Tired mountains and rally towels

It's week 4 or so on the government project, and I'm starting to understand the project and the organization. And I'm neck-deep in level setting and boots hitting the ground. As I wrote once before, business jargon isn't necessarily bad in and of itself. Sometimes, a business slang term colorfully and concisely expresses an idea not expressed in any other word or phrase.

When I first started at the government site, I was a little overwhelmed. There was a lot to take in. In one of many meetings during the first week, our government boss asked how we liked "drinking from the firehose." I have since heard lots of other people use the expression "firehose mode," so I guess she didn't coin the phrase, but I thought that it was a good, apt description of a person trying to take in a very large quantity of information in a very short time.

"Tiger team," on the other hand, is ridiculous. What can a team of tigers do for you other than protect their young and prey on large mammals? I'm pretty sure they don't have any other skills, though I wouldn't tell one that to its face. Pigs and dolphins are smarter. I can easily see why you'd want to avoid standing up a pig team, given that recruitment would be difficult, but everyone would want to join a dolphin team. OR--you could just use regular words, and call it a special projects team.

Or an A team! Because everyone loves it when a plan comes together.

*****
Ignore what I said last week. I totally want the Capitals to win the Stanley Cup.

Obviously, I'm delighted that they beat Columbus in the first round, but of course, now they have to try to get past Pittsburgh again, and if Thursday night's third period shit show was any indication, then the climb is Mount Everest-style uphill.

Meanwhile, I have an official complaint to lodge with Mr. Leonsis and the Capitals organization. We attended Game 1 of the Columbus series, and although that series turned out happily, the first game ended badly, with an overtime loss, notwithstanding an early game 2-goal lead. We had hoped, when we bought the not-at-all-cheap tickets, that the traditional Game 1 giveaway would be something good, like maybe a bobblehead, or a rally towel. Instead, we got light sticks. And when you picture that in your mind, don't think about a decent, self-respecting miniature flashlight kind of thing. Picture instead a styrofoam tube wrapped in cellophane (and there's two archaic words in one sentence). Because it was a styrofoam tube wrapped in cellophane, which Boeing unwisely allowed its logo to be imprinted upon.

Insult added to injury--the Penguins gave away t-shirts at their first-round Game 1. T-shirts, for Penguins fans! Those bitches have Stanley Cups out the proverbial yinyang and they get t-shirts!

Light sticks. Hmph. You can't cry into a light stick. Round 2 continues.

*****

This is my family in 2014, at the Pyongyang Platform at Dorasan Station. Dorasan Station is the northern terminus of a railway line that used to run the entire length of the Korean peninsula. It's less than a kilometer from the Demarcation Line at the Demilitarized Zone. The sign in the upper right corner reads: "When the Trans-Korea Railway (TKR), the Trans-Siberia Railway (TSR), and the Trans-China Railway (TCR) are connected in the future, Dorasan Station promises to emerge as the starting point of the Transcontinental Railroad." As my husband explained it to me, after he visited in 2008, the South Korean government maintains the station, though it's no longer operational, so that it's ready to transport passengers between Panmunjom and Pyongyang when the two Koreas reunite.

At the time, nothing seemed less likely than reunification. Now, I guess anything is possible. Maybe Trump deserves some credit (and now my hands hurt, from typing those words). Or maybe it's a case of Tired Mountain Syndrome.  Whatever. If one or the other or a combination of those two things represent the first step toward collapse of the worst regime on earth, then it's good news. I can't imagine how beautiful and energetic South Korea will be able to absorb and integrate the undereducated and impoverished North Korean people, but that's a problem for later. Hope springs eternal, for Korea, and Capitals fans during Round 2 against Pittsburgh, and for the rest of the whole world.

Leave the gun, take the cannoli

Monday: I won't even discuss this morning's ridiculous hyperventilating panic attack. What I will discuss is what I'm reading, which is Rumer Godden's The Battle of the Villa Fiorita. It might be even better than In This House of Brede, and that's a very high bar. It reminds me in many ways of Brideshead Revisited, despite the fact that it's absolutely nothing like Brideshead Revisited. Except it is. It would be more accurate to say that Rumer Godden is nothing like Evelyn Waugh. She was probably a much nicer person than Waugh, who was famous for being a jerk, but they were both converts to Catholicism, and both possessed sparkling clear moral vision. The Battle of the Villa Fiorita anticipated--and refuted--the myth that children of divorce don't suffer and that they're better off with happy, though separated parents. And Caddie Clavering reminds me of Cordelia Marchmain, though they are also two very different characters. I recommend it. Now I want to read Brideshead again.

And speaking of moral clarity, and speaking of books, I'm not going to read Comey's book after all. I don't need any more convincing that Trump is a liar and a scoundrel and unfit for public office. And now I think that Comey is kind of a jerk. And not the Evelyn Waugh kind of jerk who recognizes and acknowledges his own jerkitude. I read an excerpt of the book, the part where Comey describes Trump's personal appearance, and I think that a guy who has obviously never suffered insecurity about his appearance who writes so cruelly about another person's very obvious massive insecurity is a special breed of jerk.

Thursday: I went walking after work, dressed for January on April 19. It's just too cold for spring, but I still enjoyed every moment outside. My iPod (my husband's iPod, actually; mine did not survive the laundry incident) was on shuffle and I skipped around, singing along with songs that I hadn't heard in a while. The cherry blossoms and forsythia, though fading, are still in bloom and the sky was pale, pale grey blue warmed by fading, thin spring sunlight.

Paul Simon's "Train in the Distance" played as I walked and contemplated the horrible fact of the suicide of a 12-year-old boy at my son's middle school. How lost he must have been, and how lonely. I don't want to think about his last moment. I hope he lost consciousness quickly.  As Paul Simon sang that "the thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains," I thought about how this is sadly not true for everyone. I hope the child is at peace now.

Saturday: You know, I had something in my head, and I failed to put it on paper , so that might be it for the week. It might come back to me. Stranger things have happened. Like the President tweeting that he's sure that his lawyer won't "flip," making it official that a crime boss is the President of the United States. I mean, think about it. How would cooperating with the government constitute "flipping" from the perspective of the President? That's the one guy who should be on the government's side, right?

You got a nice Department of Justice here. It would be a
shame if something was to...HAPPEN to it. 

I'm sure I'll remember it later. Just when I try to get OUT, it will pull me back IN.

Passage of time

Sunday: I always feel like I won't have time to write during the week, and I always manage to find time, but this time, I really feel like I won't have time (and that's time four times in one sentence, not counting this parenthetical insertion, which brings it to six). So I'll start tonight.

We're watching "I, Tonya." It's a great movie, and although I couldn't decide whom to root for as Best Supporting Actress (I loved Laurie Metcalf in "Ladybird," but I've been a huge Allison Janney fan since "The West Wing"), I think that the Academy made the right decision.

I followed the Tonya/Nancy story very very closely in 1994. I was sure then that Tonya knew more than she admitted; now, I'm not so sure. Even then, though, I felt some sympathy for her. I was a working-class girl, too. I couldn't ice skate to save my soul from Hell, but if I had been a figure skater, I wouldn't have fit in with the sparkling ice princesses either. I find it hard to believe that a skating judge admitted to Tonya that he and other judges were deliberately lowballing her scores because they wanted to force her out of the sport. But I find it very easy to believe that they actually did lowball her scores to try to force her out of the sport. I remember watching her skate, and hearing commentators say things like "some have called her Trashy Tonya." Those "some" of course, being the commentators, who could thus call Tonya Harding trashy without actually calling her trashy.

Monday: I'm wearing glasses now. I normally wear contact lenses all day long, but my eyes were badly strained today. Eyestrain has been a problem for me for some time, but it's gotten worse. I look at a screen for hours at a time, and by the end of the day, my eyes are burned out. By 8 pm tonight, I literally couldn't see anymore. The glasses feel much better.

I've worn contact lenses for ten years. Every so often, though, I think about just wearing glasses all the time. I don't really like the way they look on me, but it would be nice to just put glasses on in the morning and take them off at night--no cleaning, no soaking, no worry about running out of lenses. On the other hand, I don't know what I'd do about sunglasses. Prescription sunglasses, I guess. Or maybe those glasses that just turn dark when you're outside?

My mom has worn glasses since she was six years old. When I was growing up, we almost never saw her without them. They became part of the architecture of her face; part of its basic structure. She changed glasses every two years or so; at one point, she even had those upside-down frames that Allison Janney wears in "I, Tonya." One of my fears about wearing glasses is that I'd tire of the ones I chose and would want to buy new ones every three months. One of my hopes is that the glasses would become so much a part of my face that I'd look a little weird when I took them off, just like my mom.

Tuesday: I keep losing things. It's spring, season of massive anxiety and panic attacks, and I tend to be forgetful and not to mince words, stupid, at this time of year. This afternoon, I came this close (imagine my thumb and forefinger about 3/4 of an inch apart) to calling my bank and telling them to cancel my debit card. Then I found it in my pocket, where I'd put it after filling my gas tank minutes earlier. I left my computer charging cord at my desk at the government site two days in a row; following the day on which I left my phone at home. I keep dropping things. I keep tripping, and bumping my head, which has probably already sustained as many blows as it can take. And now, even Microsoft Word thinks that it can mess with me. I might not have Google Docs on lockdown yet, but Word is my bitch, and I won't allow it to disrespect me.

Wednesday: Well, that took a turn, didn't it? Meanwhile, in the Day in the Life department, Shit Just Got Real division, this person is now a licensed driver in the state of Maryland:

It's always later than you think. 

Thursday: My second-ever playoff game ended with an overtime loss for the Capitals. True confession: I don't actually care that much if they win in the playoffs, although I know I'll be really happy when they eventually win a Stanley Cup. As much as I love hockey, I like the routine of the regular season much more than the intensity of the playoffs. And even for a fan, it's hard to sustain playoff excitement for over two months, which is how long it takes. It's too much.

That's right, you better run. 

Saturday: Maryland has become the home of six-month winters that end abruptly with summer. It snowed a week ago; today, we're in shorts and flip-flops. At least we haven't seen or heard the mouse. Maybe it likes the weather and wants to stay outside. Or maybe I scared it last week. That's probably it.




Sunday. Maryland weather: "I'll see your crazy ass in Hell." Thanks, Colin Jost.

To the mattresses

Wednesday, you feel like Tuesday. And Google Docs: That little hide yesterday’s six pages of meeting notes as a two-days-late April Fool’s joke? Totally not funny. Just one more indicator of the pressing need to figure out G-Suite and Chrome OS, and PDQ. I’ll get to it.

The mouse has returned (a new mouse, of course); and the efforts to catch and kill it are ascending to new heights, or descending to new lows, depending on your perspective. Although the low-tech, non-violent approach was successful last time, the new mouse visitor appears to be notably brighter than his deceased predecessor and he (or likely she) has thus far thwarted every mouse-catching effort. My husband has tried a combination of sticky traps, traditional spring-release traps, and a variety of bait. The space underneath the kitchen sink is now nearly spotless, having been thoroughly cleaned, and it's also a virtual killing field for mice. However, we continue to see evidence that the mouse has been able to gnaw its way through the door-mounted garbage bag that hangs on the inside of the cabinet door and to then enjoy a late-night buffet.

So my husband bought an electronic mouse trap, which I promise is a real, manufactured item, available for sale at Home Depot and other retailers, for an obscene and ridiculous price. Well, it’s $40, but $40 for a mousetrap is absurdly expensive. Even as he bought the silly thing, he was almost sure that it wouldn’t work, but he was determined to at least try it. Meanwhile, he rigged the traps and the garbage bag in a way that appeared virtually mouse-proof, except to the mouse, who easily picked her way around the landmines.

So now we have a night-vision deer camera. Do you think I’m kidding? I’m not. Here it is.

It's the fatigue-green plastic thing on the left. Note that there are
no fewer than four mousetraps here, and those are only the ones visible. 

I didn’t even ask how much this cost, because I would rather not know, and because it wouldn't matter to my husband, who would pretty much pay any price to figure out how this stupid mouse was managing to evade his carefully constructed obstacle course of death. Last week while shopping for my son’s baseball pants, he wandered over to the hunting section at Dick’s and there it was: An infrared light deer camera, or whatever the hell technology allows you to take video of wildlife under cover of near total darkness. He was sold.

He caught some footage of the thing last night, but we could only see part of its body (not sure which is worse--the head or the tail--we could see its icky little beady-eyed face but not its revolting tail) so we know that the mouse was at large last night, but we’re still not sure how it got through the cabinet and avoided the traps. The camera has been re positioned in the hope that we’ll get footage that shows the whole sequence: Entry into the cabinet from whatever tiny hole or crevice remains open after the extensive hole-plugging efforts, dodge and weave through the minefield, mouse middle finger at the camera, trash feast, exit stage left.

Or maybe we’ll just house train the vile creature and learn to live with it. If it didn’t leave droppings behind, then I could maybe, possibly coexist with it. As long as I didn’t have to see it. Or hear it. Or maintain any conscious awareness of its existence under my roof.

Never mind: It has to get out of my house, or die. We’re going to the mattresses.

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? 

Wild and domestic

I drove home from work on Monday night, anxious and panicky about the annual spring onslaught. Every time I thought that I had an organized list of things to do in my mind, I'd remember yet another thing that I had to do. I arrived home at 6:30, feeling completely overwhelmed and not nearly equal to the tasks at hand. Sometimes, all I can do is wait for the panic to subside; but sometimes, exercise helps. With 45 minutes or so of daylight remaining, I decided to take a walk.

I was about two blocks from home as dusk began to fall, and I saw what I thought was a medium-sized red dog running across the street about half a block in front of me. And then I realized that dogs don't have big fluffy tails. It was a fox. It stopped in the middle of the road and looked at me for a second, and then it kept running.

Crap, I thought to myself (as opposed to thinking to other people, I guess). They're not still supposed to be out in daylight, are they? I mean, it was getting dark, but it wasn't dark yet. What if it's rabid? What if it's aggressive? Should I turn and walk the other way?

No. If I'm brave enough to walk right past a snake (yes, I know that it was an imaginary snake, but I didn't know that until AFTER I decided to walk past it, so bravery credit still applies) then I can be brave enough to walk past a fox that has, after all, already run away. Unless it's lying in wait, ready to ambush me.

A stick! I have no hope of outrunning the thing, but I can fight it off with a stick. My neighborhood is full of trees, so there's no shortage of sticks, and it took me only a minute to find a nice stout stick with a sharp, pointy end suitable for fox-poking. Nothing in my entire life has prepared me for hand-to-hand combat with a wild animal, even armed with a stick, but it was better than nothing. I walked the rest of the way home without incident.

*****
I have a crazy neighbor. You'll have to take my word for that, because I can't share much detail. In addition to being crazy (or perhaps it's a symptom or manifestation of his craziness), he keeps his house in a state of disrepair that makes "ramshackle" a kind description of the place.  Unsurprisingly, he has a problem with rodents, including raccoons. Being crazy, he decided to set traps to catch the raccoons.

Crazy or not (crazy--trust me), he's a competent raccoon trapper, because he caught one right away. Then he called my husband.  In all fairness, everyone calls my husband. He's can fix almost anything, and he's very good in a crisis. And although my neighbor is a batshit raving lunatic, I share his conviction that a trapped raccoon in one's backyard is a crisis. I don't, however, agree that the solution to that crisis is to call the neighborhood police officer and expect him to immediately come and shoot the raccoon with his service revolver.

See? I TOLD you he's crazy. After my husband diplomatically disabused him of the notion that police officers can moonlight as raccoon hit men, crazy neighbor decided, as a crazy person would, to leave it in the trap until it died. I'm no friend to rodents, and raccoons are among my least favorite of these vile creatures. But leaving it a cage to starve in the freezing cold is beyond the pale. I told my husband to call animal control. He sighed. "I will," he said. "But he'll give me a hard time about it."

"Why?" I asked. "They'll come and take it and release it on the Henson Trail, and he won't have to deal with it. Problem solved."

"That was what I told him to do," my husband said. "He didn't want to release it, because he's sure that it will make its way back."

Again--Crazy. The man has two broken windows and a gaping hole in the siding on one side of his house alone. When the snow came (yes, snow, on March fucking 20th--Maryland weather is an asshole), every raccoon in Silver Spring sought shelter in his house. He's lucky that we don't have many bears around here, because there's nothing stopping one from hibernating in his garage.

*****
As the rest of the week passed, I had no interaction with the animal kingdom, until today (Saturday). My 13-year-old is taking care of another (not crazy) neighbor's cats for the week. Our neighbor dropped off her keys on her way out of town; she had already fed the cats but encouraged my son to stop by to visit and give the cats a treat.

Both of the cats are old; 15 or so. The male, an orange tabby, has been with my neighbor since he was a kitten, and she told us that he is very friendly and comfortable around strangers. The other cat, a gray and white mixed breed, is new to the household. My neighbor adopted him when her friend became too ill to care for her. She told us that the gray cat is skittish and afraid of strangers.

The cats were exactly as advertised. The male tabby, Enu, is a cat-dog. He ran to the door and greeted us happily as we entered. Kelly, the shy cat, ran down the basement stairs as soon as she saw us, and she never appeared again.

Enu followed us eagerly around the house. We petted him and fed him treats, changed his water, and checked the litter boxes, and got ready to leave. The cat followed us to the door. "Don't let him out," I told my son.

"He likes to go out," my son said. "I almost forgot--Mrs. V said to let him out in the yard for a few minutes."

"OK," I said. "But let's make sure that the gate is closed."

I no sooner said the words then the crazy cat took off running and got right through the barely cracked front door before I could close it. I ran after him.

Remember that this cat is 15 years old. He's also obese, probably morbidly so in cat terms. I hadn't expected that an elderly, overweight cat would be a flight risk, but trust me, this geriatric feline fat-ass could run like the damn wind. But then he stopped, right in the middle of the front yard. He didn't appear winded; I think he just wanted to drink in the sunshine and freedom for a minute.  So we waited as he scampered around the yard, sniffing at trees and rocks like a dog.

"OK," I said to my son. "It's time to go. Let's bring him in." The cat allowed me to pick him up, but he started to fight me as we got nearer the house, finally breaking free and running back across the yard.

Remember again: This cat is about as old as cats get, and in serious need of diet and exercise, at least one of which it was getting by outrunning me (which admittedly is not hard to do). I chased him across the street, and managed to direct him back again to his own front yard. Fiendishly clever, he ran under the car and then catloafed, tail contentedly wagging, keeping time like a metronome. He knew that I couldn't get to him from where he was, and I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew. We had ourselves a cat-human standoff.

The cat, smug and compact, was obviously enjoying himself tremendously. Every part of his body, from the serene face to the paws cozily tucked close to his body to the rotund torso to the thumping tail seemed to ask "What now? What are you going to do?" And I didn't know, other than to either crawl under the car (no) or to just wait him out. And then I heard a rustle.

My son had run back inside to get the bag of treats. "I just remembered that Mrs. V said to shake the treats, and he'll come back in." And he was right. Between the freedom of the outdoors and a delicious cat treat, there was no contest. Fatso couldn't resist the siren call of food, and we got him safely inside.

*****
It's Sunday night now. The rest of the family are on spring break, and I'll be joining them on Thursday. For now, it's three days in the world of people with (I hope) no unwanted encounters with the animal kingdom, wild or domestic.

Birdwatching

It's Tuesday. Last night, I was watching the Capitals vs. Winnipeg with my sons, and I left the room just in time to miss the world's greatest hockey player's 600th lifetime goal. Disappointing, but I got to watch the replay, and it was almost as good as seeing it live.

As I watched the game, I was imagining, for some reason, a character who becomes a hockey fan late in life. After choosing his favorite team, he realizes that he also needs a least-favorite team, a hockey nemesis, as it were. This character is not based on me, of course, because I have the moral clarity to know that the only hockey nemesis that anyone ever needs is present in the form of the Pittsburgh Penguins, the most evil franchise in the worldwide history of professional sports. My character, lacking such moral clarity, chooses the Winnipeg Jets as his nemesis.

"Why Winnipeg?" his family and friends ask him. "What did Manitoba ever do to you?" He doesn't deign to justify his choice or explain his reasoning. He just glares at the TV as his team plays Winnipeg. "Fucking Winnipeg," he snarls, every time the Jets score. That eventually becomes his catchphrase: "Fucking Winnipeg."

*****
Who knows where that came from. Anyway, it's still Tuesday. Speaking of fans, I'm not a particular fan of Rex Tillerson, but he did call Donald Trump a fucking moron on a hot mic, and for that, he'll always have a place in my heart. Godspeed, Rex Tillerson.

*****
After I finished Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I read Havana, which is so far my least-favorite Joan Didion non-fiction. In some ways, it reads like a period piece, with its very Reagan-era preoccupation with Latin American revolutionary politics. Like lots of other literary intellectuals of the 20th century, Didion seems to have had a blind spot about Communism. I mean, I'm sure she's right about totalitarian ideological rigidity among the Cuban exile population in Miami in the 80s, but she doesn't say much about the conditions in Cuba that gave rise to their extremism. Like many other writers who wrote about Latin America in the 80s, she (rightly) condemns Somoza, but gives Castro a pass.

I couldn't decide what to read after Havana. I have a pretty large backlog on my Kindle, but nothing was calling out to me, so I decided to re-read The Thinking Reed, one of Rebecca West's best, and that's already a pretty high bar.  It's just as good as I remembered.  The book takes place in France in the years between the two world wars. One of the principal characters is an immensely wealthy French industrialist who, despite enormous success and power, completely lacks the inclination to abuse or take advantage of the poor or powerless. "Though his ties were with the strong and not with the weak, he would not have had a sparrow fall, anywhere in the world." I have noticed that not every rich and powerful person is like that.

The best part is that it's been so long since I've read it that I really don't remember how it ends. So I'm torn between wanting to rush through it to find out (again) what happens, and wanting to slow down a bit, so that it won't be over too soon.

*****
Thursday: Have you ever cleaned behind your refrigerator? If not, then I don't recommend it. Leave it alone. Nothing to see. The less said, the better.

It had been a long time since our kitchen had been painted, and so I talked my husband into doing it. The paint looks beautiful, but the kitchen is now in a horrifying state of disarray that makes me wonder, just for a minute, if the dingy walls maybe weren't so bad. I don't like disorder. And I have to pretty much leave it as it is for now, because he has to finish the job tomorrow. Horrifying. I'm hyperventilating just thinking about it.

*****
It's Saturday morning now. The kitchen is back in order, and you could eat off the floor behind the refrigerator. Well, you could, but I don't recommend it. I mean it's clean, but it's not perfect. It's still a floor. So don't eat off it. I'll give you a plate.

*****
And now it's Sunday, and I have just a few pages left of The Thinking Reed.  When it's over, the weekend will be over. More importantly, I'll need to find something else to read.  Too bad that Comey's book won't be out until next month. I continue to be torn between actually feeling sorry for Trump's unfortunate staff, enduing threats, insults, and firings via Twitter; and wondering what they expected when they chose to serve a bullying, vindictive, mean-spirited, draft-dodging, pants-on-fire lying coward.  By the time the Comey book is released, there will probably be at least two or three more firings. My money is on McMaster and Sessions, but it could be anyone, I suppose.

Putin just won re-election by a landslide; and somewhere, a sparrow is probably falling. If it's a Russian sparrow, the richest and most powerful man in that country is claiming innocence and feigning outrage that anyone could accuse him of shooting down a sparrow, even as he continues to hold the gun. If it's an American sparrow, it has been subjected to weeks of poking with sticks, as its eventual killer decides if it would be more fun to shoot it out of a tree, or to just set a cat loose on it. I'm losing the thread on this metaphor, so I'll end this episode of sparrows here. Until next week...

Lost and found

*****

When I'm stressed or worried, as I am now, I lose stuff, and forget stuff. So this morning, I lost my keys. I looked upstairs and downstairs (I was staying at my sister's house after a family party in Philadelphia; my house is a one-level 1969 ranch house that does not have stairs), in my coat pocket and in my handbag, and in my shoes, and in my suitcase; and under the furniture, and even in the car. No keys. My sister's dog, who loves me, followed me around the house, looking puzzled. Is it a game? Do I look inside the shoes, too? Is she taking me for a walk? Does she have bacon in her pocket?

Then I remembered that I have a Tile, and I rejoiced. Problem solved! I'll just open the app, and it will point me toward my keys, and then I will have my keys, and they won't be lost anymore!

Tile helpfully told me that the last place my keys had been seen was on the Schuylkill River Trail in Philadelphia. I was at my sister's house in Phoenixville, and if I hadn't driven my car there from Philadelphia, then I might have been fooled into believing that my keys were inches away from the murky waters of the Schuylkill. But I knew that the keys weren't in Philadelphia, because my car, which I had driven back to the suburbs, was sitting happily in the driveway.

Bluetooth, I thought. I bet the Bluetooth is off. But it wasn't. It was on. But the Tile kept telling me that the keys were last seen on the Schulkill River Trail, and that that would be a good place from which to commence a search. So helpful. The high-tech equivalent of "where did you have them last?" Yes, that's what I'll do. I'll go to Philadelphia, and start from there, working my way outward in ever-widening circles, gradually covering the entire world, until I find my keys.

I remembered, after one more desperate sweep of the house, that the boys and I had stowed our overnight bags in the cargo hold of the car, so I looked, and there they were. Thankfully, the car hadn't locked. 15 minutes later, a Tile "we found your keys" notification popped up on my phone. I was shocked at the temerity of this useless piece of Bluetooth-dependent plastic's outrageous claim that it had "found" the keys, when it was I who had hard-target searched for them in every farmhouse, outhouse, doghouse, and henhouse in the county.

"Bitch,  you didn't find anything," I snapped at the little gray square dangling from my keychain. "You would have been more helpful," I said to the dog, who looked insulted.

*****

I suppose that keychain and henhouse should be written as two words, because Blogger is flagging them for spelling. So now I have keychains taking credit for finding themselves, and computers telling me how to spell, which is particularly galling, because my spelling skills are outstanding. And I'm really good at finding stuff, too. You have to be, when you lose stuff as often as I do.

*****

It's Monday now. This might be it for the week, because I think that work is going to take over my life for the next few days.

*****
And now it's Wednesday. Work has in fact taken over my life, but I have a few minutes while I wait for the chicken to finish cooking in the Instant Pot.

I was going to just leave this post as it was and call it a day. In fact, I should have written it in one sentence: "I was really depressed and anxious, and then I lost my keys, and then I found them." The End. But that's not how I roll, or write.

I read the sentence "I write every day" on a blog that I follow, and that was inspiring enough that I wanted to be able to say the same thing about myself. So here I am, writing again.

*****
On Friday, the very day after writing about writing every day, I didn't write a thing. Actually, that's not true at all. I wrote all day long on Thursday, but not here. It's very early Saturday morning now. My four-year-old nephew stayed overnight last night, and he woke up before dawn, as four-year-olds tend to do, especially when they're excited about hanging out with their teenage cousins. He's playing now and waiting impatiently for the boys to wake up. "Can we wake them up now?" he asked me a minute ago.

"Later," I said. "They need to sleep for a little while longer."

"OK," he said. "How 'bout five minutes?"

I'll hold him off for as long as I can, but I have a feeling that two teenage boys are about to wake up a lot earlier than they want to.  For now, I'm going to end this heated mess with a piece of valuable advice: Don't run an iPod Nano through the washer and dryer, even if it's a little dirty. No good will come of that. This advice might or might not be the outcome of personal experience.

Keeping it real

I just finished reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which should have rightly been titled Slouching Toward Bethlehem, but who am I to tell Joan Didion that we're not in the U.K. and we say toward and not towards. We're not, and we do. But that's one of the few criticisms that I can offer.

Well, that's one of the few criticisms of the writing, anyway. Nobody writes like Joan Didion, and if I could explain what makes her writing special--the combination of intimate personal detail with seeming cool detachment, the combination of ambiguity and moral clarity, the sharp social and cultural observation, both micro and macro--then maybe I'd be a better writer.  But I can't explain it, so I won't try.

Even the best writers write some silly things, though. In "Notes from a Native Daughter," an essay about the Central Valley of California and her native Sacramento, she writes about the ruins of a huge estate that had once belonged to a Sacramento woman and her husband, a European nobleman. All that remained of the once-grand estate was a house trailer occupied by the couple's only son and heir. Commenting that the young people of Sacramento, the "children of the aerospace engineers," would never know about the grand estate and its occupants, and that they would grow up believing that "the Embarcadero....has about it the true flavor of the way it was," she laments that they "will have lost the real past and gained a manufactured one..."

When I was young, I read United States, a book of Gore Vidal essays. I don't remember much about it other than sharp writing and meanness. Gore Vidal was mean. But I think I remember a similar mournful thread of complaint about loss of authenticity in material things; paper napkins rather than cloth, paste rather than diamonds; and tiny, prefabricated suburban houses instead of stately Newport cottages. From Vidal, this kind of complaint reads as nothing much more than mid-century East Coast American snobbery. From Joan Didion, it reads as real sorrow over an actual loss. In both cases, a huge point is missed; that point being that either everything manmade is authentic, or nothing is. Either every aspect of our past is manufactured, or none of it is.

*****
Unrelated: Why are Joe Beninati and Craig Laughlin wearing "You Can Play" lapel pins? I just looked it up, and found nothing. And now I have a strange desire to collect lapel pins, or maybe even to wear one.

*****
It's the next day now. There was an additional point to the Joan Didion/Gore Vidal thread, but in typical fashion, I have forgotten it. So I'm going to let it stew for day or so, just allow it to marinate until it all comes back to me. Meanwhile, my 13-year-old made a special point of coming to find me and tell me that my favorite SpongeBob episode ("Tentacle Acres") was on TV. We watched it together. Like most SpongeBob episodes, "Tentacle Acres" is about original sin, which I think is a pretty profound observation, so don't ever say that you don't get deep philosophical insights around here. Joan Didion should call me, because I have more where that came from.  Meanwhile, still nothing about the pins. I'm really eaten up with curiosity about this.

*****
I'm going to Philadelphia again this weekend. Another family party at the Canoe Club. The Canoe Club has been there for a long time, but I didn't know it when I was a child, so it's not part of my past. The stadium where I watched the Phillies play is no longer there; it was demolished in 2004. The parish school that I attended has closed, though the church remains. John Wanamaker's flagship store is now a Macy's, and Strawbridge & Clothier is gone. There are lots of other places from my Philadelphia childhood and youth; some gone forever, and some changed beyond recognition. Children who are growing up there now will have their own places. If they're young, they probably think that those places have been there forever, will be there forever, and will never change. Their parents know better. But it's all real, as real as anything built by people can be.

Distilled

It's 7:45 PM on Monday night. Today was a holiday, so it's been a lovely three-day weekend. I had to work yesterday, but it didn't matter. It still felt like a little vacation. There's something special about going to a movie--even a really bad movie--on Sunday night, and stopping for a drink afterward, and knowing that no one has to get up early the next morning. It was warmer than usual, and with crowds of movie- and restaurant-goers about, it felt more festive than a Saturday night.

*****
My older son was supposed to go to a school dance on Saturday night. He needed dress pants and shoes, and wanted a bow tie, so we went shopping. I suggested that he try gray pants with maybe a striped or windowpane checked shirt, but he decided to stick with black pants and a white shirt. He found a red bow tie with a matching red pocket square, and showed it to me. "What about this one?"

"No," I said. "With black pants, a white shirt, and a red bow tie, you'll look like a waiter. Do you want girls to dance with you, or tap you on the shoulder and ask you for another glass of punch?"

"Funny, Mom," he said. "You have jokes for days."

I do, I thought. I do have jokes for days.

An hour or so later, I realized that this might have been sarcasm, and not heartfelt admiration of my wit.

Sass.

We found pants, shoes, a bow tie, and a new white shirt. With the new clothes and a recent haircut, he looked very sharp; very stylish. The snow started as we left the store, and by 5 PM, a few inches of slushy wet snow had accumulated, and the dance was cancelled. He was disappointed, but not devastated. "I can wear the bow tie for Easter," he said.

*****

The bad movie was "The 15:17 to Paris." My 13-year-old loves ripped-from-the-headlines true-story movies, and the family movie outing was his idea. Let's just say that this one was a good story turned into a terrible movie. But we still had a good time.  We stopped for drinks and a snack after the terrible movie and basked in the vacation atmosphere.

*****

All good things come to an end, and some more abruptly than others. This morning, I heard disturbing news. And that's all I can say about that. It will pass, and there will be better news tomorrow.

*****
Tuesday: It's tomorrow. Well, you know what I mean. No change from yesterday except that it's a day later. I'm watching the Capitals, who are down 3-0 in the 2nd against the Tampa Bay Lightning, and this is the good part of my day.

*****
Wednesday: The thing that weighed so heavily on my mind yesterday seems quite a bit less worrisome today.

Sometimes, I don't sleep. On those nights, burdened with worry or anxiety or lingering post-traumatic stress, I lie awake and think, or I just give up and get out of bed. I was wide awake this morning, and I finally decided that if I was still awake at 4, then I'd just get up. Then, a minute later, it was 4:45. I'd fallen asleep, and though it was just for a little while, it felt like a whole night of sleep had been distilled and concentrated into three quarters of an hour. Everything seemed much better then, much more manageable.

And now, I have to write a newsletter article. It will be at least a week late, which for me, is right on time.

*****
Saturday: Four-year-old house guests: It's all fun and games until someone ends up in the 3 AM vomit crossfire. My kids are older now, so it had been a long time since someone threw up on me in the middle of the night. He's all better now, and I too have recovered from the shock. Vomit wasn't the worst part of this rather icky week, but it's over now. Maybe next week, I'll write something that makes sense. No promises.

Clarinets, Guns, and Money

Wednesday: It's Ash Wednesday, which means Lent, which means no chocolate until Easter. Yes, I know; not quite the same as 40 days in the desert.

*****
And now it's Wednesday night. My older son had a concert at school tonight. Because this particular concert includes young musicians from the cluster of elementary and middle schools that feed into the high school, it's called the "cluster" concert. "Cluster" is descriptive in more ways than one, but that's a story for another day. Let's just say that it's a lot of kids making a lot of noise, not all of it musical.

The point of this concert is to show the progress that children can make if they continue to take music throughout their school careers. In Montgomery County, band programs start in fourth grade, and many of the students pick up an instrument or read a musical note for the very first time during their first band class. After just a few months, they can squeak out a tune in something close enough to unison that it can be performed in public. Again, "cluster" might not do this type of performance justice, but it's all part of the learning process. By middle school, they can play more complex pieces of music, with actual arrangements. By the time they reach high school, they are pretty decent musicians.

The cluster concerts begin with short performances (two or three songs) by the beginning groups, then move on to combined performances that include the advanced elementary and intermediate and advanced middle school bands. Then the high schoolers take the stage.

At my son's high school, the musicians perform in formal attire. The boys wear tuxedos, and the girls wear black dresses. After the younger musicians exit the stage, wearing dark pants or shorts with white polo shirts, the high school kids make a grand entrance, marching confidently into the auditorium, resplendent in black and white with instruments in hand. They usually get a big round of applause, which they obviously enjoy.

The concert was over in just an hour. I waited in the car as my son helped with clean-up, and then we came home and had a late dinner. Then we watched the news. In Parkland, Florida, children the same age as my son spent the afternoon hiding from a gunman.  They weren't holding musical instruments when they were marched in single file out of the school, hands in the air like criminals, leaving behind the bloody, lifeless bodies of 17 of their classmates. And I wondered, what would the blood have looked like on crisp white tuxedo shirts? 

Thursday:  As always, thank God for all of the fucking thoughts and prayers, because otherwise, you might think that our elected leaders aren't doing a damn thing about routine mass slaughter of schoolchildren. And it just doesn't seem possible that leaders of the greatest country on earth would sit by and do absolutely fucking nothing as the bodies continue to pile up.

"What about Chicago?" That's one of my favorite NRA/Fox News/talk radio rejoinders in the gun control debate. Yes, everyone knows that the city with the country's strictest gun laws is also terribly violent. But if we're going to play "what about?" then I can go all fucking day. What about Canada? What about Australia? What about the UK? What about Japan? What about South Korea? What about Western Europe? What about every other industrialized democracy, similar to the U.S. in so many ways, except that they regulate gun sales, and their children don't get gunned down in their classrooms. What about that? That's my response to "What about Chicago?" Oh, and fuck you, NRA. That too.

Maybe it's not the time. Maybe that's it. It's been almost 20 years since Columbine. 20 years of  "not the time." With 8 school shootings in 2018 (a rate of a little more than one per week), maybe the Twitter Thoughts and Prayers Brigade will let us know when the time is right to talk about doing something other than thinking and praying. Or maybe they'll wait until school shootings happen daily and no longer even merit news coverage.

Meanwhile, if you're wondering how much it costs to buy a Senator or a Representative, here's some comparison shopping information.

Frame of reference

Sunday: I'm sick today. Again. I'm not sure why my immune system, once nearly impenetrable, has abandoned me. This actually feels like the flu, but I might be a little better today than yesterday. It's Sunday night at 6:30, and I haven't moved from the couch since I got out of bed this morning.

I hate being sick; it makes me anxious and depressed. But I got to watch six hours of Super Bowl pre-game coverage on TV, so there's that. I was half asleep at some point, when I heard my 13-year-old son say "Muzak? Why is he calling it 'Muzak'? Is that just a weird way of saying 'music'?"

"No," I said. "Muzak is a thing. It's hard to explain." So I tried to explain it and found that I was 100% right--it is hard to explain. My son was alternately curious and puzzled. "Did they only play it in elevators?"

"No," I said. "Elevators, and doctor's offices, and grocery stores--and other places."

"Why?" he asked. "Why did they have music in elevators? And why didn't they just play the real songs?"

"It's hard to explain," I said again. "But it was everywhere when I was growing up, and then it just became much less popular, and now you don't hear it anymore."

*****
So that's a lot of background for the next conversation with a kid; this time, the 16-year-old. I was waiting to drive him to a swim team event last week, and he decided to change his sweatshirt at the last minute. "Hurry up," I told him. "You're already running late."

"I know," he said, pulling off his red hooded sweatshirt. "But this sweatshirt looks weird. I feel like Little Red Robin Hood."

"Like who?" I asked.

"Little Red Robin Hood. You know--with the grandmother and the wolf?"

"You mean Little Red RIDING Hood?" I asked.

He scoffed. "That's not her name. It's Little Red Robin Hood. Isn't it?"

"No," I said, shaking my head. "It's not. There's Robin Hood, and there's Little Red Riding Hood. They're two different people. Not related."

"Hmm," he said. "I've been saying Little Red Robin Hood for a long time. Someone could have told me."

*****
Back to the 13-year-old, on another day last week.

"Mr. R's jokes don't make any sense," he said. Mr. R. is his band teacher.

"How so?" I asked. "Give me an example."

He thought for a moment. "OK. Here's one. What do you get when you throw a piano down a well?"

"I don't know," I said. "What?"

"A flat minor," he said. "See? What does that even mean?"

I thought for a minute. "Are you sure he said well? Did he maybe say mine shaft? What do you get when you throw a piano down a mine shaft?"

"Yeah!" he said. "He did say mine shaft! But that makes even less sense. What's a mine shaft?"

I explained what a mine shaft is. He looked thoughtful for a moment, and then the look of recognition dawned. "OH! So it's a MINER and a MINOR! Like a guy who works in a mine, and a FLAT MINOR, like in music! Ha ha ha! That's actually a pretty good one!"

*****
Frame of reference is everything. I read to my children all the time when they were little, but I guess we missed the Little Red Riding Hood. I'm not sure what happened with the 13-year-old and the mine shaft and the well. I know that mining is a dying industry, but he's also never seen a well in his life, so I don't know how his mind subconsciously substituted well for mine shaft. And I never did ask what prompted the Muzak conversation in the first place. There are just so many things that were household words when I was their age, which are now obsolete, no longer even remembered.

*****
Tuesday: Some things, however, don't change that much. I just helped my 16-year-old with a paper SAT registration form. You still have to fill in the boxes with block letters, and then color in the little circles. What's different now is that you have to supply a picture. We didn't have a picture that met all of the specifications (of which there are many) so we took one and printed it.

He's wearing a different hoodie in this one. I wonder who reviews the applications; which College Board employee sees the thousands of pictures of  eager, optimistic teenagers with their hoodies and their floppy hair, and their sweet, barely formed faces.

Head and shoulders visible; full face view
(required). Floppy hair and hoodie (optional)

*****
Thursday: So I'm not much of a football fan, and I've lived in a Redskins household for many years, but I grew up in Philadelphia, among the hardest-core of hard-core Philadelphia sports fans. I watched the game from my sick-person nest on the couch, and although I'd been rooting for the Eagles all along, I was surprised at how happy I felt about the win. My grandfather was a huge fan, loyal through the franchise's worst years, when they made the Browns look like contenders. My brother and nephews are also dedicated fans. My brother, one of my sisters, four of my nephews, and my 72-year-old aunt all went to the parade today, which was patrolled by my cousin, a Philadelphia Police officer. I'm pretty sure that none of them punched horses or climbed light poles, but I saw some pictures of my hometown doing some crazy things. I'm happy for them. Fly Eagles Fly.

User Manual

I don't really make New Year's resolutions (though if I did, I'd probably get around to it about two weeks into the year). But this year, I did decide (not resolve--verb choice is everything, and to resolve is to de facto make a resolution, which I don't do) to try to force myself to learn new things.

If you hang around here at all, then maybe you're wondering "What on earth is she talking about? She doesn't seem to do anything other than write and read and drive kids around and compulsively clean her house, so she must be learning something from the reading part, at least." And you'd be right. But gaining knowledge (however useless) by reading a book and learning a practical skill are two entirely separate and distinct things. I do the former very well. I do the latter very badly.

For example, I'm writing this on the Chromebook that I bought a few months ago. There's a lot to love about this little mini-computer, including its light weight, compact size, semi-attractive design, and keyboard that is ideally suited to my hands. But there are many differences between working on this and working on a PC, and instead of taking a disciplined and orderly approach to learning how to use the Chromebook well, I'm doing it piecemeal, just looking up tricks and keyboard shortcuts when I need them (and promptly forgetting and having to look up the same tricks and shortcuts over and over again. Hello? Where is the delete key?)

Last year, my husband bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner for me, thinking that I'd rather have something lightweight and easy to maneuver. And it's a nice vacuum cleaner, which also looks interesting and colorful. But it's not well-designed, because I still can't figure out how to use the attachments. I tried one time and gave up. In my defense, it's a domestic appliance, and an obviously essential feature like the hand-held attachments should be so self-evidently easy to use that "figuring it out" shouldn't even enter into the equation. There's always a work-around; mine is making my husband attach them for me. Not perfect, but it gets the job done.

*****

If you're a member of the very broad demographic that includes suburban mothers ages 30-60, then you have probably read or heard about the Instant Pot. And you have probably asked friends about it, who have probably all told you that you MUST get one, immediately. But if you're me, you have ignored their advice, because one look at the picture of the Instant Pot suggests that it's a complicated little piece of machinery, and that even thinking about figuring out how to use it will stress you out.

What is this, the space shuttle?
I mean, that's a lot of buttons, right? 

So I resisted. Every time someone would tell me how life-changingly awesome the Instant Pot is, I'd think about buying one, but then I'd also think about having to figure out how to use it. But two weeks ago, I finally caved and ordered one from Amazon, and it arrived two days later.

I panicked for a moment when I arrived home from work and found the box waiting for me. Normally, I love packages, but I knew that I had to teach myself how to use the Instant Pot the minute I opened it, or it would sit on my kitchen counter, untouched, for months. Maybe years.So I left it in the box, just until the next day. And this is where this could easily have turned into a story about how, weeks later, the box remained unopened, a daily reminder of my practical incompetence and strong inclination toward procrastination, but I actually did open it the next day.

Almost immediately, I wished I hadn't. Aside from being packaged to within an inch of its life, it included accessories and an instruction manual and a recipe book and a "quick start" guide and spoons and measuring cups and various and sundry parts. On a list of things that provoke hyperventilating anxiety for me, complicated machinery ranks pretty near the top, but proliferation of stuff ranks even higher.

Here I was faced with a choice: Either breathe into a paper bag, gather my wits (such as they are), and figure it out; or gather up all of the parts and paper, throw it all back in the box, and run screaming from the house.

I went with Plan B.

The End.

*****

No, I'm kidding. First I got rid of the box, along with the forty pounds of styrofoam packing materials, plastic, and extraneous paper. Then I put the spoons and other plastic parts into the dishwasher. That left me with a reasonably manageable pile of stuff with which to tangle. I started with the diagram, making sure that I could identify all of the moving parts. Then I read through the rest of the instruction manual, until I felt confident that I knew, at least, how to tighten the lid properly (it's a pressure cooker, so you have to do that part right or it will blow up) and how to turn it on.

Armed with knowledge, I decided to try to poach a chicken breast. Success! A few days later, I cooked some rice, which also turned out fine.  So far, I've only used it those two times, but now I have several more recipes to try; and the hard part, as far as I'm concerned, is out of the way.

Me: 1. Instant Pot: 0.

*****
High on success, I decided (not resolved) to tackle one practical challenge per month for the rest of 2018, so that by December, I'd have a dozen new and useful skills. And then the timesheet debacle happened.

People who work for the Federal government, or for government contractors, make up another pretty broad demographic (especially here in the DMV, where we're probably half the population). Those of us who work for contractors are required to carefully record every minute of time that we work, and to make sure that our government customers are billed for all of the time that we spend on their projects, but not for one minute more. This is pretty straightforward if you're 100% overhead (so none of your time is billable to the Feds) or if you're 100% embedded with a particular customer (so all of your time is billable to that customer). It gets complicated for people like me, who work on several different government projects, in addition to overhead projects.

Well, it's complicated now, anyway. We used to use a very simple online system, and it took me no more than five minutes a day, tops, to record my time. And then we decided to upgrade to a very well-known "enterprise" (God help me) system that I won't name here, but it rhymes with "Smell Tek," because it stinks. I won't burden you with details (too late). But many people who are far smarter than I (another very broad demographic) were completely flummoxed by the ridiculous complexity that this system has imposed on the once-simple task of recording work time.

So I'm taking February off. Instant Pot cooking and timekeeping count as my new skills for January and February. Maybe in March, I'll show the Chromebook who's boss.

*****

It's Saturday morning now. I'm hopeful that the politicians will figure out how to reopen the government, but as always, both sides are far more concerned with getting power and keeping it than with actually representing the interests of the people who elected them. "Schumer Shutdown" has a satisfying Fox News alliterative ring to it, of course, but it's just too ridiculous to even suggest that anyone other than the party that controls the Legislative and Executive branches is responsible for this. I'm not a Chuck Schumer fan (I can't stand most of the Democratic leadership) but this is the only shutdown that has ever occurred under one-party control.  Anyway, I'm pretty sure that they'll figure it out today, because President Trump has a $100,000-a-person party tonight. By the way, good luck to all of those billionaires if they think they'll get a refund if Trump doesn't show up.