Because I found out on Wednesday that I was going to be able to go home early, I wasn’t able to get a flight out til Sunday. So I ended up with Saturday to kill. Call it a forced vacation if you will. I looked at it as an opportunity to sleep late, and then go wander in Boston. Ah, the best laid plans, or something like that.

A woman at the front desk of the hotel suggested that if I wanted to tour Boston, the best idea would be to take the train in because, with the Big Dig (which is apparently a construction project involving digging large holes under Boston and then stuffing the highways in those holes instead of above ground, but I’m fuzzy on all the details), they would be lucky to ever see me again from all the traffic. I thought this sounded like a truly marvelous idea, so, armed with directions printed out on a piece of paper and a train schedule, I set off to See Boston.

I know where I went wrong. I figured it out later. It was an easy mistake to make. The directions said take I93 south to 495 north and then take exit 41. The problem was, I didn’t see the 495 part. So I blithely toodled along I-93 south, oohing and ahhing at the scenery, until I found exit 41 off of *that* freeway.

Now bear in mind that if these places did not rely so heavily on exit numbers and instead believed in the power of named roads like us over here on the West Coast, I might have been better off. After all, the motto of Massachusetts seems to be “Street signs? We don’t need no stinking street signs. If you don’t know what street you’re on, it’s your own fault!” But I digress.

So there I am, driving along the freeway, which is flanked by trees that have been just beautifully frosted with the snow that fell the night before (and caused all sorts of delays at the airport and any other number of problems, but darn it all, I was a tourist and all I saw was that it was GORGEOUS outside!). And I see exit 41. So I take it. Next I am supposed to go to the 4th stoplight. No problem. I can count.

Gee, it’s taking an awfully long time to find the fourth one…..

And when I did, that’s when I knew I was truly lost. Because there was supposed to be something called a Wild Harvest on my left….and there was only a drug store.

No sweat! I park, hop out, and skip inside to ask for directions to the train station.

When one is met with blank stares when one asks for directions to the train station, this is when one knows that one might be lost. Truly lost.

So…..back I headed for I-93 south. It was far too late to turn around and go find the station that I was *supposed* to find, so I decided to be extra brave and just drive (gasp) directly into Boston. Couldn’t be all that bad, right? And then I saw it! A sign on the freeway that said “Next exit, Train”. Woohoo!

I should point out here the above caveat about street signs in Massachusetts. I had to go into another store to ask for directions because surrrrrre, it’s off that exit, but then the directions stop and there are no more signs at all!

But don’t fear, my friends. I did find the train station. Or one of them. And I got to experience parking in snow. A hint. Don’t accelerate. You skid that way. Wee!

On the train I sat behind a group of women and their very small children and was easily amused by their accents. Okay, so sue me. I’m from California. We don’t have accents out here. On the east coast, they do. I got to see more gorgeous scenery. I was on my way.

I have no idea where I was in Boston when I got off. There were lots of big buildings and I did spot a coffee shop or two. I did do a little bit of wandering, nervously clutching the little colorful map I’d been given that loudly proclaimed “Tourist! See? Here she is!” to anyone who took a look at me…..and then I did a stupid thing.

Slush looks deceptive. When it is surrounded by snow one might imagine that it, too, is relatively firm. And one could step into it with confidence.

Sploosh.

Back to the train I went with soggy icicles in place of feet. Back to the hotel to bake my shoes on the heater vent.

Okay, so I didn’t get to wander around Boston. And I got lost. But I’m not too upset by it. What I got to see was more fun anyway. I got to see snow. And beautiful houses. And snow. And hear accents. And see snow.

It was a good day.

We ended early today. It’s been a long week and we’re all tired and drained, and yet noone has lost their sense of humor. It’s a great bunch of people they have here. These are people who have been pulled in from all around the world, who have been flying to different spots around the country since early January, and have weeks more to go before they can finally be home again. They’ve been tasked with the rather weighty job of figuring out how to turn this piece of rather complicated software into a package that works perfectly with their systems….and in the meantime they are making business decisions, trying to streamline their processes, and all with very little knowledge of the product or how it works.

It’s snowing outside, too. When I looked up through the window, all I saw are trees and snow – gently falling snow. Oh, it’s supposed to get much, much worse – they’re predicting a storm that might shut down the airports tonight. But in the meantime it’s beautiful. I miss snow. I miss watching it fall through windows. I miss walking across snow and listening to it crunch under my boots. I miss waking up in the morning after a snowfall and looking outside to that perfect, brilliant white carpet, and the utterly amazing silence that seems to accompany newly fallen snow. Christmas just isn’t the same when it’s not white. Winter is never quite winter when you don’t see snowmen in front yards, or kids in snowsuits with hoods pulled tight and mittens dangling from cords strung through their sleeves.

On the way to the car it was like we were all back in elementary school. It’s been too many years since I’ve been outside in snow like that. Four of us stomped around, heads upturned, snowflakes dusting our hair and faces. We were giggling as we brushed off the windows and lights on the car. We didn’t stop grinning the whole ride to the hotel, peering out the windows, oohing. We decided tomorrow if it’s not too bad we might get together – those of us who will still be in town – and build a snowman. Or something. There’s no way we can pass up on this chance.

Maybe it seems silly to those of you who get to live in snow. But there’s something so magical about snow when you never get that chance. I keep looking out the window. It’s beautiful out there. Simply beautiful.

If only I had thought to bring some gloves with me…

I did get to see snow today, out the window as we sat around a circle of tables, laptops, and a tangle of bright yellow network lines discussing some minor but apparently extremely critical detail about the system this company is trying to implement. Turned my head and there it was, falling gently from the sky, tiny puffs of white. My brief glimpes of daylight come from that window. Otherwise I am seeing this part of Massachusetts in the dark.

And mind you, even in the dark, it seems to be a beautiful place. There’s lots of trees. There’s snow on the ground. It’s nice and cold. I like the cold. Okay, maybe I’m not exactly used to this cold out here, but I remember being used to it once. And there’s snow. Did I mention the snow?

The meetings during the day are long and fast-paced. They’re figuring out what they want their system to do; I and one other person are there to collect these requirements and carry them back to the development team. Some of the things coming down the pipeline are big, complex, highly convoluted bits of logic. I’m biting my tongue, itching to jump in with suggestions because when they toss out one of these ideas, it’s all I can do to stomp on my brain as it runs off and immediately tries to figure out the best way to code that thorny bit of logic. We’re talking requests that will take months to complete – requests that will make the developers involved want to pull out their hair. I’m nearly drooling, I want to start coding on them that bad. So what if it might be stressful and I end up working long hours and there will be times when I hate that stupid bit of logic and wonder who the idiot was who came up with it in the first place…but once it’s done there’s such a sense of satisfaction that the impossible has been made possible.

I could touch on the whole political aspect of this project but I suppose I’d better leave that one alone for now. Suffice it to say that it amuses me…..in fact, quite a lot about this project this week amuses me. I’m not so sure the other participants would be as thrilled by that statement.

Now if I could only get more than four hours of sleep a night……

I flew to Boston yesterday. Hit turbulence over Denver and felt queasy the entire second leg of the flight. It didn’t help I was in the very back of the plane, and they’d cranked the heat up back there. Waiting to leave the plane at the end took forever – one of those fun times when I sit there and silently argue with my stomach. No, you’re not queasy. Trust me. You’ll be fine. We’ll be off soon. Just hold on a little bit longer. I swear, it won’t be much more.

Made it to my hotel. It’s a nice hotel. What is there to say about it? It’s a hotel. When you travel a lot, they all start to look the same. A bed. A desk. A chair that adjusts – if I’m lucky. Try being short and sitting in a desk chair built for tall men. Typing with my hands up around my shoulders. Sigh.

Today was long. It went fast – at least at the beginning, but after the conference calls that stretched on til late, it felt like tiime was dragging. At the very least, being in the meetings and conference calls kept my mind off of what today was. And I did have fun after work, doing dinner with my coworker, finding a shopping mall, pondering different colors of really adorable boots, searching futily for somewhere that was open that might sell a network hub, discovering parts of New Hampshire that perhaps we really didn’t want to be wandering around at night.

It’s pathetic, I suppose. I love being single. I really do. So why is it that this one stupid day of the year I end up feeling so darn sorry for myself? It stinks. I really thought I’d be able to get past it this year, but no. I was online chatting to friends and people were mentioning what they’d done with their significant others, and it crept up on me. That pesky little voice in my head that loves to point out all my problems and faults and flaws and won’t go away.

It’s almost over though. Today, that is. Tomorrow things will go back to being happy and normal. It always works out this way.

I’ve been doing a lot of cleaning lately. Well, not so much cleaning as sorting through my house – going through closets and boxes and crates of things that I stashed because someday I’ll need them again. I find things occasionally that make me laugh, or make me wonder why the heck I ever thought I needed to save it in the first place.

This morning I found a box full of notes, and other things from college. I don’t remember doing this, but apparently at some point I sat down and took all the notes from my classes that I thought were ‘important’ and I organized them all into notebooks. Physiological Chemistry. Nutrition. Food Science. Physiology. Biochemistry. One notebook for each – some fatter than others. I’ve been trying to be fairly ruthless with getting rid of things, because lets face it, I’ve been getting cluttered. But these made me stop for a moment. I sat down and pulled a few of them out and looked at them.

It seems a million years ago I was in college. It was a completely different person who took those notes and transcribed them neatly for review at test time. For some of them, I used different colors, just so the information I thought was more important would stand out. Anything that would make it easier to get the data into my swiss cheese brain and keep it there so I could pass.

It seems silly, but I actually pondered keeping them. Finding a place to put the box, closing it up, and leaving it there. Sort of a link to the past, back when I was studying science, doing research, pondering becoming a professor and teaching, writing freelance reviews for companies. I’m not sure why. Nostalgia, mostly. Just a little box to prove that I really did get a degree, even though I’m not using it.

But I am being ruthless, remember? I am getting rid of things that I don’t need or use anymore. I don’t need these notes. I’ll never use them again. That box will just gather dust in some dark corner of a closet and years down the road I’ll have to make the decision again – save or discard. And ask myself why I kept them so long anyway.

Three years doesn’t seem like a long time. Only three years since I packed those up and walked away from graduate school to become a computer nerd. I have never regretted it. And so they went into the trash. I still have the memories. And that’s more important than a box of handwritten class notes anyway.

I flew up to Seattle yesterday to meet my new neice. Fiona is, of course, absolutely adorable and charming and we (my parents and I) sat and watched her scrunch her face into the silliest little expressions for hours on end. Ah, the joy of newborns. I held her, and didn’t feel one teensy bit of maternal urges. If that doesn’t prove to the rest of them that I really and truly don’t want kids, well, I’m not sure what will. Regardless, she is a little doll and I am already trying to figure out just how often I can make it up to Seattle to visit without driving my little sis and her husband crazy. My sister did mention that I have a standing invitation -something along the lines of ‘my futon is your futon’ – which of course is a hard invitation to pass up when there is a teeny little baby up there who’s just as cute as she can be.

I should just note here – I’m gushing over my little neice, and this is certainly not to infer that I don’t ooh over my nephew just as much. It’s just the neice is brand new. I’m entitled to do more gushing right now.

My brother-in-law – the father of the nephew, not the neice – is looking for a new job. And he’s lately been sending my dad and I emails with some of the job offerings he’s found. In Napa. Yes, Napa. There are jobs for computer nerds in Napa. This completely boggles me. Napa inspires images of rolling hills and yuppies sipping wine while they relax in spas. Not pasty-faced, coke-bottle lens-wearing nerds hunched over keyboards muttering incomprehensible blatherings about select statements and grepping, a word which always seems vaguely illicit somehow, but don’t ask me to explain because then I would just end up sounding silly (oh, like I don’t already). But regardless, there they are. Positions paying decent money, up in a gorgeous area of California. Okay, so it would be further away from my friends in both directions, but oh gosh (she says with a dreamy expression on her face) that might be bearable if I could actually be home every night and never have to worry about my billable vs nonbillable hours and whether taking vacation will cut into my quarterly bonus, and be able to actually make long-range plans during the week because I could guarentee not only to be in town, but most likely that I would be home at a decent hour and could do stuff. It’s a tempting thought. And I freely admit that I’m scared. A big squawking chicken, if you must know. I’m scared that if I went to go looking for another job they all would look at my pitiful level of experience and knowledge and they would laugh in my face and in rude and nasal tones, loudly point out that my degree is in Nutrition, not Computer Science, and you know how you always feel like you’re one step behind everyone else in this industry, clinging on by your fingernails trying to figure out all these tiny things that everyone else seems to just *know*, well, it’s because you’re *stupid*, so why don’t you go away now. Sigh. So here I am feeling like this and dithering about what to do when I quit doing consulting because I *am* going to quit consulting because I don’t want to do this traveling anymore, but what am I really qualified to do, and darn it all it would be awfully nice to figure this out pretty soon because I want to buy a house one of these days, and I’m 30 now and it’s time. It’s past time. And I get this email from my brother-in-law. The father of my nephew, not my neice. With a job description that he is looking for. And my first thought reading through this is ‘oh my god, I can actually *do* this!’ So then I go to the job site and what do you know, I find another one that I might actually be qualified to do.

And all I can think now is, well, there goes that excuse. And can it really hurt to toss my resume out there and see if anyone bites? Because I’m on a project now that’s fairly stable and while the commute might be long, at least I am not living in hotels and flying back and forth every week, so it’s not like there’s any sense of urgency. What do I have to lose?

So why am I still so scared?

Caffeine. I’m running low here. Time to get more coffee. And hurry up about it, will ya?

Hectic seems to be the norm lately for my life. This project I’m currently assigned to keeps hitting snags we never expected. We need a DBA badly, but no sign of one being found or assigned to us. Trying to pin the users down on requirements and getting enough info out of them has been difficult, although it is getting better. However, I’m here for 10-12 hours a day lately, and no end of that in sight at least through this week. I need sleep. This morning more problems, right as I walked in. Nearly two hours on the phone with everyone, trying to track down what happened. No, don’t care what happened. How do we fix it? How do we make sure it doesn’t happen again?

Hook up an IV into my arm and just feed it into the veins directly. Much quicker than drinking it. Really. And then I won’t have to taste it. How can anyone actually drink this stuff *black*?

The cats weren’t happy with me last night. I came home to anxious faces. I was a bad cat mom. Very bad. The food bowls were so low you could actually see the bottom! Oh, the horror. The inhumanity. Or something. Anyway, I filled the bowls quickly, all the while apologizing profusely to them, and since I was so tired from work. I didn’t even try to figure out what toy it was they had ripped into nonrecognizable little shreds of green foam all over the living room floor.

Alright, maybe not a caffeine IV. What about a caffeine patch? They have them for nicotine. Why not caffeine?

Yes, but those are for people trying to quit smoking.

So? What’s your point?

Well. You’re not necessarily trying to cut back.

This morning when I was looking for the dish sponge, I figured out what it was. I’m not sure exactly what the sponge did to antagonize them. Or why it is that they decided that, after ignoring this sponge (and all its little scrubby, spongy predecessors) for the 5 years I’ve been in this house, that last night was the night that it had to die. Perhaps it committed suicide. I may never know.

Caffeine. I need more caffeine. Sleep isn’t going to happen. Not for a while. But as long as I have caffeine…..

To my brand new neice,

You’re not old enough to read this. You’re not going to be old enough for several years, and by then you may not even care. But you’re just born and there’s things I am thinking, now that I have a little neice. I’ve got a nephew too, and I love him just as much. But you’re a girl, and I’m a girl, and I look at the world through a girl’s eyes and I see things that worry me.

I want for you to be able to ignore mirrors. To treat them as any other piece of furniture. To not look in one and automaticaly find fault with what you see. I hope that you will never feel you must judge yourself on the basis of what you weigh, or what your cup size is, or how large your tush might be.

I want for you to not have to be afraid when you’re out alone in the dark. To never have to worry that because you are female, you are a target. To be able to wear whatever you want and not have anyone think that this gives them the right to treat you as less than a person.

I wish for you a career that has no glass ceilings. No old boys’ network. No discrimination of any kind.

I wish for you a world where you can love who you want to love, whether that be male or female, and noone will even blink

I wish for you a world where the choice of whether to keep or end a pregnancy is yours and yours alone, and not based on what a bunch of right wing religious fanatics think it should be.

I wish for you to grow up strong and confident. To laugh loud and long, play hard, love what you do, love life, live life. You will make mistakes – everyone does. But you have choices. You can either let those mistakes hold you down, or learn from them and use them as stepping stones to raise you even higher.

Welcome to the world, Fiona. It’s a beautiful place.

all my love

Fiona Elizabeth, born at 10:08pm, 01-29-2000, 8 pounds, 20.5 inches.Perfect

I replaced my showerhead tonight.

Oh, I know. Big deal. So what.

But you see, it was a *plumbing* thing. I managed to do a *plumbing* thing and nothing broke! This is not always the case. Plumbing and I do not usually get along. There was the time I took apart the pipes under the sink because my friend dropped her ring down the drain and it seemed such a simple task to pull off the pipe…except that some little rubber gasket or something like that was rotten and fell to pieces the minute the pipe came off and we had to call in the maintenance guy to fix it and he was not amused.

Or the time when the water softener hose came undone and I tried several times to fix it because it kept pouring water all over the floor of the garage and leaking into the dining room of the house and if you’ve ever smelled mildewy carpet, you know what fun *that* can be.

So while replacing a showerhead may seem an easy task, I was not exactly filled with confidence. For all I knew, I could take the old head off and the whole darn pipe would crumble to bits at my feet.

However, it was a piece of cake! Of course this is after I stood in front of the vast display of showerheads at the local hardware store, contemplating which one to get. All I wanted was a showerhead. Just a little metal doohicky I could screw on so that I could actually, maybe, if I was really lucky, have a shower in something that had semi-decent water pressure and didn’t spray upwards and sideways, but *down*, onto me.

Finally I picked one, more out of desperation because the store was closing and by golly I was gonna replace that showerhead tonight so I’d better just grab one *now* than because I’d decided on which of the wall of shiny heads to take home.

Armed with the new showerhead, my wrench, and determination, I headed into the bathroom with my entourage of furry assistants and tackled the chore. There was a brief moment of consternation when at first the old showerhead refused to budge and I had visions of the thing being rusted permanently in place, but hooray, it was just being stubborn, and off it came.

I have a new showerhead. It’s amazing.

Maybe next week I’ll tackle the water softener again.

ME: Ho hum, today will be nice and slow. I can finally catch up on all this work.

COWORKERS: Gee. We have this little Microsoft Access thing we need to have developed.

ME: Hey. I’ll volunteer to do it. No problem. I just need to download the install from the company installation directory. Piece of cake.

COMPUTER: sits there looking grumpy.

ME: ‘Do you want to install?’ Sure I do! **Click** Hmm. Something seems to be wrong…….

COMPUTER: I’m bored.

ME: What? What’s wrong? See? I’ll uninstall. Will that make you happy? I’ll reinstall and make it all better. Honest.

COMPUTER: I’m still bored.

ME: See? I’ll reboot. You’ll work now. So I can do this teensy little Microsoft Access database….hey! Quit freezing up on me! I’m talking to you!

COMPUTER: Oh yeah?

ME: Yeah!

COMPUTER: I *told* you I was bored.

ME: Fine. You’re being rebooted.

COMPUTER: Oh yeah?

ME: yeah. What are you going to do about it?

COMPUTER: Watch.

<…..Missing operating system…..>

ME: Nonononono!!!!

COMPUTER laughs maniacally. Don’t even think about retrieving your files, either. DOS? I don’t do DOS.

*****

Hit return if you want to reformat your hard drive, and lose any and all files you ever had on this system, and watch the blue screen of death come up sporadically, and reboot another 5 or 6 times and completely hose your system and lose absolutely everything and have to reinstall every single piece of software that you need to do any amount of work at all, and don’t think you can do this quickly either because I’m going to make you fight with me ALL DAY if I want to!

*****

ME: Sob!

**Click**