Cookie Fortunes
Apr. 11th, 2005 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liralenI got a fortune cookie today and the fortune read: "You are about to experience great change in your life. Enjoy it, go with the flow." Wow... modern, colloquial English in a fortune cookie, how amazing...
It's been quite the weekend. I think I left you with an account of the week. I'll have more on Friday, when we visited the Pawnee Buttes in a minute, but it'll be backfilled for the day. Short version was we headed north and east into the "Boonies" and Jet hiked a mile and a half straight and was cheerful as a jaybird stealing a bit of foil. We stayed in Cheyenne and headed back on Saturday afternoon, after a morning spent in the pool, at the playground, at museum for the Roundup, and lunching on random Quickie Stop food.
John and I got to see Sin City. I read that book when it was first published, and the film had so many of the original touches that made it seem like a rough, low-budget film noir with comicbook special effects and it hurt my head to realized I remembered two of the three plots, nearly in their entirety, and had lines engraved on my heart from the third. It was more gory in film, though. More Tarentinoesque (yes, I know he was a guest director), to the point of near absurdity. Two older people left in the middle act of the second story, and I didn't blame them. Not for even a normal sense of what's Too Much.
It was exactly as I remembered, though, and I admired that. And now knowing the entirety of Lone Wolf and Cub, I could see the depth of that genre's influence on the stories. In the marrow of it, even to the wolf's human femur linked right to the dog with the human hand in its mouth from Yojimbo. I have to admit that that sense of ultimate justice and what was the right thing to do even in an insane world satisfied that part of me that it satisfied when I was a young adult studying those comicbooks.
But I didn't enjoy it, not the way I thought I would given how I'd enjoyed the Kill Bill movies, how I had once loved La Femme Nikita when I first saw it more than a decade ago, and how I'd really enjoyed The Professional, Dusk 'Til Dawn, the original El Mariachi, etc.. (Okay, when I first saw it Pulp Fiction twanged my "too much" sense, too, maybe it should have).
Just a week ago I'd picked up Dan Simmon's Hard Cases to read the initial stories before Hard as Nails to see if I could get some momentum to really read that book if I borrowed it again, and it petered out for me as well. For some reason the overwhelming violence just wasn't what I wanted to see any more. It was a weird thing, like biting a Bernard C. chocolate and realizing that I could just toss the other half and not care. I guess a part of the old me is gone. Simple violence doesn't do it for me anymore, simple revenge plots just leave me cold. Kill Bill had that Mom hook to it that I couldn't resist. House of Daggers had that romantic plot that was more knotted than a planter hanger. Hero had a very fundamental question and choice at its heart. Both the last two had some gorgeous cinematography as well.
Anyway... I left feeling emptied and had a lot of dreams of old that night.
Sunday morning saw nearly a foot of snow. It snowed all day. I shook the trees before lunch. John and Jet and George left at 1 to go to Wyatt's birthday party at the Farm Wyatt and his family live in. Isabel had a nap. I had a bath. It was a very quiet day. By night, the roads were bare and nearly dry.
I read all of Terry Pratchett's Soul Music and started The Truth and that took care of any bad dreams.
This morning we had a lazy breakfast, and then headed off to return Jet's video tapes, and then headed into Denver. Jet fell asleep. We saw traffic stopped on I-25 headed north. I don't know why.
We decided to stop at The Empress for lunch and had the best dim sum we've had for a while. The Chinese broccoli was cooked *just* enough, the taro balls were dead crisp on the outside and warm through, the har goa and shao mai were perfectly steamed and not sticky, and the sesame balls had been Just Fried. The pu-ling (that's what the waitress kept calling it instead of pu-erh) tea was thick and tasty and cleared the palette. It was very, very good.
Jet even ate half a taro ball as well as his usual sticky rice.
From there we went to the Denver Science and Nature Museum and had a blast. Jet loved the Space exhibits. He got to fire a steel ball at a sand bit to see how meteors hit. He got to see water run through sand and make patterns and channels. He got to play with an infrared camera and giggle as the red faced little boy's yellow hands turned red when he rubbed them. He played with the lunar grabber, and gently put away ALL the bags and grabbers and cleaned up the area before he'd leave. He would have stood forever watching the Mars landers' movies and slides if we hadn't said the magic word "dinosaurs" in his ears.
He peered at all the exhibits in the dinosaur area, lifting up flaps and asking anyone near-by to read them to him. He suckered a few other parents and two museum volunteers into reading or explaining things to him as well as us. He had a blast.
John and he went into the mummy exhibit for a bit, while I got a potty stop, and then we all decided to peer for a bit at a display of Russian folk art sculpted in gemstones. Wow. It was just astonishing. There were about a dozen different scenes of Russian life that were all done in semi-precious gemstones of all colors and textures. There was one of two prisoners done in a zebra striped stone that was amazing in that where the stripes had come together the sculptor had put joints so that the bunching of the stripes looked like the bunching of the clothing... There was one of a grandmotherly type spinning flax on a drop spindle with a old fashioned distaff and every detail was gorgeous. The distaff was carved from petrified wood, with the grain of the wood gleamingly polished. Her babushka was made from palest amethyst, wrinkled with the appropriate stresses of being tied about her head. Thousands of details like that on scenes of three drunken buddies swaying down a street together, a *big* man enjoying a tiny cup of tea in the midst of a bath in a barrel, a massage lady beating a man with birch branches (each tiny leaf shining brilliant green), or a man cutting a chunk of ice with a saw... it was amazing stuff. Jet liked peering at each of them while perched on my shoulders so he could see them closely.
From there we tried to get home, and got caught in a horrible traffic lockup. The same stretch we'd seen locked up while going down. After an hour of it we took the next exit available, and headed home through the flat grid. Unlike in Seattle, there's always a way around here.
By the time we got home, I was sick with a headache and I tried going to sleep, but I couldn't and it was already 5:30 pm. So I tried to nap for a few minutes, and finally gave up and showered instead. When I was done, I went down, put the tomato plants outside, and walked out, barefoot, to see what everyone wanted to do for dinner. It was THAT warm outside. Folks decided to go to Durango's for dinner, so we did and everyone was well satisfied with their dinners. Jet ate two corn tortillas, a strawberry pop, and some chips. He was pretty happy with that. Everyone else really liked what they had, so I was very happy to try Mexican again. John was the best sweetie and bought me a flan to take home.
When we got back home, I ate my flan, read my book, and then tried to clean up a few things for work. I ran into a buzzsaw of emails from Friday. I need to just surf the wave as it comes, not fight it directly or anything. We'll see how it goes. I need to extract myself from the process stuff I've been mostly doing, as rewarding (and easy) as it's been, and really start concentrating on the customer stuff. I can do it and I want to, and that's nothing to sniff at.
It's been quite the weekend. I think I left you with an account of the week. I'll have more on Friday, when we visited the Pawnee Buttes in a minute, but it'll be backfilled for the day. Short version was we headed north and east into the "Boonies" and Jet hiked a mile and a half straight and was cheerful as a jaybird stealing a bit of foil. We stayed in Cheyenne and headed back on Saturday afternoon, after a morning spent in the pool, at the playground, at museum for the Roundup, and lunching on random Quickie Stop food.
John and I got to see Sin City. I read that book when it was first published, and the film had so many of the original touches that made it seem like a rough, low-budget film noir with comicbook special effects and it hurt my head to realized I remembered two of the three plots, nearly in their entirety, and had lines engraved on my heart from the third. It was more gory in film, though. More Tarentinoesque (yes, I know he was a guest director), to the point of near absurdity. Two older people left in the middle act of the second story, and I didn't blame them. Not for even a normal sense of what's Too Much.
It was exactly as I remembered, though, and I admired that. And now knowing the entirety of Lone Wolf and Cub, I could see the depth of that genre's influence on the stories. In the marrow of it, even to the wolf's human femur linked right to the dog with the human hand in its mouth from Yojimbo. I have to admit that that sense of ultimate justice and what was the right thing to do even in an insane world satisfied that part of me that it satisfied when I was a young adult studying those comicbooks.
But I didn't enjoy it, not the way I thought I would given how I'd enjoyed the Kill Bill movies, how I had once loved La Femme Nikita when I first saw it more than a decade ago, and how I'd really enjoyed The Professional, Dusk 'Til Dawn, the original El Mariachi, etc.. (Okay, when I first saw it Pulp Fiction twanged my "too much" sense, too, maybe it should have).
Just a week ago I'd picked up Dan Simmon's Hard Cases to read the initial stories before Hard as Nails to see if I could get some momentum to really read that book if I borrowed it again, and it petered out for me as well. For some reason the overwhelming violence just wasn't what I wanted to see any more. It was a weird thing, like biting a Bernard C. chocolate and realizing that I could just toss the other half and not care. I guess a part of the old me is gone. Simple violence doesn't do it for me anymore, simple revenge plots just leave me cold. Kill Bill had that Mom hook to it that I couldn't resist. House of Daggers had that romantic plot that was more knotted than a planter hanger. Hero had a very fundamental question and choice at its heart. Both the last two had some gorgeous cinematography as well.
Anyway... I left feeling emptied and had a lot of dreams of old that night.
Sunday morning saw nearly a foot of snow. It snowed all day. I shook the trees before lunch. John and Jet and George left at 1 to go to Wyatt's birthday party at the Farm Wyatt and his family live in. Isabel had a nap. I had a bath. It was a very quiet day. By night, the roads were bare and nearly dry.
I read all of Terry Pratchett's Soul Music and started The Truth and that took care of any bad dreams.
This morning we had a lazy breakfast, and then headed off to return Jet's video tapes, and then headed into Denver. Jet fell asleep. We saw traffic stopped on I-25 headed north. I don't know why.
We decided to stop at The Empress for lunch and had the best dim sum we've had for a while. The Chinese broccoli was cooked *just* enough, the taro balls were dead crisp on the outside and warm through, the har goa and shao mai were perfectly steamed and not sticky, and the sesame balls had been Just Fried. The pu-ling (that's what the waitress kept calling it instead of pu-erh) tea was thick and tasty and cleared the palette. It was very, very good.
Jet even ate half a taro ball as well as his usual sticky rice.
From there we went to the Denver Science and Nature Museum and had a blast. Jet loved the Space exhibits. He got to fire a steel ball at a sand bit to see how meteors hit. He got to see water run through sand and make patterns and channels. He got to play with an infrared camera and giggle as the red faced little boy's yellow hands turned red when he rubbed them. He played with the lunar grabber, and gently put away ALL the bags and grabbers and cleaned up the area before he'd leave. He would have stood forever watching the Mars landers' movies and slides if we hadn't said the magic word "dinosaurs" in his ears.
He peered at all the exhibits in the dinosaur area, lifting up flaps and asking anyone near-by to read them to him. He suckered a few other parents and two museum volunteers into reading or explaining things to him as well as us. He had a blast.
John and he went into the mummy exhibit for a bit, while I got a potty stop, and then we all decided to peer for a bit at a display of Russian folk art sculpted in gemstones. Wow. It was just astonishing. There were about a dozen different scenes of Russian life that were all done in semi-precious gemstones of all colors and textures. There was one of two prisoners done in a zebra striped stone that was amazing in that where the stripes had come together the sculptor had put joints so that the bunching of the stripes looked like the bunching of the clothing... There was one of a grandmotherly type spinning flax on a drop spindle with a old fashioned distaff and every detail was gorgeous. The distaff was carved from petrified wood, with the grain of the wood gleamingly polished. Her babushka was made from palest amethyst, wrinkled with the appropriate stresses of being tied about her head. Thousands of details like that on scenes of three drunken buddies swaying down a street together, a *big* man enjoying a tiny cup of tea in the midst of a bath in a barrel, a massage lady beating a man with birch branches (each tiny leaf shining brilliant green), or a man cutting a chunk of ice with a saw... it was amazing stuff. Jet liked peering at each of them while perched on my shoulders so he could see them closely.
From there we tried to get home, and got caught in a horrible traffic lockup. The same stretch we'd seen locked up while going down. After an hour of it we took the next exit available, and headed home through the flat grid. Unlike in Seattle, there's always a way around here.
By the time we got home, I was sick with a headache and I tried going to sleep, but I couldn't and it was already 5:30 pm. So I tried to nap for a few minutes, and finally gave up and showered instead. When I was done, I went down, put the tomato plants outside, and walked out, barefoot, to see what everyone wanted to do for dinner. It was THAT warm outside. Folks decided to go to Durango's for dinner, so we did and everyone was well satisfied with their dinners. Jet ate two corn tortillas, a strawberry pop, and some chips. He was pretty happy with that. Everyone else really liked what they had, so I was very happy to try Mexican again. John was the best sweetie and bought me a flan to take home.
When we got back home, I ate my flan, read my book, and then tried to clean up a few things for work. I ran into a buzzsaw of emails from Friday. I need to just surf the wave as it comes, not fight it directly or anything. We'll see how it goes. I need to extract myself from the process stuff I've been mostly doing, as rewarding (and easy) as it's been, and really start concentrating on the customer stuff. I can do it and I want to, and that's nothing to sniff at.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-04-12 07:04 am (UTC)and hee, I can just picture Jet running around lifting up flaps and asking people to read him things. The most fun way to do a museum exhibit, with an excited kid :)
no subject
Date: 2005-04-12 05:33 pm (UTC)I got pictures of the grandmother and of a donkey... :-) I'll put 'em in my pictures and maybe put 'em under a tag or something.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-12 05:36 pm (UTC)A page with all the carvings in thumbnail (http://konovalenko.com/Carvings.html). Many of which we *didn't* see at the exhibit.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-13 03:56 am (UTC)LiralenLiralenLiralen I have a favor to ask! Book recs! A friend of mine is having manager troubles; that is, she's the manager and all worried she's not doing it right. Apparently her staff kvetches behind her back about her, but when she asks them what's wrong they won't say.
Which would certainly upset me, so I can understand why she's freaking out. She's not good at detaching herself from work stuff and not taking it personally, and she's afraid to ask her boss for help because it seems like whining. (I told her any boss with a shred of sanity would be glad to talk to her about it, and hopefully she's going to.)
Do you happen to know of any books or references on management that might help with this sort of situation? She hasn't had any sort of management training (does anybody ever get any, in practice?) and really wants to learn. (If you don't know of any, that's okay - I just thought you might as you're pretty well-read on the subject.)
*runs off to look at the pretty carvings*
no subject
Date: 2005-04-15 03:50 pm (UTC)Most of the training I got was from an HR class about how to manage at Xilinx and what was important to the company culture and management. It had a lot to do with how to interact with my guys and what was important to say and not say. They also gave me an appendix of books to read and look at for specific problems and things to do. So Xilinx really does take care of its new managers so far as the hard parts of the problem. The easy things like "What do I do with a timecard?" are the things they don't do that well. Hee.
But if she's getting defensive about it... that could make it really hard.
Hm.
"First, Break All the Rules" by Marcus Buckingham is a very general book about what it takes to be a great manager, why it's important, and some good basics about hw to do it. I'm a little worried, though that she might read and just say, well, I just shouldn't be a manager... because of impostor syndrome stuff. It's also got a good metric for measuring her success or where she needs to work on getting to br a better manager. Also "Next: Discover Your Strengths" for her and her people might open the door to what they're good at, what they want to do, and how she can make some of that happen for her folks. Those might be some good, basic teambuilding activities. I bought my folks those books with money out of my own pocket just to make sure we all started on the same floor.
Maybe the book about impostor syndrome and what to do about it might be a better basic thing? But I don't know how you'd introduce that to her...
There's four allogory books by Patrick Lencioni about top level mangament, team building, and meeting structure that are really good. I would probably recommend "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" (that would speak directly about the problem you described, actually) and "Death by Meeting" as beginner management classes. If she's interested in the next level up, "The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive" is a book I keep going back to since I went from trenches to director level in less than six months it's been really useful.
Hooe that helps!! If she's interested in, generally, how management can make or break a company, _Good to Great_ and _Built to Last_ by Jim Collins are fascinating books about company/CEO level Good Thing To Do.
And your own boss can be your best resource, especially if they have expectations about how you do your job. It's far better to talk with him about his expectations than to just to go on assuming you know what he expects out of you. Talking through problems is the thing my present boss loves doing with me. Our 1:1's range from his problems to my problems to a lot of periphery stuff. My boss' biggest goal is to make me effective, and maybe that's our corporate culture, but I have often brought up communication problems with him and we work it out together and he helps when we figure it'll actually be of use. Sometimes we figure out a game plan for me to execute and he asks how it went to make sure it worked, not to "check up on me". :-)
It's interesting, though... if she believes her boss thinks she's whining when she comes to him with problems, maybe that's why her people aren't coming to her with their problems, because either they think they're whining, or she's indicated to them that she thinks they're whining? Think of it as a mirror... her attitude towards herself, is it affecting her attitude towards her direct reports?
no subject
Date: 2005-04-15 05:25 pm (UTC)(And I think you may be on to something with the mirroring, in the sense that people might not want to bring problems to the boss if it clearly makes the boss feel unhappy and responsible.)
no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-21 02:09 am (UTC)I did, and she found it really helpful, and says she's going to get those books. And now she's got a really good plan for solving the problem, too, which seems to be working.
So thank you!