Daily Adventures

The high-desert moan of the wind has been omnipresent for the last week. The warm winds melted away the eight to ten inches of snow piled everywhere, other than in the most persistent shadows, still mounded with dirty ice. So the world, in the low slant of morning sun, was all the dusty taupe of Front Range winter. The trees were black lace against the grass and cold pale sky, and flocks of geese rose in deep V's heading, inevitably north. Their compasses already pointing toward a spring that still feels so far away.

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I had a very very good birthday, even though it began a little too early, as I had to be up by 7 to get to church early enough to make coffee. But John made waffles and bacon for breakfast, and the boys went with me while I made coffee.

( A busy, lovely day. )

Just today I was reminded of the first six months after I quit work. I'd just come off a huge project that involved hundreds of people, lots of management and coordination, and communication up and down the organizational hierarchy. My boss actually offered to send me to the West Coast to get an MBA because of the work I did, so I had shown some aptitude. I was good at it.

However, for the first six months after I stopped working, I spoke to nearly no one. Even John and Jet didn't get a lot of conversation from me, and I slept 10 to 12 hour nights for quite some time.

I feel a little bit like a flat tube of toothpaste.

I'm still not exactly sure why, but given that last year I came up with nearly half a million first draft words, and this year for the first three quarters I still managed to write nearly a quarter million words even with nearly a whole quarter completely off and all the editing needed to get a manuscript published, maybe I have reasons.

( And, as always, it's hardest to cut myself some slack, but I've tried to with ghost shrimp, outdoor movie, and books. )

I'm going to Biloxi next week, and I have been planning on giving my hair away to Locks of Love for a while. Last Sunday, someone sat me down and said, "Wouldn't it be nice to not have to deal with your hair while you're working on houses in Biloxi?"

And I think she was right. So I went into a local studio and had it cut off. darkprism_fics gave me a number of references, and I love what I ended up with.

It's the first day of Jet's Spring Break, and we did a lot of Mechaton, video games, and gardening. We also went to the grocery store and found Blue Bell ice cream! It only just showed up here, and there are several fans of it already in the Biloxi crew, so it was wonderful to find it for relatively inexpensive prices in our own freezers.

( Cut for pictures! )

Something John found recently.

This was taken probably ten years ago. 1998. As the backset is the forest growth at the back of our old Redmond house, that we moved out of in 1999. But that is the banker's suit I still fit in now. *laughs* Though I have no idea where those sunglasses went. Hm...

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I finally realized why Riku appeals to me so very, very much.

It goes with my original Liralen/Blammor dichotomy. Darkness hidden amid the light of appearances. Having two sides, one light, one dark and the light can only be really be accepted, given, if the darkness is acknowledged and embraced. Riku fell into the dark. He fought his way out of it, but his full return was only through the grace of another's death and he wouldn't have walked all the way back himself if he hadn't gotten pointed out by Kairi, hung onto by Sora. Riku's darkness was, perhaps as all darkness is, one he walked alone. He trusted his own strength, and that alone. And that's part of why he fell.

It's why I fall. I have fallen. I got up. I will probably fall into the dark again. I usually do, and, like Riku, it's only when I trust my relations with others that I get pulled out. But it's as hard for him as it is for me. Let me fade back into the darkness...

While writing a Lenten contemplation, I was dragged back through a few memories of people saving me when I had no right to be saved, no expectation of it. When co-workers fought for me when I was going to get laid off just because I was married to John, when teachers fought for me when I tested out of a gifted program. Heck, now, at the church, so many people seem to believe I belong when I don't. I can't believe it's going to be okay, that my darkness will be accepted, and then something happens and suddenly someone's at my back and I can fight for theirs.

Perhaps John is my Sora. The open hearted one that trusts everyone and believes everything, who can never give up because it just never occurs to him that that's even an option. So, even battered or despairing, I get up again and go to battle, trusting him when I can't trust myself. Maybe that's all I need.

It's interesting to have the in-house massage therapist note a few things that are unique about my body and how she has to deal with it:

• My muscles "run hot", hotter than nearly everyone else she works on.
• My musculature is also denser than pretty much all the women she works on.
• She doesn't see the amount of inflammation I get very often in anyone.
• I seem to have more tension and physical stress than she's used to dealing with as she fusses a lot about me and the "pain you must be in".
• I "carry charge", as in I shock her nearly every time in the fall/winter, and it seems that few others do.

To be fair, she also finds it shocking that I have three running computers in my cube. So her norm and mine may be wildly different. :-)

Still, it's interesting to contemplate that my body may just hang onto stress and tension (and static charges) more than most. Or, on the other hand, I may just generate more stress than most people. *grin* Physical stress as opposed to emotional stress. I just channel it into my body or something as folks here seem to accuse me of a Buddha-like calm in the midst of fighting fires or when everyone else in the room is yelling at each other I step in. Ah so...

It's always interesting to get a look at myself through other eyes and another mind.

Part of the class was a 360, where I got feedback on my tendencies with certain behaviors, all good behaviors, which is a nice way to measure it. They just ask how frequent the good behavior is getting exhibited.

It was good, though, for me to really see, in numbers and specifics, what other people see me as being good at. And even the "bad" numbers had, as average, me doing some pretty amazing things on a pretty frequent basis. That is eye-opening to the really critical parts of me. I am good. I am doing good, too.

Wow.

You know the perfectionist in you is taking over when, in class, a dozen different people told you what you did very well and then two people tell you what you could have improved, and you hug those two defects to you for the rest of the week, all but forgetting the positive things.

I will not COMPLETELY forget...

"You know how in a game, the really great referees are the people you just don't notice. They just do their job and things go great, and you never notice what it is they're doing. She was doing that, just directing the traffic and getting out of the way of everyone's ideas."

1. What? Only twenty? Wimps.
2. Time had an article about a 60-year-old doctor's take on how to age gracefully and one of the things he mentioned was a Buddhist method of psychotherapy based on what he called the Buddhist premise that all misery stems from the mistaken separation of experiences into "good" and "bad" and trying ones damnedest to avoid the latter. I have many mixed feelings about this and thoughts that float in and out of my head on this, including "isn't that Taoist?" "what does that make my pursuit of coffee perfection?" "does bad coffee actually make me miserable? (not really, add milk and sugar to dead burnt badly brewed anything and it tastes okay)" "that's one of my root axioms" "it's what makes some people call me amoral or 'afraid to judge'" "damnit, I'm a P, I shouldn't have to judge" etc.... ahem
3. Work is challenging and useful to many people. It is stressful and demands my full capability and I become sharper, harder, faster, and more abrupt because of it. Like a blade being honed I'd think it a mildly painful process for the blade but it becomes more of what it was intended to be.
4. John is the rock to my blade. Hm... does that make Jet paper?
5. My completely FULL ToDo list for today in my Franklin-Covey planner.
6. Need to refill planner, the Collage setup looks cool in that I can reconfigure it the way I need to, yes, I rely on paper when my hands hurt too much.
7. MUST make spreadsheet and questions today. I hate holding up other people on things that they need to do.
8. Uncle Charlie makes very, very sloppy, delicious, sticky pulled pork BBQ sandwiches. There is a spot of sauce on my Hawaiian shirt to prove it, and a spot on my keyboard. Yeesh. Rub rub rub
9. Keepsake Memories is not my kind of scrapbooking shop. It specializes in all the consumables and does very little for those of us looking for durable, flexible, configurable solutions for every situation.
10. But... mmm... precision tip scissors.
11. Kodak AND Yahoo! now have fifteen cent 4x6 prints for digital pictures! I can now do that darned kaleidescope with precision.
12. A single page gives me an immense amount of satisfaction. To the point where I can now sleep at night when I finish a single page.
13. Tea is good. Smoky Imperial Breakfast is very, very soothing and sharpening as well.
14. Bonnie is out getting her third child, a girl adopted from China and it's a big thing for her. I'll admit that what's most on my mind, though, is "dang, no massages for a while and extra work is tying everything up in my hands." Right hand is getting tight enough I know it's going to go numb if I keep pushing.
15. Luckily, today is my Friday. Yes, having a flexible work schedule is a blessing. I am thankful.
16. Midnighters is very much a reflection of a side of high school life I saw late.
17. It's good to be able to read Changeling Sea in an hour.
18. I LOVE Robert Rodriguez's Rebel without a Crew as much for his message about how to do something you love without fear. It is absolutely amazing how much detail he puts in his diary on shooting El Mariachi.
19. Overnight trip out in the mountains this coming weekend. The leaves will be turning, the snow is in the air already, and it'll be fun to have a break time outside the house with my family and John's parents. I'll get a chance to really read Rodriguez's book while Jet has four adults to keep an eye out for him.
20. Eek! Snow! Must gather all the green tomato clusters up and into the garage to ripen... mmm... digging in the dirt...
    

It's a meme that's meandering about. No tagging from me, the idea is to just list twenty things on your mind.