I’d been toying with the idea of replacing the mostly dead pine tree in the back yard with a grapefruit tree, but had not yet worked up the motivation to make a special trip to a nursery just to find one. But then, there we were at Costco yesterday afternoon, on a trip spurred mostly by my desire to pick up a box of the cutest handmade cards ever, and we were greeted with a huge selection of brand new citrus trees, and right there in the front were ruby red grapefruit trees. So what could I do but pick one up and put it in our cart and bring it home with us?

We did go out on this afternoon, after the choral fest that was the Palm Sunday service, and ponder how best to remove the aforementioned mostly dead pine. But that’s when we discovered that mostly dead pine trees are quite painfully prickly, and that even one year is long enough for a tree to set down enough roots that you can’t exactly just rip it out of the ground with your bare hands, and we also couldn’t seem to locate the shovel, even though we know we have one, so the cute little grapefruit tree is currently still sitting in its pot right beside the back porch. I’m not too worried about it right now, mainly because we keep getting rainstorms, so it’s getting plenty of water, and even a little sun when the storms break and psych us into thinking spring might actually be right around the corner, before promptly dumping several inches more water on us one more time. But I know we cannot leave it there indefinitely, and one of these days we are going to have to go out there and remove that stupid mostly dead tree, prickly bits or not, because the whole point of getting the grapefruit tree was to plant it so that some day, years from now, I will have grapefruits of my very own, and leaving it in its pot is sort of going to defeat that whole purpose.

Last night I zipped home from work and wolfed down dinner, and then grabbed one of the baby blankets I’ve been working on these last few months, found an appropriate gift bag, signed my name on a card, and dashed off to the first baby shower of the weekend. Our church, this year, is having quite a pile of babies – one born in January, one born in February, three within days of each other in April, and one more in May. And that’s just the ones we know about, since that would only take us through the first half of the year. It’s going to be babypalooza come summer, and baby showerpalooza kicked off on Friday night.

The mom-to-be’s house was overfull of women, and the noise level was a little overwhelming. We all had to pick nametags (I decided to be ‘Diaper Genie’) to play a variation on the clothespin game – instead of worrying about not crossing your legs, we had to instead remember to all people by their nametag moniker instead of their real name. Not so much a problem for me, since I didn’t know most of the other attendees there, and not so much a problem for most of the rest of the crowd, since it was so crowded and loud you could barely hear a conversation anyway. The congestion did make the second game of the evening a bit more participatory, since I’m not sure we were supposed to be discussing it amongst ourselves, but really there was no choice. They passed out 6 diapers, into which some enterprising person has melted six different chocolate bars. By smell and sight we were then to identify the mangled treats cradled carefully within the cushy padding of the diaper. After correctly identifying the Mr. Good Bar I gave up, if only because that one was a little too realistic for my tired brain to handle, and I found an empty seat in the living room near a few people I knew. Turns out it was the right spot to sit, since once the present opening began we were right next to the mom-to-be and actually got to see all the cute little things she was given.

Today was the second baby shower – held this time in the social hall at the church so there was a little more room to maneuver. This friend knows she’s having a girl (the one last night wants to be surprised) so there were oodles of adorable little dresses and booties and accessories in pink and purple and pastels. At one point she opened a present and pulled out a dress in pastel plaid and I think every single woman in that room immediately demanded to know if they made it in adult sizes because it was just the perfect ageless sundress for spring.

The baby born in January was there, being just as cute as he could possibly be. At one point I ‘stole’ him from his mother (by asking if she might like to actually eat her lunch with both hands instead of balancing a baby with one and trying to juggle a fork with the other), and we all had fun merrily ignoring the guest of honor and the party games and focusing on a chubby cheeked, dimpled little boy who is just getting old enough to figure out how best to charm everyone he meets.

I have, apparently, been far too blasé about the fact that I have so far not been sick this winter (unlike in previous years, where I have constantly battled the sinus infection from hell for weeks on end). Yesterday I spent the entire day with a feeling of impending doom as the pressure in my sinuses grew and grew. Add to that the fact that my eyes were dry and irritated all day, and I think I spent most of yesterday looking as if I was quite likely on something (due to the slightly reddened eyes). This might not have ordinarily been a problem, except that yesterday I was in Oakland attending a meeting at the office of the president of an extremely large statewide organization, and I would have preferred to look a little less like I hadn’t slept in the last two weeks.

I finally gave up after choir practice last night and took the last of the decongestants we have in the house. I figured maybe I would be lucky and the spiffy side effect of insomnia would kick in while I was already asleep and so I would just sleep right through it. But it is 1:30 in the morning now and I have spent the last 45 minutes lying in bed wide awake, my brain racing furiously in a bazillion useless directions, so…so much for that theory.

At least my sinuses no longer feel as if they are trying to kill me by making my head implode so I suppose a little insomnia is a small price to pay. Especially if it makes me actually sit down and write a journal entry, right?

I feel as if the days are slipping by lately and while I have been fairly busy, there really isn’t much to say. I finished my socks (and wore them to work and lo, they were comfy and very blue). I started making a birthday present for my little sister, and while the yarn I am using is a huge pain to work with, the project is turning out so gorgeous that I may have difficulty not just keeping it for myself. Our sprinkler head magically fixed itself (with, I suspect, a little help from the gardeners). There are strange blue flowers growing amid the climbing roses on our side yard arbor and while I suspect that they are some kind of weed the effect of blue flowers amid the white roses is so pretty I am loathe to actually go out and hack out the offender. Spring sprung early, which means the trees in the front are full of flowers and leaves, the nutmeg scented geranium in the pot by the front door is spilling over its sides with tiny white flowers that have no scent at all (nutmeg or otherwise), and the white peach tree in the back yard went through its far-too-brief explosion in pink blossoms and will, I suspect, be even more overloaded with fruit this year than last. Sadly it is still too small to actually handle everything it wants to produce so I also suspect I shall be doing some serious culling later in the summer. I am also pondering replacing the dead pine tree in the corner with a red grapefruit tree but since that would entail actually going to a nursery and buying the tree and digging a hole and planting it, so far it has gone no further than just speculation.

Speaking of the back yard, after taking last summer mostly off from any yard improvement projects, we’re starting to mull around the idea of this year finally tackling either the reading nook or the courtyard area. Since each one will require lots more lugging of large heavy stones and manual labor, I suspect that the reading nook (which is about one quarter the size of the courtyard area) will win out. Oh, and we finally found someone to come out and give us an estimate for putting in a drop-down ladder for attic access, so I am eagerly awaiting his call to set up an actual time for that. I have such plans for that attic. The instant we can finally get *into* it, the closet in the library is going to be emptied of all its piles of holiday decorations, so that my slowing growing stash of yarn will finally have a (cat-free) home of its own.

I am still wide-awake, and I am half afraid that I just may not ever get back to sleep tonight. So I think I will close this for now and go do useful things, like run a load of laundry, and load up the dishwasher, and feed the cat who is currently sitting on my chest and making it very hard to type, and pretend that when this decongestant wears off later today and the lack of sleep can finally hit me like a brick wall, that it will all have been worth it. Oh yes. I am sure of it.

A few months ago (possibly around November) Richard and I were awakened far too early one morning by the sound of water pouring on our roof. At first we thought it was a heavy rain storm, but looking out the window quickly showed that it was either an extremely small, localized storm (a storm which rained from the ground up, no less), or one of the sprinkler heads in the front yard had gone kaput. We weren’t going to get up at that time of night to do a sprinkler inspection, but later in the day Richard went out to look.

Our answer to the problem, at that time, was to turn off all the sprinklers, since it was nearing the rainy season and the sprinklers really weren’t required at that time anyway. We figured we’d deal with it later – when spring hit and the rainy season was over and we once again needed to water the yard.

Well guess what? Apparently spring has sprung. This morning, at about 3:30, I was abruptly jerked out of sleep by the sound of water pouring onto the porch roof right outside our windows. Gah. Since neither Richard nor I flipped the switch, nor do I think burglars make a habit of sneaking into people’s back yards and turning on their irrigation systems, I can only assume that the gardeners made the decision for us.

That early in the morning I couldn’t do much about it except mutter nasty things under my breath, get annoyed at Richard because the sprinklers did *not* wake him up (although to my credit I did decide against poking him awake so he would have to experience the geyser too), and give up and crawl back into bed and hope that I would eventually get back to sleep (in case you were wondering, I did not). Because it is still March, and history tells me that despite the uncharacteristically sunny days we’ve been having lately, the rain and the gloom will return, the sprinklers were turned back off this evening. But the fact that the gardeners did it once means that they are just as likely to do it again. So it appears that this weekend we’ll be doing a little irrigation system repair – and hopefully it will be as easy as everyone tells me it should be.

Yesterday morning we decided to do something a little different, so we headed into Davis to the (relatively new) crepery for breakfast. Next we headed off to get more cat litter (always an exciting trip) to the one tiny little store in our area that carries the stuff we use. I took the opportunity to see how much improvement the allergy shots have given me so far (it’s been about six months since I started them). While I was able to be in the store for a brief period of time, I eventually gave up and went outside and watched the chinchillas through the lovely allergen barrier of the plate glass window while I waited for Richard to finish buying the litter. The combination of tiny store plus large quantities of small furry animals, plus a distinct lack of any kind of air circulation whatsoever is still a little too much for me to handle. But I only ended up doing a little sneezing, and I didn’t have to go diving for the inhaler, and there was nary a hive to be seen. Ah. progress.

Last night was the latest installment with the Davis Musical Theater Company – Annie. Richard and I discussed before the play that we might have to set up a new rating system. If the play was really bad (as some of them have been), we would deem it ‘crepe worthy’, and leave at intermission to go to the crepe place for our after-play dessert. If it was not so bad, we’d stick it out for the whole thing, thus deeming it ‘pie worthy’, which meant that we’d do our usual after-play trip to Baker’s Square, which is the only restaurant actually open late enough to be an after-play destination.

Surprisingly, for a play where a large number of the main characters were kids, this one was definitely pie-worthy. The kids could not only act, but sing quite well for their age. The dog provided quite a bit of unintentional humor when he made it quite clear that he really did *not* enjoy the high notes in the play’s signature piece (“Tomorrow”). Overall it was actually quite enjoyable. Of course, having only ever seen the movie version of Annie, I was a bit blind-sided by the fact that the original play was actually quite the political statement for its time. But it gave us something to talk about later with my parents over pie. And even though I was very much in the mood for a crepe instead of pie, I much prefer the pie-worthy plays over the crepe-worthy ones.

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This weekend I finally decided that it was time to get over my fear of sock knitting once and for all, so I grabbed a set of double pointed needles and the skein of yarn I got from my knitting secret pal, sat down with the pattern, and got started. And, much as I expected (since this is what happens every time I try something new in knitting), it turned out to be not nearly as impossible as I was sure it was going to be. And in fact I finished off the first sock this morning.

I am ridiculously proud of this. I know it’s a silly thing to be proud of in the grand scheme of things, and there are a lot of people who make far more complicated things out of yarn, but I don’t care. It’s my very first sock. Plus, unlike my very first sweater (the one I made for my nephew with the neck opening too small for his head), this sock actually fits. And I have already cast on for the second one, so I expect by the end of the week I will be showing off my socks to everyone I meet. I am sure they will all be either impressed and amazed, or else will just back away slowly from the giddy woman showing off her blue striped feet.

Over the past week or two I’ve been doing some rather frantic work on my Photoshop class. I made it through the final lesson late last week, and this week, since the class ends on Friday, I decided to final tackle my Final projects. Note the multiple ‘projects’ there? If one wasn’t bad enough, they made us to two.

The first one was an inspiration in complete and utter lack of artistic talent. It was to be a montage of items, and I had to use a whole list of various techniques. I decided to do something with penguins, for lack of any other ideas, and poked around online (hooray for Google’s image search) until I managed to find enough penguin pictures to suit my needs. Then it was off to crop them and color them; to stick them all onto a lovely picture of an iceberg (well, it was lovely before I started with it, at any rate), add some little penguin footprints, and so on. I think the nicest thing I can say about that particular montage is that it is spectacular only in its sheer badness. No, you cannot see it. I think that once the class is over I will send it merrily off to the trash bin on my computer and do a silent little dance of joy when I hit the ‘delete forever’ key. I sent it off earlier this week and have heard nothing back from the instructor at all. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but considering the class officially ends tomorrow, at this point I really don’t much care.

The second project is the one that’s been driving me nuts for months. I was to create a fake magazine layout (again, using a set number of images and techniques). I had no ideas whatsoever, until Richard – likely having simply gotten tired of my whining about the whole thing – told me he was surprised I hadn’t thought of the obvious idea already. Do a layout involving knitting and cats, he suggested. Um. Oh. Well. Yes, that would make sense. I could wonder why I wasn’t able to think of that all by myself, but we all know the answer already so let’s not even bother going there.

So that’s what I did. And for all of my worrying and all that I was convinced that I would not be able to do this, I managed to put something together that didn’t look half bad. It is not, mind you, the loveliest of creations, but every single image I used for my fake knitting store ad came from pictures I took with my own little camera (plus one the instructor provided that we had to include), and I was able to muddle through most of the list of techniques we had to use without having to look them up in Photoshop’s help files. So I guess maybe I learned something after all.

You know the best part about finshing up the second Final project? It means that for me, the class is over. Over! And now I can install the game Richard got me for Christmas that I’ve been waiting to play because I knew it would become a massive time suck, and I do not have to pretend that I am the slightest bit creative with color or images or things like that ever again. Yay!

Today, despite having a million other things we’d much rather do, we got up and loaded up the car with all the recyclables, and drove them over to the recycling collection center, where we discovered that they moved things around, so we had to do a lot of peering into smelly metal bins to figure out where to dump our bottles and papers and cans. After finally figuring all that out, and then grabbing a quick breakfast, it was off to take care of those pesky taxes.

I think this is the first year in a very long time that both of us have had only one job (no thanks to the dot bomb), so there were a few fewer pieces of paperwork to sort through. Of course, despite our best efforts we did manage to leave a few things at home, as usual, so Richard got to make two trips back to the house to rummage in the files and track down the stuff we were missing. In the meantime, the tax preparer and I spent far too much time peering cross-eyed at the instructions for how to calculate the nifty tax break that we got from buying the Prius last year. Their software did not make it remotely easy, nor did it make it very clear just what we were supposed to do, and how we were supposed to calculate the relevant numbers (how does one extract the cost of just the fuel efficient piece of a hybrid car when the dealer not only does not provide a cost breakdown, but has no idea how the heck to get one because it is all an integrated machine, for crying out loud, and why were we calling him anyway).

We eventually figured it all out, and the computer did its magic and calculated all the numbers, and the end result was that while we ended up getting money back from the state, it was just a little less than the amount we owed the the feds. I suppose that means it all worked out okay, even though I admit to having had wistful dreams of getting a refund overall. Ah well. At least the taxes are now out of the way, and done nearly two months early, and once we get the state refund I’ll immediately write the check to the feds, and then it’ll all be done. Take that, procrastination gene!

Today was the usual mix of music practice and church, followed by some knitting. There’s enough of us yarn addicts at church now that we’ve organized a rather informal knitting and crocheting circle. We meet after church for an hour or two, braving the random ants in one of the Sunday school rooms (a room which seems to have the world’s most determined ants because no matter how hard anyone tries to get rid of them they always come back). This afternoon I actually got to show someone how to knit, which was actually kind of fun because it wasn’t all that long ago I was on the receiving end of the instructions.

Interspersed with bouts of tax-induced hair pulling, choir rehearsal, grocery shopping, and knitting, we have also been watching season 5 of Angel, which finally arrived on DVD from Amazon this past week. I think it is, so far, my favorite season of the whole show. As much as I love it though, it depresses me a little that when these DVDs are over there will never be any new Buffyverse TV for me ever again.

When I was in high school, I was a band geek. I played the oboe in the concert band and the woodwind ensemble (and once even in field show). I played the flute in marching band, for parade routes. During field show I played all the non-drum percussion instruments, xylophone, glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba (with four mallets, no less) and once even an eight-foot tall copper gong. And because that wasn’t enough band geekery for one person, and also because I happened to play piano, I was also in the jazz band.

The last one really never makes sense to me when I look back on it, for the sole fact that I have never been much of a fan of jazz music, and despite one might expect, playing it for four years did not make it any more endearing. Long drawn-out drum solos bore me to tears, and saxophone and trumpet solos leave me cold (although this might have more to do with the fact that pretty much every trumpet or saxophone player I knew who was given a solo had the big fat swelled head and ego to go right along with it). Being asked to ad lib on the piano terrified me. And yet I was in jazz band all through high school – all four years. Go figure.

The ironic thing is that even though I can only take about one or two jazz tunes before I start to gouge out my own ears, there were a few I didn’t mind, and an even smaller selection I actually really liked. And my very favorite of our repertoire, the entire time I was in that little ensemble, was “Birdland.” I have no idea who wrote it, nor do I know who did the arrangement we used. All I know is that I loved that song, and whenever the director asked us what we wanted to do for a performance, I’d flap my hand wildly in the air and ask to do that one. Of course, the rest of the band wanted to do other things, and over the four years players came and went. And when I graduated from high school I decided I’d had more than enough of jazz – both playing it and enduring it – and over the years I mostly forgot all about it.

NPR tosses little snippets of songs in between their news segments. On the way home from work yesterday I wasn’t paying much attention to what they were talking about until suddenly the music started playing. And I recognized that song from the first three chords. Birdland! They were playing my song! And I did a very un-adult like squeal of glee in the privacy of my car and turned the radio up really loud, and then might have possibly done a little pouting when the snippet was over and they went back to news and more mundane things.

It’s been lurking in my head all day today. If I let my mind wander those opening chords start up and if I’m not careful I find myself humming along. Birdland. It’s the way jazz should be. Oh yeah.

When I was younger, I was a Girl Scout. In fact, I was a Girl Scout from the first year of Brownies all the way through the last year of Seniors, and even earned the Gold Award to finish it all off. I was fortunate to have access to troops over the years that focused on keeping us girls active and learning. During the years I was a Junior, a Senior and a Cadette, my troop did long backpacking trips, went camping in Wyoming (memorable for both the funnel clouds in the sky and the fact that I spent four hours lost in a canyon because we thought it looked like a good shortcut), competed in camping skills (who else can say that they’ve won awards in both semaphore and Morse Code several years in a row?), made solar box ovens, sang, danced, wore neon green uniforms, and generally had a blast.

Part of the reason we did so much cool stuff was that my mom was the troop leader, and she didn’t believe in sitting around and just doing ladylike crafts all day. One of the things she emphasized to my sisters and I was that there was nothing we couldn’t do just because we were girls, and to that end, she made sure all the girls in her troops knew how to use tools, and how to do basic maintenance around the house. There were a few parents who were ever so slightly horrified when they found out that she had shown all of us how to find the main water and gas connections for a house; how to turn off the water for an individual sink; how to take things apart and put them back together, but we all pretty much ignored their dithering. There were also a few of the girls who had obviously been given the ‘girls don’t do that’ speech a time or two, and seemed to be aghast that my mom expected all of us to occasionally get our hands dirty.

One little girl in particular had a small fit during one meeting, when we were doing something with tools, and told my mom that she couldn’t use a screwdriver because she was a girl.

My mom, never one to mince words, retorted “Why not? It’s not like the boy holds it with his penis.”

She heard from more than one set of parents about that one, since there are an amazing number of people out there who feel that their little girls are far too delicate to hear the ‘p’ word, but the point was made. If a boy can do it, a girl could too, and none of the girls in her troop were ever allowed to use their gender as an excuse. It’s something that has stuck with my sisters and me into our adulthood. There are a lot of things I don’t know how to do – and an awful lot of those do tend to be traditionally ‘male’ tasks, like building and carpentry and electrical work. But I know that my only stumbling block is that I just don’t know what I’m doing, and not that I *can’t* do it just because I’m a girl. After all, I’ve rewired lamps. I’ve replaced faucets and showerheads. I’ve taken apart plumbing (although in retrospect it didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped). I’ve sanded and finished and painted and built things. The only thing that stops me from doing more is simple lack of know-how.

So when my knitting friend told me about Ladies Night Out at a hardware store in Vacaville (Meeks), I was intrigued. I liked the concept – training classes specifically geared toward women – so last night I headed off to see what they had to offer.

They had three sessions – one on drywall (taught, I should point out, by a very enthusiastic woman), one on toilets, and one on moldings – and you could attend two of the three. Since I think I know everything I really want to know about drywall (after spending an entire day hanging it for the Habitat for Humanity project last summer), I decided to check out the toilet session first, then attend the molding session next.

The whole thing was amazing. Hardware stores (much like many mechanics) are still, too often, places where sexism lurks and is sometimes encouraged. A woman walking alone into a hardware store is more likely to be given the proverbial pat on the head, and there are a lot of hardware stores where there is still the assumption that if you’re female, you obviously don’t know what you’re doing, and everything has to be dumbed down. Not, mind you, that I’ve run into that at our favorite local hardware stores (what, doesn’t everyone have a favorite hardware store?), but I’ve seen it – and experienced it – in others. And I think, in a way, this Ladies Night Out was geared toward trying to change that.

There was a large crowd of women – and yes, even a few men (mostly husbands, I suspect, of some of the attendees). They provided us with dinner, and there were a few employees wandering around throughout the evening passing out door prizes – things like work gloves, knee pads, portable CD players, little tool kits. The grand prize of the evening was a huge combination tool that looked like it sanded and drilled and screwed and did a lot of other really useful things. And the sessions were led with the assumption that we were all smart people who knew what we were doing, but just needed a little help. The guy who led the toilet session walked us through how to take an entire toilet apart and put it back together – including replacing the valves, seals, and so on. The guy who led the molding class got into animated discussions with a few attendees on which nail gun was best for which project, and which compound miter saw would be most useful, and seemed to just assume that we all would be at home around both. It was informative and energized and most of all, so very refreshing, because they treated us all like we were just ordinary people, and not like we were ‘girls’.

Among all the adults there was one little girl in attendance (likely a daughter of one of the other attendees). She sat in the front row during the session on toilets and clutched a rather raggedy looking stuffed animal while she watched him take things apart and discuss the pros and cons of the various types of valves and seals and parts. She had glasses and a pony tail and she was probably about 8 or 9 – maybe around the same age as the little girl who told my mom she couldn’t use a screwdriver because she was a girl, all those years ago.

I was glad to see her there.

Back when I was a database nerd (back when I traveled around the country and worked for big soulless companies who didn’t care if I lived or died as long as I churned out billable hours) I used to routinely be given tasks to do that involved things way outside my scope of knowledge. My very first ‘real’ project – and bear in mind this was when it was still a small organization (and therefore possessing of a soul, and nice people who actually cared) was on Microsoft Access – a project for which I was given the software a full two weeks before actually meeting with the client because I had never used Microsoft Access before this in my entire life. Somehow I scrabbled through a ‘Teach Yourself Access in 20 days’ book in about one week, and spent a lot of time frantically pouring through online tutorials and help sites and code samples, and managed to keep one step ahead of the client throughout the project and thereafter became labeled an ‘expert’. Another time I was sent to a project and found out later they’d told the clients I was an expert in database tuning, and really, while the things I could do with AT-SQL were the stuff of visions, a database tuning expert I was not. So I spent another few frantic weeks scrabbling through anything I could get my hands on, including reading the server manuals cover to cover and somehow staying just enough ahead of the game to get their databases running in tip-top shape after all, and from the reviews I got after the fact, it turned out that no one was the wiser. No one, that is, but me.

I loved doing all the writing of code. That part of my job was the thing that would wake me up at night from dreaming stored procedures; would make me lose track of time at the office when I was neck deep in a procedure so convoluted that I would lose track of where it started and where it ended. But the part of my job that eventually led me to quit (aside from the whole being bought by a soulless corporation and being treated like a nameless peon thing) was the part where I felt as if I was forever hanging on by my fingernails and no matter what I did I would never quite catch up because no matter how much I learned there was always far more I was somehow supposed to know (by virtue of being ‘sold’ as an expert in those fields) but did not, and I got really tired of feeling as if I was always one step away from a rather spectacular failure.

In my current job we’re in the process of revamping our intranet, and somewhere along the line it became known that I know HTML, and so I became part of the revamping team. And then there were other software programs tossed into the mix, including a certain proprietary online information management system, and then, because there is only so much one can do with this particular system from their web-based editor, yet more proprietary software was required. It showed up in the mail, I installed it, and then spent a few days reading tutorials and pouring through knowledgebase articles and white papers and bookmarking pages full of hints and examples and code samples, and doing my very best to figure out how to make changes to objects in a software I do not yet understand very well. And today for a short moment in time I started to feel that old panic welling up inside me – the feeling that I was doomed to always feel one step behind the rest of the world and that I was never going to feel like I had this all mastered again.

But then I found a way to make it do (mostly) what I was hoping it would do and all the pieces fell into place, and even though I am not an expert in these new systems by any stretch of the imagination, what matters is that I know just enough, and there will be time for me to work on all the rest of it when, and if, I need to know more later. And a little thrill went through me when I sat back and looked at what I did – things that maybe the regular non-code nerd might never even notice because all the hard stuff always happens behind the scenes, and I thought to myself that there was a reason that I was good at what I did, in that other life, and that even though I have no desire to ever go back there again, sometimes it is good to have these little moments of nostalgia when I can actually see what those managers saw when they billed me out as an expert in software I’d never touched – because they knew that I’d always figured it out before and by golly, I’d likely do it again. And what do you know. I did.