you bank account, your savings, etc. and be prepared for some nasty drains.
  2. Justice is swift… but only sometimes. There will be periods of frenetic activity (filing motions, entering pleadings, etc.) and periods of waiting. It’s hard to tell which is more frustrating – the weekends spent digging up financial data for the last 3 years (I held the process akin to a colonoscopy in terms of preparation and comfort), or the seemingly interminable waiting on SOMEONE to do SOMETHING – a court-appointed evaluator, the other side to make a move, your side to make a move, the court date or mediation date or settlement date to arrive. You’re juggling the calendars of the court, your attorney, their attorney, and any experts called in. In my case it was complicated by a school year. So don’t expect this to be “I hired an attorney this will all be sorted in a few weeks”.
  3. The best way to not go to court is to be prepared for court. In my case, we were two civil parties trying to reach an agreement outside of court, but in order to do that, we had to follow the court schedule. In a family law case, before your actual court date – mine moved 3 times, the last one was the 14th of January – there are a series of “assignment due” phases, as doled out the court. There’s the list of witnesses. Then a little bit later you have to supply your first (1st) batch if interrogatories and requests for production (basically, here’s everything we’re going to look into in the court case and you have to answer it like you’re sitting in front of the judge). Then, you usually have to supply YOUR answers to THEIR “rogs”. Then there’s the inevitable follow up (hey, this is missing, or hey, what’s that). Then there can be depositions (mine didn’t make it that far) and/or a second round of rogs. Then there’s all the paperwork and letters and facts and case stuff you hand to the judge BEFORE the actual trial – so all the Perry Mason-like things you expect your attorney to say, quote, or reference have, in essence, already been forwarded to the judge ahead of time.  Keep in mind every one of these steps comes with a price tag – yours and your attorney’s (for you spend a not inconsiderable amount of time getting ready for these steps), and theirs and their attorney’s.  Each of these steps though gives you a bit more information to work with, and the price tag (and time, and information) can help drive parties to WANT to settle, as you get a very good idea of what all would be covered in a trial.
  4. Speaking of “you answer their rogs”, the notion that you have any sort of privacy should go out the window. Like, now. In the course of this process I got a very basic set of “rogs”, probably boilerplate, adjusted just a bit to suit the circumstance. I think it was 20-something pages. I’ve seen rog requests top 50 pages, 110 questions, and 25 requests for production. There are no sacred cows – in mine, I had to answer about my health and health history and every possible thing about my finances you could conceive (really—including did I have offshore bank accounts, a trust fund, etc.). In others, you can be asked about your alcohol consumption, any felonies/misdemeanors, if you are or have ever been in counseling, what you “feel” about the situation, etc. Therefore, as of present, my embarrassing purchased coffee habit is not only known to the world through foursquare, it’s also known through the courts system.
  5. Do not ever bluff, and do not let your attorney tell you it’s okay to bluff. If you indicate you are going to do something, do it. If you say you’re going to bring a motion for example, do it. Saying you are going to do something and then not doing it pretty much undermines your whole position and renders any prospect of being taken seriously in jeopardy.  Corollary: do not assume anyone else is bluffing, either.
  6. Your faith, and trust, in your fellow man will be tested. You’ll be tempted to “just talk” to the other party, surely if you just used the right words to explain yourself, THEN they’ll understand, because it’s just not possible that you can both be so far off, right? Surely it’s all just a big misunderstanding? That may be: but any discussions you have will likely get twisted horrifically and thrown back at you, probably in a court document, and it will sting like the bejeezus. Save discussions and attempts to explain for after, for your attorneys, or for mediation.

 

Step 3: Try to enjoy the process.

I’m serious. Try to, at least if for no other purpose than to recognize you never, ever want to be in this position again, and you’re paying a lot for the privilege. Try to look at the process as a learning experience, watch how it works, and so forth. It helps take some sting out of the fact that you are spending a lot of money and time.

 

One final note: as I sent out the news to family and friends who had been asking near daily how it was going, I was asked a lot if I “won”. You don’t win in a family legal battle, any more than you win at a family argument. Damage is done, beyond finances, that is fixable but the scars remain permanently. In this case, it’s damaged trust. I didn’t “win”. I did however manage to get written down, and ordered by the court, the things I found important. That is defined, then, as a “good outcome”.

 

Moving On

Bobbie3 Comments

It goes to show that it’s been a while since I’ve blogged that the entire user interface of WordPress has changed since I last visited. Apparently I’ve been gone for a couple of months, courtesy of the legal quagmire I was in.

Now, to address the usual questions, NO I hadn’t done anything illegal and NO it wasn’t anything that impacted anyone else but my immediate family — such is civil law. But the entire affair — which could be measured at 15.5 months or 19.5 months or slightly over 3 years, depending on whose ruler you use and how petty you are — was exhausting. My ability to blog and post was limited to the most vanilla of subjects, as the process proved when you are in civil court the “other side” (or, more likely, their attorney) will write and say and twist things truly ridiculous given any length of rope.

I therefore had visions of scenarios like: “Bobbie posts about how stressful her job is, therefore she spends too much time working, therefore she is an unfit mother”. Or, “Bobbie posted about her recent dental appointment, where her dentist suggested teeth whitening, therefore she drinks too much coffee, therefore she is an unfit mother”. Like it or not, I was able to successfully (?) imagine in some weird six-degrees mental exercise all roads leading to the “other team’s” desired output, namely their contention that I am/was All Things Evil, Ever.

Now that that is finished, I’m free to post about whatever. Which, I am happy to say, I’ve actually given some thought.

My mother-in-law-to-be recently spent time with me in my kitchen and was extolling the virtues of a gardening blog she happened upon. When asked why I blog, I deferred to my older blog (which was divorce, and then dating, therapy), and then the current one (which before the Event was about physical triumph over a traitorous body and mental exercise over that which occupied me at work). The only consistent running theme has been “this is something that is occupying a percentage of my brain space”, but there was no consistency in the volume of the space it occupied or the genre of space. Nor, I must say, is it terribly useful (per se) to read. It’s more of a voyeuristic window in the frenetic ramblings of a mid-30’s (or, nearly 40) single mom with an interesting (to her) career and an inability to finally decide, once and for all, if she should get chickens.

Going forward, this blog will have three aspects: initially, I’m going to brain dump about all of my learnings of Court. It was a fascinating process, from beginning to end, and I certainly got my money’s worth (which, at best guess, is somewhere in the mid-priced luxury vehicle range). There will likely be a spike in Economics posts as I pursue my degree. There will be the occasional work vent, and possibly a vent or two in the parenting line, as my son is at the interesting and challenging age where I spend a lot of time playing chauffeuse, financier, and guidance counselor. You are hereby put on notice. With that, we begin again… seven years after we started the first time.

Welcome, again.

Miscellany

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NB: I don’t use the word “random” in the title because it’s often misused. I find people use “random” to indicate what I would call “miscellany”. Anyone interested in the semantics can look up the differences in the OED.

The very best corn maze in the state of Washington is in Snohomish, WA. The place is unassumingly called “The Farm”, and if you are headed north up the 9 take the Snohomish exit right past the bridge over the river, turn left off the exit and drive about 4 miles. You can’t miss it. It’s a giant corn maze.

In the shape of Washington State.

And the maze is made of accurate highways — all marked… including country roads, also accurate, also marked. Cities and interests (Grand Coulee Dam, The Space Needle) are all marked with actual edifices and both “Quick Facts” and a longer set of paragraphs about the history of the part of Washington you are in. It was incredibly fun and I totally recommend it. I may force the Male Person into going some weekend.

Our group got lost trying to find Vantage.

You see, the maze was so accurate it included Road Closures. The 90 was closed in a part of it, as were two other major highways (mercifully not the 5, because we had to hightail it down from Everett to Olympia). And we spent our life driving walking around in a hellhole trying to find Vantage, between the broken bits of the 90 and highway 97. I think I actually want to drive out to the REAL Vantage, WA in order to make myself at peace with the experience.

During the field trip I had the joy of watching 3 boys (one of them my son). I have a friend who now has three boys, I really have no idea how she will keep her sanity. That is all.

In other (see? not random, ‘cuz we’re still talking about me, but miscellaneous, because this is a complete non-sequitir) school is both more and less than I thought it was. Believe it or not, listening to the Freakonomics podcast weekly and reading the Economist will still leave you with some knowledge bits lacking and so you actually do have to read your course materials and respond to the class discussion items. Fortunately, I seem to be able to do so. I psych myself out before every “problem set” that is due, and I leave each one going “Oh. That’s all right, then.”

Finally (again, miscellany, not randomness) I have not at all determined what I want to be for Halloween. Now accepting suggestions. In the past (recent) years, I have been: Elphaba, a Catrina doll (bride), a dominatrix, a Knight, Zorro, Alice in Wonderland (complete with blonde wig), and (when pregnant) someone with an Alien chestburster (a little lower, thanks to the BoyChild). Oh, and a Vampiress and I think there was a witch in there somewhere.  Rules: no massive face paint (Elphaba was impossible to clean — myself and then the items I cleaned with). Must be work-appropriate. Points for creativity.

And if you are saying, “But you promised us legal poo!!!”, well, I’m sorry, but that’s still (STILL) going on, and looks to be through the end of the year. Maybe you’ll get some dish for Christmas.

Here We Go Again…

BobbieLeave a comment

Greetings from South Satellite at SeaTac! Yes, I’m actually writing BEFORE I get on the plane, which has no WiFi. More awesome is my pre-planning on this, so I am the smug owner of both the most recent issue of Discovery and the most recent issue of the Economist. That plus hopefully some decent sleep will aid in the 9 hour flight to Heathrow, and the 2 hours down to Rome.

The verdict on the back/neck was essentially I’ve got degeneration in a joint and in a disc — so, um, I’m old. And apparently we fight age with muscle relaxants (which suck, because if I take one, I have to plan on not doing anything for 12 hours), anti-inflammatories (which suck less but the digestive tract does not like), and lots of Physical Therapy (which sucks because it means the nice PT dude pokes all the owie spots and makes them more owie).

I know I promised more on the Legal Fun, but since it turns out getting a Summer Schedule in place ran a tab of about $850, I think it’s safe to say I’m still in it, and won’t be out of it for a while, so maybe those blog posts can come in October or November. Hey, just in time to scare people for Halloween!

At the rate time is flying, though, that’s not long. The major milestones of the summer are flying by, Kevin and Margaret got married, STP has come and gone, our Leadership Summit has passed (short: YAY US! And… there’s a lot more to do); there’s this trip and then the next trip (fun trip!) and then camp and back to school and PTA and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.

Net-net (and I say that because it makes the Editor cringe, and that looks almost like a smile on his face, so it’s nearly the same thing) this has brought me to the Big Decision to… Not get chickens. I just added on a running routine (to replace the cycling one), a knitting class, I still have a quilt, and I keep having to remember that in about a month I’ll be back in school, too. I think chickens may drive me nuts, as fun as they sound. In a way this feels like giving up, or maybe it’s just streamlining. The male person is not secretly relieved.

So. If you’re in Seattle and you’ve got chickens, I’d like to come help out once in a while, and buy some eggs off of you. The same way I like to occasionally go to the dog park to pet the pups but do not foresee another puppy for some time (Bulimikitty, I’m looking at you).

With that I sign off… as the long metal tube of the jetway beckons to the OTHER long metal tube that will take me to Olympic-land, and then to the land of caprese and carbonara. I can’t complain, try as I might :).