Next weekend is a three-day weekend. I am holding on to that fact right now, even as I sit here, barely able to keep my eyes open and knowing that no amount of coffee is going to wake me up any further this morning. Yesterday afternoon during my lunch hour I went to Curves and staggered in, bleary-eyed, hoping it would at least wake me up a bit more. It worked – but only briefly. By 3 o’clock in the afternoon I was searching for toothpicks with which to prop open my eyelid, and by the time I got home I was more than ready for a nap. Today wasn’t much better.

I am blaming this latest bout of restless insomnia on the rather abrupt change in weather. After the short and fairly soggy spring we had, we seem to have jumped directly into summer without much of a transition at all. It’s supposed to be in the low 90’s all week. And even with the windows open it feels somehow stuffy and oppressive in our room at night – as if summer is lurking like some huge and malevolent creature just beyond our sight.

I know the real reason why it has gotten so warm so quickly, and it has everything to do with Murphy’s Law. We’re discussing large amounts of do-it-yourself labor for our backyard. Naturally this requires Mother Nature to bring on the energy-sucking heat wave. I have a sneaky feeling that we may be scuttling around in our backyard digging trenches for the raised flower bed wall, pulling weeds, and setting flagstones for pathwork with only the full moon, or perhaps the rising sun as light. And all the while wondering aloud why we didn’t get this sudden urge to landscape back when it was still cool enough outside to make heavy lifting and digging more enjoyable.

It was a long and musical day for me today, since the instrumental ensemble played in church in the morning and the recorder group held a short but highly effective rehearsal as well. Right now it looks as if we are actually going to start having ‘real’ classes on Sundays – perhaps a few this summer and then more seriously in the fall. The recorder seems deceptively easy to play, but there are nuances of pitch and tone that we all (with very few exceptions) still need to learn. And somehow having a recorder group that actually knows what it is doing, beyond simply providing notes in rhythm and (mostly) in tune seems like a worthy goal.

Tonight’s choral concert went surprisingly better than I think most of us ever expected, especially after the disaster of Thursday night’s rehearsal. By the end of the evening my voice was fading, and I think most of us in the choir were completely exhausted. It doesn’t help that the choir director is inordinately keen on us all wearing robes for this sort of thing – robes that are made of polyester and are therefore equivalent to wearing one’s own personal, portable sauna. We had a quick rehearsal beforehand, walking through the entire thing twice to figure out all the logistics of choir versus recorder group versus everything else. And then the concert started and suddenly a lot of things started falling into place.

Back when I was in synchronized swimming, I remember how consistently we would flub things in practice. There were always sections in the routines where I could never manage to hold my breath quite long enough, or get a formation quite right. But I was never concerned because I knew that come performance time (be it exhibition or competition), somehow it would all work out. When I was involved in the various bands in high school and college, there was always the same sort of understanding – a difficult section flubbed here and there wasn’t so much of a worry because the rush of adrenaline that came with any sort of ‘real’ performance somehow smoothed out edges that practice never could. Tonight, the choral concert felt the same way. By no means were we perfect – but in the past two years with this director we’ve done a lot of improvement, and it really showed.

This morning started with cornmeal waffles and pecan butter, and then Richard ran off to get a haircut while I got started on the house-cleaning. I cleaned the kitchen and cleared off tables while he vacuumed up the rampaging dust bunnies and unearthed the back porch from the pile of clutter that had somehow accumulated there over the winter months. Then we managed to get ourselves thoroughly lost trying to find the restaurant where we were to meet my parents and sisters and their offspring for lunch.

After lunch Richard and my older sister’s husband went off for some quality nerd bonding time (or in other words, they saw Matrix Reloaded. Richard and I actually saw this last night as well, since I was not willing to wait any longer than absolutely necessary. And while we are on the subject I should point out that while Kenu Reaves still cannot act his way out of a paper bag and while the movie editors really need to get over their obsession with bullet-time fight scenes because we get it already, it was still a lot of fun). Meanwhile my parents and my little sister and I piled into a car and meandered around the back roads in the hills between Fairfield and Vacaville until we found the Morningsun Herb Farm.

My mom and my little sister’s excuse was that my little sister was putting in an herb garden for my mom for a (belated) mother’s day present. My excuse was that I have this lovely garden window in the kitchen that has been sadly lacking in greenery for far too long.

It’s a dangerous place, this herb farm. Lush greenery everywhere you turn, with all the fragrant scents of the contents of a spice rack. The sheer volume of different types of each herb or vegetable or flower was at times almost overwhelming. How to choose just one type of sage or lavendar or basil from the dozens of varieties offered? I filled my arms with tiny pots – garlic chives and thai basil and geraniums that smell oh-so-deliciously of nutmeg. When I no longer had space to carry them I tracked down a convenient box and added parsley, cinnamon basil, cilantro. I eyed low-growing creepers for future use in garden pathways and pondered an entire shelf of tomato plants – purple, yellow, striped, cherry, giant. There were peppers of every variety. At one point we walked through the little demonstration gardens where the lavender bushes grew huge, and where an extremely lazy garden snake made its way nonchalantly across the path.

Then it was time to drop off my parents and little sister with their flats of herbs and then a quick run to the grocery store before heading home to start working on dinner. I peeled and chopped and stirred and blended carrots and potatoes and celery and onions into creamy potato cheese soup. I stirred butter and eggs and flour together and made nearly a dozen golden-brown cream puffs to fill with cool whip and drizzle with chocolate sauce later that night. And then everyone descended on our house – 7 adults and three toddlers – to run around on our new grass in the backyard, and crowd around the table in our dining room for dinner, and babble excitedly at the cats, and take nighttime baths in the big green marble tub. Well, only the three toddlers did those last two, but otherwise the house rang with noise – laughter and talking and the thundering of toddler feet.

Later, after Richard went off to meet friends for gaming, I went to my parents’ house and picked up my little sister to get coffee. We sat in Starbucks because it was the quietest of the coffee shops we could find, and we talked about things – girl things and family things and children and husbands – over coffee and chai and mocha crunch angel food cake, and discussed once again planning a sisters-only trip one of these days. And once the coffee was gone and it was time for the coffee shop to close, I dropped her back off at my parents house and drove home, reminded once again why I miss her so.

It’s been a crazy kind of week, all building up to this weekend. My little sister flew down today with her daughter (her husband is off at a wedding), and so I�ve been trying to figure out how to fit in time to see them in between work and everything else.

The ‘everything else’, for the most part, is the choral concert this weekend, and tonight we had our final practice. Two hours, to go over far too many songs that we have not had nearly enough time to practice. And to say that it went badly is putting it mildly.

It doesn’t help that the little fledgling recorder group is playing for the concert as well – playing music that has overwhelmed a good portion of the group and is still a struggle for the rest of us who – while we may at least get the rhythms, are still trying desperately to get the fingerings correct. Last night I went to a friend’s house and three of us gathered with stands and music and did our best to muddle through the most difficult parts. I think I have an advantage, having such a long background in music, but my tired brain wants to use oboe fingerings for recorder notes and it throws me off time and time again.

Tonight we were all tired and frustrated. People made mistakes over things we’ve long since passed by. People showed up late and wore their exhaustion and frustration like armor. The choir director snapped at us. We snapped at him and each other. We are not ready. No matter what happens; no matter that there is no more time left to rehearse, we are not ready.

We walked out of the church and looked up into the sky. The night was beautiful – breezy and cool and lit by stars. The total eclipse of the moon was tonight, and while we didn�t rush outside to see it at its zenith, an hour later, earth’s shadow still fell across most of the moon�s surface.

And somehow it all doesn’t matter so much anymore.

There are plusses and minuses to working in a tiny office. For example, one benefit is that there are no vending machines, and now that the bag of tootsie rolls in the kitchen has been depleted, this means that unless I want to chew coffee grounds, I am reduced to sucking down water in the late afternoon when I am hungry. Alhough don’t think I haven’t considered the coffee grounds idea a time or two. Ditto with the plastic silverware.

This is good for the whole ‘healthier me’ thing, of course, since I bring my lunch every day (hooray for the joy that is frozen dinners). So if I don’t bring it with me, I don’t get to eat. Naturally, one of the things we purchased shortly after we decided to take the eating plan seriously again was a set of little one-cup containers, providing an easy method of carrying around my current favorite snack food (Lucky Charms). Quit snickering. Lucky Charms has little crunchy marshmallows. There isn’t a vegetable out there that can top that.

On the down side, the size of the office means that there really is nowhere to eat the aforementioned bag lunch unless I sit at my desk. And then I feel really weird not actually doing something productive if I’m at my desk. What can I say – the workaholic guilt thing is a hard habit to break.

Of course this has also worked out well for the whole ‘healthier me’ thing, since if I go work out, then I am out of the office for about 45 minutes and I can take a little break from whatever it is I was doing at the time. Granted I still end up eating my lunch at my desk when I return, but at least there is a break in there somewhere. And I suppose the need for a short break from the office is as good an incentive as any to get some exercise.

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Apropos of nothing, my new favorite drink these days is Diet Vanilla Coke. This is because it incorporates a number of important features, including caffeine, bubbles, the taste of vanilla, absolutely no calories whatsoever. Of course what is more critical than the things it includes is the one thing it doesn’t have – that revolting aftertaste that defines the regular Diet Coke and has led me to demand to know whether restaurants carry Pepsi or Coke because diet colas are not alike.

One of our latest Netflix offerings was The Toy That Saved Christmas – another Veggie Tales show (because we are having far too much fun with the hilarity that is talking vegetables). Sunday I mentioned that we had the DVD to my parents and somehow this turned into a movie swap, since they have now joined NetFlix and had just finished watching a trio of old Muppet Show episodes. So tonight we popped the Muppet Show DVD into the player and started watching.

Talk about a big slap in the face with the “old” stick. I remember seeing these episodes back when they first aired twenty years ago! There was Linda Rhonstadt, singing in the swamp with the little chorus of frogs, and Harry Bellefonte doing a drumming duet with Animal, and John Denver, looking so very, very young, being mauled by large toadstools and surrounded by singing delphiniums and succulents. There was Dr. T and his band, and Pigs in Space, and the two old codgers sitting up the theater box who always had something sarcastic to say.

I was never a fan of Miss Piggy. She always struck me as somehow just a bit too pushy and a bit too self-centered. Kermit was always cute but somehow a bit too wimpy for my tastes. In fact I think Gonzo was one of my favorite characters, just because he is so…well…odd. Any character who hangs out with chickens and keeps a mold garden is someone I could find fascinating (although granted, in real life I might be more apt to keep my distance, especially with the mold garden thing). And Ralph the dog was a favorite just because he played the piano.

I remember seeing all the Muppet movies when they were released at the theaters, and then getting the sheet music so my sisters and I could play the Rainbow Connection song (and the one Gonzo sings in the original movie) over and over on the piano until I’m sure my parents were sick of it. I remember when it was a big deal for a star to appear on the Muppet Show – somewhat like the prestige stars now get when they score a spot on The Simpsons. And while they might have been interacting with fuzzy puppets on the Muppet Show, surely that was better than being simply a voice for a cartoon character.

As I was frantically sending out emails to my older sister and my brother-in-law this past week, and poking Richard to do the same with his sisters, I noted that there were times when I wished that some of us lived farther away from our parents than we do. Not that I don’t like spending time with either my parents or my in-laws, since actually, they’re all fun to hang out with, but the simple fact of the matter is that with my mom, Richard’s mom, my brother-in-law’s mom, and the fact that my sister is a mom too, that meant that somehow we had to figure out how to schedule Mother’s Day for four separate moms. Toss in choir practice, followed by recorder group practice and then church and things can get awfully complicated. Not too mention exhausting.

Somehow we managed to get everything all worked out, although there were brief moments of panic as I suddenly remembered this morning that I had forgotten to pick up the corsage I ordered for my mom last night…and the florist was not open today. Luckily the florist at the local grocery store was open so while I was trying to remember the fingering for F-sharp on the tenor recorder, Richard very nicely stood in a long line with a lot of other frazzled-looking men and managed to procure a corsage.

My older sister came down with her family for lunch and gifts were exchanged. My mom is a big fan of John Deere tractors so when I spotted a John Deere tractor salt and pepper set a few months back I knew it was the perfect gift. Plus I’d found a lovely card for my sister that wasn’t the least bit snarky (okay, I’m ducking now – hee hee).

My mom, sister and I sat around and chatted a bit, trying to coordinate plans for next week, when my younger sister is coming down with the world’s most adorable niece, while the guys (Richard, my brother-in-law, and the almost-5 nephew) stretched out on the floor to play several marathon rounds of Hi Ho Cherry-o. And then Richard and I checked our watches and zipped off for round two of the Mother’s Day fun – dinner with his parents and youngest sister at Benihana’s. There were gifts. There was garlicky fried rice and shrimp. There were threats of plum cheesecake (pardon me while I shudder yet again at the thought) which were thankfully thwarted and replaced with offers of ice cream, and then, most amusingly of all, as we were just getting ready to leave, the waiter handed gift certificates to all the women at the table who appeared to be of child-bearing years, without once asking if we were mothers or not.

I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep lately. It’s not that I’ve had a lot to do. No, the reason is simply because this weekend is the weekend of the May Faire in our little town, and we happen to live close enough to the fairgrounds that we could hear probably more than we waned to. Last night the entertainment was Leann Rimes, and tonight we will be serenaded by the Doobey Brothers and Credence Clearwater Revisited, or whatever the heck the surviving members are calling themselves these days. The music hasn’t been too bad so far at least, but the concerts tend to last until after 11pm. Not so much a problem last night, since this morning we could sleep in as gloriously late as we wanted. But definitely a problem for tonight, since tomorrow will start far too early.

We have yet to actually go to the May Fair, despite having lived in this town now for two years and my parents living here for six years before that. I think the allure of small town agricultural fairs just never sunk in. You’ve seen one prize pig, you’ve seen them all, right? Besides, Fair food (motto: If it ain’t fried, why bother?) doesn’t exactly fit into the healthy eating plan, and considering my recent penchant for getting car- and air-sick, I figure carnival rides shouldn’t rank high on the list of things I must do. However, we did go to another festival going on this weekend. Yep, the hippies were out in force on the campus, since the weekend of Mother’s Day is always Whole Earth Festival at UC Davis.

We wandered around the festival but this year it felt…well…tired. There seemed to be something lacking. There weren’t as many people wandering around, especially for noon on a Saturday, and there weren’t as many booths. I didn’t see nearly as much tie-dyed clothing (although a new entry this year was the booth all about reusable cloth sanitary napkins. And let me just state here that while I do try to be environmentally friendly, there are some places where one has to draw the line – and this is one of them where the line gets drawn with a great big girly “Euww!!”).

I left Richard on campus since he’d signed up to volunteer at the Linux booth, and headed home to play with dirt. I’ve had clippings rooting in a bowl of water (which has to be refilled a lot more often than one might expect because a certain grumpy tortoiseshell cat thinks the rooting bowl is her personal water glass), and earlier this week I was taken in by a selection of herb plants and came home with a little pot of basil and a little pot of oregano – both of which had definitely reached a size too large for their tiny little planters. So I dragged the bag of (cobweb-encrusted) potting soil into the house and proceeded to have the most marvelous time making an amazing mess. I replanted the herbs. I introduced the well-rooted clippings to actual dirt. I dragged the ferns downstairs and gave them larger pots (and trimmed off a lot of dead leaves). And then I ran around and watered everything else that was green and growing in the house and when it was all done I put the (much smaller) bag of potting soil back in the garage, vacuumed up all the stray dirt and plant parts, and then collapsed on the sofa for a while until Richard called to say he was ready to come home.

I’ve seen these in other journals and while sometimes the questions intrigued me, I never managed to get around to doing one. But this one got me thinking enough to actually write an entry. So here you are. My very first Friday Five. I doubt this will become a regular event, but who knows.

1. Would you consider yourself an organized person? Why or why not?
I would say that it depends on the things being organized. For example, my kitchen is fairly organized. My closet – organized. My linen closet – organized (well, for brief periods before the cats get into it and scrabble around in the blankets and towels to make themselves more comfortable). My desk and my car – not so much.

I am very much a pile person. I like to keep things in their place, even if that place happens to be a certain pile on the desk. All the things to be filed live in one pile (in a box that is usually occupied by a cat). Stuff that eventually needs to be put away is in another pile off to the side. Bills that need to be paid are stuffed – untidily, to be sure, but still, all together – in a little plastic divider that sits on my desk and holds, among other things, bank statements that I need to eventually open and look at, articles from magazines I wanted to keep for who knows what reason, and, in explicably, the title to my car. I think I keep it there only because I’m paranoid that if I actually *file* it somewhere I will never remember where I put it and someday when it comes time to trade in the Maxima for something more shiny and new, I will end up tearing apart the house to find it.

2. Do you keep some type of planner, organizer, calendar, etc. with you, and do you use it regularly?
At one point in my life I actually had a paper planner, and amazingly enough I did use it fairly religiously. Considering that it weighed several tons, I eventually switched to an electronic version. The latest model is a Palm m515. The one and only reason I use Microsoft Outlook as my email program at home is because it synchs the calendar with the Palm and gives me pop-up reminders. Without that electronic calendar I would never remember any dates at all. Writing things on a wall calendar does not work at all for me – I either forget to write it down or I never look at the wall and end up switching months sometimes days or weeks past when I should have flipped the page. In fact, my current wall calendar is still sitting on April. Oops.

Plus the Palm comes with two nifty features that the paper organizer never had. With the foldable keyboard (and a handy installation of Documents To Go) I can pop that sucker out, click the two together, and take notes at meetings, write journal entries, even work on stuff for the office. And also, there are games. I shudder to think of the hours of sheer boredom I would have had to endure in airports without Rally on my PDA to keep myself entertained.

3. Would you say that your desk is organized right now?
See answer to question one. Every once in a while I plow through the stuff on my desk, file everything that needs filing, put everything away that has been sitting there for days/weeks/months, and remove as much of the dust and cat hair as I can. It doesn’t take long, however, before it starts to get a tad cluttered again. The important thing is that the mess, such as it is, is contained to only a small portion of my desk area, and there is usually enough clear space that I can actually use the desk as something more than just someplace to store things.

At the new job I am surrounded by people who usually have huge architectural plans spread out on their desks, on the floor around their desks, and on every other available spare surface. In fact I have teased one of my coworkers on his habit of ‘walling off’ his desk by arranging little piles of things across the floor between his area and the rest of us.

I tend to use the pile system at work as well, but unlike at home where it’s okay if it gets a little messy, I try to keep things a bit more organized at the office. I actually have file shelves to keep paperwork for my various projects separated, and I routinely go through everything that’s scattered across my desk and dump everything I no longer need into the recycling bin.

4. Do you alphabetize CDs, books, and DVDs, or does it not matter?
So at this point I suppose I have to admit that when we moved into this house, I sat on the floor and organized all of our CD’s and books. The CD’s were grouped first by genre and then by letter. I didn’t go so far as to alphabetize each and every one, but all the A’s are together, followed by all the ‘B’s’, and so on. I am pretty sure that at this point, that system has pretty much disappeared, but the point here is that I at least gave it a good shot.

Books I organize by type. All the children’s books and humor books are on the shelf in the guest room. Hardbound books live downstairs in the living room, computer books, reference books, and books on religions all live in the computer room. The paperback shelf in the master bedroom holds all the science fiction and fantasy. Those I have tried to group, first by author and then by series, and those I do try to keep in some sort of order, if only because when I want to read something, I’d like to know where the rest of the set is as well.

5. What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to organize?
I haven’t a clue. I think it’s never been difficult to actually organize something…once I actually get started. It’s the getting started that is the most difficult part. This is the main reason why it is that we’ve been in this house now for slightly over two years and I have yet to organize my desk, a task which requires transferring everything from a few boxes and my old desk (which is now used as a table for my sewing machine) into the new built-in desk drawers in the computer room. I know that once I finally get to it it will go fast. It’s just that I’m sort of dreading the task, because I know I’ll start finding a need for drawer organizers and file labels and little shallow boxes in which to stash all the tiny odds and ends, and it always seems to overwhelm me.

I’ve been a bit cautious about saying this, if only because I have had high hopes for a job before, only to have them blown to bits once reality actually set in (*cough* Benthic Creatures *cough* Big Fish *cough*). But at this point, five weeks into it, I think it’s safe to say that the job is everything it was promised to be. And I think it’s also safe to admit that I like it. I like this job a lot.

I’m slowly being introduced to all the members of this company, beyond our little office on the river. Two weeks ago I spent a day in Berkeley with my boss and an architect, looking at buildings on campus and getting a crash course in green construction. Later that same week we flew to Seattle in the morning for a meeting to discuss a new research proposal by a group in Canada, and then flew home that night. Now that they have installed a video conferencing system in all the offices, I’ve met (albeit a fuzzy and not exactly streamlined version of) a few more of my more distant coworkers. There are rumors of trips to other offices to introduce me (and the work I’ve been doing) to the rest.

I think the best part about the job so far, however, is the work I get to do. There are writing assignments that are often challenging– mainly because the world of construction is still mostly a mystery to me, but also because my boss and I are still in the process of figuring out just how we want to write things. There are two shiny new databases sitting in a shared drive now that are chock full of marvelous VBA code written all by me – code that sometimes required quite a bit of research and digging to figure out how to write. There are spreadsheets full of data that I spent hours mining; data that I’ll be updating monthly and having fun digging into, analyzing, graphing in pretty colors to show the various trends in the construction industry.

I have been facing another learning curve – this one having nothing to do with the subject material I’m writing about, configuring, or graphing. I’m so used to be surrounded by people at my same (or higher) level of experience and knowledge of database design that I’ve probably become a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to coding. I want things to work a certain way, and I’ll keep digging and digging until I find it. I’ll demo a piece of functionality, prepared to add all sorts of caveats about what I need to do next; ready with the list of things still be done, and am still slightly amazed that it isn’t quite so necessary anymore. I’m so used to being surrounded by other people who speak the same (computing languages) as me that it took me by surprise the first time someone had no idea what I meant when I said SQL. Considering that I’ve got no idea what they mean when they spout out a lot of words from plans and estimates, it’s probably a fair trade, but still, I’m not used to being the only code nerd around. And in a way, I’m starting to like the fact that it’s just me. Granted it would sometimes be nice to have someone to bounce query ideas off of, but I’ll admit that there’s a selfish pleasure in knowing that everything that’s been built so far had no one else’s fingers in it but mine.