This is a test

 I need to see if the whole page layout on this blog is completely messed up or if yesterday was a one-off. 

A matter of hours

It’s January 19, 2021, well past noon, which means that we have less than 24 hours remaining in the terrible, terrible Trump Presidency. 

I worked on my book list for a little while, but I won’t get through it today. I have a lot more to do with it than I thought. That last sentence could describe any number of ongoing tasks and projects in my life. Anyway, at my current pace, next year’s list will be shorter. I’m only on my second book of the year and it’ll be several days before I finish it. I think that we all need to see Trump safely out of the White House and on his way to Mar a Lago before we can relax enough to think about books and blogging. Or at least I do. It’s less than a day but it only takes a minute to press the nuclear button, right? I don’t even know how that works, actually; and I’m better off for that lack of knowledge. Ignorance = Bliss. 

*****

So tomorrow, I’ll be back at work on the list, which I do hope to publish before the end of the month, even if “before the end of the month” means January 31, 2021 at 11:59 PM. Maybe I’ll have something to say about the Inauguration, too; or about the beginning of the new administration. Probably not, though. It’s enough that this one is ending. I don’t want to get greedy.

Distraction

Oh technology. You confuse and confound and (sometimes) amaze me. 

As threatened, I waded back into the Twittersphere, thanks to the recent vacancy. And I tweeted, or I posted a few tweets. I’m not quite sure on the verb choice, but it doesn’t matter, because I don’t think I’ll be around for long. 

A reasonably well-known actress and high-profile Twitter personality posted a comment that I objected to, though I agreed with 90 percent of the rest of her (many) tweets this weekend. So I commented, noting my objection. And surprisingly, she responded, almost immediately. She kindly acknowledged my concern, clarified her position, and added a few additional details, for context. We chatted back and forth for a minute or so, and then I put down the phone and walked away for a short while. When I returned, I found that at least ten other people had added their comments. And I wondered “who are all of these internet randos inserting themselves into this conversation?” And just as quickly, I realized that I myself was an internet rando who had inserted myself into the conversation. 

Ask not who is the Twitter troll; she is me. 

*****

Twitter was fun for a few minutes, but I’m not going to make a habit of it. After a few more minutes of acknowledging and responding to the other tweeters’ comments (all of whom agreed with the actress with whom I had disagreed), I was all tweeted out, but I felt that it was necessary to tell my vast internet audience that I wasn’t ignoring them; I was just exiting the thread so that I could go for a walk. I don’t think I’m cut out for an endeavor that makes me think I have to explain myself to total strangers. 

*****

In other technology news, I’m writing this on my brand-new Chromebook, delivered into my hands this very day. It took me all of three minutes to set this thing up, and now here I am, telling you all about it. 

You might remember that I bought a Chromebook three years ago, but I gave it to my 10th grader when schools closed and classes moved online. When my old PC died, I decided to replace it with another Chromebook. It’s a beautiful little device; nice to look at and hold and wonderful to use. Now I just have to get accustomed to Chrome OS again. I have a lot of keyboard shortcuts to memorize. And Google Drive is its own thing altogether. But I like a challenge. I like to learn new things; at least, I like to think of myself as a person who likes to learn new things. 

*****

I finished wiping the old computer and now it’s ready for recycling. Setting up the new laptop took a hot minute, but shutting down the old one took forever. Apparently it’s harder to destroy than to create. That sounds like a metaphor for something, doesn’t it? 

As a rule, I avoid New Year’s resolutions. I have plenty of character flaws, and plenty of things I can try to do better, but it’s a process, not a once-yearly to-do list (though I do very much love to-do lists). But it’s the beginning of a new year and I think that one thing I should resolve is to try not to be the kind of person who is made so easily happy by new things. This new Chromebook makes me pretty happy. It’s clean and pretty and the backlit keyboard responds so well to my tapping fingers. It’s nice to look at and it’s fun to watch the words appear on the screen as I type. 

There’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose. But I wish I was less attached to the things of the world. I’m watching impeachment coverage and that’s only one of the ten million things that are more important than my new Chromebook.  

*****

So I’m too materialistic. But it’s not only material things that make me happy. I’m watching the fading winter light right now at 5:15 PM. Not only is it pretty, but it’s still light at 5:15. And the days will keep getting longer; at least until June, and that’s ages away. So that’s a happy thing. 

And here’s another thing. Capitals hockey begins tonight! No, I can’t go in person, but I do get to wear my new reverse retro screaming eagle jersey while I watch on TV. OK, so the jersey is a thing, but that’s not what I’m most happy about. And then there’s Donald Trump. He’s desperate to tweet, and he can’t, and that makes me happy. Vindictively happy, yes; but happy is happy and I’ll take it. 

*****

How did I end up here, anyway? Didn’t I start with technology? I did. At least I maintained some thematic consistency with the Twitter references. Adult ADD is a constant struggle for me, especially now when I can’t look away from the news for more than five minutes. I guess we’re all in that together now. Everyone in the United States has adult ADD this week. New stuff can’t change the current state of affairs. Neither can hockey. Not even a winter sunset can quiet the noise and chaos. But I welcome the break. I welcome the distraction from the distraction. 

50,000 and change

Did you miss me? I took a whole month off from blogging to write a novel. And I didn't actually write a a whole novel, but I wrote 50,000 words, divided into chapters, with characters and dialogue and scenes. Those 50,000 words might eventually whip themselves into shape and turn themselves into a novel. I'm going to leave them alone for a while, and see what happens. But you don't have to finish a novel to win NaNoWriMo; you just have to write 50,000 words, and I wrote 50,000 words. 

I also wrote this almost-daily NaNoWriMo diary. Soon I'll writing once again about absolutely nothing in particular. It's nice to be back. 

November 1: Time to get started. I had an idea for another novel, but that’s for next year. This year, it’s this book or bust. 

November 2: 3,800 words on day 1. I was hoping for 5,000 but almost 4,000 will do. That’s a lot of words in one day. 

November 3: I passed the 5,000-word mark, so I’m 10 percent there. Oh, and there was an election. 

November 4: You know, if I could write a novel made up of nothing but snappy dialogue, I’d be done in a week. Meanwhile, we have no idea who’s going to be President on January 20. 

November 5: Why can’t I write a novel made up of nothing but snappy dialogue? Who’s going to stop me? 

November 7: I forgot to write anything for yesterday, though I did get about 1,000 words in. And in unrelated news, we have a President-elect. 

November 8: I think I’d get more done if I stopped congratulating myself for my hilariously clever chapter titles. That’s about twenty words out of 50,000. Do the math, as they say. 

November 9: It’s Monday night. I should be writing and instead, I’m re-watching Chapelle’s monologue. 

November 10: 50,000 words in a month does not necessarily equate to a novel in a month. As long as I have the former then I can worry later about the latter. That was fun, wasn’t it? See what I did there? 

November 11: A Federal holiday. Trying to pile up the words to build a cushion. 

November 12: Yes, readers do need to know how a character makes meatballs. So I’m gonna tell ‘em. 

November 13: That meatball part was my favorite thing to write. Maybe someone will make some cookies or caulk a bathtub, and I’ll describe that, too. 1,000 words is 1,000 words. 

November 14: It’s Saturday and I want to try to get 5,000 words in. I have about 250 so far. So I only have to do that 19 more times. 

November 15: Season 4 of "The Crown" might interfere with my plans to get this thing past the halfway mark today. 

November 16: No it didn’t! I’m past 25,000 words now. The second half begins. 

November 17: I was very tempted to quit today, but then I snapped out of it and now I’m cooking with Crisco. 

November 18: You know what "cooking with Crisco" means, don’t you? That’s figurative language. Because I’m a novelist. 

November 19: Can I attend a virtual community association meeting, give a speech, and write a novel all at the same time? Only one way to find out. 

November 20: I kind of like writing fiction, but I can’t wait for this month to be over. 

November 21: I’d rather read than write. I can read 50,000 words in a day, easy. But if I’m going to get to 50,000 words written by November 30, then I have to put the book down and get going. 

November 22: I had an idea that I don’t particularly love, but it’s an idea and I’m going to write through it because 50,000 words is all I care about right now. I’ll sort out the details later. 

November 23: 14,500 or so to go. I will need to ramp up production if I want to get to 50,000 by next week. 

November 24: Sometimes you have to write on your phone, while you’re sitting in your parked car. 1,000 words. 

November 25: It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and I feel a little sick, so of course I’m afraid I have the ‘rona. But I can still write. 

November 26: Turkey, wine, a nap, and almost 2,000 words. 

November 27: Today was not as productive a day as I had hoped. Day-after-Thanksgiving torpor is not compatible with productivity. 

November 28: 46,000 words seems like a lot but I have only three days, (well, two and two-thirds) to write 4,000 more, and I don’t know if I have that many left in me. 

November 29: 50,024. I made it with one day to spare. 

November 30: And now I’m not going to look at this thing for at least a month. Maybe longer. See you next year. 

In earnest

Monday, October 19. It’s Monday, late afternoon, and I’m finished work for the day; or rather, I’m all but finished. I’m waiting for the answer to a question. That answer might or might not come today, but there’s no point in wasting time, so I’ll kill this bird and then pick up the same stone again if I need to kill another one. 

Forgive the poor choice of figurative language. I’m not in the habit of killing birds, with stones or anything else. I am in the habit of doing two (or more) things at one time, an approach that yields mixed results. Multi-tasking isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. 

Anyway, it was a fine day, except that I couldn’t do several of the tasks on my to-do list because I could not read my own appalling handwriting, which grows worse by the day. It’s what I call a problem, because it is a problem. Though I swore that I would never sit for another exam ever again, I’m studying for a certification exam, taking copious notes, and I don’t know how much use these notes will be when it comes time to review them. But the act of writing things down helps me to remember. Except, apparently, when it comes to my to-do list. I still can’t read three of the items that I wrote down on Friday, and I don’t remember what they might be. 

*****

Tuesday, October 20 (two weeks away from the biggest shit-show of an election in American history). It’s Tuesday now. I’m in the middle of at least half a dozen drafts, and I’ll finish them soon. But in addition to writing, I’m also reading P.D. James’ Time to Be in Earnest, a one-year diary of her life from 1997 to 1998, and this inspired me to return for a bit to the daily diary form of writing. Of course, a day in P.D. James’ life generally consisted of having lunch with former Prime Ministers, or delivering an endowed lecture, or meeting with her publisher to plan an international book tour; and mine right now consists of sitting around the house in sweatpants editing IT service catalog pages and creating PowerPoint presentations and wondering what to cook for dinner; but each life has its place, you know?

Oddly enough, I have never read any other of P.D. James’ books. I don’t know what attracted me to this one, but it’s very good. P.D. James happened to have been born at the right time (1920) and the right place (England) with the right talents and gifts to become the perfect first-hand witness to history and social change. The book is supposed to be a daily diary of just that one year, but she also writes quite a bit about her entire life; enough that this is almost an autobiography or memoir. Because the book covers a year that overlaps 1997 and 1998, James records her immediate reaction to the death and funeral of Princess Diana. I’ve watched “The Queen” about half a dozen times, and it’s very interesting to read an Englishwoman’s real-time impressions of the events depicted in the movie. I’m going to watch “The Queen” at least one more time; and I’m also going to read more P.D. James. It turns out that she also wrote The Children of Men, the movie version of which I have also seen about half a dozen times. 

Sweatpants and PowerPoint and half-finished essays and re-watching old-ish movies--I can’t imagine why Prime Ministers, former or present, aren’t lining up to get me on their luncheon calendars. But enough about lunch. I still need to figure out dinner. 

*****

Wednesday, October 21. A neighborhood friend has been posting daily updates on Instagram, with captions that always begin “Social Distancing: Day (number).” He passed Day 200 a few days ago. I didn’t look at a calendar to count and see if he started with March 14 as Day 1, as I would have. It’s enough to know that 200 days is too many days. 

Since March, we’ve had little pockets of normal life here and there, for which I’m grateful. But the abnormal has far outweighed the normal. I’m losing my social skills, and they weren't that great to begin with. I never know what to wear. I spend several minutes every morning puzzling out this question, accounting for weather and video calls and if I’m likely to leave the house and for what reason. And then I put on leggings and a sweater, or shorts and a t-shirt, and that’s what I wear for the rest of the day. 

I keep thinking that I want life to return to normal; that I want to be out in the world, busy from morning to night, and that I want to wear real clothes every day, and to take a bit more care with my appearance. But do I? Do I really? Every day, all 200-plus since March, seems to rob me of a tiny bit more of my energy and initiative. I walk every day, weather permitting; and I still have work. I still keep the house clean. I write every day, and I keep in touch with people. But if I’m honest, and I’m always honest, then I must admit that of all the things that call my name, my family room couch has the loudest and most compelling voice. If I did only what I wanted to do today, then I’d have spent the entire day on that couch, finishing P.D. James and re-watching “Miranda” and “Mary Tyler Moore” on Hulu. And sleeping, because I can’t sleep at night. It’s Day 200-whatever. 

*****

Thursday, October 22. Today is a better day. After a thick morning fog that hung on until nearly 10, the sun came out, and everything looked much cleaner and brighter than it did amid yesterday’s gloom. And yesterday got even worse after I wrote that entry, with pestilence on top of the plague; pestilence in the form of SNAKES. THREE OF THEM. 

I live in Maryland, in the Washington DC suburbs, not in Florida or Australia or the fucking Mekong delta and so I do not expect to have to dodge serpents when I take my daily walk. Yes, they were garter snakes (and one of them was definitely dead) but THREE snakes in one little 2.5 mile suburban stroll is at least two more than I would expect to see and absolutely three more than I ever want to see, because I never want to see any snakes, not even little ones, not even deceased ones. 

You and me both, Samuel L. Jackson. You and me both. 

Today is the the day of the last of the three presidential debates; and I can’t wait to not watch it. It’s also ten days until the start of NaNoWriMo, and I’m going to try that again this year, because what could go wrong. I have a character and (kind of) a plot and everything. It’s very tempting to start writing now, but other than writing down a few ideas (because I don’t want to forget), I am going to follow the rules. I’m going to begin writing on November 1 and I’m going to stop on November 30; and hopefully, I will end up with a 50,000-word novel. That’s 1667 words a day. I can write 1667 words a day on my head. I can’t vouch for the quality or coherence of the words, but I can write them; and if I’m following the rules (and I’m always following the rules) then that’s all I have to do. The editing comes later. P.D. James died in 2014, so she probably knew about NaNoWriMo. I don’t know what she might have thought about it. I suspect she would have disapproved, but I could very well be wrong. And she's not the boss of me anyway. 

*****

Friday, October 23. I am not a TGIF person, not as a rule. It’s not that I don’t love weekends and time off, because I do. But I also like work; and counting the days until Friday has always seemed tantamount to wishing away days of one’s life (one P.D. James book, and I’m already throwing around the impersonal pronoun like it’s dolla dolla bills in a hip-hop video), and that seems unwise. 

But this week? I think I hit the wall with the COVID-enforced WFH this week, and Friday couldn’t come a day too soon. Two days away from my computer and I’m sure that I’ll return to next week’s onslaught of virtual meetings and teleconferences with my customary good cheer, but I spent today teetering on the edge, and one more call would have pushed me right the hell over. 

I was going to continue writing this post for two more days, but I haven’t published anything since October 8 and I don’t want you all to forget about me, so I’m going to wrap up this little dear diary week today. I have a few more pages of P.D. James left; a few more days of 1998, when Microsoft Teams didn’t exist and Donald Trump was just a loud-mouthed real estate developer. A person should live in the present rather than dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, but it’s hard sometimes, I tell you. It’s hard sometimes. 

Proliferation

Do you know what I just did? I just bought another handbag. This might seem like a thing that is not even worthy of mention; and in and of itself, it is not. But if you’re not doing anything and you have all the time in the world, feel free to search this blog for the words “handbag,” “tote bag,” “purse,” “pocketbook,” or “reticule.” 

Not the last one, of course, because it’s not 1893. It’s 2020, and I have far too many handbags, as your careful search of these keywords will have made manifestly and abundantly clear. Not only did I buy another handbag, but I bought a whole bunch of other random stuff that I don’t need. And even though I know that I don’t need these things (in fact, I won’t even WANT some of them when they finally arrive), I just keep yielding to the impulse to add something to my electronic cart and then to finally push the “place order” button. There’s always a momentary thrill just as you push that button, isn’t there? And then of course, there’s the fun of anticipation, the frisson of excitement as the mail truck or the UPS truck rumble down your street, slowing until they stop right in front of your house. Nothing else sounds like a delivery truck arriving at your front door. 

*****

Do you have any particular rage triggers? I’m not an angry outburst kind of person, liberal use of the f-word notwithstanding. But I do have a few things that provoke unreasonable, blinding, furious rage. A wrong turn, especially at night, is one of those things. Last night, I turned the wrong way on a now-unfamiliar road (I say “now-unfamiliar” because it’s a road that I used to drive on nearly every day; but I no longer live in that neighborhood and the street and the neighborhood look very different now because of twenty years of construction and development) and the result was a 15-minute detour in the dark and a near collision (entirely my fault) with a person who was trying to make a perfectly legal left turn as I tried to blithely sail straight through an intersection from the other left-turn-only lane. I was furious. Not my finest moment. 

And drawers! How I hate it when a drawer gets stuck closed or (much worse, because it looks sloppy) stuck open. I have to walk away from a jammed drawer. Thank goodness I’ve never had a hammer nearby when a drawer was stuck because I’d turn the whole cabinet or desk or chest into kindling. 

The worst thing about a drawer that’s stuck is that I almost always know that it’s going to happen when I put in that one extra thing that’s just too much for the drawer, but I do it anyway because I can’t stand to have things laying around uncontained and because I can’t let the drawer win. Me and a dresser drawer are like Donald Trump and the coronavirus. I’m not going to let it dominate me. I’m just going to call in a Navy helicopter and a team of Secret Service agents and Army doctors and then stand back and let them show that drawer who’s boss. 

*****

So I followed my own instructions, and I did a search of this blog using the recommended terms. It turns out that I have written about having too many handbags more times than other people actually have handbags. Does that make sense? I’m talking about sheer numbers, a subject about which I am not qualified to write, but just try to stop me. 

I like to think of myself as a person who is not a collector, but that’s self-delusion of the highest order, because I have more than enough handbags to form a collection; not to mention hundreds of books, dozens of t-shirts, a shitpile of notebooks, and Bic four-color pens distributed everywhere I might need them to take a four-color note. It’s not reasonable. And it occurs to me, with my razor-sharp intellect and unparalleled deductive reasoning skills, that there might be a connection between a proliferation of stuff such as I describe here, and drawers that won’t close (or open). 

The moratorium begins now. No more handbags. No more non-electronic books. No more four-color pens, except to replace one when the ink runs dry. No promises on the t-shirts. I do love t-shirts; and in my defense, I accumulate them, but I seldom actually buy them. 

*****

And now it also occurs to me, with my steel-trap mind, that t-shirts are the only thing on this list that I actually store in drawers, so a handbag and book and pen moratorium won’t solve my drawer-rage problem AT ALL. As for bad night driving? That’s only going to get worse, I’m afraid. It’s all downhill from here. 

Ants marching in circles

It’s Sunday morning, and we’re back from a week away. We’re watching the Capitals, who seem determined to exit the playoffs at the hands of the Islanders. I care a lot less about hockey than I usually do, because I care a lot less about a lot of things than I usually do. Damn ‘rona. 

I kept a daily diary during our vacation, and I just cleaned it up and published it on the blog. I was just worried enough about the NJ “travel advisory,” whatever that means, that I didn’t want to post anything online until we were safely over the Delaware Memorial Bridge and heading back toward Maryland. Who knows? Maybe they were monitoring blogs and social media as a way to identify non-quarantining invaders from Maryland and Virginia and half of the rest of the country. But the travel advisory turned out to be a non-event. I held my breath for a bit as we approached the bridge, wondering if we’d see flashing electronic warnings to out-of-state visitors to quarantine or else. Not only were there no signs or reminders on the road, there were no signs or reminders anywhere. It was nothing. We lived our lives on vacation as if the NJ state government didn’t exist. 

*****

Now it’s Monday, and was that thunder? Yes, it was; and my timing is impeccable. I just got home from the pool. I’m rearranging my days a little bit, shaking up the routine so that I don’t sink back into the corona-funk that I just managed to pull myself out of last week. Normally I write first and swim later. Today, I decided to reverse that order and if I hadn’t, I’d be sidelined because of a thunderstorm. I swam my laps and now I’m sitting on the couch writing about it. Yes, I know that this is the same damn thing that I do every day, but I REVERSED THE ORDER. Don’t you get it? It makes all the difference, I’m telling you. 

The thunderstorm that’s happening right now is an August, pre-fall thunderstorm, not an apocalyptic July heat purge. It was pretty sunny for most of the day, but cooler than normal. The days are getting a little shorter. The crape myrtle is in full bloom, and the pool water is chilly. Everyone is talking about school, such as school will be in a few weeks. Everything is uncertain. Everything is up in the air. Even the thunderstorms can’t make up their minds. I’d usually describe a thunderstorm as “raging” or some other hyperbolic adjective; but this one isn’t even shouting. It’s rumbling gently, explaining itself more than anything else. It’s not mad. It’s just there.

*****

Now it's Tuesday afternoon and I'm sitting poolside, waiting for my nephew to finish swimming. I finished my laps and got out because it's cold in there today, but 7-year-olds don't get out of the pool until someone makes them. The whistle will blow in 20 minutes, ending this swim session, so I'll let him stay in the water until then. 

We don't have chairs at the pool this year. Thanks 'rona. So I'm wrapped in a towel, sitting on the warm pavement of the deck, watching a red ant run around in circles. I don't know why he's doing this. I don't have a particular interest in entomology in general nor the habits of ants in particular, but this does seem like out of the ordinary behavior, given ants' reputation for industry and purposefulness. It's a word. Summer 2020 is getting to everyone, even the ants. 

Or maybe the ant is trying to disrupt the routine a little bit. Maybe it needs a break from the daily grind. Maybe it's tired of working from home and distancing from the other ants. They're social creatures, I know that much. 

I spent just a week away from the constant crush of current events, and I’m just like that thunderstorm. I’m here, and I don’t want you to forget about me, but I don’t have to shout. I’m just like that ant. I’m going to shake things up here and there; defy expectations. I like this newly nonchalant, uncharacteristically insouciant attitude. It won’t last, but I’ll enjoy it for now.

What, me worry?

Sunday morning, you sure look fine. I wish you were a little warmer and I wish I had slept last night and I wish I felt like doing anything other than sitting on the couch in sweatpants feeling sorry for myself. But it’s bright and sunny and it looks pretty, and that’s something.

I was writing something else, and I couldn’t figure out how to finish it and I also couldn’t find a single reason to care about it so I decided to just write about nothing. I’m depressed. Whatever.

You know what I should be doing? Well, I can think of a lot of things, but here’s one in particular. For some reason, I volunteered to run a bake sale on Maryland primary day, and I need to start getting that organized. I promise you that I won’t be actually baking anything for this bake sale (well, maybe one batch of cookies); but I guess I have to do something to get other people to bake or buy whatever we’re going to sell. Sign-Up Genius. Sigh. My children are almost grown and there’s so much about their childhood and teenage years that I will miss. Sign-Up Genius, I assure you, is not one of those things.

*****

It's Monday afternoon now. I snapped out of it right after I finished writing this whiny mess, made Sign-Up Genius my bitch, and crossed that particular chore off my long long list. Right now, I'm sitting in the parking lot at Rockville High School, waiting for my son to finish his first high school baseball practice. I get more work done in this parking lot than anywhere else. If only I could do dinner prep in the car. Better yet, if only someone else could cook for me. #GOALS

Because it's the first day of baseball practice, it's also the first day of spring sports season. It's almost 5 pm, but the parking lot is almost as busy as it would be at normal dismissal time. The annual spring onslaught commences and I'm not even worried; not yet, and not much.

What I am worried about is a really weird problem with my blog publishing settings; and by “weird problem,” I mean me; i.e., user error. I moved the blog in late 2018 because of some technical problem that I don’t remember well enough to describe. Now I find that the old site is getting tons of hits. I don’t know why and I don’t know how to fix it. So maybe you’ll read this or maybe you’ll never see it. Maybe no one ever will.

But am I panicking? No, uncharacteristically, I am not. I’m trying this new thing where I just calmly figure out what I need to do and how to do it and then just do it and get on with my life. Call it a resolution. I’ll let you know how that all works out.

Rhetoric

It's 10:15 on Saturday night and I worked all day today. And I mean all day. ALLL day.

It's Saturday, for crying out loud, but it was actually a good day for me to work. I've been out of sorts, and having to work gave me a good excuse to not go out and enjoy the beautiful May weather. But still, it's Saturday, and now I'm completely exhausted, and my eyes are shot for the day. So I'm going to go and take out my contact lenses, and make some tea, and watch TV for a little while, and go to bed. I'm watching "Broadchurch" on Netflix. I'm obsessed with Olivia Colman's character.

*****
Now it's Sunday. I'm working again and I'm a little salty, wondering just who writes "work to ensure that risks are identified and mitigated," rather than "identify and mitigate risks." And that's not the worst of it. Oh, not even close.

*****

It's Wednesday evening and I'm sitting outside watching my son's baseball game, and freezing. It's May. Did I mention that? Why am I freezing in the middle of May?

I didn't wear my beloved sweater tonight because I don't want to wear it out. So the sweater is warm and comfortable at home while I sit shivering in an entirely inadequate nylon pullover. Poor planning on my part. Poor decision making.

I used to say that Maryland's climate was changing but now I think that it has already changed. This is probably the fourth consecutive year that we've had chilly gray March-like conditions in May, almost right up to Memorial Day weekend, when summer miraculously returns. I suppose I can live with the once-unseasonable chill, as long as we get the miracle. But I still wish that I had worn my sweater.

*****
It's Thursday now. I took a rare weekday day off and spent it shopping, another rare event. And strangely enough, it was lovely. And successful, too. I bought some things.

I'm sitting in church as I write this. My younger son's Confirmation is in 30 minutes or so, so we're just waiting for the procession to begin. I suppose I should be praying.

In fact, maybe I should pray for my few remaining brain cells. When my sons were getting dressed, I asked my older son if it was strictly necessary to drop his shorts and t-shirt on the floor or if it might have been possible for him to drop them in the laundry hamper five feet away. "That's a hypothetical question," I said. "Don't answer it." 

Even as I said this, I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't remember the right word. And I always remember the right words. Remembering the right words is all I know how to do. Fast typing, compulsive housecleaning, and words. Take away any one of the three and I'm all but unemployable. 

Rhetorical question. That's what it was. A rhetorical question, not a hypothetical question. And there is always an upside because my son has grown in wisdom enough that he knew better than to correct me. 

*****

It's Friday night now, 9:30 PM. Today I wrote a really good nomination for an award that my company would like to win, so I think that my mental acuity has recovered a bit from yesterday's aphasia episode. Thanks, Holy Spirit. I'll stop blogging in church now. It's the least I can do.

The End of the Year

Thursday night: I’m at my sister’s house right now and cannot remember the WiFi password. She’s asleep, so I won’t bother her. Thank goodness for offline Google Docs. I can still write even when I can’t get online. Because wouldn’t it be the greatest of tragedies if  you couldn't read this bilge? Too much to contemplate, I know--too great a potential literary loss.

Meanwhile, just about a year to the day after I wrote this, I found myself at the Gateway Pharmacy, once again singing along to Chicago ("Searching So Long") and contemplating the purchase of several different types of fancy soaps. I think I go there just for the music. And the soap, of course. I bought several, and I’m looking forward to a very clean January.

It's hard to believe that the holidays are drawing to a close. Every year, right around December 14, I panic at the rapid and inexorable approach of Christmas, just 10 or 11 days away, with so much of my shopping and baking and decorating yet to be done. And then it’s December 27, and mid-December seems ages ago; nowhere near Christmas. It’s still holidayish, especially here in the Philadelphia suburbs, where holiday nostalgia is a way of life. But the magic is wearing off. The post-Christmas sales already look ragged and picked-over and children are a little frantic, desperately wringing every drop of fun out of their waning Christmas vacation.

*****

Friday: We finally made some decisions on the Ireland trip; most importantly, what place other than Dublin to visit. Our original proposed itinerary had us in five different places in six days, and since I can barely manage to force myself out of the house most days, I suggested that we limit it a bit and try to minimize the driving and checking in and out of hotels and spend more time just being wherever we are. So we have a compromise.

The place other than Dublin is Kerry, and now there’s an additional layer of confusion because it appears that Kerry and Killarney might be the same place but I’m not 100% certain and I don’t want to be the person who asks. Later this weekend, I'll have an in-depth chat with Google and settle the matter. Meanwhile, I’m up to my eyeballs in picturesque Irish names and I’m feeling like I just can’t. I steered us away from a trip to Bunratty Castle because I object to the name Bunratty. That name conjures crowds of Boston and New York and Philadelphia tourists, festooned with claddagh jewelry and sentimental about their Irish roots. Not to mention the two rodents in one name. No thank you. I'm sure we will find another Irish castle.  They have a lot of them in Ireland.

Saturday: We're back home now. Our house still feels very festive and Christmas-y, and we still have way too many snacks and treats. Just a few minutes ago, I was looking for another snack. I found a half-empty bag of tortilla chips from last weekend, when we had friends over to watch the sad sad Redskins game. The bag has a clear window in the front, and the words "Great at Parties," with an arrow pointing toward the window.

I thought about that little arrow. Was it meant to prove that there are, in fact, chips in the bag? Or that these particular chips have a special quality that makes them better for parties than other chips? Maybe the consumer is meant to watch these chips in action, on their best party behavior, vying for attention. "Invite me to your party," a chip will exclaim, "and I won't ask to take over the music selection!" A second chip will chime in. "Invite me to your party! I won't say ONE WORD about Trump." Then a third. "Invite me to your party! I won't double dip. I won't even single dip. I'm a chip. I stay away from dip altogether."

I don't make New Year's resolutions, but as I listened to the imaginary chip chatter, I realized that I'd better at least resolve not to eat everything that doesn't move, as I've been doing for the past few days.I put the chips away, and got some carrots instead. Carrots are quiet. They keep to themselves.

Sunday: I suppose I do make resolutions. I resolved to stop eating junk; and then I also resolved to stop spending so much money.  Five minutes later, I spent $150 at Ikea's post-Christmas sale. I went there for a lamp.

I just finished a book that I liked much better than I expected to. My Paris Dream, by fashion writer and editor Kate Betts, is kind of a memoir of Paris in the late 80s and early 90s, but it's more the story of Kate Betts' life and career, told through fashion. My Paris Dream is very different from The Long-Winded Lady, another memoir of a city. Kate Betts takes a broad view of Paris. She doesn't describe much, though the passing details that she does share are vivid and memorable. Her Paris is alive with characters and personalities, and her life there was so fast-paced and achievement-driven that she didn't have time for close observation of physical detail.

Though the books are quite different, My Paris Dream reminded me of  The Long-Winded Lady. Unlike the Paris that Kate Betts wrote about, Maeve Brennan's New York seems a very lonely place, populated only by strangers whom Brennan observed from a distance. But Brennan was very intimately acquainted with her tiny corner of the city, and makes the reader share her feeling of loss every time a building comes down or a restaurant closes or a quiet residential street is taken over by office buildings. Both My Paris Dream and The Long-Winded Lady were written by women who crossed an ocean to find the city that would shape their lives.

After Paris, I was at loose ends, deciding what to read next. I'm now three stories into Graham Greene's 21 Stories, and I'm completely absorbed. Our Man in Havana is the only other Graham Greene I've ever read, and the stories aren't quite as good as that, but they're very good.

It's the last day of the year, so this will be my last book for 2018, and my last blog post, too. This post isn't really finished yet, but I don't want to start a post in one year and finish it in another. Happy New Year.

Cahier d'affaires

When I was in Montreal this past summer (oh, summer--how I miss you), I bought a French-language day planner for 2019. Now I'm not so sure about it. It's fine that it's in French; I know the days of the week and the months of the year. It's the format, and the tiny font. I can't see it. I don't want to talk about my eyesight right now. But it's not so good.

I started shopping for a different planner, but there are way too many to choose from. So many formats. So many "dashboards" (a candidate, along with "metrics," for most overused business word ever). I'm not sure how a paper calendar page, no matter how complex its layout, can be called a "dashboard," but that's a question for another day. Meanwhile, I'll probably just stick with the planner that I bought. C'est bien.

There's a lot going on on this page, isn't there?
And it's all in French, and too small to read. 

Anyway, French or English, a planner is necessary because I have a lot of stuff to keep track of. I'm busy morning to night, and I don't want to stop. I get anxious when I stop moving. So I keep moving.

*****

The early 50s are an interesting age to be. I have friends who are just a few years older, and they're winding down. They're not quite ready to retire, but they're planning for it, and not just in a vague, pie-in-the-sky, "someday when I retire" way. They're making concrete arrangements, and picking the actual dates when they'll just stop working.

Sometimes when I'm tired, I think that it would be nice to just retreat from the world; and I wish, just for a moment, that I was also winding down. Then I think about the implications of not having enough to do, and not being needed every day, and the whole idea of leisure loses its charm. I see the TV commercials with the soon-to-retire couples (the woman always appears to be a decade younger than her husband) meeting with their financial adviser and planning for 30 or so years of travel and gardening and boating and beach-sitting and all of the other things that people are supposed to want to do during retirement, and I just can't imagine myself embarking on a life of full-time rest.

*****


via GIPHY

Well, maybe.

*****

When Social Security and the idea of retirement as a lifestyle were invented average life expectancy was pretty low compared to now. The idea of Social Security was that if you survived past 65, then you probably wouldn't be strong enough to keep working, and there should be some sort of safety net that would allow you to spend your last few years in relative comfort and security. And I'm all for this. I'm human, so I like comfort and security. I also like travel and beach-sitting as much as the next person,. But I don't think that we're meant to spend so much time idle. People live into their 80s now, but they still retire in their 60s. Beyond the obvious strain that 20-plus years of retirement puts on a system that was designed to support two to five years at most, there's the larger question of what we as human beings were created for. As much as any person might enjoy decades of carefree downtime, it's probably not what we're meant to do.

*****

I like working. I like having something to do every day that's important and meaningful. I like making money. I like making friends with the people I work with, and having people to commiserate with when things go badly, and to celebrate with when things go well. I like taking care of my family. I don't want to stop doing those things now or any time soon.

Plus, I have a kid starting college next year.

*****

This started with something about a planner, didn't it? I don't know how it turned into a manifesto for delayed retirement and productive old age. I almost included a side trip into the (real, I promise you) world of food nostalgia. That's a whole post in itself. Something to look forward to, n'est-ce pas?

Highlights

I just finished Wallflower at the Orgy, and it turns out that Nora Ephron is just as honest about herself as Joan Didion. Maybe even more so. In an essay titled "Makeover," she writes about the women's magazine makeover craze of the 70s and 80s, and her personal experience with plastic surgery and high-fashion hair and makeup, and her disappointment with the results on herself. As a woman who learned early how to be funny because I wasn't going to get attention any other way, I completely understand her reaction to a makeup artist's claim that he can make any woman interesting if not beautiful:

"But I am interesting. It's beautiful I want to be."

Yeah, Nora. I know.

*****

Nora Ephron knew about interesting at the macro and micro levels. She writes about the famous and influential people of the time--Helen Gurley Brown, Bill Blass, James Beard and Craig Claiborne, Jacqueline Susann--and in a sentence or two you understand something essential to their personalities; and then in just another sentence or two, you see how they turned their particular preoccupations into hugely influential cultural trends. For better or for worse (it's hard for me to think of Helen Gurley Brown's influence as anything but disastrous, though I believe that she sincerely thought that she was helping young women), Ephron's subjects shaped the popular culture in which I came of age.

This has always been an interesting topic to me. With unusual prescience that allows them to see a shift in tastes or beliefs just before it materializes, some people just know what will be in or out a few minutes before the rest of us catch on. Or by sheer force of personality, they make a trend happen, instead of just predicting it. I'm a quiet person most of the time (what Helen Gurley Brown would have called a "mouseburger") and I also tend not to notice things until they're utterly impossible to miss. A stylish person can explain to me why a particular look is good or bad, and I'll understand; but even if I had the ability to envision and create a new fashion or a new literary trend or a new direction in American cuisine, I don't think that people would follow my lead. And that's OK. Cultural icon status is too much responsibility for one person to bear.

*****

Now it's Veterans' Day; another unearned gift of a day off . At 4:38 PM, it's almost dark. It's cold and heavily overcast, so I can't see the sun setting; just the light gray solidly cloudy sky with an etching of dark gray almost-bare trees. The weekend is pretty much over, but that's OK, too. I squeezed as much out of the three days as I could, and now it's time to work again.

*****
Wednesday night. I'm watching hockey; the Washington Capitals (of course) vs. fucking Winnipeg. An uneventful game thus far. Not so the weather. It's November 14 and we're already bracing for the dreaded, God-forsaken, bane-of-the-Northeast's-existence "wintry mix," my least-favorite two-word combination other than "password reset." It's going to be a long winter. Snow in November is neither interesting nor beautiful.

*****
The Capitals lost. They're very inconsistent this year. It's Thursday now. Icy pavements and sleet tapping on the windows and temperatures hovering just below freezing. I'm not ready for this dead-of-winter nonsense in the middle of November. The January inertia is descending and it's not even Thanksgiving.

On the other hand, the weather forced cancellation of an evening meeting that I hadn't been looking forward to, and now I'm finished everything I needed to do today at the delightfully early hour of 8:30 PM. Even winter has its consolations. I'm awash in free time, so I'll find something new to read. If I don't have anything coherent to say next week (because why should next week be different from any other), then at least I'll have book reviews, weather reports, and sports highlights. You've been warned

Downtime

Monday: Christopher Columbus was a terrible person, and Columbus Day is a stupid, stupid holiday. But after years of 1099 contracting, I am grateful for any paid day off. I didn't do any work today. This does not count. Nor does the laundry.

Some of my friends have been urging me and other friends to do less. Reject chronic busy-ness, reject overwork and overscheduling, and just be. "You're a human being, not a human doing," they say. "You're a person, not a productivity machine." "You're allowed to exist without having anything to show for it."  All true, I suppose, but that's not how I live my life. It's not how I roll. Like Toad, I'm a veritable slave to my to-do lists; and when I'm not doing something, I worry that I should be.

But I didn't do any work today. I went shopping and bought some new things. I went for a walk and waved to Running Lady. I took a nap while my kids watched "The Office" on Netflix. I did some housework. I read a book. It was delightful.

Tuesday: The best thing about an officially sanctioned weekday off is that no one else worked, either; so you're not behind. Everything was just as I left it on Friday. If not for the password reset debacle, it would have been a good day.

But there was a password reset debacle, and I have only myself to blame for it. Last week, I had to reset my password for the timecard system. Yes, that timecard system. I was sad that I had to reset the password, because first of all I hate resetting a password like I hate rodents and invasive medical procedures. And because my old password was awesome, comprising a sharply worded insult to the company that invented the timecard system and the required capital letter, number, and special character. It made me laugh every time I logged in, and that's worth something.

But I had to change it. And I decided to outdo myself and make an even funnier password. And so I did. I created a funny funny password, and I confirmed the funny password, and I completed the captcha, chortling with glee the whole time. What could have gone wrong? What could I have possibly have forgotten?

Yes, the super-creative password is the Internet version of hiding something so well that you'll never ever find it. I played chicken with the log-in screen, refusing to click on the stupid stupid "forgot your password?" link, knowing all the time that it would lock me out after too many unsuccessful attempts. And I made too many unsuccessful attempts, and it locked me out. And that was the end of that.

So after the system administrator bailed me out of Internet jail, I created a new password. And I wrote it down.

Which is good. Because it's hilarious.

*****

Thursday: I didn't actually skip a day here; I just wrote something that is becoming a little too long to be just a daily journal entry, so I'll expand on it a bit and post it next week. I'm sure you're all agog waiting to read it.  

Several minutes of your life that you can never reclaim

Wednesday: Yesterday, I took my normal lunchtime walk through Twinbrook, and I fell down, hard. I really have no idea why. It wasn't wet or icy, and I didn't trip on anything, or step into any holes. I fell off my shoes. That's the best way I can describe what happened. One minute I was up, and the next minute I was down.

I don't generally wear high heels at all. Whenever the subject of shoes comes up, I always joke that I have to be able to run for my life in my shoes. Everyone laughs at that joke. Only I'm kind of serious. But I was wearing a kind of chunky-heeled sandal, and I guess I stepped the wrong way. I skinned my left knee pretty badly, and scraped my right hand, with which I partially broke my fall. I'm pretty sore today, but it could have been so much worse.

Like most adults who fall for no apparent reason, I immediately looked around to make sure that no one saw me fall. I'd just walked past several other people who were walking, and had passed a house where two people were sitting on the front porch. When no one ran to my aid, I couldn't decide if I should be relieved that no one had witnessed my embarrassing failure to remain upright, or outraged that witnesses who had likely seen me fall to my knees didn't rush immediately to my aid. But as I said, the damage was relatively minor, and so no aid was needed.

But still.

*****

Friday: I'm working from home again today, as I normally do on Friday, so I'm marinating in the blend of fake outrage and indignation that is emanating from MSNBC, which is on as background noise. How is it possible that McConnell and Feinstein and Grassley and Schumer can even maintain straight faces as they decry hyper-partisanship and lament the passing of civility and reason in politics?

*****

Saturday: Well.

*****

Sunday: I'm so cranky today. No, not because of that. That doesn't matter. It was all but inevitable.

Well, it does matter. But it's not why I'm cranky. I'm cranky because I'm in the middle of the FAFSA. Which I started right after I registered one kid for winter sports, which is a 40-step process that meanders along through 27 or so electronic pages. Then after the thousandth click, the long-awaited "submit" click, you see the dreaded red error message, and you carefully examine each page to find the one error that is preventing your exit from this hell. And you find that the error was your failure to answer one required question: In addition to the sport for which your child is registering (Boys' Swim and Dive) is he or she interested in participating in pompons?

This was a yes/no question, but perhaps they could just offer pompons as a sport for which to register, thereby obviating the need for this question. And what is a pompon? Why only one M? Everyone calls them "pom-poms."

According to Grammarist, the original word was pompon, but because most people misheard it as "pom-pom" (of COURSE they did), the two-M version has come into more common use, and now each version of the word is equally popular. Grammarist might be right about the origin part, but they're dead wrong about the relative popularity of "pompon" vs. the far more common (and rightly so) "pom-pom."

So that was fun.

Then I had to pay for a field trip for another kid, using another 40-page web form, which required me to first create a "profile" of my student, and then select that profile from a drop down.

And now I'm on the FAFSA.

And I'm a little stabby.

And my knee still hurts.

So that's all for now. I wrote about something real last week. This is the best I can do this week.

Pompons. 

Ridiculous.

Something strange in the neighborhood

It's Saturday night, and I'm the only person home. My husband and younger son are at a baseball game, and my older son is at work. I'm unusually tired, so I'm in for the night at 8 PM. I'm going to watch the "Ghostbusters" remake with Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon. I'm sitting on my couch with my computer on my lap, and without a thought in my head.

After I finished Lynn Freed's Leaving Home, I returned very briefly to Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends. I'd intended to finish it, in fits and starts, in between reading other books, but I find that I can't make myself care about what happens to the Seekers. Right now, I'm reading Entering Ephesus, by Daphne Athas, an author I'd never heard of before I found this book. Entering Ephesus is a novel about three sisters whose family loses its fortune during the Great Depression and is forced to move from an unnamed New England beach town to Ephesus, a fictional southern college town. Apparently, the novel is somewhat autobiographical, and Ephesus is loosely based on Chapel Hill.

I'm almost finished with Entering Ephesus, and I don't know what to make of it. The racist language on almost every page is shocking, even considering the context of 1971, when it was published; and 1939, when the story begins. And the characters are mostly unsympathetic and unlikable; even borderline evil. On the other hand, it's hard to completely hate a book that includes passages like this:

"The linoleum rugs could not be taken up because the house was riddled with termites. In the middle of the night they could hear tiny, intermittent chain-saw noises as the termites worked, laborious as Communists digging the Moscow subway." This is part of a description of the broken-down house that the family rents when they arrive in Ephesus, having finally lost their beautiful 15-room mansion overlooking the sea.

In a later scene, the girls have entered the local school, where the youngest is instantly the most popular child in her class. Asked by the teacher to comment on an oral report presented by the  poorest, least fortunate child in the class, she praises the boy sincerely and winningly, causing his classmates to see him with new respect: "Even Miss Bogue felt a lump in her throat. There was a victorious feeling in the depths of her being, that feeling that arises when it is manifest that the underdog has won."

So I don't completely hate it. But I don't love it either, and I won't be sorry to finish it. I can overlook the racism, given the historical context. And unsympathetic or evil characters can make great novels, even if they win in the end. But I have an old-fashioned need for redeeming value in a novel; evil characters must be evil for a reason and must more importantly be opposed by good characters. And that's the deepest textual analysis and most insightful literary criticism you'll get around here. On a scale of 1 to 10, it's a 5, and three of those five points are conferred on the linoleum passage.


*****
Now it's 8:10 PM on Monday night, and I'm taking a break from work to write about work. I work too much. And that's all I have to say about that. Actually, I'm not really writing about work, but about something that happened where I work. Melania Trump visited HHS today to speak at a summit on cyberbullying. And if you think that I'm going to snark it up about the wife of the mother of all cyberbullies speaking out about cyberbullying, then you're wrong. Because I like Melania. I think that she means well, and that she's trying her best to make something positive of her situation. And her spokeswoman is savage AF, as the kids say. She'll probably lose her security clearance.

*****
Tuesday. Once again, it's 8 PM; and once again, I still have work to do. And once again, I'm writing about it rather than doing it. It's a pattern.

I took a break for 30 minutes, to swim in a pool that was a tropical haven of rest yesterday and an icy Norwegian fjord today. OK, so I'm exaggerating. But it was cold. And it occurred to me, as I swam one chilly lap after another, with the sky gray and lowering, that yesterday might have been the turning point. It might have been the last day of warm-water swimming for 2018. Two weeks from today, the pool will be closed. I kept swimming as a few raindrops fell.

If you have ever worked on a huge proposal, then you know that some proposal tasks are worse than others. If a proposal is an aircraft carrier, then resumes and letters of commitment are KP. Do they have that in the Navy? Whatever the kitchen duty is called. I guess on a ship, it's a galley.  But it could be worse. I could be writing a compliance matrix. That's latrine duty.

I turned on some music a little while ago, because I needed an energy boost.

• "Mr. Blue Sky," Electric Light Orchestra. It's not possible to sustain a bad mood through this song.
• "Cheap Thrills," Sia. This song appeared on at least five "Worst Songs of 2016 According to Snotty Hipster Critics" lists. Morons. This is one of the greatest songs ever.
• "Forever," Chris Brown. Yeah, I know. Me too. But no one can be all bad who can make people so happy with just one song. 
• "Party in the USA," Miley Cyrus. Shut up. 
• "(Lay Down) Candles in the Wind," Melanie. My mom had the album, and we played it all the time. I could listen to this song a hundred times and never tire of it. I sing along like a six-year-old holding her mother's hairbrush like a microphone. 

*****

It's Wednesday now, and I have work to do, so of course I need to write about having work to do before I can actually do the work. The whole house of cards might be about to come down now, but I can't worry about history in the making. I have a proposal to write. 

Fiction and non-fiction

Monday: It's 6:50 AM, and I'm the only person in the house who's awake, but that will change in 20 minutes or so. Meanwhile, it's time to get started on a post for the week.

In "Stranger Than Fiction," Will Ferrell plays an accountant who is also the lead character in a work-in progress novel written by a neurotic novelist played by Emma Thompson. He discovers (I forget how) that he is not only a fictional character, but a doomed one; and he spends the rest of the movie trying to change his fate and convince the author not to kill him off. It's a good movie.

I'm not a novelist, but I write. Some days, I do little else. Sometimes I write about how or why to do things that must be done--a procedure, or a policy, or a weekly email that lets swim team families know what meets and events are happening this week, and what everyone has to do to make sure that those things happen.  Sometimes, I write about things that have already happened--a past performance narrative for a proposal, or a blog post about a new product release, or another email newsletter with highlights of the last month's events and accomplishments.

I realized yesterday, as I wrote a weekly newsletter, that writing about events and plans is almost the same for me as actually making them happen. In fact, it's the only way that I can make something real and concrete.

*****
And now it's Wednesday, and who even knows what I was thinking when I wrote that. It was a bad day.

But Tuesday was a much better day. At 12:30 or so, I was in a meeting at the government site where I work, when a senior Fed interrupted the meeting to announce that the Thai soccer players and their coach had all gotten safely out of the flooded cave where they'd been trapped

That night, my sons were watching "The Martian," a pretty good movie, on TV. I wondered aloud if the movie had already been scheduled to air, or if the network's programmers had made a last-minute decision to show it after the miraculous rescue. My older son asked me what one thing had to do with the other. What does a high-budget movie about an improbable space mission have to do with 12 little boys and one man trapped in a dank, cold, pitch-black underground pit, that could so easily have been their tomb?

A world waiting with bated breath, watching a race against life and death. A no-expenses spared all-hands-on-deck rescue mission. Volunteers willing to endure great physical hardship, even extreme danger, just for the possibility of saving one life, or 13. The heartbreaking sacrifice of a hero who gives up his own life to save others'. And a cinematic happy ending. No matter how awful humanity can be (and we suck sometimes), we will still bear any burden and pay any price (JFK, I think) to save another person's life, whether he's lost in space or trapped in an underground pit. You couldn't write a happier ending. 

Saman Kunan, rest in peace.

Red, white, blue

As a veteran government contractor, I am highly fluent in Beltway acronym. But every time I think I've heard them all, a new one comes along. Three different times last week, I heard people describe a plan or a project as "OBE" (technically an initialism and not an acronym, because it's pronounced "O B E" and not "obe" as in rhyming with "lobe"). It didn't really register the first two times, but when I heard it a third time, I had to investigate.

"OBE" does not mean "Order of the British Empire," at least not in this context. It means "overcome by events," which is now my favorite-ever government insider slang term. I'm going to find at least 10 reasons a week to describe something (or someone, even) as "OBE."

And now, you might be thinking to yourself, as you contemplate the minute of your life that you spent reading this, a minute that you will never regain, that this blog is or should be OBE. You would not be the first person to think this. The author beat you to it.

*****

It's the 4th of July. Normally, I'd write "fourth" rather than "4th," but the ordinal number is acceptable in references to Independence Day. My sons are looking forward to their favorite 4th of July dessert: Yellow sponge cake dessert shells filled with strawberries, blueberries, and Cool Whip. Not whipped cream, but Cool Whip. My Korean mother-in-law introduced them to this mid-century Americana treat, and now, they consider the holiday incomplete without it. Apparently, my mother-in-law's friend, also Korean-born, told her that this red, white, and blue dessert is an American tradition, and she or my sister-in-law have made it for every 4th of July gathering since.

Having married into an immigrant family, I've learned that most immigrants are eager to understand what is uniquely American, and to adopt it as their own. For some immigrants, this means observing and imitating American ways of dress and speech. For others, like my neighbor from Vietnam, it means growing and cultivating the greenest and most American of front lawns, complete with garden gnomes and American flags and barn-shaped mailboxes. For my mother-in-law, it's food. She cooks, and eats, mostly Korean food, but she always insists on traditional American fare for American holidays. Turkey for Thanksgiving and ham for Christmas; and of course, strawberries, blueberries, and Cool Whip in a little cake shell for 4th of July. Sons and grandsons of immigrants, my children have the most American of families. 

*****
So between one thing and another, my week has gone off the rails. Last week at this time, I was ahead of or at least on top of every task and chore on my list. This week, a combination of a midweek holiday and other unexpected occurrences has thrown the whole operation into chaos. Overcome by events, I will end here. Until next week...

Guided tour

Summer swim season is officially underway. This means (among lots of other things) that between my normal weekly work newsletter, the weekly news update for the government project, weekly emails to the swim team, and this hot mess, I'm writing four once-a-week bulletins. It's hard to keep it all straight. By July, swim team parents will be reading about IV&V and SharePoint development; while government IT people will get to read all about 15-18 boys' freestyle results. Everyone will learn something new. Everybody wins. 

*****

I had to correct a recent Instagram post because of a typo in a hashtag. This was not the result of carelessness or poor spelling skills (as if) so much as failing eyesight.  And it's only going to get worse.

*****
So that's a lot of writing about why I'm not actually writing this week. Instead, enjoy this photo tour of the scenic Twinbrook neighborhood in Rockville, Maryland. All photos taken with my old Samsung Galaxy S7, which I just replaced with a Google Pixel 2. Maybe I'll tell you all about it. Next week, that is. 

*****

A mailbox shaped like a barn, because why not?

Click here to find out why
I have no idea what kind of bird that is.  

No parking sign: One of the few indicators that the neighbors
of Twinbrook might not welcome the daily office worker invasion. 

Flower walk

A trailer with a cat face. Again: Why not?

Neighborhood watch. Someone probably
called the cops on me. 

A Little Free Library!

I read somewhere that bamboo, once it takes root,
cannot be eradicated, so I hope these people actually
 like their bamboo. 

Hand-painted storm drain next to Twinbrook Elementary School.

Fancy

There didn't seem to be any point to this when I wrote it, but a point occurred to me today during my lunchtime walk. Just like how everything old becomes new again; sometimes, everything that was once too-new can become charmingly old , with only the passage of a few decades or so. When it was built, Twinbrook must have seemed garishly new and modern to the Victorian-home dwellers of Rockville. Now it's settled and quaint, with its patina of World War II history and its architecture reminiscent of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which are after all part of a previous century. It's like strolling through a day during the Eisenhower administration.

*****
As I walked, I saw two little children get into a car and drive away. Well, teenagers. It was 12:30 in the afternoon, and I wondered why they weren't in school, but wondered even more how it's possible that people who were born during the Bush 43 administration are now driving cars. I've become almost accustomed to watching my own son get in his car and drive to school every day, but when I see other young people driving, the whole thing  just seems ridiculous and improbable all over again.

*****
My husband is Korean, in case you didn't know that. One thing you learn when you're married to a Korean is that Korean people don't necessarily plan family visits--they just show up.  Once a year or so, my mother-in-law will call us, and tell us that relatives from Toronto or New York (but not Korea--not many left over there) have arrived, and that we need to drop what we're doing and commence with the family visitation. And so we do. When I was younger, I might have seen this as an inconvenience but the older I get, the more I realize that nothing matters more than people, and whatever you have to do to accommodate them is worth whatever inconvenience results.

So on Tuesday afternoon, my husband called me at work and told me that his cousin was in town for a conference, and that he wanted to have dinner with us that night. We met him at my sister-in-law's house, and went to our favorite local restaurant.

*****

When I first started shopping at Korean grocery stores, I discovered Shilla Bakery. Shilla Bakery is a small chain of stand-alone bakeries that serve the Korean communities, but the company also sells products through Korean stores, like Lotte and H-Mart. We once bought a Shilla Bakery cake to take to a party, because I liked the slogan printed on the box: "Shilla Bakery. It Make a Deep Impression on Your Mind." The cake tasted like a stick of butter mixed with confectioner's sugar, and then lightly dusted with flour. Ten years later, I can still taste it.

So wait. That box was telling the truth!

Anyway, my husband's out-of-town cousin came bearing gifts, including a box of giant Korean pears (which are a story all to themselves) and a fancy cake from another Korean bakery. I knew that it was a fancy cake, because it said so, right on the box:

Any questions? 

Most of the box is in English and French. I didn't check the French grammar, but the English is idiomatic, to put it kindly. I do love the little truck drawing in the upper left-hand corner. With almost 20 years of experience as a Korean by marriage, I'd have recognized this as a Korean product even without the very small Korean label on the bottom of the box. Bon appetit. 잘 먹겠습니다. 


*****
Every year, on Memorial Day weekend, I joke hat I have no problems that summer can't solve. But a family that I know--not close friends, but friends--have suffered something so awful that nothing in my life can even aspire to problem status. So for now, I have no problems, period. Happy Summer.

Book learning

Monday: It's spring break for my husband and kids. A few more days of work, and I too will have a short break.

Tuesday: I’m at a new job site today. Not a new job altogether, but a new location. Or rather a new job and a new location, but the same company. My company won a new government contract, and I have been assigned to support it as a writer/editor/communications person. Ordinarily, I would not be blogging when I’m supposed to be working, but I can’t really do anything else yet. The first morning at a new job is always the same. You’re introduced to a few new people (who are all very friendly in this case), stashed at a desk that might or might not remain your desk, and then left to await additional instruction. It’s 8:45, and I’m supposed to attend a meeting at 9, but I don’t know where the meeting is.  I don't know where anything is, actually, including the bathroom.

This is a new office, and only partially occupied. It’s extremely quiet. I suspect that the people who work here every day have no idea yet what they’re supposed to do with me nor what I’m supposed to do for them. It’ll all be clear enough soon. Meanwhile, I have no computer, no office supplies, and no instructions, so I’ll just write until it’s time to stop.

This office is very modern and very businesslike and very clean. I have a window in my regular office, but here, I’m in a cubicle. But the cubicle is in a room with windows, and so I’m not cut off from daylight altogether. Other than the hum of the HVAC system and the quiet tapping of a cubicle neighbor’s keyboard, there’s no sound at all. This is partly because the office is half-empty, and partly because the carpeting and padded cubicle walls absorb sound.

It’s 8:53 now, and I have to figure out where my 9 o’clock meeting will be. I have a very poor sense of direction, and indoor navigation is sometimes harder than outdoor. Outdoors, at least I can use Google Maps. My life has become a Portlandia sketch.

Now it’s 10:47. I’ve been to two meetings, which have revealed a little bit about what this project is about. In a supreme irony, the person who is least able to calmly deal with change (that person being me) is apparently going to be heavily involved in what appears to be a pretty big change management effort. But the project seems interesting, and it's surprising how much you can learn in a meeting, especially when everyone knows you're new and they don't expect you to do much other than listen and smile and nod your head. I'm also pretty good at remembering names, so now I have an idea of who is who, and who does what. Still not much idea of what I will be doing, and I’m sure that it will be weeks before I don’t get lost on my way to or from the ladies’ room, but it's only been two hours, and I know a lot more than I did when I showed up this morning, so I'm optimistic.

Now it’s 1:12. I’ve been to three meetings, and am waiting to attend a fourth. Without any access to any systems here (I can’t even ride the elevator unaccompanied yet), writing about my day in the vaguest possible terms is all I can do in between meetings. I seem to learn something new in each meeting, and I’m actually rather looking forward to the next one. And I know my way to the ladies’ room now.


Thursday: I was too busy to write anything yesterday. After the four meetings on Tuesday, I returned to my regular office for the rest of the day. It was nice to see how much people missed me while I was gone. Wednesday was much the same as Tuesday: A morning of back-to-back meetings at the government office, tons of note-taking (I have no idea if I'll ever refer to those notes again, but the physical act of documenting something helps me to remember and understand it better), more names to remember, and then back to my office. The project officially kicks off next week, so I'll learn more, I hope.

I used my Chromebook to take notes. It's fun to use, but I still don't really know how to properly use Google Docs. I suspect that you're not supposed to just copy and paste everything into Word, but that's what I'm doing right now. I'll figure it out. 

We took our older son for his first college visit today. He liked the school very much. We ate at the student commons, and I bought him a t-shirt in the bookstore. After weeks of lingering cold, it was beautiful and sunny and 70 degrees, and a college campus filled with what appeared to be very happy young people was the perfect place to be.

Friday: It's Good Friday. I would normally go to Stations today, but we have another college visit planned. The new job will involve more analytical and program management work than I normally do (because I normally do absolutely nothing like that) so I decided to do some online Excel courses, because I think I'll need far better Excel skills than I have. I did one course last night, which wasn't hard, because it focused on formatting, and many of the formatting features are intuitive if you're an expert Word user. Formulas, on the other hand, are a whole other thing. I took a pre-test on the formulas module, and received a 28%, which could easily have been even lower, because I randomly guessed the correct answer to one of the questions.

Some people enjoy video/interactive/online training courses. I do not. I'd rather read something, or sit in a classroom. My learning style is ideally suited to the mid 20th century. Since I can't go to Stations, I'm planning to complete one module of the formulas course this morning, and another later tonight when we get home. This will serve as penance.

And now it's later tonight. The second college visit went well, though we were not prepared for an abrupt 20-degree temperature drop from the time we left home to the time we arrived. The Excel lessons are really excruciatingly boring; so boring that just typing whatever thought pops into my mind is far more interesting. I'm definitely learning, though. I had absolutely no idea that you could change the properties of a document, or add tags to make it more searchable. Genius! Well done, Microsoft!

Saturday: I don't know what it is about the Saturday of Easter weekend. I always have intense anxiety attacks on this particular day. Spring is PTSD season for me. But it also means that summer can't be far away.

OK. I know how to create a pivot table. But I have no idea why. Why is this useful? In what circumstances will I need this? I have no idea. But what I do know is that a trendline that draws trend inferences only from the spreadsheet's own data is worthless.

Sunday: Happy Easter! Anyone who wanted to see my 13-year-old son wearing anything other than a t-shirt and shorts should have attended the 10 AM Mass at St. Patrick's in Rockville. By 11:30, he was home, out of his shirt and tie, and back in a pair of shorts and a Capitals t-shirt. 16-year-old, on the other hand, has decided that the people deserve to see him in his full splendor, and he is still wearing his crisp white shirt, bowtie, and dress pants. He did make one concession to comfort, exchanging his dress shoes for black Nikes.

Usually when I write daily diary-style entries here, I try to find a theme for the week to unify the whole thing. And this morning, I realized what that theme is. During both of our college visits this week, we encouraged our son to get involved when he starts college, to try new things, and to learn as much as he can. Even if, for example, you have never had to analyze project performance or create reports and spreadsheets, you can learn, and maybe you'll find that that's the thing that you should be doing.

I might need to learn more about SharePoint, too. And although it's true that anyone who appoints me as their SharePoint administrator or project analyst will probably live to regret that decision, I can at least try to help the people who are actually qualified to do those jobs. What's the worst that could happen?