If You Have a Boat or a Plane

Just a quick post this morning before I head off to work, but I simply had to share: an email request for auction donations for Si's elementary school noted that a "great hit" from auctions past included auctioning off a weekend in your vacation home...also, "if you have a boat or a plane," those make "very popular offerings."

I'm trying to imagine owning a Cessna, and then imagining letting someone else fly it around. "Just be sure to top off the tank when you bring it in! Oh, and be sure to pull up on the landing!" or whatever it is you have to do in order to land.

Or it's equally possible that they mean auctioning off a trip in your Lear jet. There are a sizable handful of parents for whom this isn't a joke. Sigh.

Perhaps we can auction off a chance to use our camping equipment ("bent forks and crappy knifes we stole from our college cafeteria included at no extra cost!").

Friday Favorites

During this time of transition from summer break to school and from not working to working full-time, when we all wake up in the morning groaning "is it a school day aGAIN?", a Friday Favorites list showcasing transitions I like.

My five favorite transitions:

1. From night to day;

2. From week to weekend;

3. From non-talking toddler to talking toddler;

4. From dirty to clean;

5. From worrying about money all the time to not worrying about money too much at all.

But really. Transitions, they suck.

Joining the Family

Had my first day of work yesterday and it went well. I didn't get fired on my first day, for example, even though I had this sort of irrational fear that I would (not while there, of course. I wasn't getting "we're going to fire you as soon as we can" vibes or anything). I was pretty tired by the end of the day, and by tired I mean tired of sitting in a chair: one thing about those eight hour days is that it takes some serious sitting muscles. There was also the whole getting-up-at-five-am-and-meeting-thirty-people-before-lunch tired. But that's to be expected, and it's even kind of pleasant, or will be when I get along a little further and it is accompanied with a sense of having accomplished something.

The part about starting a new job that I'd forgotten, or that I have gotten more sensitive to, is the absorbing of a whole new body of information. This is something that gets harder as I get older, or is harder because I already have a lot of things I want to be doing with my day. At the start of a new job I always feel a little like I've stumbled into someone else's family reunion and suddenly I'm expected to become a permanent member of that family and also the family archivist. All while I'm still kind of scanning the horizon for my own family reunion. (The workforce: a vast park full of picnics, apparently.)

Well, I'm off to roast some hot dogs. For someone's else's family. Cheerio.

When You Get Up at Five

It's hard to feel scintillatingly intelligent, or even basically competent. Nevertheless, here I am. Me and the distinguished-looking bags beneath my eyes. Because: guess what today is! Yes, it's Tuesday. Yes, also the first day of September. Ding-ding, time's up--it's my first day of work!

My boss (boss-to-be?) did call yesterday to uh, check in and make sure I was still coming (the number of times he's asked me if I'm still interested in this job, if I'm really coming, if I'm going to be there, etc., are beginning to make me a leeetle nervous--wait, what did I sign up for, again?) I was relieved to hear from him--my second interview was almost a month ago, and I hadn't really heard from them since. It was easy to start wondering if it was all a mirage--that I would show up today and people would politely ask me what I was doing there.

Nevertheless, I am looking forward to it. Not to the early mornings or the (*ack*) drive or the rushing around that will once again be part of my life, obviously. But I'm looking forward to more than my paycheck--I'm looking forward, boringly, to routine & having coworkers again.

So! Here's to work!

Summarizing Conclusions

So, what I learned from listing my favorite runs is that my two basic requirements for good runs are views and million-dollar homes. Hmm. Apparently, who needs bike paths? Natural areas? Quiet, car free spaces? Not me!

So I should clarify: all of my favorite runs DO involve bike paths, or at least parklike medians. Also, my key criteria seems to have been whether or not a run made me want to drag myself out of bed at 5:30 a.m. I'll point out that otherwise great runs that involved ANY stretch of running along a busy road or along a dank secluded river, even if I would do them in a second and have never had ANY safety problems, didn't make the cut. It's how the run looked in my mind, you see. It's easier to actually power through a poorly lit underpass, especially when I'm right there and can suss out potential hazards, than to imagine running there. Especially if I am in my safe warm bed.

In other words: I love ALL my runs. Except for the ones I don't.

Happy Monday.

Friday Favorites: Best Short Runs, 4 miles or (usually much) less

1. Boulder, Colorado. From the 6-person condo I had a room in to the foothills and back. Best moment: crossing north Broadway at dawn, looking south and east over the whole city and the Flatirons. Best at dawn.

2. Greenwood Village, Colorado. My three-mile loop up through the million-dollar houses and down through Cattail Park. Great views of the foothills and the plains. Best at dawn.

3. Fort Collins, Colorado. From our rental on LaPorte over past the Cemetery and down Mountain Avenue, past all the cute little Old Town Victorians and uber-designed gardens. Best at dusk.

4. Near Belfast, Maine. Down the dirt road a friend lives on, out onto a gravel road to the dead end and back. Past a nineteenth-century cemetery, two-hundred-year-old farmhouses, and pine woods. Best midday.

5. Boulder, Colorado. From east Arapaho Road, south past the golf course into the open space and back through the leisurely 2-acre east Boulder suburbs. Best midday.

Yellow: Should We Hate It?

Sources Say Yes.

So, I spent all last week painting the kitchen and TV room yellow, and I hate it. Also, I'm so tired from painting in the first place that I'm not sure what the best fix is anymore. Simply repaint it? No way. The yellow will STILL BE THERE. I'm thinking torch the house and start over.

So the deal is, I thought I liked yellow. Since we moved in I've had in mind to repaint the kitchen a pale, summery yellow, something to feel bright and good-morningish as the sun streams through the house and the water heats for coffee. I've even painted a few other rooms in the house yellow--the hall bathroom and the hall. That's where the trouble started. I liked that yellow, but in certain light it seemed a little cold. Not quite enough sunshine, a little too much overcast polar sky. So, I thought, let's still go with yellow. Let's just warm it up a bit.

Unfortunately, I didn't really process the mechanics of "warming up." You warm up a color by adding red, or, since we're dealing with yellow to begin with, you add orange. Technically, it seems, you warm up yellow by adding the cheese powder from boxed mac and cheese.

So the past week I've been painting the walls of my kitchen with the fake-cheddar sauce yellow of mac and cheese.

Grok.

It's gotten to the point where I can't look at any yellow anywhere without feeling slathered in butter. The yellow of the hall and bathroom? Looks like banana taffy. Yellow houses I used to like? Yech. Even Helen's pretty yellow dresses have something unbearably margarine-y about them.