There is a new sense of urgency in the air at work. There is a buzz of activity, and an undercurrent of excitement. Things up top have shifted, and perhaps finally in our favor. Assessment of current status is to be implemented, and along with this, the technical document review I’ve been begging for for months. Whoever this new regime is, they seem to understand that it is worth spending a bit of time in the beginning to save time later.

And yet I’m having a hard time getting too excited. I’ve had my hopes built up before, only to watch them crash to oblivion as the project careens toward yet another last-ditch effort for salvation.

I want to believe that this will finally mean things are going to improve, I really do. But it’s been over a year now living in chaos mode. It’s a bit hard to see that beautiful vision glimmering on the horizon and not immediately assume it’s yet another mirage.

And speaking of building up hopes, I had a meeting tonight for the Board of Directors on which I serve – the one I was highly reluctant to return to. It was quick, calm, and with one exception, concise. And there is a relatively new board member on board whom I’m liking more and more. She’s upfront and honest – qualities we’ve needed in this little group – and she’s motivated by what would be best for the organization, not what’s best for her. And she’s pointing out things that others haven’t wanted to notice or discuss – but with her naivety of the politics and history, she forces it into the open. I adore this. She is wonderful. And tonight she managed to escalate an issue that we’ve all danced around for years, escalated to the point that we will be finally attempting to do something productive about it.

I am amazed. Once again I’m cautious against outright optimism because I’ve seen this fail too many times, but how can I not let some of that excitement spill over? A chink in the stone wall we’ve all rammed our heads against to no avail, and perhaps this time it will be enough to turn the tide and begin the tedious process of removing that which has hurt this organization too many times already.

Things are hovering, circling warily. The push has been made. Now, in both situations – work and personal – I must impatiently wait to see what shall result.

I am failing in my nerdness. I may bear the title, but I’m sorry to report that I’m simply not cut out to be a full-fledged nerd. I’m so ashamed….

We went to a gaming convention this weekend – DundraCon. We drove down Saturday morning, early enough to make it to the sign-up sessions for the afternoon games. We’d intended to stay til late tonight, but by lunchtime we were both tired and more than ready to leave.

I’m not sure if this is simply a sign that I’m getting old, or that we were just too tired from everything else. I’m hoping it’s the tired part, not the age – heh.

I did try to have fun, and the seminars we sat through were rather interesting, even if not quite what I was expecting. I think perhaps the biggest problem I had was simply that when I game, I prefer to game with a group of friends. The social aspect of hanging out with people I know is just as important to me as the actual game itself, so the idea of signing up to game with perfect strangers just wasn’t too appealing.

Regardless, we did sign up for a few games, but unfortunately they were all cancelled, and I was a bit relieved about it anyway, because there was just no way I could have stayed up til 4am like one of the games required. People were gaming 24 hours a day. Heck, I was never able to pull an all-nighter back in college; there’s no way I could do it now for table-top roleplay. I’d be snoozing amid my dice before we’d even ventured beyond the inital startup period.

And speaking of dice, we each bought some – a required activity when one is at a gaming convention. I prefer the marbled or smoky ones, while Richard prefers the spotty ones. It works out well, really it does. No squabbling over whose dice are whose – he gets those ugly speckly types and I get all the pretty ones. We’re both happy, and so, of course, are the cats because they now have a 30-sided die of their own to bat around the house.

I’m not a complete failure though. Even if I didn’t see the excitement in gaming til the wee hours of the morning with perfect strangers, going to this thing did inspire me to game again. I miss the roleplay on the Pern-related MUSH’s I belong to, and going to the con got me excited about them again. I don’t expect to have as much time to game as I once did – back when I was still in college and working parttime, or simply working closer to home, but I do want to find *some* way of fitting it into my schedule. One of these days. Soon. I hope.

We are driving down 680, visiting friends or family (I don’t remember which). You’d never had a pomegranate before, so I am cutting one apart with my less-than-sharp pocket knife. There are no napkins in the car, so I’ve got newspaper on my lap, and one of those free shirts nerds like us always get from our companies on top of that. Purple juice is, nevertheless, splattering the dashboard. There is no way you can eat these neatly while driving, so I shell the seeds and drop them into one of the cup holders, and you scoop out small handfuls to eat. Later on, finished and sticky, we stop at a mall to wash hands and try to swab the juice spots from the car.

********

We are driving down to Monterey for a weekend of relaxation. You’re driving because we’re in your new car and it has a CD player, so we grabbed Stunt by BareNakedLadies, and two Billy Joel albums. We sing along at the top of our lungs all the way there and back. It doesn’t matter if we don’t carry the tune quite well. We point out the scenary along the way and I realize that I will carry this with me, hoard this memory and bring it out every time I hear those songs play again.

********

We are headed for a barbeque at friends’ house and we stop at the produce stand. They have English peas and since we both love them, we buy a huge bag. While I drive, you hand me pods and we shell together, piling the empties in unsteady heaps in the cup holders, popping the sweet green rounds into our mouth greedily, until the bag is done and we are full, even then wishing we’d bought more.

********

We are driving, late at night. You’re behind the wheel and I’m falling asleep in the passenger seat. Our hands are clasped, and you say it’s alright if I want to close my eyes. I doze off, still holding your hand, waking every now and then to watch you through sleepy eyes as you drive, and every once in a while you look at me and smile, and as I sit there, curled into the seat, watching you as I drift in and out of sleep, I am reminded all over again why I love you.

********

Happy Valentine’s Day, Richard.

Sunday started with the best of intentions. I called my older sister to let her know that we were going to come up to meet the new baby, just as soon as we swung by the house and took the weekly pictures. Armed with digital camera, we headed off to the house, where we were greeted by the large and fluffy black cat again, who has apparently decided that the roof is an extremely inviting place to play. We snapped a few shots, obligingly pet the cat – the usual.

Everything was going hunky dory until we were ready to head out and I tried to start my car and it didn’t quite work. The engine would start for a few seconds and then promptly shut off. I tried several times, but no luck. There was plenty of gas, and the battery was certainly just fine, as suggested by the plethora of little warning red lights all over the dashboard.

Ended up having to have the car towed, and since I’m not familiar enough with the town we’re moving to, to know where there might be a reputable mechanic, I simply had them take it back to the dealer’s where I’ve gotten all the maintenance done anyway. We dropped the car off, filled out a little envelope with the symptoms, sealed the key inside, and then waited for my parents to come rescue us.

Ah, the miracles of modern computer technology. The mechanic called today, and to make a long story short, apparently the computer brain of the car’s anti-theft system decided that it no longer recognized the main computer brain.

In other words, my car thought I was trying to steal it, so it turned off the engine in response.

I’m a bit torn between finding this amusing, being glad of the display that shows me the anti-theft system really does work, or being a tad worried about the fact that the computers got out of synch in the first place.

I guess we’ll just have to sit back and wait to see if this happens again. I’m kind of hoping this was a one-time glitch. Ah the wonders of modern technology. Or something. Heh.

I am obsessing over house colors. I can’t stop myself – when we are out now I am looking at houses for the color scheme – trim plus all the other bits. Does that look nice? How would that look on ours? They have a high roof too – maybe that theme would be okay. How does one choose something like this? It’s not like a room where you could simply paint over in a day if you just couldn’t stand it. This is an entire house. To change it will require much money and time and effort. How can I choose? How is anyone supposed to pick just one?

This house is making me dither on more things than I’ve dithered on probably in the last several years. All these tiny inconsequential things that mean nothing to anyone else, and I’ve done my best to not bore friends and family with my little petty issues (so of course I dump them here, because where else should I talk about them, after all).

And the funniest thing is that I’m not even worrying about the cabinets any more. At least not now. Even though the color of the house is going to be one of the last things on the list, I’m worrying about that. Go figure.

We have a week’s reprieve on the whole question of electrical outlets and lights. We were to go out and do our (what has now become a) weekly meeting with the builder to discuss wiring, but it’s been raining so hard that he called to cancel. They weren’t even going to be there yesterday and there was just no sense in it. No need to let a little rain and mud stop us – we drove by last night to see. The boards once laid out to form a rather wobbly sidewalk have been moved so we picked our way carefully through the mud, trying to jump from random board to the odd pile of gravel that was deposited weeks ago in what will become our front yard, and has remained there ever since.

It was cold and windy, but we could see that they’d made a bit more progress with the siding, so we were compelled to go inside and see what it was like from there. We tromped around a bit, guided only by a little flashlight and the glare from the headlights of the car, but didn’t stay too long because it really was cold.

One side effect of that little trip is that reality is beginning to raise it’s funny little head. See, I had this marvelous idea for a disgustingly mushy and goofy romantic dinner – drag out a card table and a few chairs, set them up in our unfinished dining room, and have a candle-lit picnic dinner in our almost-a-house for Valentine’s Day. But standing out there last night, it occurred to both of us that it’s probably still a bit too cold, too windy, and the house a bit too open for any sort of comfortable dining experience. If this were several months down the road, we’d be just fine and the open design of the mostly uncovered frame wouldn’t be an issue. But it’s still February, and with the rain and wind lately, we decided that perhaps it might be better to have a Plan B.

Plan B is to have dinner at home – make it together, and actually eat at the dining room table. Scoff if you will; perhaps it’s boring to you. But for two people who are so often busy that we rarely get a chance to even go grocery shopping, dinner at home – and not something we ordered over the phone, or picked up at a drive-thru on the way from work – is a rarity, and therefore classifies as special. I’m looking forward to this far more than I would if we were simply doing what everyone else is doing and going out to a fancy restaurant. Heck, we can do that any day of the week.

We’ll make dinner, side by side, in the tiny little alcove they call a kitchen in this house we’re renting, and we’ll set the table with cloth napkins and napkin rings. We’ll dim the lights and light the candles, and there will be soft music playing in the background. We’ll have a quiet dinner, just the two of us, talking, laughing, spending time together.

And it will be lovely.

Saturday. Mom calls – her usual weekend phone call. Because of older sis’s problems with her first pregnancy, the doctors are checking her nearly every day now. Any hint of high blood pressure and she’s to be admitted and induced, but until then, she’s okay. She’s due Wednesday. I make sure, for probably the fiftieth time, that she and older sis have my cell phone number, just in case.

When my nephew Aaron was born. I was working on a project in South Dakota – performance tuning for the application at Gateway computers; working in a warehouse painted like a Holstein cow. I found it amusing that in these tin cans in which we worked, certain hallways had been designated tornado-save zones, as if somehow this part of the building was any safer than any other part for having the roof peeled off, much like the lid of a sardine can. Several times that summer the sirens went off and we all dutifully trooped out to the ‘tornado-safe’ hallways and stood there for indeterminate periods of time.

I and my coworker had rented apartments, and I’d only set up local phone service, since I made all my long distance calls on the calling card anyway. I sat by the phone after my mom called to let me know she’d finally gone into labor. I was on the phone with my dad (and I don’t remember where they’d shipped him that month but he wasn’t in town either) and he got paged, and we knew it was them, telling us the baby had come. He had to hang up to call them back and I sat at the little table in this mostly-bare apartment, huddled in a chair by the phone, waiting for him to call me back and tell me how everything was. They had never found out what sex the baby was, and so when I finally called, too impatient to wait for my dad to call me back, my brother-in-law teased me by telling me weight, length, everything else but what it was.

Tuesday night. Mom is over for a fitting for the wedding dress and notes that older sis’s blood pressure was a bit high but so far she’s okay. It’s going better this time – she hasn’t had to be hospitalized and we’re all crossing our fingers that nothing happens this time – that she doesn’t have to be induced, that Nathan decides he’ll come out normally, that this pregnancy will be just fine.

When older sis was nearly full term with Aaron, her blood pressure shot up so high the doctors were worried. She was hospitalized, and had to stay on her side for several days. Despite their best attempts to induce, Aaron just didn’t seem to want to come out. Older sis later joked about the diet she was given – clear liquids. She’s developed an amused aversion to orange jello as a result. They fed her that a lot in the hospital.

This time, it is liver proteins – something about them in her urine, something about an adverse reaction to magnesium treatments. I’m not clear on the details except that the situation was serious enough to warrant hospitalization, and once again, inducing labor. Even after Nathan arrived, small (6 pounds) but perfectly healthy this morning, she must remain in the hospital til at least this weekend because of the liver condition. The doctors are warning her about any future pregnancies – there will be no discussion; she simply gets a set time and then a c-section. They are not willing to let it reach this stage again. We’d all hoped that Aaron was a fluke; Nathan proved it wasn’t.

I haven’t seen him yet, nor will I til this blasted sinus infection has reached a more tolerable level. And I’m feeling a little guilty because this time, I never found out how long, how much he weighed; all the little details you’re supposed to ask. But I didn’t really care so much about all of that – I can find that out later, and it’s just numbers anyway. All I care about is that older sis will be okay.

And of course, that Nathan – my new little nephew – is finally here.

I’ve taken Richard to the hospital before for his asthma, so the fact that we spent the wee hours of Sunday morning in the emergency room was not that big a deal. This time the room was blissfully free of beeps and hisses; the only sound the steady noise of the thing he was breathing into, and the angry cry of an infant down the hall. The baby cried almost constantly for the better part of an hour while we were there. I’m not sure quite when it stopped, only that at one point, as I was drifting off to sleep, huddled on a stool next to Richard’s bed, I woke up and realized that the crying had stopped.

The doctor who saw him acted as if he had more important things to do, asking questions and then making it obvious he wasn’t even paying attention to the answers because he would ask the same questions again. There are certain questions one asks an asthmatic when he shows up in your emergency room. I’ve only been once before and even I know that now. This man didn’t ask most of them – he seemed more concerned with scribbling something on his chart and then breezing out. I was angry, but because Richard had at least been given the breathing treatments he’d received before, it didn’t seem worth chasing the man down and discussing his distinct lack of bedside manner.

Sunday’s bout seemed to have been a slow buildup that began with a low-grade fever on Thursday, and ended, finally, with us rushing to the hospital again Monday night. He spent Monday working from home, and by the time I called on my way home from work, he was coughing into the phone and sounded as if he’d just finished a ten mile sprint. I held my breath and waited, not very patiently, until he finally agreed that perhaps he ought to go to the hospital after all, at which point I murmured something to the effect of ‘it’s about time’, and off we went.

And this time he didn’t come home with me. Several hours of breathing treatments and a chest x-ray later, they decided that he needed to stay there.

I think if this had been the first time I’d had to deal with this side of his asthma, I’d probably be much less calm about it. It’s nothing to be taken lightly and I was more than a little worried, but I know that it’s treatable; that his condition is maintainable and that he’ll be fine, and that despite his dislike of being in hospitals, that sometimes that’s going to be the best place for him to be. That doesn’t make it any easier for either of us, but beyond getting him quickly to a hospital, there’s not much more I can do.

To make things even more fun, after I left him at the hospital last night, my nose decided that it wanted to join in the excitement, and I promptly developed what seems to be my body’s ailment of choice these days – yet another sinus infection. I toughed it out at work as long as I could today, but finally left early, since being unable to breathe puts a damper on my energy level. We were quite the pair in his hospital room tonight; him coughing and wheezing, me blowing my nose and muttering unkind things about my sinuses as we poured over the house plans, unwilling to let something like hospitalization get in the way of deciding once and for all where the computers would live. (don’t laugh – it makes a difference in the number and placement of electrical outlets and phone jacks in the room).

Saturday was Bethy’s birthday, so we headed down to Berkeley to meet up with a small crowd, go to a bar, eat lunch, and have amusing and loud debates on politics (hard to debate when everyone agrees that Bush is useless, but we *did* try, really we did), catch up on PernMUSH gossip, and generally have fun. Getting there was a bit hectic, however, because for whatever reason, I thought we had to be there by 1pm, and considering that it takes over an hour to get there, and by the time we left our house it was less than an hour til 1pm, I was a bit worried we’d miss the group before they headed out. Amusingly enough, however, even though we actually did make it by 1pm (we just won’t mention how fast Jennifer was driving to accomplish *that* little feat), it turned out we had the time wrong all along and so we were early. Sigh. Ah well.

The reason we ended up late is because we swung by the house, only intending to be there just long enough to take our requisite weekly pictures. But while we were there, we were cornered by the air conditioning guy, who wanted to make sure that he was putting the vents everywhere we wanted, and by the way, we might want to think about upgrading the energy efficiency of the air conditioning unit. And then as we were heading for the car, eyeing our watches and realizing just how late we really were, the roofers waved us down. Did we want woven or valley metal, they asked us.

I should point out that Richard and I are begining to perfect the blank stare and the slack-jawed ‘huh?’. Luckily, the roofer who asked us recognized the look, took pity on us, and pointed out the difference on some neighboring roofs. We mumbled out a choice, and then dashed out of there before anyone else asked any questions that we hadn’t a clue how to answer.

Sunday we went back to the house, this time to do a walk-through and determine placement of light switches and electrical outlets, and this time we decided to take along someone to help. We enlisted my mom to come with us because even though we had a rather vague idea of what we needed to do, we figured that it would help to have someone who’s lived in enough houses to have gotten a feel for what would be nice to have. While Richard drew little room pictures on a pad of paper, we wandered the house and pointed to walls – put an outlet there, and there, and one here, and what about there?

A contractor scrambled down from the attic where he’d been installing air conditioning ducts, and asked about fans. Did we want the normal ones or the more expensive, quiet ones? Did we have any thoughts on the placement of the fan grills themselves?

I think Richard and I really need to simply tattoo “First Time Home Owners – Proceed With Caution” on our foreheads. That would make life so much easier. Really it would.

The builder wanted to meet with us because of the fireplace issue in the master bedroom. Call me silly, but I’ve been dithering about this now for the past few weeks – should we or shouldn’t we, and all the while Richard has patiently waited for me to come to the same conclusion he came to much earlier on. After finally making up my mind to do it, we discovered that we had *just* managed to squeak this one in.

The builder has this expression that we’re beginning to recognize. It’s sort of a half-smile, full of tolerant amusement, as he tells us that we’ve passed our window of opportunity, or in other words, what was once a $50 change will now cost hundreds of dollars, and do we really want it *that* badly?

I made the decision this week to take half-days on Fridays to deal with house things like this. He needed us to be there, on site, to show us some things, and we really can’t do that at night. So I drove straight from work to the house this afternoon, where Richard met us, and we put the fireplace issue to rest.

He’s got little red lines drawn all over the floor now. There’s where the fireplace will go – in the corner in the master bedroom and it’s perfect – exactly what we wanted. There’s the lines where our sinks and bathtub will be in the master bathroom, and we needed to make a decision on the length of the sink today because he had to worry about all the plumbing.

In the kitchen, red boxes marked where the refrigerator would stand, where the oven will be, where the sink sits. And then blue lines drawn onto the floor indicated cupboards. I’m not a slouch when it comes to imagination, but I’ll admit that it’s not the easiest thing in the world to look at a blue line on the floor and extrapolate that into cupboards on the walls, five feet up. The whole cupboard and cabinet issue is looming closer now and can I just admit here that that particular decision is *not* one I’m looking forward to? I haven’t been looking forward to it ever since he asked me, in the very beginning, back when the house was just plans on paper, what sort of wood I preferred for the kitchen. Um….huh?

He’d dropped off a sheet full of composite roof samples. For a bit of fun and giggles, take a two-inch by four-inch chunk of composite and then attempt to guess how it will look on an entire roof. For our house in particular, this is more important because, as you can see here, the roof is rather prominent. We pondered the terra cotta red, and Richard was rather taken with one that had an odd shade of bluish green, but in the end, we decided to go with nicely generic slate gray. The biggest reason for this inability to decide on roof color is simply that we haven’t managed to make up our minds what color the house will be, period. Luckily, we’ve got a month or so more before that becomes an issue.

As we wandered the house staring at little red lines, the roofers arrived. Apparently no one told them quite how steep the roof was. One of them asked our builder if he could have built it any uglier. Heh. I’ll admit I do have sympathy. I wouldn’t want to be climbing around on that roof either!

They’ve installed most of the windows now, there are piles of siding outside, and the sheet rock was to be delivered later in the day. He started to detail out the schedule for the next few weeks – putting up all the siding, tiling the roof, installing the fireplaces, setting up the air conditioning and heating vents. Things are continuing just as quickly as before, I suppose, but at this stage we have to be involved a lot more often than before. More decisions I’m not even sure how to make. Gulp.

A few weeks ago, I finally accepted that I just wasn’t being very good at keeping my paper journal anymore. I’ve been rather sporatic about it all the years I’ve had one (since early college, I think), and there’ve been times when months would go by between entries. I’d gotten better in the past few years – mainly because sitting in the airport is a really convenient place to write, and I’ve done an awful lot of that as a consultant.

But lately it’s been getting to me, not having anywhere or any way to do an occasional brain dump. So a few weeks ago, I found a program that allows me to keep a daily journal on my PC, and started in.

It’s amazing how much of a relief it has been to finally have this in place. I may not be able to use it while sitting in airport lounges, but there’s finally an outlet. With everything that’s been going on lately, I’ve needed this far more than I realized.

************

It happened again – the ‘congrats to one person for the entire project’s success’ speech. This time it was at the mandatory dinner Tuesday night, during which one of the consulting higher-ups reported that he and his little team of manager croonies were there to find a solution to the project, submit it to the customer, and by virtue of doing this, save the day. The fact that they know next to nothing about the history of the project, as well as the fact that the customer already knows the solution but seems simply unable to come to a decision, appear to mean little to him.

A week ago, I was still raw enough to have been upset by the whole speech. But while I admittedly wasn’t exactly thrilled about what they were saying, the whole thing didn’t faze me so much this time. I’m not sure if I was simply prepared for it, or it if just doesn’t matter as much to me any more. I’ve got bigger issues to deal with these days than whether a few of my fellow Big Fishians do something completely rash. They’ll learn the hard way, same as the rest of us.