My boss has been doing the bus/bike thing to work every now and then for the past few months. I’ve pondered it, but never worked up the enthusiasm required to get myself out the door half an hour earlier than I usually leave.

This morning, however, I finally did it. Or rather, I should say that I managed to do it, but just barely. I am all about being sustainable and environmentally friendly, but taking the bus is more expensive than driving my car. Plus it requires exact change. For someone who rarely, if ever, carries any cash at all, this was a bit of a challenge. Regardless of all my misgivings, however, I did manage to leave the house and give myself just enough time to zip up to the store, get cash for the bus fare, and then make it to the bus stop with only seconds to spare before the bus arrived.

Each bus can handle up to two bikes, which fit into racks that have been bolted into the luggage areas underneath the bus. It seems a colossal waste of space, since without the rack you could probably fit a few more bikes in there, and the racks are not necessarily the most self explanatory, nor do the drivers seem to know the secret tricks to getting a bike to actually *fit*.

Once we arrived in Old Sacramento, we pried the bikes out of the luggage areas with can openers and rode about three miles through the park to the office. All told, I managed to score just a little under 13 miles today, which was a nice boost toward our goal. I also determined that next time I do this, even though it’s such a short distance, I am definitely wearing my padded bike shorts. The padding was sorely missed when riding over the cobblestone streets in Old Sacramento, you see. Ouch. Serious ouch.

It was a nice experiment, and at least now I know where to catch the bus for both ways, and how to work my way to the office, and more importantly, how to wedge my bike into the bus so that the top of the luggage area does not remove the handlebars. I doubt it will become something more than an occasional thing, for a number of reasons (not the least of which had to do with the cobblestones). The timing is certainly an issue, since many nights we have somewhere we have to be in the evenings and there’s little enough time as it is to scrounge dinner out of our kitchen without adding on the additional time of bussing and biking. But when I’m faced with the need to rack up a dozen or so extra miles to meet the monthly quota, at least it’s nice to know an option exists.

Remember how I said I was determined to finish that 10-pound bag of satsumas? Well that was before Richard found out that that 10-pound bag of oranges he bought from a coworker’s kid (school fund raiser of some kind) was actually 25 pounds of oranges. 25 pounds! 10 pounds was bad enough, but we figured Richard would probably just eat them all and I’d focus on the satsumas and we’d be fine. But 25 pounds? We are talking one whole heck of a lot of oranges for two people to get through, especially when one of those two people (that would be me) is not really a fan of oranges much at all. Add in the remaining satsumas and we are facing over 30 pounds of citrus fruit, sitting in huge orange mesh bags on the dining room table because there was no where else to put it all.

My little sister, when I poured out our orange plight to her in an email, immediately went online and searched out a whole plethora of recipes that make use of oranges. I have already put out a plea to my parents (both of whom are in Germany now!) for temporary use of their orange juicer (although if we’re going to do that I have to borrow their teeny tiny strainer because pulp in juice is nasty and wrong and just the thought of that juice that so proudly announces that it has Extra Pulp makes my stomach churn). If I was determined before with the measly ten pounds of satsumas, I am even more determined now.

Someone please remind me of this in about two weeks when I never want to see another orange fruit ever again. Okay? Please?

On the way home from work last night I stopped at the produce stand and, among other things, bought another ten-pound bag of satsumas. When I lugged it into the house Richard gave me a look that clearly indicated he thought I’d lost my mind. After all, sitting in a colander on the counter were the sad and lonely remnants of the previous ten-pound bag, and it was only this past weekend when I firmly declared that I was sick of the darn things and couldn’t stand to eat any more.

But I am determined. I will eat these, even if it is only a few at a time. Not only are they good for me, but they serve the rather attractive purpose of letting me quickly reach my daily quota of five servings of fruits and/or veggies a day – one of our big goals this year. Besides, by the time we finish this bag, their rather short season will be ended for the year, and so even if I reach my tolerance of satsumas by that point, it will no longer be a problem. I’ll have 9 or 10 months in which to get over it before they start showing up in the produce bins again. Who knows – by then I might have managed to work my way up to something else in the citrus family besides satsumas and grapefruit.

********

We got up this morning and did our 6.5-mile bike ride. I’ll admit there was a brief moment after the alarm went off during which I lay in bed and seriously pondered just going back to sleep. But the only way we’re going to hit that 1000 mile goal is if we get up and do these short little rides on a regular basis. Considering the late start, my current goal is simply to reach 50 miles by the end of the month, and I know if we don’t ride twice a week until then it just isn’t going to happen. This morning’s ride was done mostly in the dark again because replacing the batteries in the bike lights didn’t fix them. On the way home from work I stopped by the bike store to get new lights. I did not end up getting lights at all, since apparently we’ll need some sort of special attachment to get them to fit around the bars, but I did manage to procure a new helmet, new biking gloves, a rear view mirror to attach to my handlebars, and new toe clips. The best way to discover just how much toe clips improve your riding is to suddenly have to ride without them.

Today started off too early, for which I have only myself to blame because I was a big slacker and did not do my final prep for week two of the Harry Potter class I’m leading at church. In my defense, when the leader’s guide arrived on Friday, I *did* immediately read through the whole thing, so it wasn’t like I hadn’t done anything. But I ended up getting up early anyway to at least have a chance to sit down and scribble out notes for the class itself.

I had to be at church earlier than Richard anyway, since it was the third Sunday of the month, which means the instrumental ensemble was playing all the music, and since my dad’s still in Germany, I’m still the acting director. In reality I don’t do much directing so much as I pass out the music, set the tempo, and then occasionally at the end of a song I have to do interesting contortions with my body in order to hold the oboe between my knees while still blowing the last note and at the same time waving one hand wildly over my head in order to cut the rest of the group off. It all usually works out, but I am still looking very much forward to when Dad gets back and takes it over again.

Getting up early this morning wasn’t made any easier by the fact that we were out so late last night. At least it was for a good reason – last night we went to see the latest offering by the Davis Musical Theater Company, which was Jesus Christ Superstar. Despite initial misgivings due to the lackluster showing of the rest of this season, we were pleasantly surprised. There were a few minor issues, like the fact that the electric keyboard and guitar were sometimes so loud they drowned out the singers, but overall the performance was wonderful. The cast was energetic; especially the woman who played Simon, and the man who played Judas was outstanding. There was a sense of coherence about the entire group – cast and musicians – that has been noticeably lacking in the past few productions by DMTC, and it was a relief to see that it had not been lost, only misplaced.

And then of course after the play there was the traditional post-play pie and play recap with my mom (much to my dad’s dismay, since he missed the pie and discussion due to being in Germany), all of which meant we didn’t get home until late, and didn’t get to bed until even later, and all day I have been yawning and trying to make up for it.

So speaking of sleep (or lack thereof), this afternoon we went out and bought a new futon mattress for the living room couch because the old one was thin and uncomfortable and now seemed like as good a time as any. We found a tiny furniture store in Vacaville that was so full of stuff we could barely walk, but they were selling the mattresses for prices so low we let the guy talk us into a new futon cover (with matching pillows) as well. Then as soon as we got it home and tossed the old mattress into the trash and put the new one down, we both collapsed on it and took a nap, just to try it out. Or rather, we tried to take a nap, but the cats were determined to out-cute each other and so finally we just gave up and instead lay there and cuddled,

It was nice just lying on the futon together. We’ve got a king sized bed that we sleep in, and I love that bed because there is enough room for both of us to sprawl and not smack each other, plus there is almost enough room for the cats to swarm me without shoving me off the bed (I said ‘almost’ because there is not a bed made that is big enough to deter a cat if it is determined enough). But the downside to having the big huge king-sized bed is that we usually end up each on our own side of the bed with a big gap between us. Considering the propensity for sprawling and snoring on both our parts this is usually a good thing. But lying there, cuddled next to each other, it was nice to be on such a small area. Sometimes, like when we were snuggled on the new futon mattress this afternoon, I miss the smaller bed. Of course then I climb into the big bed and there is actually room for me between the seven lazy cats and I know that going back to the smaller bed would drive me crazy. But sometimes, just for a moment, it’s nice to pretend.

Another Friday Five.

1. What does it say in the signature line of your emails?

   During one of my stints as a traveling database code monkey one of my code monkey friends gave me the niftiest little program that would attach a random sig line to each email that I composed. I adored that program and spent far more time than I really want to admit to, searching out witty sayings to add to the queue from which it could choose.

   Alas, during one of the laptop conversions or upgrades the program was lost, and I have never found something to replace it. This means that my sig line is now stuck to only one thing at a time, and only changes when I find something amusing enough that it overrides my natural laziness and forces me to go into the account settings and make all the manual changes. This is why all email originating from my home computer contains the following quote from J.R.R. Tolkien – “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.” – and has contained that quote for probably far too long.

   Of course, I couldn’t remember what the actual quote was when setting up the nifty web-based email Richard configured for me to use when I’m at work, so instead of a quote from a well-known fantasy author, emails originating from this system contain quotes from my immediate friends and family, which may or may not make much sense to anyone who wasn’t involved in the conversation from whence they came. For example, right now, depending on the email account I’m using, the sig line is either “What good is decaf to a worm?” (originating from, I kid you not, a conversation I had with my in-laws about compost heaps), or “I wish I were an imaginary lemur, so that I could have time to expand my horizons in all the directions they could go”, which I am not even going to try to explain because it would take far too long and by the end you’d all be backing away from both Richard and I, sidling quickly to the door in the hopes that the men with their little white coats would be coming soon to take us away, ha ha.

2. Did you have a senior quote in your high school yearbook? What was it?

   High school has been long enough away that I actually could not remember if I had a quote. Thankfully it only took a few moments to remember just where the heck we’ve stashed the yearbooks, so I tracked down my picture and what do you know, I did, indeed, have one: “Morning is not a time, it is a state of mind.”

   I am sure that there was nothing deep or meaningful about that quote, even when I filled out the little form for the yearbook at the time. I have a feeling that it was meant to be a commentary on the fact that, as a band geek, I had to be at school an hour early every morning for practice. Every morning! For four years straight! The reasons changed with the seasons, since in the fall there was field show practice and in the winter and spring there was jazz band, and if having to get to school an *hour early* every day wasn’t geeky and insane enough, I also ended up staying after school for band things (wind ensemble practice) as well. And yet somehow I successfully avoided any sort of serious addiction to caffeine until graduate school, when working the graveyard shift as a waitress forced the issue.

3. If you had vanity plates on your car, what would they read? If you already have them, what do they say?

   I wanted JENIPUR, but of course it was already taken, which was so surprising because Jennifer is such an uncommon name, especially for women in my age group, and Jennifers who like cats are even more rare. Sarcasm? Never. Anyway, I got a variation on that, which, combined with the license plate frame that says “Owned by Cats” and the ‘Cat’ fish (much like the Darwin fish but with cat ears and tail and it says Cat in the middle instead of Darwin), my car sort of screams “Cat Lover”. At one point in my life I might have entertained the notion of attaching whiskers to the front grille. Luckily I have since grown past that idea. Really I have. No, really.

4. Have you received any gifts with messages engraved upon them? What did the inscription say?

   I cannot think of anything I’ve ever received that is engraved. I guess my friends and family are not much into engraving (that was not a request for engraved things, family members who are reading, so don’t get any ideas about pizza cutters or cheese slicers into your heads!). Although now that I think of it, an engraved pizza cutter *is* a good idea for my dad…

5. What would you like your epitaph to be?
   If we’re going to be highly technical here, I would actually prefer to not have a tombstone at all because I’d much rather be cremated and then sprinkled somewhere pretty, with lots of purple and blue flowers. And besides, if we’re going to be honest here, I’m a little miffed that cemeteries do not allow the really cool kinds of tombstones any more and make you stick with some stupid flat plate in the ground so they can mow around/over it more easily. Because lets face it, what’s the point of having a tombstone if you can’t have a TOMBSTONE, with gargoyles and curlicues and maybe some really sappy stone cherub weeping gracefully on the top. However, just for the sake of argument, if I really must have a tombstone, I think I would prefer something vaguely cryptic, much like the worm comment in my sig. In fact, I like that. Engrave it on my tombstone. “What good is decaf to a worm?” We could just forgo the weeping cherub and carve it in big letters in some vaguely old world font. Right underneath the gargoyles.

Four years ago today I wrote my very first entry in this journal, titled “Waking up to green mice.” Naturally, it had to do with cats, because what better way to start a journal written by, and about, a bonified cat lover.

Over the past four years the journal has undergone a handful of design changes – some minor (like when I discovered how to make buttons in a graphics program and replaced the text links), and some major (first it was blue, then it was yellow and green, now it is mostly purple). My life has undergone a lot of changes as well. I went from working as a highly stressed (but highly paid) software consultant traveling hither and yon writing code, to pure technical writing, to being laid off, to working with social workers and their clients, and then to a job which combines the best of the code writing and the technical writing into one and that doesn’t require travel or a hideous commute. I went from single, to dating, to married. I went from renting a tiny little house to building a house from scratch that’s almost double the space of what we were used to. I went from couch potato to someone who’s working out regularly (3 to 5 times a week); someone who actually not only owns padded spandex bike shorts, but who wears them for actual bike riding on a (getting more) regular basis.

There’ve been a lot of changes in the past four years, most of which are documented in this little journal of mine. On a whim I counted – I’ve written over 770 entries so far. Never in my life have I managed to maintain a paper journal for more than a few months at a time, but it’s been four years for this one.

So anyway, four years. And speaking of exercise and biking and padded shorts, Richard and I decided that despite the severe slackage of last year in the biking department (due to job changes, job travel, and let’s face it – sheer sloth), we wanted to keep up with the riding. So we made an agreement to try to ride 1000 miles in 2004. Since it only averages out to a little over 80 miles per month it’s really not such an impressive goal as it might look. The main thing is just to get us back on the bikes.

To that end we got up on Tuesday morning and went for a brisk but short ride around town. The batteries in our bike lights are dead so we decided to stick to the better lit roads in town, and managed to cross off the first 6.5 miles toward our goal. It’s not much, but it’s a start. I realize that January is going to be a slow month as we tweak our schedules and get ourselves back into the habit while trying to work around inclement weather (this morning, for example, it was so foggy that riding in the dark would have been too dangerous), but I know once we get back into a rhythm, it will all work out.

As a little added incentive for myself in this goal, I signed up for Going Nowhere, joining a throng of other people determined to rack up miles in some manner or another. So hopefully soon I will be able to start proudly displaying a string of little icons at the bottom of my entries, marking my progress to date. It’s a toss up between whether I want to measure my progress in rubber duckies or in chocolate chip cookies, but since I don’t have to worry about that until the first 100 miles, I figure I’ve got a few more weeks to make up my mind.

Remember back in September, when I talked about this? It’s been a few months, and a few delays due to trying to coordinate two busy schedules, one of which includes the schedules of two busy little kids, but finally my friend and I hooked up and managed to nail down a day to get started on the next phase of the tree in the breakfast nook.

After church we all went out to lunch and then she and her kids and her large and impressive container of paints and painting paraphenelia came over to our house. The kids immediately busied themselves with the various toys we’ve collected for precisely that purpose (we may not have kids of our own, but we try to at least be prepared to keep them busy when they come to visit!) while she and I got to work. Or rather, she got to work and I sat on a chair and watched her in awe.

She is one of these people who can just see things that I am completely incapable of seeing. She’s the type of person paint chips were meant for – she can take that teeny tiny square of color and not only envision the entire room in that shade, she can also toss in accent colors and techniques and know immediately how it will look. I, on the other hand, am one of those people who still has a hard time determing if my top matches my pants when I get dressed in the morning. This, obviously, is why she took over on the tree once I dutifully painted in the outline she so nicely drew for me.

The trunk is completely detailed now, and it looks amazing. She even thought about how the light comes in from the windows so that it will look ‘natural’. And then she dragged out smaller brushes and showed me how to do leaves because despite my complete and utter lack of artistic talent, the leaves get to be my responsibility. Of course, just like with the trunk and branches, I’ll put the splotches on the wall and then she’ll come over for one more round of detail work to turn my splotches into something looking less like a preschooler was let loose with a bucket of fingerpaint, and more like…well…a tree.

I cannot even begin to tell you how exited I am at how this thing is turning out. I may, currently, be hopelessly intimidated by the prospect of having to ‘leaf’ this whole thing by myself, but I am telling myself, much like the Little Train That Could, “I think I can, I think I can”, and if I keep saying it long enough I’m sure I will convince even myself.

In the meantime, however, I give you the tree, phase 2.

A few months ago I agreed to ‘teach’ a Sunday school class called “The Gospel According to Harry Potter”. It’s actually based on a book by the same name, and the gist of the six-week class will be to go through the Harry Potter books and discover just why they really aren’t the evil devil-worshiping civilization-defiling works that the right-wing fundamentalists are convinced they are. This is an attitude which, frankly, completely confuses me because after all, they are just books – highly entertaining books about kids who encounter some real life problems (albeit wrapped in some rather fantastical events) and who have to learn how to handle them.

I’ve been struggling with how, exactly, to ‘teach’ this class since my goal is to make it mainly discussion. Of course this all depends on how the rest of the class acts (and is it cheating to say that I have begged Richard to be in the class at least the first week so as to help ‘seed’ the discussion just in case everyone else sits there and stares at me like little lumps?). Today, in preparation for the class, I read through the book on which it’s based, plus another one my mom got me for Christmas called The Spirituality of Potterworld and I took notes and flagged a few pages in each, and then to top it off I read through first book in the series again and decided that I’d stop there, even though there was still plenty of time to make it through the remaining four. No matter how much I might like the books, there is only so much Harry Potter even I can take in one day, and three books of it was enough.

So instead of focusing on Harry Potter I decided to take care of a few things I’d been putting off, like mailing off the duplicate gift we got for Christmas, taking a much needed nap, and making some design changes to the Stonegoose site. Except that Richard wrote the Stonegoose site in php, and I do not speak php. I speak HTML only and am rather proud of that fact. I have, in fact, not ever really wanted to learn php. So this is why it is that I managed to break it, and quite spectacularly, just by doing something as simple as adding and removing a few links and reformatting the link lists. Luckily, at least, Richard came home from helping his dad set up DSL and a wireless network at his parents house shortly thereafter and figured out what I’d inadvertantly done, so now all is well. Plus I took out the little ‘stone’ goose my mom-in-law gave me for Christmas and dressed it in all twelve of its seasonal hats and posed it cleverly on paper bags so it looks as if it had an actual backdrop, and then Richard did something nifty so that every time you load the main page you see a different picture. We have already established that I am easily amused, so I am sure it is no surprise to you that I have, since he did this, sat here and hit ‘reload’ numerous times just to giggle at the goose in all its various hats.

Last night was the first craft night of the year. I had fully intended to bring my nephew’s sweater with me so I could get help from my knitting guru on how to fix it (I’m going to unpick one of the shoulders and then sew on another few rows to include some button holes. Or at least this is the theory. I have yet to do it to see if it will work), and to that end I made sure to grab the correct size needles and the correct color yarn. Naturally, however, I forgot to bring the sweater itself, so instead I worked on the sweater I’m knitting for myself, and chatted with the others and it was very noisy and there were small people dashing in and out and really, I wish we could do this craft night more than once a month because it is so fun.

I was right about the meetings yesterday. They both went on far longer than expected, and we did not leave for the airport until after everyone else had gone home and the office lights were turned off around us; until it was so late we startled the cleaning crew as we emerged blearily from the door.

The last time we did this, my boss and I made reservations for the later flight but got to the airport in time to catch a slightly earlier one. This time we tried to do the same thing but the earlier flight was so delayed they were moving everyone onto the later flight anyway. So instead we wandered around the terminal and tried to find something to eat (Burbank airport is not blessed with much in the way of food choices), and then we finally just sat at our gate until the plane arrived and we could finally board and fly home.

Today I have been bleary and exhausted, and it has been hard to focus on the things I’ve needed to do. By the time the work day was over and I was heading home I had no energy at all to try to do even the simple act of cooking lemon pepper chicken for the fajitas we’d planned for dinner. So instead we got Chinese food and managed to finish just in time for choir practice, where it was obvious that I was not the only one there who was tired and bleary and coming down from what has been a very long post-holiday week.

I am writing this while sitting in the most marvelous little chair. It is covered in deep plum plush and looks like a modernized version of an easy chair. Tucked underneath is a little footrest on wheels, covered with a pad of the same plum fabric, while on either arm are separate pieces that can be adjusted. On the left is a little drink holder that swivels, and while perhaps deep enough to hold a mug or a paper cup of coffee, is not exactly the best place to stash a bottle of diet Pepsi. On the right is a little lap desk that can swivel in and out, to any position I desire. If only it would swivel down an inch or so I’d be so happy – once again I am confronted by a chair that was only ever met for taller people than I.

I’m sitting in this ridiculous little chair because I am down in Santa Monica again, this time for two meetings. Normally I would be camped out in the tiny little meeting room but it is lunchtime and there are two people eating lunch in there, and I didn’t want to disturb them. So instead I will wait in this silly chair, in this little lounge area that looks as if no one ever uses it, looking out over an extremely sunny balcony that looks as if it hasn’t been used in quite a while either. There is, however, a new gas grill out there, so I can only hope that future use is intended.

I flew down this morning and arrived a few hours before I was needed. But such is the problem with flying; you have to take what you can get, and the next latest flight would have had me here too late. So I got up at 5 in the morning and drove myself to the airport with plenty of time to deal with nonexistent parking problems and nonexistent security lines. I got to the Burbank airport and tracked down a taxi and then the taxi driver and I did our best to figure out just where the heck I was supposed to go. My description of “remember where that guy hit his gas instead of his brakes a few months ago and plowed through a whole bunch of people? The office is over there” wasn’t as helpful as I’d expected.

It’s a lovely day to be here, if I had to be anywhere today other than in cold and soggy Sacramento. I wandered the promenade during lunch and ambled slowly up and down the streets, enjoying unseasonably warm weather and perfectly blue skies. But now I am back here, in my little plum chair, waiting for the real reason I flew down here – two meetings, back to back, both of which promise to be very long, but both of which I have been rather curiously looking forward to since I first learned of their existence. They may both end up in lots more work for me in the long run, but this actually makes me quite happy. I may never shake that residual feeling which has been tiptoeing around in my head since I was laid off. It is far better to have too much to do than not enough; far better to be needed than to be told to pack up your things in a box and go home now because you are suddenly and without warning expendable.