I was told lately that I’ve been slacking off, not writing very often, so I guess that means I’d better come up with something (So there, big sis. Ha!). I’ll admit that I’ve had very little imagination this week at all. At work I’m documenting objects and classes in visual basic, to the point where when I sit down at the computer and attempt to compose anything else (be it an email message or a journal entry), my fingers are set on autopilot to start with “This method configures…” and go from there. Useful for work, perhaps, but deadly dull to anyone who wasn’t looking to delve into the SDK for the-company-to-be-nicknamed-later’s software.

We’ve been watching the Olympics sporadically all week, but Thursday night I made extra sure to set the VCR while we were at choir practice, and we got home in time to see Sarah Hughes take the gold in women’s figure skating. I know there are those of you out there who may have been disappointed for Michelle Kwan, but Sarah’s excitement, and the fact that it was so very obvious she was having fun in her performance made me root for her the moment she took the ice. She deserved that medal simply because she went in there thinking she hadn’t a shot in hell of getting it and skating the best performance of her life. Of everything else that has happened this Olympics – everyone and their government filing bitchy little complaints about judging discrepancies and whether or not drug tests are fair – Sarah’s win is the one thing that will stand out for me the most. Granted, now that I’ve seen her skate, the next time I get out on a rink I’m going to feel even more like an inebriated hippo flailing around the ice, but that’s okay. I’ll still have fun.

And okay, so I haven’t spent *every* hour at work this week describing code. I also have been reading all the archives of this journal and trying very hard not to laugh out loud and make my coworkers wonder just what was so funny about Visual Basic *this* week. I forwarded the link to Richard. Now the two of us have started getting inspired. Hmm…..

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Jennifer’s Helpful Hint #32: When your cordless mouse isn’t working and you try to reset it and nothing happens and you try to plug in the old mouse and nothing happens and you speak ill of your computer’s parentage and give it a few reboots and nothing happens and then you storm out of the room to console yourself with a Poptart (because you had extra Points left and besides, Poptarts are the consolation food of the truly discrimiating adult), when you come back, you might, just maybe, want to try replacing the batteries (yes, those batteries. The ones you replaced only TWO WEEKS AGO). Voila. Sparkly lights and functioning mouse once again. Sigh.

I’ve been recovering slowly from this bout of winter cold, impatient for it to be finally over since the waves of apathy have continued to wash over me at least once a day since it began. At least I knew enough to recognize what they were and I could (mostly) ignore them. I was doing fairly well all week, looking forward to the weekend. I had plans for this weekend. My dad and I were going to finish those bookshelves. I was going to start on the curtains for the computer room. I was going to organize the financial stuff into the new ledger system I’ve been envisioning, and clean the bathrooms. I was going to be productive.

And then my mom called Friday night, her voice strained, telling me of a situation with my dad that I wish didn’t exist, and I felt that apathy coming back and this time I didn’t even try to pretend that it wasn’t there. They are having problems. Big problems. And even though I know that there is nothing I can do or say to help, still I feel powerless, as if there should be something I could do to make this all better.

I didn’t get much of anything done this weekend. It’s probably for the best that Richard was not here. I curled up in a chair and read books. I ate the rest of the Valentine’s Day cookies (and somehow managed to still stay in my Points. This actually surprises me). I covered myself with blankets and buried my head in the pillows and slept. I was supposed to go have dinner with my older sister last night but she knew something was going on, and I knew that in my emotional state, all she would have to do is ask and I’d spill what I wasn’t supposed to tell.

I woke up this morning to the sight of a silly Cthululu next to my computer, and my husband curled up underneath blankets and cats on the bed, finally home from two days of RPG-convention-fun. This winter cold is finally fading away and for the first time in days I feel alive, as if I could do something constructive again. My parents are both strong and I know they will get through this, just as they’ve weathered so much else over the years. And I have to accept that no matter how badly I may wish to fix things – for them and for the rest of my friends who are hurting right now – I cannot. I can only fix myself.

It’s a beautiful day today. If I focus on that, it will be enough.

There is an ice rink in this town where I work now. I’m not sure how old it is – I’ve not lived here in nearly 15 years, so it could have gone in any time in the last few decades. But I hadn’t realized it was here until today, when a coworker noted that they’ve got a program there during lunchtime. For a small fee, they’ll provide the skates, coffee and munchies, and an instructor, all in a blissfully uncrowded and childfree atmosphere.

I didn’t hesitate when she asked if I wanted to come. I remember ice-skating when I was a child, and then sporadically over the years once we moved to warmer climate and the only available rink was too far to drive on a regular basis.

I laced my skates on tight, remembering at least to do that much, and then tentatively stepped onto the ice. At least my one fall of the afternoon was early on, and only my dignity was bruised, nothing more.

It was slow going at first as I tottered around the ice, occasionally clutching at the wall to regain my balance. But then, after a few turns around the rink, I could feel it starting to come back to me, and I began to pick up speed. It was clumsy and awkward, my blades scraping the ice and my feet wobbling, but I was skating.

The instructor gathered up the handful of us who admitted to being merely beginners, and had us do a few simple things. She even tried a backwards step that all but my coworker and I could do. The two of us tottered backwards, flailing our arms and laughing at each drunken swoosh of the skates as we inched our way toward the wall that seemed suddenly a lot further than it had been when we were facing the right way. But we did it – the backwards swoops in and out, and the skidding stops and the side-to-side sweep of skates – everything that the instructor showed us how to do. And suddenly I found just a little bit of grace again, even after so many years.

We headed back to work on feet that are unsure about being crammed into stiff boots on thin metal blades, and with thighs and calves that are not being the slightest bit quiet about reminding us that they haven’t been used in quite this way in far too long. And we made plans to go again – perhaps once a week for now.

I liked that feeling of grace. I don’t have it very often.

I made cookies Wednesday night, rolling out the dough and cutting them out with a slightly bent heart-shaped cutter I found. It wasn’t until after all the cookies were cooling on the counters that I remembered that our wedding favors were shiny heart-shaped cookie cutters, and I had one sitting on the back of the stove, with the ribbons and bells still attached. Heh. Ah well. There’s always next year.

We frosted them a bright pink (I can never achieve a true red, no matter how much food coloring I use), all except a small handful that got chocolate instead. The chocolate ones were, of course, the ones we saved for ourselves.

I left him a basket in his car. He left me a marvelously huggable hippo and a balloon on the bed. We ate cookies and ice cream after choir practice. Maybe it wasn’t incredibly romantic, but that doesn’t matter.

Happy Valentine’s Day to my perfect match, the guy who said, in unison with me, “Ooh, we need these!“

One of the most frustrating things about recovering from a bout of winter cold/flu/whatever this is, is that I get exhausted really easily. I get out of bed, go downstairs and get myself breakfast and I end up with my elbows on the table, gasping for breath into my Pop Tarts (the breakfast of the truly mature adult). I wander back upstairs and end up collapsing in my computer chair, listlessly smacking at the delete button for all the Valentine’s Day related spam in my inbox (there’s a certain flower company out there who seems really determined to make sure that I’m aware that I can get free chocolates with my order of a dozen roses. At what point does this become harassment, I wonder?).

I stayed home from work today because I figured getting easily exhausted probably didn’t have a place on the freeway during the half-awake not-yet-caffeinated drivers on a Monday morning. Besides which, I’m also nursing a lovely cough. What with the lack of energy and the hacking I feel like a poster child for why it’s a bad idea to get into a five-pack-a-day smoking habit.

But the winter cold/flu/whatever could not deter me completely. If I was going to be sick all weekend, by golly, I figured I might as well get something productive done. So yesterday afternoon Richard and I put the primer on all the boards for the shelves (in between synchronized bouts of coughing, sneezing, and wheezing. It was very romantic. Trust me). And today I slapped two coats of paint on those suckers. I lay them out propped up on our recycling bins and some drawers from a chest of drawers we were planning on donating to charity (We can still donate it, I suppose, but it’s a bit paint splattered now). Using rollers makes painting long flat surfaces go really fast, so I’d go out to the garage, slap on some paint, then crawl back inside and collapse in a chair panting, to ponder the wisdom of inhaling paint chemicals while sick for an hour or two before going back out to do it again.

But they’re painted, finally. Which means that next weekend my dad comes over with his saw and we hack the backboard down to size and then finally get those darn shelves put together and installed. And I suppose I ought to at least point out that we are not talking about some puny little set of shelves. Nope. This sucker stands about eight feet tall and four feet wide. The back is a piece of plywood that took great contortions on my part to paint (considering that even when standing on my toes and stretching, and leaning the board down as far as I could, I still don’t reach eight feet into the air). These shelves will be attached directly to the wall in the bedroom, and the actual shelves are very shallow – only six inches. Just the right size for our ever-growing collection of (science fiction / fantasy / horror) paperbacks.

Once the shelves were done, and because sucking down a whole lot of paint fumes wasn’t enough to scare the cold/flu/whatever viruses into submission, I decided to tackle the litter box closet, a task which involved dragging both electric litter boxes (yes, I said electric) out, scrubbing them down, sweeping up all the litter on the floor (my cats feel that litter works best when artistically flung in every direction), and then scrubbing the floor too. And after I did that then I had to clean up the bathroom because there was�.goo�everywhere. I won’t go into details. If you’ve had cats for any length of time you understand.

After all of that big stinky excitement (which seemed to be the theme today – stinky paint, stinky litter boxes) we went and got salmon tandoori for dinner because spicy food clears the sinuses (and hoo boy did they give it a kick tonight!) and came home to watch the Olympics, where I got to see what skateboarding punks do when it snows, and also some pretty amazing leaping and twirling and tossing and all the other nifty things that go along with pairs skating.

I would say it’s bedtime except that someone (unfortunately, that would be me) had the brilliant idea that she should take advantage of the nice weather and wash the sheets to line dry them and so the bed has yet to be made, and the cats refuse to express gratitude for the sparkling cleanliness of their toilet facilities by making the bed up for me. Ungrateful little furballs. See if I let them sleep on my pillow toni�.oh, what am I saying. Like I even have a choice.

I have been lethargic and dragging for the past few days. I didn’t have any sort of explanation for it – just this dull apathy that seemed to permeate every part of me to the point where I felt as if any little thing might be just the reason I would burst into tears.

Friday I finally succumbed and went home early, just to try to shake off the melancholy. I said I was feeling sick, even though it wasn’t a physical malady I thought I was dealing with.

Imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to a sore throat and a stuffed-up nose. Richard has been fighting this all week and apparently it’s my turn. The general lethargy finally makes sense, and I’m grateful to know that at least it was merely the buildup to a bout of winter flu and not something more. I am not the type of female prone to mood swings, so to be experiencing such a thing was extremely disconcerting.

I have rested all day today, as much as I have been able. Both of us are low on energy and frustrated over our bodies’ betrayal. We had plans this weekend of working on those dratted bookshelves, but unless we’re both suddenly brimming over with health tomorrow it seems the bookshelves will be, yet again, postponed

Dear NBC,

The Olympics are here again, and this means that, despite my unwillingness to have to deal with them, I am forced to endure your “News Personalities” on a daily basis. If I want to watch the opening ceremonies, I must listen to their inane babbling. If I want to watch figure skating I must strain to hear the music over their useless chatter. There seems to be absolutely no escape from them.

So I have a request. Could you please, maybe for just ten minutes each hour, show the Olympic sports completely silent? Let the music play, display the name of the athlete on the screen, and pretend for just one second that the intellect of the American public isn’t really on par with your average avocado and can actually figure out that when the skater falls it’s a bad thing and she’s probably not happy about it. Don’t explain to me what the production is about because by golly I might just be able to figure it out myself. Don’t babble endlessly in the background and make your viewers wish they could just chuck the remote through the screen and bean your “News Personalities” in the head, if only to make them SHUT UP, just SHUT UP for even a few seconds of precious quiet.

And then, would you please publish that ten minute time slot, so we can all tune in without having to wade through your endless dramatic renditions of all the trials and tribulations the Olympic athletes are going through. Let us pretend for just a few minutes each hour that we can actually afford to be there at the Olympics, on site, and have the luxury of watching the performances without having the pain and agony of people babbling idiotically in the background telling us things we already know.

Give it a try. I’ll bet you’ll have more people watching during that ten-minute no-talking zone than at any other time during the hour. Although if it makes your “News Personalities” happy, they can keep on yammering; just turn off their microphones so the rest of us simply don’t have to hear them.

I’ve been a little giddy all day today. It’s a silly thing, I suppose, in the grand scheme of things. The reason for my good mood is a small stack of papers, sitting beside my keyboard. It’s a nice, satisfying, 94 pages worth of paper, and the reason why it makes me so happy is because I wrote it. Every word in those 94 pages came out of my keyboard, typed in by my very own fingers. And today it was released to the entire company along with the latest alpha version of the software. Like I said, it’s not much in the grand scheme of things, and chances are likely that we won’t get any feedback at all on the documentation unless people really hate it, but the thing is that it is mine – my very first big thing that I have done as a real honest-to-pete technical writer. And I’m pretty darn proud of it. I might just have to take a copy home and stash it away in a folder somewhere, all tied up in a big bow and something sappy written on it so I can drag it out years later and bore the socks off of my grandnieces and grandnephews by telling them about it all the time.

I’m sure that in another few months, after I get a few more big chunks of work churned out, it will seem like no big deal. But for now you just have to humor me. Or else let me tape it to your fridge and then pat me on the head and tell me how pretty it is. Consider it my grown-up version of a finger-painting, okay?

On a side note, they released the ‘preliminary final’ version of the new software to those of us testing/writing about it late last week. I scanned through the application to double-check a few things and finish up the last of the tutorials, and thought I was all done until this afternoon when the QA woman mentioned in passing that they’d added a minor, inconsequential item (ha!) – a checkbox that makes one piece active or inactive. I had a brief moment of all-consuming panic and sprang into action, muttering under my breath about last minute changes as I hastily updated document, screenshots, etc. to take into account this new little thing that had to go and change the way things would be done in the system. I slammed that puppy together, refreshed the pdf file, and then fired it off with literally two minutes to spare. Pant, pant, pant.

The life of a technical writer – never-ending excitement interspersed with moments of sheer and blinding panic. I seriously love this job.

Flying home on the plane yesterday, I huddled in my seat, coat wrapped around me like a protective shield. I tried my best to doze, but it wasn’t exactly successful. The people in front of us were laughing and noisy – not disruptively so, but too animated to sleep near. I felt vaguely guilty because the little old lady sitting next to me seemed to want to chat, but I just wasn’t in the mood to be even remotely social. I just wanted to go home.

My mind started to wander and I found myself thinking about a girl I knew, back in graduate school. There was one year where I shared an apartment with several different people – or rather the apartment shared it with several of us. I moved in with one woman; she moved out and I found a new roommate; I moved out and she found someone new. But that is not the point of this story. The point is the first roommate – the one I originally was to live with.

Ellie was one of those people who are always animated and cheerful, even when things are falling apart. It wasn’t false or saccharin. She seemed genuinely happy and more than prepared for the knocks the world gave her. She was friendly and smart and warm, and her major professor left the university and stranded her, forcing her to have to move away so she could have a chance of completing the work she needed to do for her doctoral thesis. Weaker people would have gotten discouraged at such a setback, but not Ellie. She always rallied. It was sometimes amazing and humbling to watch.

She moved away and I got busy – too busy. We corresponded sporadically and I even headed down to visit her once. She was doing well, finishing her research and dating someone who seemed to care a great deal for her. And then, a few years later, she moved back.

She called, excited. She wanted to get together and we did, but this was in the middle of one of my traveling stints. My weekends were already overloaded with trying to get everything done and appease all the existing friends and family members who wanted pieces of my all-too-precious free time. And I regretfully let our contact slip, deliberately. There simply wasn’t time for me to fit another friendship into my over packed life.

I’m not sure what made me think of Ellie as I sat on that plane. Perhaps it was simply that sometimes I am reminded that in life you have to make choices. Sometimes you know even as you make them that you will regret the decisions you choose, but you make them anyway because there doesn’t seem to be any better option.

I felt guilty for allowing a friendship with someone as amazingly nice and sweet as Ellie to die from deliberate neglect. I wondered then, as I do now, if she realized that it was simply that I was too busy and not that I didn’t like her. I hope she knew that. I hope she understood.

Saturday morning Richard and I flew up to Seattle. Everyone else arrived Friday night but I didn’t want to battle the traffic to get to the airport, and more importantly, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the trip. It’s not that I didn’t want to see my sisters or my niece and nephews. It’s just that spending a weekend with three children all under the age of five has never been high on my list of things to do, and I knew that the two days would be loud and rushed and frenetic.

It was my older sister’s idea – a joint birthday party for the niece and younger nephew. Both sisters collaborated, planning decorations, a few party games, and the food. It was a jungle themed party, so there were wild animal stickers, green and orange streamers, and a tiger for a cake with orange cupcake ears. The birthday boy smashed his cupcake to little bits, while the two year old delicately licked away the orange frosting, one finger full at a time.

All three of them are still young enough to be completely fascinated with bubbles, so the celebration included a trip to the front yard, where the adults produced the bubbles and the kids watched or chased. Bil-2 produced slow, perfect globes that wafted gently down until they reached face level for the toddlers. The nearly-four-year-old would clap them away, while the two-year-old popped all she could by ramming them with her face. Later on, we took them into the backyard for a ‘wild animal hunt’ but by then it was cold and getting dark and the kids really weren’t quite getting the concept of the game. Still it was worth it just to hear my little two-year-old niece do a rather garbled rendition of the word ‘rhinoceros’. She’s talking up a storm now, and even managed to say Richard’s name. Mine, of course, she didn’t even attempt. It’s a reaction I’m rather used to by now. My name is apparently difficult for little mouths to pronounce.

This morning my sister and Bil-2 made waffles and scrambled eggs. We took the kids to a shopping mall where there is a playground that is a square of thickly padded carpet surrounded by padded walls and benches for parents to sit. The playground equipment is all breakfast food – eggs sunny side up, with yolks that were squishy and meant to be bounced on. A piece of bacon curved into a slide. A bowl of cereal to climb into and on, the steps up the side a pile of banana slices.

There were plenty of pictures taken; plenty of smiles and laughter. Little sis and I tossed around ideas of bookshops and bakeries and moving to somewhere where it’s not so wet as Seattle, and not so dry as California. And then we piled into cars and headed for the airport and then, hours later after the usual delays caused by random inspections of families with small children and little old ladies in wheelchairs, we came home.