Dealer's Choice

On Tuesday I was raised by my alarm from a dream in which I was going to lose my job, or might have been going to lose my job, or was going to get reshuffled, or whatever, and the key point, other than man, what is it about getting woken up from a dream? I was groggy the whole darn day - was: I wasn't too upset. Yes, it was a dream, and also my eraser turned into a miniature kit fox and ran into the corner, but the prospect of losing my job, even on waking, was not terribly distressing. I had a momentary flash of panic about the mortgage and other expenses (as well I should), but my main reaction was, "Hmmm. I could do a lot with all that extra time."

Which is perhaps why two days later, after a work day that made me wonder to which cost code I should charge 30 minutes of seething and 45 minutes of wasting my damn time, I thought, hmmm. I could just not have to deal with any of this.

I could just be at home, and do home stuff, and be homey and homely and home. And then I had a little frisson of delight and relief - all of the irritating insoluble problems of the workplace could just vanish, just like that, and I would be free.

It sounded wonderful. For about five minutes. Then I remembered that:

a. I really do like my paycheck very much, and

b. I also am kind of involved in things at work right now, and walking out would leave me with an eternal sense of having left something unfinished, plus

c. Irritation is good for me.

It took me a while to realize this. Irritation - not crushing stress or daily misery, but the kind of condition where you have to sigh sharply and bustle in and do things right - is good for people. So is training yourself to suck it up and just deal with the fact that the air conditioning comes on when it's 46 degrees outside (WTH, Building People?), that the computer upgrades you need to do your job aren't likely to come before October even though other people in the office just got brand new iPads, and that meetings will always be dominated by the ones who do nothing but complain. It's like exercise: it's uncomfortable during the practice of it, but afterward you feel great, plus your muscles are better toned.

So: instead of getting all bent out of shape when I get yet another incomprehensible request to deal with something that I'm pretty sure we solved three months ago, I just breathe, smile, and think feel the burn. And also: nope. Not leaving. Not today.

Friday favorites

1. Favorite book I've been reading this week: The Little Princess, to Helen at bedtime. This is actually one of my favorite books of all time, and I look forward all day to reading it, even as my adult mind keeps getting tripped up by some of the details (what part of two adult men spying on a child through her window, and then sneaking into her room as she sleeps, is NOT CREEPY? Also, the happy ending where the rich youngish man finds the love of his life in, I mean becomes the legal guardian of, his dead business partner's 11-year-old daughter - well, it's great and all until she wants to be a grownup with HER OWN LIFE and get married and stuff, and THEN WHAT HAPPENS?)

2. Favorite meal: a made a pork chop thing with red cabbage, and a crock pot chicken and yam thing that I didn't even get to eat because I was so busy going to a wine-tasting tupperware party up the street (my life can be SO HARD sometimes), but I think my favorite thing this week was the lentil salad with goat cheese and sundried tomatoes that I managed not to burn. Needless to say I was alone, all alone, with my privileged bowl of lentils in the corner. Everyone else ate cereal and cheese quesadillas.

3. Favorite weather this week: it snowed on Thursday, real snow that stuck on the ground and everything. We built a fire and lay around reading books/ building Minecraft thingies (sets? scenarios? I don't even know).

4. Favorite work run. This fall I've been doing runs at work. These are way, way better now that the temperature at noon is no longer 92 degrees in the shade. It's still a barren, bleak, warehouse-filled landscape, though, and while most days I run over and do laps around the windy expanse of soccer fields, once a week I give myself permission to drive to the bikepath and run along Cherry Creek.

Friday Favorites

1. Favorite time of day. Morning, obviously. Always. But this time of year I like it especially: I get up when it's still dark and write, and then either go for a run or drive to work as the sun is rising, so I'm glutted with sunrises these days. I love it. It's so much better than my habits from the past few years, where I was running in the dark half the year and in the shower, I think, for the sunrise.

2. Favorite read of the week: I'm working my way slowly through The Hemingses of Monticello, which is about the family of slaves who were both Thomas Jefferson's unacknowledged inlaws and his companion and children. This is pretty much the perfect book for me right now: I spent the first half of the year immersing myself in the life and world of Thomas Jefferson, and dreaming of how to create my own private Monticello (which I'm still ambivalent about. I think people who create utopias tend to use the people in their lives as building blocks, and men who create utopias are especially dangerous this way). Now I'm reading about the invisible secret of Monticello, made visible. Much of the book is obviously speculative, but it's such smart and carefully researched speculation that it hardly matters.

3. Favorite meal of the week: chicken soup (made with leftover roast chicken) with basil pesto and rolls made with leftover mashed sweet yams. We've also had a lot of dessert: both Helen and Silas dedicated themselves to dessert projects this week. Si made a recipe he'd found on the internet, cupcakes with tombstones on them (well, two of the cupcakes had tombstones. Then he decided that was way too much work and the rest just have frosting.), and Helen made a recipe she'd found in a craft book, sugar cookies with food color paintings on them. She also made a T shirt with a pink zebra painted on it in fabric paints. They're both so crafty, those kids, although Si is still a follow-the-instructions-to-the-letter kind of guy, while Helen feels free to improvise.

Other than that it's been kind of a hard week, for no especial reason, except that I've had five bad hair days in a row and the kidnapping in Arvada has been bringing me down and I'm in kind of a personality head butting with someone at work (who is not in my department, so it's not really a crisis or a constant problem, just a disappointment to realize, again, that I am not liked by all people all of the time even though I SHOULD BE BECAUSE I AM A TENDER PRECIOUS SNOWFLAKE AND ALSO BRILLIANT.)

Anyway. The yard is adrift is golden glowing yellow, so there's that.

Another Sputtering Return of the Friday Favorites

1. Favorite moments of the debate (note: this was the first presidential debate I have watched in 20 years, not counting SNL. I might wait another 20 years before I watch the next one.) Was it when Silas, turning away from the evening's Educational Entertainment, emerged with a carefully chosen alternative viewing choice? Or when he realized that no, sorry, we weren't going to turn off the debate to watch Spongebob? Was it the end, when it was finally over? Was it forty minutes before the debate started, when Helen and I were driving home through deserted streets that were gray with dusk and blooming with big dimly orange puffs of autumn ash tree - the debates were held here in Denver, not far from our house, and the interstate closed at 5, so it was like a little holiday time at the end of a busy working day. This one, I think. This was my favorite moment. Before they started.

2. Favorite part of the season. Every fall I think about Kenko's injunction that "branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration" - and then I think, nah. The fall leaves at their red and gold peak thrill me much more than a pile of brown leaves on the ground, even if that means I am privileging a certain moment in the eternal flux of the universe. There will be plenty of time for austere beauty in November. Today I remain resolutely delighted by the first flush of golden ash and bitter red sumac. This right here is my favorite moment of fall.

3. Favorite book I read in September: Finders Keepers by Craig Childs. This book hits on pretty much everything I struggled with when I lived in southwest Colorado and made my living (such as it was) walking the National Forest looking for pottery shards and rock flakes. I hated how anytime we found something interesting our job was to seal it in a plastic baggy and ship it to a big artifact storage locker. I hated the feeling of salacious pleasure I got anytime we poked our noses into something that was once private. I hated how I couldn't just slip a pretty little shard into my pocket, no matter how much more I'd appreciate it than the artifact storage locker.

4. Favorite mood for the week: recovering invalid. Between the sewer mess, the melancholy fact of fall, and the trip for work to Las Vegas (whoo boy) (it wasn't like that, just DULL), I am feeling the need to treat myself like a delicate Victorian convalescent this week. Someone who needs to lie about in the sun wrapped in lots of clean linen, being administered medicinal doses of tea and fresh air. So I took yesterday off. I volunteered in Helen's classroom this morning (which was awesome. I will definitely do this again.) I slept in two days this week.

5. Favorite dinner I made this week: make-your-own tacos. I cooked the beef with a new chili powder I picked up on a trip to the Littleton Penzey's: this is actually the first time in my cooking life that I have deliberately purchased a spice mix and to paraphrase a friend, I will need to live forty more years in order to make up for forty years of not using spice mixes. The mix is delicious. I think it has sugar in it, and possibly powdered heroin. It is so, so yummy.

6. Favorite work thing*: my personalized stationery. I like it so much that I hoard it: no ordinary to-do lists for this stationery, no sir. Only the biggest and most important lists go on this stuff.


*I have been feeling insulted and put upon lately by the fact that I need to work. This is not a feeling specific to my particular job, which happens to be going fine, but an irritation at a basic life condition (namely, that I am not independently wealthy; or possibly that the world has not chosen to pay me for doing what I like to do. Harrumph.) However, I am going to counteract this feeling by listing my favorite work activity each week. Identifying details will be redacted, obv.

So much to say, so little of note

Sometimes I let this thing lag for so long I wonder if it's even worth it trying to catch back up.

Didn't care for the mineral water smell

And then I'm like, who am I kidding? What else would I do with all our pictures if I didn't have a blog?

Awesome glasses from a geocache

Where else would I get to talk about how we went to Yellowstone and saw four measly bison, petting-zoo elk (technically they were wild, in the way that squirrels are wild), lots of bubbling mud, some waterfalls, and a bear? It was rushed but fun.

The kids enjoyed it, more or less.

I think they liked the legos they brought along the best, and then the lake options at the cabin where we stayed, and Yellowstone Park features came in a dusty third, but, well, they can say they've been there.

And then I could tell you about how we've been back for a whole week. How I am a fresh expert on the return-to-work experience. First two days: learning how to do your job again. Second two days: putting out all the fires that erupted while you were out. Last day: whoo, it's Friday. Or how on Friday I rode my bike to work, which is almost becoming a Friday habit. Or how tomorrow we have eight boys ten and under arriving for a sleepover. On a work night. I am crazy.

There. All caught up. Now in my next post I can talk about how I can't get my mind around the fact that I've been doing this parenting thing for a whole decade.

Dislocation

Last week my workplace moved, and this week marks the first regular work week in the new place. For most of the people I work with it's a bad change: we're 20 miles away from our old building, so people's commutes have doubled or even tripled. There is a lot of grousing and many people have suspiciously puffy eyes when they come in every morning, as if they maybe spent some of the drive in tears. Some people have gone from corner offices with wall-to-wall windows and close views of the nearby rocky ridge to windowless caves. Other people have had their job duties completely upturned and their daily work routines disrupted--"I feel like I've taken a totally new job," said one of my coworkers. "Everything is new." I try to keep pretty quiet. I think I technically live the closest to the new office (five and a half miles away, but still: the closest). I also have a bigger, brighter, newer office with new furniture, and what's more, the move was an excuse to toss out all my predecessor's files and books and knickknacks. So I am unobtrusively thanking my lucky stars/ office politics/ the powers that be for my situation. Nevertheless, it has been an adjustment. I find myself thinking idly of the walk I will take at lunch--and then remembering, with a small pang, that no, that walk is 20 miles away. People I used to see every day are located in offices I can't always reliably find. Everyone in my department has their own office, now, so that instead of being grouped in out former cozy circle we are spread along a wall--the casual interactions we used to have don't work anymore. It isn't bad. It isn't something that we won't all get used to and find the new benefits in. I, for one, am already right now reaping the benefits of having 30 to 40 minutes less commute time every single day. But the adjustment is still surprisingly difficult and it reminds me of how much of our internal equilibrium is based on external cues we're almost unaware of--like geography. Like circadian rhythms, which are going to change based on which way our offices face and whether we have access to circadian cues. Like...is this possible?...external vegetation. Our new office is located out in the midst of warehouses and rugged old ranchland. There's very little out here in the way of plant life except knapweed, scattered weedy cottonwoods and siberian elms, and occasional strips of bluegrass and landscaping trees. There are no houses and the offices tend toward the utilitarian. There isn't much in this landscape that is thought out, or that reflects attention to place. Or interest in place. I go for my lunchtime walk and it's beyond barren: it's desolate, windswept, neither human nor nature but some drosscape in between. I catch sight of my office building at the top of the hill and I have a little lurch of affection for it, like I'm sighting my covered wagon after foraging for buffalo chips. Aw, we're pioneers, I think, even though we're literally sitting between two demographically identical office buildings. It's interesting to think about the animal basis of all this, how some animals are so sensitive to changes in light, termperature, or smell that they'll up and leave a place if it changes too much. And even if humans are more akin to noise-and-change-loving house sparrows and racoons, we still get all discombobulated and grumpy when it's suddenly brighter or our room faces north instead of west. One problem with noticing the animal basis of my response to changing geographical location, though, is I start noticing the animal wrongness of my daily routine. Driving! Desk sitting! Working away from my family! It makes me want to up and leave, some days, and go in search of a daily routine that feels biologically better suited.

Two more things

1. Today was Helen's first day of school. She was beyond excited (I was beyond excited, even though I'm not convinced it's THAT big a milestone; the transition to middle school looms larger right now. Or maybe that's just first child bias). Both kids are starting to devolve a little from "excited" to "violently grumpy." Although, thanks to a house filled with plastic sheeting and drywall dust, I'm having a lot of luck in farming them out for playdates and currently I am in the house ALONE. (Someday soon it will be payback time, and I have a feeling I'd better start thinking of favors to do NOW.)

2. I met Jess today! She's just as beautiful and sensible as she appears in her blog.

I also went for a hike today, at a state park out on the plains that I'd never been to before. Tomorrow I go back to work. I don't dread going back to work, exactly, but that just seems like another person, that self of mine who gets up early and goes for a run and packs a lunch and gets in the car to drive to work. (And that self's life is not exactly exciting. Nor is it leisurely, which is what I crave right now, alas.)

The idea of routine is appealing, however. We've reached the point of no return in the renovation: our drywall is gone. The front of our house looks like a barn, with pink panther fiberglass batts in place of stalls, and a smell of dust and mold instead of straw and manure. I have this naive belief that if I can just cobble together some kind of routine I can ride out all the dust and disruption with smiling equanimity.

Trip

So, tomorrow I get on a plane and head south for my first-ever business trip. I have been low-level stressing about this for months, high-level stressing for a few weeks, but at this point I'm just sort of fatalistically resigned slash excited. I mean, I am excited. New city, new people, new hotel, et cetera. I am also sort of mourning all of my disrupted habits in advance--I am a person who thrives on routine, and I can't stop trying to figure out how I'm going to go running every day, or get the breakfast foods I like, or read every night like I'm accustomed to. A lot of my nervousness has to do with the sheer number of new things I will need to accomplish in the next few days, from hiring a cab at the new city's airport to dealing with bellhops (how much to tip? can I just grab my own bag and go?).

Hubs ribbed me gently when I did half my packing this past weekend; I pointed out that the last time we did a big family trip by airplane I broke out in hives. At least I don't have hives, people. Not yet.

That said, I am sort of ridiculously pleased when I casually mention that I'm traveling for work. It seems like a very grownup, real-job thing to do, and while I've never really envied business travelers (and maybe even grumped that if companies didn't see the need to send their employees buzzing all over the globe, maybe we wouldn't have so many CARBON PROBLEMS), I'm still thrilled to experience the fabled Business Trip. Also the fabled Expense Account, which I sort of can't imagine myself using.

So. I'll be gone for a week. Ya'll enjoy yourselves while I'm gone.

We interrupt this vacation

For a short message from work. That message is: you're still employed (thankfully), so get in here.

After five days of Christmas break, full of food, family, fun, and inexplicably huge amounts of wine, I'm heading back in today and tomorrow. Part of me is sort of clutching my head and groaning (you want me to do whhhat?) Part of me is glad to get away from the struggles with the Wii and the Leapster. And the sensible, logical part of me is glad to get back to the desk and be reminded of things before I take another five days off and forget it all completely.

Here's where I would like to do a short meditation on the value and beauty of work, only it's before six a.m. and I'm too groggy for that. Instead I'll just wish everyone a happy day--especially those of you who don't have to sit at a desk today.

Why I Love My Bike

My favorite form of transportation is the bike. Yes, it has its limitations: it doesn't do snow, and rain is kind of unpleasant, too. Long distances are inconvenient. But overall, if I could ride my bike everywhere, I would.

I bought my current bike in 1993 for $500--a Specialized Rockhopper mountainbike. At the time that was a sizeable chunk of my savings, but I fell so instantly in love that I didn't regret a single one of those dollars. I rode it in snow, in ice, in rain, in the dark. I used it for actual mountain biking and also for commuting to various jobs, including one that was ten miles away from where I lived (by sheer coincidence, that job lasted only two weeks).

Sixteen years later, I've put more miles on my bike than on my first two cars combined. I've ridden well into my third trimester of pregnancy. I even rode during the months of my first pregnancy when I was both hugely pregnant and crippled and had to walk with a cane--it was the only form of locomotion that didn't hurt. I've hauled groceries, kids, biology-chemistry-physics textbooks, and small pets. I ride to school events, baseball games, and playgrounds. As late as last week I hauled Helen to her ballet class on the bike carrier she is much too big for, and even though work is thirteen miles from my house I'm still hoping to commute here by bike, at least occasionally.

I love starting the day by riding to work. I've had to defend this to my kids countless times over the past years, usually while hauling their complaining selves out the door to their own bikes. I like starting the day with taking deep breaths of the crisp clean morning air, with getting a feel for the weather and the temper of the day ahead, with seeing what's out there or catching a glimpse of a hawk or a fox. I like getting to work a little chilly or damp, pulling off all my gear, shaking out my hair, and settling in. Inclement weather is a challenge, one that I've overcome by the time I get to my desk. One of the hardest things about having kids has been that this pleasure is so often inconvenient, or involves massive struggle or argument (the kids do NOT feel like riding their bikes is a great way to start the day).

One of the challenges with my new job is that regular bike commuting really isn't an option. By the most direct yet still bike-friendly route, it's thirteen miles, which could take me as long as an hour and a half one way (I like biking, but I'm not a fast biker). Combine that with an eight-and-half-hour day, kids to pick up and feed, and a spouse with his own busy and stressful schedule, biking to work can only be a luxury that I indulge in a few times a year. I'm bound and determined to do it, though--I'll keep you posted.

Not that there's anything wrong with it, but...

has anyone ever worked at an office with a male boss and his wife where the wife was not in charge of office parties and birthdays and goodbye gifts?

It's like a semi-official expectation. It's also one of about 1 million reasons why I could never work for my husband: I lack the skills. (Luckily for his employees, and me, he possesses a rare y-sorted gift-giving gene.)

I can't say this observation makes me mad, exactly. It's not like End of Feminism. And all (two of) the wives I've known in this situation genuinely seem to enjoy the parties, decorations, being thoughtful, et cetera. But in both cases it did sometimes seem like she was enabling her husband's complete lack of interest in/ concern for his employees...or else just participating in the stereotype that the woman is the one who is caring and thoughtful, and the man is the One Who Gets Shit Done, and perpetuating the further and much more annoying cultural belief that these two things have to be separate.

Or maybe I'm just griping because I myself am so EVERLOVING POOR at the gift thing, and I'm jealous.

Friday Favorites

So I'm not going to go on here about how I inexplicably keep thinking of this job as a prison term/ David Copperfield child labor gig, but in honor of my occasional feelings of claustrophobia (you: and HOW is it you've held down a job all these years?), a Friday Favorites of the things I fantasize about doing (and which may or may not be impossible now that I am EMPLOYED):

1. Doing a two-week family road trip. This might be one of those childhood memories best left un-relived, but still, I'd like to find out instead of just letting this dream sink into oblivion.

2. Doing a writer's residency. I haven't done one since 2007, folks. I'm starting to get itchy.

3. Taking time off whenever Si's school has a holiday, which is approximately every other day. I want to take him to do fun mom-n-son outings! That I couldn't do when I didn't work because we couldn't afford it! Now that I can I don't have any tiiime! I think this one qualifies as a Middle-Class Sob Story (TM Tess).

I could go on, but those are the main things right now.

Friday Favorites

In honor of Back to Work, a Friday Favorites list about job stuff:

1. My favorite function in Photoshop: the magic eraser. I mean, come on. Even if I didn't know what it did I would love it, just for the name. And there are few things (at my work) quite so satisfying as clicking on annoying ugly spots on my figures and having them just...disappear.

2. Favorite thing about my work climate: they provide free hot chocolate. I mean, at my last work, we had to pay for coffee.

3. Favorite thing about my work location: (and this is remembering that actually I wish desperately that they would move so that I didn't have to drive for an hour every fricking day) I like being so very close to the hogback. It rises up less than a mile away, a flat wide slope of mountain mahogany and rock. I mean, there's an interstate between my work and it, so it's not like I can run over there on my lunch hour, but I can look.

4. Favorite thing about working (besides getting paid): being busy. I mean, sometimes I am too busy, and that sucks. But sometimes, much of the time, I am just the right amount of busy, and I like it. I'd hoped to replicate that during the year I had "off" by making my own concerns a job--but it just wasn't the same.

With Gusto and Fun

So, it appears that next week my life will take a turn for the busier. Instead of just moping at home during Helen's daycare days, wondering why editors aren't calling and trying to work on my novel, I will be heading into the big city and doing work at a Prominent Cultural Institution (PCI). You will notice that I did not say my life will take a turn for the flush-ier, or that we'd be able to afford to replace the leaky windows in our front room: this work is unpaid. Technically, it's for students. Undergraduates, even. However, when I was moaning to a friend about this--I'm 37 years old and taking an unpaid internship! what the hell am I thinking?--she counseled, wonderfully, that I shouldn't care about that. I should just take this for what it is, a great opportunity, and do it "with gusto and fun." That's the best advice I've had in a long time, so I'm going to do my best to live up to it.

Of course I have misgivings, which I'm going to confide to the ethersphere in an attempt to exorcise them. My biggest fear is that this will lead to nothing; or worse, some other opportunity will come along while I've committed myself to this one and I'll have to pass on it. Or at least make a choice. I kind of hate making choices, especially when one side of the choice is "money and dullness" and the other side is "fun and poverty."

Other fears:

1. This internship will lead to nothing, and will be an interesting but useless interlude.
2. The awkwardness will never wear off; I'll be the 37-year-old unpaid make-work-er for eight uncomfortable weeks. Oh, hai. What do you have for me to do toDAY?
3. The end will feel like the end of my last job before this one: I'll feel disappointed and not-chosen.
4. I won't make connections, either for myself or others.
5. I won't have any ideas; I'll just come in every day and sit obediently at my desk, and never do anything beyond what's asked of me.
6. I'll have great ideas, but they won't catch fire: I won't be able to do anything with them, or convince others to pursue them (this is one of my life patterns. A BAD one, obv.)

But! I'll get to take the light rail every day (well, three times a week)! I'll get to go into the city, with my clippy-clop heels on; I'll get to feel like a part-time member of The Club, for a little. I have some wild hopes, too. I'm afraid to share those too much, but I'll lay one out: I hope this leads to me being in a position to help the people who are helping me now, by bringing me in.