Four years ago today I wrote my very first entry in this journal, titled “Waking up to green mice.” Naturally, it had to do with cats, because what better way to start a journal written by, and about, a bonified cat lover.

Over the past four years the journal has undergone a handful of design changes – some minor (like when I discovered how to make buttons in a graphics program and replaced the text links), and some major (first it was blue, then it was yellow and green, now it is mostly purple). My life has undergone a lot of changes as well. I went from working as a highly stressed (but highly paid) software consultant traveling hither and yon writing code, to pure technical writing, to being laid off, to working with social workers and their clients, and then to a job which combines the best of the code writing and the technical writing into one and that doesn’t require travel or a hideous commute. I went from single, to dating, to married. I went from renting a tiny little house to building a house from scratch that’s almost double the space of what we were used to. I went from couch potato to someone who’s working out regularly (3 to 5 times a week); someone who actually not only owns padded spandex bike shorts, but who wears them for actual bike riding on a (getting more) regular basis.

There’ve been a lot of changes in the past four years, most of which are documented in this little journal of mine. On a whim I counted – I’ve written over 770 entries so far. Never in my life have I managed to maintain a paper journal for more than a few months at a time, but it’s been four years for this one.

So anyway, four years. And speaking of exercise and biking and padded shorts, Richard and I decided that despite the severe slackage of last year in the biking department (due to job changes, job travel, and let’s face it – sheer sloth), we wanted to keep up with the riding. So we made an agreement to try to ride 1000 miles in 2004. Since it only averages out to a little over 80 miles per month it’s really not such an impressive goal as it might look. The main thing is just to get us back on the bikes.

To that end we got up on Tuesday morning and went for a brisk but short ride around town. The batteries in our bike lights are dead so we decided to stick to the better lit roads in town, and managed to cross off the first 6.5 miles toward our goal. It’s not much, but it’s a start. I realize that January is going to be a slow month as we tweak our schedules and get ourselves back into the habit while trying to work around inclement weather (this morning, for example, it was so foggy that riding in the dark would have been too dangerous), but I know once we get back into a rhythm, it will all work out.

As a little added incentive for myself in this goal, I signed up for Going Nowhere, joining a throng of other people determined to rack up miles in some manner or another. So hopefully soon I will be able to start proudly displaying a string of little icons at the bottom of my entries, marking my progress to date. It’s a toss up between whether I want to measure my progress in rubber duckies or in chocolate chip cookies, but since I don’t have to worry about that until the first 100 miles, I figure I’ve got a few more weeks to make up my mind.

Remember back in September, when I talked about this? It’s been a few months, and a few delays due to trying to coordinate two busy schedules, one of which includes the schedules of two busy little kids, but finally my friend and I hooked up and managed to nail down a day to get started on the next phase of the tree in the breakfast nook.

After church we all went out to lunch and then she and her kids and her large and impressive container of paints and painting paraphenelia came over to our house. The kids immediately busied themselves with the various toys we’ve collected for precisely that purpose (we may not have kids of our own, but we try to at least be prepared to keep them busy when they come to visit!) while she and I got to work. Or rather, she got to work and I sat on a chair and watched her in awe.

She is one of these people who can just see things that I am completely incapable of seeing. She’s the type of person paint chips were meant for – she can take that teeny tiny square of color and not only envision the entire room in that shade, she can also toss in accent colors and techniques and know immediately how it will look. I, on the other hand, am one of those people who still has a hard time determing if my top matches my pants when I get dressed in the morning. This, obviously, is why she took over on the tree once I dutifully painted in the outline she so nicely drew for me.

The trunk is completely detailed now, and it looks amazing. She even thought about how the light comes in from the windows so that it will look ‘natural’. And then she dragged out smaller brushes and showed me how to do leaves because despite my complete and utter lack of artistic talent, the leaves get to be my responsibility. Of course, just like with the trunk and branches, I’ll put the splotches on the wall and then she’ll come over for one more round of detail work to turn my splotches into something looking less like a preschooler was let loose with a bucket of fingerpaint, and more like…well…a tree.

I cannot even begin to tell you how exited I am at how this thing is turning out. I may, currently, be hopelessly intimidated by the prospect of having to ‘leaf’ this whole thing by myself, but I am telling myself, much like the Little Train That Could, “I think I can, I think I can”, and if I keep saying it long enough I’m sure I will convince even myself.

In the meantime, however, I give you the tree, phase 2.

A few months ago I agreed to ‘teach’ a Sunday school class called “The Gospel According to Harry Potter”. It’s actually based on a book by the same name, and the gist of the six-week class will be to go through the Harry Potter books and discover just why they really aren’t the evil devil-worshiping civilization-defiling works that the right-wing fundamentalists are convinced they are. This is an attitude which, frankly, completely confuses me because after all, they are just books – highly entertaining books about kids who encounter some real life problems (albeit wrapped in some rather fantastical events) and who have to learn how to handle them.

I’ve been struggling with how, exactly, to ‘teach’ this class since my goal is to make it mainly discussion. Of course this all depends on how the rest of the class acts (and is it cheating to say that I have begged Richard to be in the class at least the first week so as to help ‘seed’ the discussion just in case everyone else sits there and stares at me like little lumps?). Today, in preparation for the class, I read through the book on which it’s based, plus another one my mom got me for Christmas called The Spirituality of Potterworld and I took notes and flagged a few pages in each, and then to top it off I read through first book in the series again and decided that I’d stop there, even though there was still plenty of time to make it through the remaining four. No matter how much I might like the books, there is only so much Harry Potter even I can take in one day, and three books of it was enough.

So instead of focusing on Harry Potter I decided to take care of a few things I’d been putting off, like mailing off the duplicate gift we got for Christmas, taking a much needed nap, and making some design changes to the Stonegoose site. Except that Richard wrote the Stonegoose site in php, and I do not speak php. I speak HTML only and am rather proud of that fact. I have, in fact, not ever really wanted to learn php. So this is why it is that I managed to break it, and quite spectacularly, just by doing something as simple as adding and removing a few links and reformatting the link lists. Luckily, at least, Richard came home from helping his dad set up DSL and a wireless network at his parents house shortly thereafter and figured out what I’d inadvertantly done, so now all is well. Plus I took out the little ‘stone’ goose my mom-in-law gave me for Christmas and dressed it in all twelve of its seasonal hats and posed it cleverly on paper bags so it looks as if it had an actual backdrop, and then Richard did something nifty so that every time you load the main page you see a different picture. We have already established that I am easily amused, so I am sure it is no surprise to you that I have, since he did this, sat here and hit ‘reload’ numerous times just to giggle at the goose in all its various hats.

Last night was the first craft night of the year. I had fully intended to bring my nephew’s sweater with me so I could get help from my knitting guru on how to fix it (I’m going to unpick one of the shoulders and then sew on another few rows to include some button holes. Or at least this is the theory. I have yet to do it to see if it will work), and to that end I made sure to grab the correct size needles and the correct color yarn. Naturally, however, I forgot to bring the sweater itself, so instead I worked on the sweater I’m knitting for myself, and chatted with the others and it was very noisy and there were small people dashing in and out and really, I wish we could do this craft night more than once a month because it is so fun.

I was right about the meetings yesterday. They both went on far longer than expected, and we did not leave for the airport until after everyone else had gone home and the office lights were turned off around us; until it was so late we startled the cleaning crew as we emerged blearily from the door.

The last time we did this, my boss and I made reservations for the later flight but got to the airport in time to catch a slightly earlier one. This time we tried to do the same thing but the earlier flight was so delayed they were moving everyone onto the later flight anyway. So instead we wandered around the terminal and tried to find something to eat (Burbank airport is not blessed with much in the way of food choices), and then we finally just sat at our gate until the plane arrived and we could finally board and fly home.

Today I have been bleary and exhausted, and it has been hard to focus on the things I’ve needed to do. By the time the work day was over and I was heading home I had no energy at all to try to do even the simple act of cooking lemon pepper chicken for the fajitas we’d planned for dinner. So instead we got Chinese food and managed to finish just in time for choir practice, where it was obvious that I was not the only one there who was tired and bleary and coming down from what has been a very long post-holiday week.

I am writing this while sitting in the most marvelous little chair. It is covered in deep plum plush and looks like a modernized version of an easy chair. Tucked underneath is a little footrest on wheels, covered with a pad of the same plum fabric, while on either arm are separate pieces that can be adjusted. On the left is a little drink holder that swivels, and while perhaps deep enough to hold a mug or a paper cup of coffee, is not exactly the best place to stash a bottle of diet Pepsi. On the right is a little lap desk that can swivel in and out, to any position I desire. If only it would swivel down an inch or so I’d be so happy – once again I am confronted by a chair that was only ever met for taller people than I.

I’m sitting in this ridiculous little chair because I am down in Santa Monica again, this time for two meetings. Normally I would be camped out in the tiny little meeting room but it is lunchtime and there are two people eating lunch in there, and I didn’t want to disturb them. So instead I will wait in this silly chair, in this little lounge area that looks as if no one ever uses it, looking out over an extremely sunny balcony that looks as if it hasn’t been used in quite a while either. There is, however, a new gas grill out there, so I can only hope that future use is intended.

I flew down this morning and arrived a few hours before I was needed. But such is the problem with flying; you have to take what you can get, and the next latest flight would have had me here too late. So I got up at 5 in the morning and drove myself to the airport with plenty of time to deal with nonexistent parking problems and nonexistent security lines. I got to the Burbank airport and tracked down a taxi and then the taxi driver and I did our best to figure out just where the heck I was supposed to go. My description of “remember where that guy hit his gas instead of his brakes a few months ago and plowed through a whole bunch of people? The office is over there” wasn’t as helpful as I’d expected.

It’s a lovely day to be here, if I had to be anywhere today other than in cold and soggy Sacramento. I wandered the promenade during lunch and ambled slowly up and down the streets, enjoying unseasonably warm weather and perfectly blue skies. But now I am back here, in my little plum chair, waiting for the real reason I flew down here – two meetings, back to back, both of which promise to be very long, but both of which I have been rather curiously looking forward to since I first learned of their existence. They may both end up in lots more work for me in the long run, but this actually makes me quite happy. I may never shake that residual feeling which has been tiptoeing around in my head since I was laid off. It is far better to have too much to do than not enough; far better to be needed than to be told to pack up your things in a box and go home now because you are suddenly and without warning expendable.

We put Christmas away tonight. We packed it all up in plastic bins, nestling ornaments carefully in divided layers so they won’t be crushed; arranging and rearranging boxes of cards and wreaths and garlands and various other decorations so that somehow, some way, despite there being more of everything this year, they all fit into the same space.

The wall above the fireplace is empty and far too white. The mantel looks shrunken; the shelves – despite being full of books – look bare. The tree still stand, listing severely to one side in its container, but it has been given only a temporary respite. Come trash day on Friday morning it, too, will disappear, and in the meantime it looks lonely, stripped of baubles and sparkles and lights.

There are still bits and pieces of Christmas that remain. After all, putting Christmas away is never a one-day affair. This weekend or next Richard will climb on the roof and take down all the outdoor lights while I carefully wind up the indoor ones and store away all the suction cup hangers and gutter hooks for another year. There is the inevitable cluster of broken ornaments that require either some careful application of super glue, or for enough time to pass until we finally give up and just throw them away. And even when this is all done, days will pass before all the last bits of Christmas are found and put away.

Even so, there is a sense of relief. I have been ready to put Christmas away earlier than usual this year. It’s not that there was any particular reason – as holiday seasons go this was one of the good ones. I had simply reached the end of my appreciation for it all. It is as if only once Christmas is all packed up can I feel as if I can truly start a new year. And it is also because sometimes all I truly need is for everything – no matter how sparkly and colorful and lovely it might have been – to just go back to normal.

Last night we had my parents over for dinner. I dashed home from work and swung by the produce stand on the way home to pick up a huge bag of green beans, and then tossed two heads of garlic into the oven and got the brown rice started on the stove and stood there and snapped green beans, and somehow managed to get everything mostly set up or ready by the time they arrived. Richard came home later and started the steaks that, despite being in the fridge all day, were still mostly frozen. Regardless of that setback, they turned out fine – perfectly cooked, and when slathered with roasted garlic they were delicious. It amuses me that due to our spontaneous order of Omaha Steaks, and the antelope I consumed on New Year’s Eve, I have eaten more red meat in the past few weeks then I had the entire year. In fact I think perhaps the last time I had a steak was when we were in Chicago for the training for Benthic Creatures, and that was more than a year ago. I don’t deliberately avoid red meat; it’s just that I usually prefer fish or chicken, or no meat at all. And yet the steaks for dinner were my idea last night. Go figure.

Today was not nearly as lazy a day as Thursday, but still we managed to finish off the rest of season 1 of Angel. We also cleared out the guest room that, because it is where the wrapping paper lives, had become a sort of mini catastrophe zone by the time Christmas rolled around. Richard gathered up boxes and deflated all those little plastic packing bags (Amazon always stuffs at least half a dozen in each box) while I grabbed my gardening shears and tackled the bushes on the side yard. The bushes for what will eventually be our ‘fence’ are box hedges and they grow sooo slowly. But they can be shaped perfectly and eventually they will look nice and I keep reminding myself that this is why we chose box hedges every time I compare them to the other bushes – the ones on the side yard that grow about half a foot a month (or at least it seems that way sometimes) and refuse to be kept in line. I hacked down probably about three or four feet worth of bush parts off that side yard, and this is not the first time I have had to do that since we planted them. Compare that to the little box hedges, which are finally now tall enough that it’s easier to go through the gate instead of just stepping over them. They’ll probably take another two years at least before they are anything as definite as a ‘fence’, and in the meantime I will most likely have hacked down a few fences worth of excess foliage in those other darn bushes. Next time I am going to plan this better. Box hedges all around is sounding better and better every time I have to drag out the clippers.

Today we managed to take care of another chore we’ve been putting off and putting off, much like trimming those darn bushes. When we moved in we started out with several extra house keys. But eventually they were all dispersed to the various people who needed access to our house (mainly to take care of our cats). When we started the cleaning service a few months ago, Richard gave them his house key, and when we hired the pet sitter for the Christmas trip, the only house key we had left was the one on my key ring. So for about three weeks now we have had no way to get into our house at all except through the garage. And I have been expecting a rather rousing dose of Murphy’s Law any day now regarding this distinct lack of keys.

However, somehow Murphy was apparently not paying attention. The pet sitter swung by to drop off our key, so we promptly zipped off to the local hardware store and made an extra three copies. It occurs to me right now that I have no idea where Richard put those extra copies, but we did at least make sure that they work, and at least now we each have the ability to get into our own house if something ever happens to the garage door opener. This may not be very exciting in the grand scheme of things, but I figure if nothing else, the ability to avoid getting locked out of my own house is at least worth noting as a good thing.

We did not watch the stupid ball drop in Times Square, and we did not really do any sort of toasting at all, but it was still a nice New Year’s Eve. I left work a little early so I could get home in time to change before we had to head back to Sacramento for dinner. I tried not to eat much for lunch and neither did Richard, but even if we’d not eaten the entire day previous, I still think we wouldn’t have managed to finish dinner. It was an amazing amount of food.

The restaurant is one of our favorites anyway, and last night they outdid themselves. We started with heirloom squash and chestnut soup with just a hint of peppery kick. I am not a squash fan so had been unsure of this soup, but it was divine, and if I can ever track down the recipe I will be such a happy camper. Then they brought us a selection of sausages and some lobster spring rolls, and once we’d savored those tidbits we moved on to huge spinach salads with candied pecans. There was a tiny dish of passion fruit sorbet between salad and the main course – filet of beef and antelope – and then, finally, there was dessert – intensely chocolate mouse smothered with an orange glaze, or praline cheesecake with hazelnuts and vanilla bean gelato. And at the end, when we had to reluctantly push away more than half our desserts and were sure we could not possibly fit in another bite, they brought us tiny chocolates filled with a passion fruit crème that we simply could not pass up.

After dinner we wandered Old Sacramento for a little bit, then ended up finding a place to sit so we could just watch the people walk by. There were hundreds of people milling around, wearing flashing earrings and necklaces or glittery hats, and blowing on horns or rattling noisemakers. At one point a woman came by shaking hands, followed by a man with a video camera; turns out it was the mayor of Sacramento. And eventually we joined the slowly growing crowd of people standing near the river, just in time to see fireworks show, which was short but spectacular, especially the finale.

After the fireworks we headed home. I took a short nap (or tried – the cats didn’t really let me), and then we curled up on the futon downstairs with cookies and ice cream and ushered in the new year with the first disk in season 1 of Angel. About twenty minutes after midnight Richard looked over at me and wished me a happy new year, and I blinked, realized that midnight was past, and did the same. And then we stayed up for another three hours until we’d finished the first four episodes and decided that the show was starting to grow on us, before we finally could no longer keep our eyes open and crawled into bed.

Today has been such a lovely lazy day. I got up early to feed the cats since they refuse to let me sleep late, and then couldn’t get back to sleep. So finally I went downstairs and curled up on the futon under blankets, where I was promptly swarmed by four of the cats, and that is where Richard found me when he came down a little later. We ended up watching more episodes of Angel and eating a few leftover cookies from our New Year’s Eve ‘feast’ until early afternoon, at which point I finally decided that no matter what the cats wanted, I didn’t think I could lie in one place all day just so they could be comfortable. So instead of playing cat bed, we decided to go out and hit the outlet stores because we both were in need of new pants.

I was fully expecting to see crowds, since it’s a day off for most people, but the outlet stores were practically empty. In a place where you usually have to circle once or twice to find a parking spot it was bizarre to be able to park right next to each store we wanted to visit. I guess everyone was staying home, either sleeping off the excesses of last night or watching the game or the parade. Whatever the reason, it was nice to be able to browse at our leisure without having to jostle through crowds. We went to the fabric store to snag some boxes for ornaments and lights (since they were on an incredible sale) and I managed to not even go near the yarn aisle at all, and then we ate lunch and came home and watched more Angel and let more cats sit on us and that pretty much sums up the rest of the day.

I talked Richard into opening his main birthday present early because I knew he would want it for the trip to and from Seattle (a 30-GB mp3 player), and since that and Christmas kind of wiped out the rest of my budget for gifts, I didn’t really have much else to give him (also the mp3 player was sort of a ‘big’ gift anyway). While we were at Fry’s this past weekend I bought him the software to learn Mandarin, which I told him I would wrap for him even though he knew about it, but he ended up opening up the box and installing it before I could even wrap it. So this morning, faced with the fact that he has received every single one of his gifts early, I grabbed something he already owns and wrapped it deliberately messy, with a whole lot of extra tape, and then I woke him up by yelling “Happy Birthday” at him and made him open it. Unfortunately he was a little too groggy to fully appreciate the humor at the time; it wasn’t until we were sitting in the little bakery about an hour or so later, eating breakfast, that he started to laugh about what I’d done. So that was my final birthday present to him, I suppose – a way to start the day with a laugh.

He has the day off today from work, lucky him, but I had to come into work. It’s quiet in the office since people are still off on vacation, and it is hard to focus on work when I can look outside at the river and the pretty day and it just reminds me that if I was home we could go do something fun together like go for a bike ride or even just a walk before the weather turns on us again. But that isn’t really going to happen today, so instead I am focusing on tonight, when we will dress up in pretty clothes and go to our favorite restaurant in Old Sacramento and eat far too much marvelous food and wander around all the stores and see how they are decorated for the holidays, and then watch the fireworks over the river. We did not bring any leftover Christmas cookies home with us which sort of defeats the whole idea of toasting in the new year with leftover cookies, but there is ice cream in the freezer if we feel the need, and I will mull a pot of cider, and maybe I might even swing by the store and buy a package of those silly poppers that explode in showers of confetti and tiny paper streamers, just so we can set those off at midnight and confuse the cats and make noise and be as goofy and silly as we want to be because we might as well end the day (and the year) as we started it – with a laugh.

Happy 36th Birthday to my favorite guy. Happy New Year to everyone else.

After all the wildness of the weather yesterday it was a bit odd to wake this morning to relative quiet outside, and to drive to work with the sun actually daring to show itself from behind the clouds. All through the day we would occasionally glance wistfully outside at the beautiful, perfect day – the river so blissfully calm and the sky so blue. Why couldn’t this nice weather come on Thursday, when we have the day off from work and can take advantage of it? Instead there is more rain predicted for New Year’s Day – and while I fully intend to be as lazy as possible that day I had pondered the idea of taking a short bike ride in the morning, just to kick the year off on the right foot. Ah well.

I have been having fun at work these past two days since my boss gave me more things to build in the database – things that required some marvelously long bits of code to write, so as to execute all the appropriate functionality. There were times I just had to stop and stare at the table structures for a while, or scribble random things on paper in order to try to figure out exactly how to make it all work, and a few of the pieces had my brain spinning ever so slightly, and it could have been a lot more complicated except that my boss decided at the last minute to make a tiny change that made it all so much simpler. Plus there was a brief discussion in the morning on what-if’s, having to do with huge piles of data that currently live in spreadsheets, and whether it might be easier to manipulate them in their current location or pull them into Access. I sense more code writing in my future. I love this job.

Richard’s parents came up to take us out to dinner for Richard’s birthday. We went to Chevy’s, where we all made very sure to inform the waitress that it was his birthday so they would come and put a sombrero on his head and sing (loudly and off key) to him at the end of dinner. Because, really, what better way to show the true depths of your love for someone than to dress him up and laugh at him?

And then after dinner we came back home so he could open his presents and so we could all laugh at Allegra, who was working herself into a fine snit and was randomly either telling us all off, or reaching out a paw to smack whoever was closest on the head. She wasn’t using claws, at least, which is rather restrained for her when she is in full snit mode. I think it helped that Richard’s presents came with a large paper-filled box, into which she promptly settled, still grumbling at the world in general even as she burrowed into the paper.