I’m regularly working 10-15 hours per day on this project. We’ve entered crunch time – development is at frantic pace, and we’re all overworked and over tired. I come home too exhausted to want to do much more than poke at my keyboard. I have things to do around the house that I just never seem to have the energy to do, and I keep telling myself that it’ll only be for a bit longer, when in reality I know that it’ll be longer than just a bit. Phase 1 development is final in mid-October, so if all goes well and the gods are smiling, perhaps then I’ll go back to a more ‘normal’ schedule (normal being relative when one is a consultant).

We were discussing resources with the head of the project, and when it came to the issue of myself and my fellow consultant-from-Davis, he noted that he fully intended to keep us around as long as he could. So contrary to my earlier guesses, I won’t be rolling off this project any time soon. I’m having mixed feelings about this. I have told my new manager, and reminded her during her recent trip to see us, that this will be my last project as a consultant. I wheedled the office manager back in my ‘real’ office to not give my desk away because even though consultants do not officially get their own desk space in this latest incarnation of my company, I won’t be doing it forever, and I’d like a place to go back to. But that was when I thought that perhaps by the end of the year I’d be able to go to a ‘normal’ desk job. Now it’s looking like I might be still on this project through summer or fall of next year and I’m torn, because there *are* plusses to staying. It’s within driving distance of my house (the existing one, and the one we’re building). The project – while frustrating and hectic and time-consuming – is a wonderful project and I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with. And as long as I remain a consultant, I get the quarterly bonus, which can only help when I’m looking at suddenly becoming a house owner in less than a year.

And yet I also realize that sooner or later I have to make the decision to leave, and be strong enough to walk away from not only this project, but from all that I have known and done over the past three and a half years. Because not only am I wanting to leave consulting, I have also started down the path of thinking that perhaps I want to leave the company as well. When I worked for the smaller fish (prior to it being bought by the current larger fish), they understood that consultants need to be allowed a certain freedom to do their work. I liked my job because I liked the corporate policies. I liked the software I was working with. And I honestly liked the company. Okay, so the travel was starting to wear on me and I’d already been working on getting out of consulting when my then-manager dangled this project in front of my nose and I backed down and took it. But I still felt like I was more than just a number to my company.

Not so with the bigger fish. The continuing message we get, pounded into our weary consulting brains by the higher-ups, is that we don’t count as individuals. The emphasis is on being billable. It doesn’t matter how it affects our personal life. Billable. That’s the key word. We’re penalized for taking training or going on vacation because our entire bonus structure (and with consultants, it’s the bonus structure that keeps us here – that’s what is our compensation for having no life. It’s a BIG chunk of our salary) is based on hours worked. If the hours spent don’t count, we might not even *get* a bonus. When the salary is lower because they expect that you’ll make it up in bonus, this means that if you take vacation (non-billable hours) or take advantage of the training offered (assuming, of course, that you can actually find the *time*), you lose part or all of the bonus for that quarter.

It’s not that my older company didn’t want us to be billable – it’s just that they had a much nicer and more understanding way of putting it. When we were required to give up a weekend to go to that horrid conference in Las Vegas that consisted of three days of utterly useless Death By Power Point presentations, we were reminded that we should find some way to make up the hours we’d be losing as billable work to go to this sharding conference. That made me angry. Very angry. It’s good that I refrain from replying to some of these emails that come out or I might have my decision of what to do made for me, but regardless, it’s this sort of thing that is tipping the scales toward me leaving the company entirely.

But despite the attitude – the big-company corporate policies, the time-wasting mandatory meetings and conference calls during work hours, the fact that it has become more and more obvious that to my company, consultants are merely billing machines that can and should be overworked – I am still clinging to the idea that I could just transfer to another department. Because frankly I’m still scared of what’s outside. I inheireted this position by the simple virtue of my previous companies being bought up around me. I never had to go through the stress and worry of the whole job search. I had this opportunity handed to me on a silver platter and while I consider myself darn lucky it didn’t blow up in my face, it still means that I never had to work to find it. So I’m scared to leave because at least if I stay then it’s easy. I might not be happy, but at least it would be the easy way out.

So I go back and forth, and little things tip the scales one way or the other. Another lovely email from the VP’s discussing how we could all save costs if we did some inane little thing that probably makes all sorts of sense to the desk-bound people who came up with it, but doesn’t apply in the slightest to the thousands of us who are out in the field. Another reminder that I am nothing more than a number to them. And then that lovely bonus check every three months, and the thought of having to go out into the big scary world of job hunting and back the pendulum swings the other way.

I don’t know yet what I’ll do. I do know that I’ll most likely spend a fair amount of time dithering back and forth, and that as this project continues, it at least gives me the luxury of time. And perhaps by the end, when I’m ready to either transition someone into my position, or the project itself runs to completion, the balance will be skewed more heavily on one side or the other and I’ll finally be able to make up my mind.

This afternoon as I was prattling on about these really neat paper dragons Richard and I have been putting together, my mom wondered aloud exactly when she and my dad would get to see them, since she’s been hearing about them ever since we started on them, weeks ago. I caught the hint, a bit belatedly, and invited them over for dinner since I was in a mood to cook anyway (the close proximity of that wonderful produce stand just off the freeway inspires me), and it’s always better to take advantage of those moods with guests.

This meant, of course, that now Richard and I had to finish the remaining dragons before they came over, but there wasn’t much left to do. We’ve been working on them ever since he came over to my house one evening with the book in his hands – something he’d spotted at Borders books and thought might be fun to do. I was, of course, thrilled. These are not simple little paper figures you punch out and fold. They’ve required hours of work, carefully cutting and gluing. The authors of the book apparently felt that instructions were for wimps, so we’ve had to muddle through most of them on our own. Not that that has made it any less fun, although we’ve joked about our exciting lifestyle – evenings spent hunched over the coffee table, scissors in hand, smearing glue with just the right touch onto stiff paper cutouts that slowly have transformed themselves into colorfully detailed three-dimensional dragons.

Making paper dragons is obviously not everyone’s choice for entertainment, but somehow it just seems to fit Richard and I. We’re both dragon fans, and our tastes run more toward the eclectic anyway. Between the two of us, we’ve got a small assortment of gargoyles – a collection which I hope will grow over the years. We’ve also found all sorts of things in the Dancing Dragons catalog that we think the new house will need. I suppose we’ll have to forgo perching gargoyles on the roof corners as drain spouts, and the iron dragon lawn ornament might be a bit much, but the ‘Here there be dragons’ sign will hang outside on the gate for all to see, and there’s some dragon house numbers in that catalog that are awfully tempting…

The paper dragons are all lined up on a shelf right now, waiting til I get the time to string them together into a mobile, which will dangle somewhere in the new house. But this isn’t the end of our construction. Wandering through a toy store last weekend while shopping for birthday presents for three year olds, we spotted our next project. It’s a puzzle clock, the cardboard formed and shaped to look as if it’s carved wood, decorated with ivy, and two little elves at the base. Small wonder we took one look at the box, then at each other, and then marched it right to the cash register. It’s us.

My new manager decided that my practice of taking the laptop to my ‘real’ office and downloading email only once a week or so just wasn’t going to do, and unlike my previous manager, and the folks I deal with on a regular basis from my company, she isn’t willing to work with alternate email addresses. I explained to her that getting my email from home on my thoroughly crummy telephone connection just wasn’t an option, nor was I willing (or even had the time) to go by my office every night just to get email. So she told me I could request a token card to hook the laptop to my DSL connection that I already have. Hey! Now this is an alternative I didn’t know was available to me. This does, of course, hinge on my actually getting that request approved, and judging by the way things are going with my request (some tech support person decided, in his infinite wisdom, that what I really was requesting was to have DSL installed. I’m not quite sure how he deduced that out of my note that said “I need a token card so I can hook my laptop to my DSL”), but eventually it will happen. I am being optimistic.

In order to do this, however, I would have to either set up another phone outlet for DSL – something I could do by myself now that I know it’s nothing more than taking off the cover for the phone jack, figuring out which color wires go where, and then attaching said wires to the appropriate places, but I really didn’t want to go through that hassle. The only other alternative was to constantly be unplugging the cable from the back of my PC in order to plug it into the laptop, and I figured that was going to get really old, really fast.

Richard and I had already discussed setting up our own internal network when we move into the (as still not-begun house). But with this new wrinkle, and the fact that this would mean he could hook his laptop into my DSL when he comes over as well, spurred us to doing the hub thing sooner rather than later.

It wasn’t quite so easy as one might think. The first time we headed out to Fry’s, we got a switch. It was what the guy there told us to get – hey, we didn’t know any better – and after poking at it, glaring at it, and finally breaking down and calling tech support on it, all to no avail, we realized we didn’t have the right thing.

We have it now. This little sucker is not only a hub, it also acts as its own little internal server and firewall. Okay, so maybe we went a wee bit overboard, but hey, we’re talking two nerds in an electronics store, faced with aisles and aisles of gizmos and gadgets guaranteed to make us drool. If we could register for wedding gifts at Fry’s, we would. I figure the fact that we managed to escape with only a handful of cables and a DHCP hub for DSL was pretty lucky.

So now it’s here, all blinking lights and sprouting a rainbow assortment of cables. Of course, once we get the file server and the web server online, we may have to break down and get a larger hub. But that can wait. For now.

There is a cat in my hall bathroom. She has been there nearly two weeks now, although there are times (more often than not, lately) that it feels she has been there a lot longer than that.

She is sick, and that’s why I have her. Her owner – a friend of mine from PernMUSH – is out of town and so I agreed to watch her, since all she needs is a few pills at night, and the usual cat care. No problem. I’ve taken care of dozens of cats before, most sicker than this one. This would be a piece of cake.

Ha. I didn’t know any better, apparently.

She gets two pills every night, and one of them is teeny. And she is smart – she’s figured out that pills are icky and she doesn’t want any part of them.

I know how to pill a cat. In fact, I know how to do lots of things to cats – I spent four years as a foster home for a local humane society and when this evolved, very early on, into bottle-feeding orphan kittens, I got a crash course in feline medicine. Babies of any species get sick more often than adults, and when those babies are already compromised by being abandoned by their mothers, they get sick even worse. So I learned how to give shots. How to rehydrate a sick cat. How to get a recalcitrant feline to take medication, in whatever form it needs to be delivered.

This cat has been testng me a *lot*. She is queen of pill-avoidance, and it doesn’t help that one of them is actually a quarter pill, and the whole pill wasn’t all that big to begin with. And the key factor in her ability to avoid taking the pill is that she has this amazing knack of somehow snagging the pill with her tongue, and then stashing it in her lip until I let go of her and she can go spit it out.

She gave me a few rough days in the beginning, but I finally got the hang of it – a combination grab, turn the head just a bit, scruff the neck, and stuff in the pill. She glares at me but we both know who the winner is going to be, and it isn’t the smaller of the pair of us.

If the pilling battle was all of it, I wouldn’t mind too much. When it comes to medications, whether they’re liquid or pill, or when it’s time to trim claws, I always win. It may take me a few tries, and I don’t always emerge unscathed (with seven cats of my own, I’m usually sporting a few scratches and scrapes), but I win.

The biggest problem is that this cat cries. She mews and yowls and doesn’t shut up, and for a teeny little thing (probably no more than six pounds dripping wet), she has an amazingly overdeveloped set of lungs. I go to sleep listening to the sound of her yelling and it wakes me up. She wants out and she wants out now. And if she was perfectly healthy I may have broken down and let her. But she’s not. She’s got a nasty little gastrointestinal problem that causes her to have…well, I won’t go into the gooey details, but it ain’t pretty and the bathroom is the best place for her to be because at least all surfaces are bleachable. My cats peer curiously at the bathroom door and haven’t even blinked an eye on her nightly bolt out the door when I head in to feed and medicate her, even though she’s hissed at them plenty. And the yelling doesn’t seem to faze them at all.

Me, on the other hand – well, let’s just say that I’m starting to count the days til she’ll be gone, and telling myself that at least I’ve gotten some practice in trick pilling techniques. There’s got to be a good side to this somehow.

I took my car in for an oil change today. While I was there, the mechanic mentioned that I was closing in on 30,000 miles, and that meant a major checkup to the tune of approximately $500 that I had to look forward to. My first thought was – how on earth did I manage to put nearly 30,000 miles on this car that I’ve only had a year? Of course, driving nearly 100 miles round trip to work every day helps….but that’s not the point of this particular monologue, so I’ll just leave it that at sometime in the near future I’m sure there will be a whimpering post about spending lots of money on filters and air hoses and such.

My plan was to drop the off the car and have my mom pick me up at the dealer, since we were to go spend the afternoon together anyway. My mother suffers from distinct lack of direction sense, but even with this I didn’t think it would be an issue – the dealerships are plainly visible from the freeway and I knew she had been out in that direction many times before. So I waited. And waited. And waited. And as the time passed I became more and more annoyed, and then started feeling guilty for being annoyed because what if she was stalled on the side of the road or there had been an accident and here I was, pacing back and forth impatiently at a car dealership where at least I had somewhere air conditioned to wait.

I finally broke down and asked to use their phone to call my parents’ house. My mom wasn’t there, but my dad was, and he hadn’t heard from her. Twenty minutes later, I decided to call again and this is when I finally remembered what I had in my purse.

Yes. The evil thing finally arrived. I ordered it back in May from the my company’s web site, and then dutifully called once a month to see just when it was that the cellular phone would grace my presence…and about two weeks ago, it came. In their infinite wisdom, my company had it sent to my house. Bear in mind that my job description clearly states 100% travel, and with that caveat, that would make it highly unlikely I actually would be able to be home to pick up a package, but regardless, they had it sent there instead of to the nearest company office. And the package required a signature to retrieve. So not only did I *have* to have this horrid little device, now I had to go out of my way to go *get* the darn thing. This involved leaving work early to meander around Sacramento and find the Fed Ex distribution center. I got the box, opened it up in the car, and made my very first call on it to Richard while sitting there in the parking lot. Then I dumped the phone into my purse, carried all the associated gizmos and instructions inside my house when I got home, and hadn’t really had any time to play with it since.

The first warning I should have had was when I opened the box. This thing is cute. And I mean cute. It’s tiny and black and folds up to less than palm size and it’s CUTE!! It’s not supposed to be cute. It’s an evil device and I hate the things and how can I truly hate it if it’s cute?

The second warning was that suddenly there were reasons why it was that I should use it. I was more than a bit alarmed to find myself one day driving home from work and even contemplating making a call from the freeway. When I realized what I was thinking I was truly shocked. What happened to me? Luckily I stifled the impulse, but still. Just the mere presence of one of these things in my purse and I was becoming one of them.

I hadn’t given the number out to anyone because I hadn’t even had the time to figure out how to do simple things like make it ring, or set up the voicemail. I figured I’d get to it one of these days when it was important, but it wasn’t really crucial, and perhaps if no one had the number it could just languish in my purse and I could pretend it didn’t exist.

Then today I remembered that it was there. I didn’t have to borrow the phone from the dealer to call my dad. I could call direct. And it occurred to me that if my mom had one of these, I could call her direct and see what the problem was. Or if I’d thought to give her the cell number, she could have called me to let me know what had happened – which, as it turns out, would have been a significant time saver, as for whatever reason unbeknownst to either my dad or I, she ended up going to the Toyota dealer and waiting there for me for an hour, even though not only did I tell her I was goin?”g to the Nissan dealer, she left a message for my dad saying the exact thing.

So….we finally found each other, and after much relieved laughter that neither of us was lying beside the road in a bloody heap (okay, so I have inherited a bit of my mom’s tendency to worry) we were on our way.

But not before I made sure that I had figured out how to make the phone ring, and given both my mom and my dad the number.

Okay, so I still hate the things. And I think I’ve successfully squelched the impulse to need to use it to call for small things. But I’m grudgingly starting to admit that perhaps they really could be useful, and maybe it isn’t goiing to be quite so bad having one after all. Mind you, I still would have preferred to keep my pager. But I don’t have it, and if I’m stuck with something, well, the phone is alright for now.

Besides. How can I resist it? It’s cute.

Sigh.

After all this time I couldn’t stand it any more. It keeps coming up on radio, snippets of news here and there, luring me in even as I try so desperately to ignore it and not care. But I am weak. I succumbed.

I watched Survivor last night. Richard and I curled up on the couch and turned on the TV and flipped through channels, watching commercials, the end of a bad sitcom, *anything* to avoid the Republican three day “Listen to us spout pompous nonsense at you” bash that all of the major channels seemed to insist upon broadcasting. Until finally it was time, and we switched to the right channel and settled in. We figured we’d watch for a bit, be bored, and then head out and get dinner.

Ha. How to describe this show? It’s not great entertainment by any stretch of the imagination. It’s not classical, or informative, or comedy. It’s just….well…it’s just a show about a bunch of people who play nicey-nice with each other and then talk behind each other’s backs and plot in little groups how to stab the others when they least expect it.

In short, it’s about life, albeit a rather cynical view of it. And despite my best intentions I found myself actually starting to care. I didn’t form any opinions over who should win. No, my interest is more centered around who I think shouldn’t. I have to wonder – did they pick Rich because he is a cocky, egotistical, full-of-himself bastard, or was that just a lucky perk? I don’t intend to watch the show again – I’ll wait to hear from news and radio who actually wins – but I have to admit that I’ll probably cheer when he’s booted from that island. If the rest of them are smart, it’ll be soon too. Of course, considering that he’s lasted that long, this may be giving them too much credit. Or else the others who were already booted were even worse then he was. Shudder.

And now for something completely different. Last weekend my mom got together for our once-a-month do-something-for-wedding-plans date. We managed to look at a few halls, and then we headed down to the fabric store to get some ideas on colors and such. Okay, like we needed an excuse to go into a fabric store! (dangerous places, those stores. Neither my mom or I can ever enter one without buying something. But anyway…) While we were there, we (naturally) meandered back to the pattern books, and proceeded to spend the next hour or so poring over pictures of dresses. And during the process, we started to get some ideas of what to torture/subject/ridicule…um..I mean ‘grace’ my bridesmaids with. In fact, by the time we left the store, we’d determined the theme of the whole wedding.

But aside from that, as we were pouring through the Vogue book, we found it. The dress. Oh yes. When we finally stopped laughing and wiped the tears from our eyes, I gave in and bought the pattern. It was worth it just to scan in the picture to send to my bridesmaids, and to Richard’s mom. My dad merely blinked and manfully resisted any comments. My older sister suggested that perhaps it shouldn’t even have the underskirt. My maid of honor’s response was ‘dear, dear Jennifer. Please tell me you are not serious?’ Richard’s mom merely noted that since she had it in orange, she was already all set. And Richard thought it was lovely (heh). Which does beg the question of whether I should be worried about his taste (or lack thereof) in women’s evening wear?

So what do you think? Should this lovely….um…thing be for the bridesmaids or the mothers?

Oh, don’t worry. As funny as that outfit is, I’ve got something completely different in mind. I’m just sorry that I missed the look on Richard’s best man’s face when he told him what the *real* theme was going to be…

The sky Monday night was awash in pink and gold and purple as I drove home. I wanted so badly to stop on the side of the road and just watch as the sun set, but I had to be somewhere and I was already speeding in order to make it. So I had to make do with watching as I drove madly down the freeway homeward bound, darting glances out the side window at a sky streaked with more color than I’ve seen in a sunset for a while. Sunsets need clouds for maximum beauty, but there’s a delicate balance – too many and it blocks the view; too few and there is nothing to reflect the color back. Sunrises can do without clouds, but sunsets need just enough. That night there were just enough. A few days before, driving home, I had time to stop and watch the sun sink past the horizon. Pulled my car off the road and sat on the hood. It was on one of the back country roads I take to get from my town to the next, and so there was very little traffic. I could hear cars on the distant freeway, but the more immediate sounds were the random melodies of birds and crickets. I watched the sun disappear and the sky move from lavender and pink, to the silhouette of a landscape that always happens when there are clouds – if you stare up at them just at the right time during a sun set, it almost looks as if you are gazing across some oddly familiar landscape of hills and plains, surrounding an open, cloudless lake of sky. The bugs finally chased me back into my car, else I’d have stayed until it was pitch dark. I wanted so badly to be able to do that Monday, because the balance of clouds was perfect. But the day was too long and too tiring. I drove to work watching the sun as it crept up over the horizon, rimmed in gold, and I drove home in time to watch it go away. Days where I work this much drain me of energy. There have been too many days like that recently, and it’s highly likely they will continue for a few more weeks.

I am restless again. Our manager came up to see us today and she and I spoke about what my options would be once this project is over. She took the reminder that I intended to make this project my last one as a consultant with fairly good grace, even offering suggestions, and noting that she would send me names to talk to in other departments. The conversation, although informative, has only made me more frustrated with this situation, simply because I realize that I won’t be able to leave for another four to six months at least. It’s not that I don’t like this project, because I do – quite a bit. It’s just that I’ve tried not to think about how much longer this would go on, and talking with her forced me to put it into perspective.

I just have to be patient. It’s difficult, knowing that there is an end in sight but it’s still too far away to touch, but I know that it’s coming. And perhaps I am fooling myself. I don’t expect that switching to a new department in the company will suddenly give me oodles more free time, but I do expect that I won’t be expected to work more than nine or ten hours a day (instead of 12+ like now), and the commute will be much shorter, and perhaps I’d start to have more time to stop and watch those gorgeous sunsets when I see them.

Or perhaps another way to look at it would be to note that if it weren’t for these insane work hours, I might never be paying attention to the sky and so maybe there is the bright side. At least it’s something to hold on to, while I wait.

I’ve had my fake nails now for a few months and I have to admit that, despite the fact that they do make my hands look prettier, and it’s fun to wear polish and all that, I’m starting to get a bit tired of them. They’re pretty, to be sure, but because they’re thicker than regular nails, sometimes it’s hard to pick up little things like coins or pieces of paper. When I type they make a tapping noise on the keys. Okay, maybe real nails would do that too, but when it’s just my own nails, they never really get long enough to tap. But there’s other little things. Opening the pop top on a soda can has become a much more difficult task than before. I’ve even resorted to wheedling my friends into doing it for me – either that or executing a skillful maneuver involving a pen top to pry the little metal tab up enough so I can slide one finger underneath without fear of snapping off one of these nails and causing myself much pain.

So why, you are now asking, do I not get them removed? The answer is very simple. I leave them on because, despite the minor annoyances, these are the closest thing to a cure I’ve found. It’s not a complete cure, but it’s as close as I can get. The mere fact that I can’t grasp tiny things very easily means that for the first time in nearly twenty years, I have a full set of eyelashes.

Yes, I said eyelashes. The disorder is called Trichotillomania, and if you want to know more about it, I’d suggest drilling down on that link. But I’ll summarize briefly here. It’s not an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, although perhaps that’s the easiest type of thing to compare it to. I have a mild form – luckily. Mine only manifests with pulling out the lashes and eyebrows. Other people can go so far as to pull out head hair, and even eat it.

It’s a quiet disorder, for obvious reasons. It’s not like you would go up to strangers on the street and introduce yourself with ‘Hi, I’m, Bob and I have Trich.! How about you?” It’s something that I’ve tried to hide for years, with limited success. Eyebrows can be drawn in, but nothing short of falsies will replace actual lashes. Eyeliner only does so much, and mascara doesn’t work if there aren’t lashes to apply it to. In college I finally decided to try to do something about it, so I went to see a psychiatrist. While he didn’t offer me a cure, he was far more helpful than he may have realized. He helped me to understand that what I have is a very real medical condition, and he helped me come to terms with it. I have Trich. I have had it for nearly two decades, and chances are pretty strong that I will have it til I die. He mentioned that some limited success had been achieved from the use of certain drugs like Prozac, but considering that Prozac is insanely expensive, and that OCD’s and similar disorders require the maximum dose, plus extra drugs to boost the effect…well, I passed. Besides, it’s not life-threatening. This isn’t like the people who wash their hands twenty times an hour, or something like that. It’s just hair. Okay, so I look funny, but that’s all.

A few months ago I was watching television and to my surprise there was a short clip on Trich on the local news. I saw the previews and I even though I usually avoid TV news due to the idiocy of the anchors (can we *please* get people who actually care about how to pronounce medical terms? Is that too much to ask?), I waded through whatever sensationalized stories they had to report and then watched as they discussed the disorder that I’ve had for so long. They flashed a URL on the screen, and I immediately went to look. I found a chat room. I logged in. I was surrounded by people just like me. Lots of them.

I can’t explain what a relief that was. I’ve known that I wasn’t the only one with this disorder – after all, the definition has been in the medical books far longer than I’ve been around and diagnosed. But still, it’s a rather odd thing to have, and I didn’t know anyone else who would even understand. My family has always been baffled by this. I know that they all think that if I just *tried*, I could stop it. How do you explain that with compulsive disorders and their ilk, you just *can’t*. How could I explain that most of the time I’m not even aware that I’m even *doing* it?

I spent some time browsing the site, and talking with the others who were logged in that night. There were stories posted from others who have Trich, talking about how long they’ve had it, what they’ve tried to cure it – although there were very few success stories. And in the chat room, the feeling of relief was shared by more than me. A father logged on, having seen the same show I did. He thought perhaps his daughter might have Trich, and he was wondering what he could do to help her. We all offered suggestions, and then at one point he asked how long. How long had it been for each of us? That’s when I did the math and realized that it had been twenty years. Two thirds of my lifespan. Strangely, that was sort of comforting. It’s a part of me – this odd little disorder – and even though it would be nice if some day I were to wake up and never tug out another eyelash or eyebrow, I know it isn’t going to happen. I have accepted it.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to try to work with it. Hence the nails. I have these darn nails and I will keep them for as long as I can stand them. My brows still suffer – the more stress I’m under, the worse it gets. But the lashes are alright. I have lashes. After all this time, I look *normal*. Finally.

And that alone is worth the inconvenience.

If there is one thing I can say about the midwest, it is that the food is distinctive in the inverse proportion of fat to vegetable matter. In this little town we stayed in for the family reunion, there were only a handful of restaurants. The one my family went to the most was a little place that fairly screamed ‘home cooking’. The woman who runs it comes up with a new menu every night, and there was a certain theme in her choices that seems common to midwestern cooking. The vegetables, such as they were, were cooked beyond any hope of nutritional value, and then quite often smothered in a liberal coating of melted Velveeta cheese. The meat – and this includes beef, poultry, and seafood – was, in some form or another, fried. Salads consisted of iceberg lettuce drowning in dressing made from scratch, and with a mayonaise base. Jello salads figured predominately on the menu. For my younger sister and her husband – both vegetarians – trying to find something to eat became an amusing nightly ordeal.

And we have been spoiled, out here on the West Coast, with a gourmet coffee shop in every neighborhood. Bil-1 and I decided to try our luck at the store that advertised cappuchinos and chai tea. The tea was just fine, although I did get a kick out of the woman who informed me that the ‘spiced’ (normal) version was just too spicy for her. The cappuchino, however, was not. Our first clue should have been the distinct lack of any cappuchino machine noises, but we were distracted by some other people wandering by. The General Mills commercial insists that you can’t tell the difference between their cappuchino mix and the real thing. They are wrong. Very very wrong.

I managed to get an upgrade to first class on my flight home on Sunday. The meal began with a fresh spinach salad, and there were perfectly steamed vegetables accompanying the main course. I had no idea how much I was missing *real* food until I found myself getting excited over airplane food. Sheesh!

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As news of my impending nuptials made its way around the family members at the reunion, I was cornered by more than one well-meaning relative and given wedding advice. Giving advice seems to be a common theme for many people when they learn that someone is going to have some sort of Big Event, and my relatives were certainly no exception. “For your honeymoon, go on a cruise”, I was told. Of course, I’ve been hearing that one for a while from friends, acquaintances, and coworkers. Richard’s and my current honeymoon suggestion that we go to New Zealand and try to get bit parts for the final filming of The Lord of the Rings is usually met with an odd stare, but somehow I think our idea is more appropriate for two nerds than a cruise. Heh. Other suggestions have centered around the wedding itself. What kind of food to serve. Where to get married. Whether we should even *have* a wedding at all. This last has been rather amusing because my dad, continuing a long running joke that started back when my older sister was planning her wedding, occasionally offers a lump sum if we’ll just elope instead of have a church wedding. We joke back that all he has to do is up the ante enough and we might just do it.

It’s been kind of fun to listen, so I really don’t mind the advice too much, even though Richard and I will make up our own minds on what to do. My favorite so far was from the reunion, where one of my who-knows-what-version-of-cousins pulled me aside to let me know that, speaking from the experience of marrying off three children, weddings aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and if I really wanted to do it stress free, I should elope. Bringing both sets of parents with us, of course, so they don’t feel left out, and by the way, Hawaii is a lovely place to honeymoon.

Hmm…. I wonder if my dad put her up to it? (grin)

Saturday started early, with family members trickling into the park to drag picnic tables into some semblance of order in preparation for the reunion. By noon, everyone had shown up and my aunt startled my mom by asking the newest clergy member of the Hickson family to offer the prayer. My mom isn’t used to doing that sort of thing – as she put it, the people she usually prays with are sick or dying (she’s a hospital chaplain). Nevertheless, I think she was pleased. Ministry has run in the Hickson family for several generations, and she is merely carrying on a family tradition. My mom’s family have been Methodists for a long way back, and religion always plays a minor role in their lives. We all joined hands as my mom gave a prayer, and as the reunion drew to a close, we all sung a few hymns, those of us who are more absent than present at church humming the familiar tunes even if we didn’t quite know the words.

It was a typical family gathering, I suppose. Potluck lunch, heavy on the potato salad, jello molds, and brownies. One cousin with his laptop and a family tree program going around the tables, gathering information. Adults clustering into their own generations and catching up with each other’s lives, watching the children as they played, enjoying the beautiful day. Fiona, being the youngest there, was passed around from one set of arms to the other and endured it all with giggling grace. We all posed for a group picture at the end. I’m not sure quite how many generations there were, nor am I entirely sure of the link between all of us, even though there was a point when we tried to figure out who was what type of cousin to whom.

That evening, my sisters and all the female cousins (or cousins’ wives) in our age group gathered together for what has now become a tradition – a trip to the local ice cream shop, where we loaded up on calories and silliness, and then to the pier to find a dark corner to sit and talk. The one exception to the group was Bil-1, who was allowed to join us by virtue of the fact that the last time we were there, he was made an honorary Hickson woman (don’t ask). We sat on that pier til it was very late, laughing, talking, noisy and having fun. This occasional trip to Ohio has been the only time my sisters and I have ever had to get to know our cousins besides the yearly Christmas card from their mom and so we all have been looking forward to that time on the pier.

We ended the evening with a walk through the sleepy little town, hugging our goodbyes and promising to try to schedule our time at Lakeside better next time. It had been four years since we last saw each other, and with the wedding next summer, it may be a few years til I see them again. I know that as the years pass and we all get older, I see more and more of our mothers in them. I wonder if they see the same in my sisters and me.