Drama

April 22, 2010

I start a new job a week from Monday. New skills to learn - more technical tasks than what I do now, but still expanding on the writing and health literacy knowledge base.

I'm working from the road most of next week - loading up the computer and heading for NC. The bulk of what I'm doing between now and the office move is one-offs, anyway - editing short marketing pieces and letters to members. The big projects have been handed off already.

There's a threat of serious illness in the family, and I'm trying not to be scared. Success is elusive. I'm operating in gears B and D - Bargaining and Denial - with an occasional downshift to Avoidance.

The Tour de Cure is coming up in less than four weeks. It's great for Avoidance - lots to do, and I haven't done most of it yet... This week, for sure. Although I have been riding. Endorphins are better than meds.

And I'm scheduled for jury duty next week. The nice lady at the Jury Pool office sent me a duplicate Juror Qualification form and told me to request deferment so I could go to NC as planned. I really need to be there. I honestly don't mind jury duty - just not next week.

My desk  at the office is a rubble heap. I only just got boxes today. Guess I need to go down there and start putting stuff in 'em.

Spring fever

Neil Diamond's "Forever in Blue Jeans" is stuck in my head.

The last four days have been hot and sunny, a little stormy, cool and breezy, warm and humid, warm and sunny, sunny and breezy, a little stormy, cloudy and humid, humid and breezy, and what happens next is anybody's guess.

I want to ride my bike to work tomorrow. I want to ride Wednesday and Thursday. The weather should cooperate if the forecast holds up. The question is what time it gets daylight, and that's not as easy to find on the Weather Channel. I need to bookmark the Old Farmer's Almanac - it's more dependable all the way round.

Work gets done, as always - but I want new projects, and if they're not immediately available, I'll make them up. My living room office space is almost done - partitioned book shelves from Target turn on their side make a perfect set of cubbies for paper, sticky notes, blank CDs, library books, and the shoes I kicked off an hour ago. Yard sale shutters wait in the corner to fit into skylights and windows on the ovenish second floor.  A delightful print - an Indian elephant, decked out in holiday finery and treading beautifully tiled floors - waits upstairs in the guest room to be hung; the neighbor put it out with the trash.

I bought a new mouse pad Saturday. It was in the 50-cent bin at Michael's Crafts - poppies. I'll go back to the Louisville Slugger one later in the summer, but now, I want poppies.

On the other hand, Cincinnati is kicking off their home season with a three-night stand against the Cubs. Wonder if Mitch could get two days off. I bet I could, if I take my computer and find a place with wireless internet so I could work after the game. I want to go to the Aquarium. I want to go to a baseball game. I want to see Soriano  - somebody - anybody (as long as it's a Cub!) hit one over the wall.

I want to ride my bike tomorrow - in a skirt. My daughter calls it "channeling Copenhagen." I want to be one of those women who rides a bike day in and day out and always looks like a woman, whatever the weather.

Must be spring.

B-Cyclin'!

Ah, spring -- that loveliest, most bipolar of seasons! Balmy, sweet afternoons and midnight tornadoes. And unlike hurricanes, tornadoes aren't likely to clear the air. The morning after a hurricane seems most often to be bluer than blue, bright and gleaming; after a tornado, it just rains some more. Hurricanes are temper tantrums; tornadoes are the psychotic break before a major depressive episode.

Sunday, they had tornadoes back home. From the looks of things on the Weather Channel Monday morning, it was still raining in North Carolina. Up here in Kentucky, yesterday was just -- how do I say this? -- bleh.

But I was at the office, and it was Monday. And right now, I don't do Mondays. At least not at the office. I was there because I had one project -- four pieces of Health Literacy revisions -- that I needed to run through the assessment tool, which I can't get to from home. I went in at 7 a.m. with Mr. Early Bird, and I'd hoped to be out by 9 a.m., on the way home to finish out the day at my desk by the window.


No such luck. The phone kept ringing, the Health Literacy pieces kept refusing to go below a 7th grade reading level (we shoot for 6th), and I finally realized I was going to miss the 10 a.m. bus home and decided enough was enough. I borrowed a helmet from my friend Kirk, who keeps a spare at his desk, and I checked out a B-Cycle.

We have bikes where I work. You can sign up for a B-Cycle card, get a helmet that's just your size (Kirk's took some adjusting...), and then when you need wheels for a short hop (or in my case, a longer haul), you put on your helmet, scan your card, choose a bicycle, and it's yours for 24 hours. They're good, solid bikes, heavier than Nellie Belle, but with great baskets and -- I have to admit -- somewhat more precise gears. They're a little harder to shift, because they're the dial-on-the-grip type; we old ladies with the beginnings of arthritis in our hands sometimes have trouble with the grip required to turn them. But they are more finely tuned than the little "thumb-clicker" ones like Nellie Belle has.

The weather yesterday was chilly. It was supposed to be in the 50s, but it didn't get there until almost sunset, after the clouds broke. At 10 a.m., it was foggy, damp, and still in the low 40s with a wind chill in the 30s. Actually, it felt almost exactly like it did in November, the day before Thanksgiving. And the route was much the same. Not bad -- unless you don't have gloves.

I stopped at the bike shop; all the winter stock was gone, and all they had were fingerless riding gloves. Better than nothing.

I rode four miles before the #15 bus caught up with me, and I took it to the end of the line, then rode from Holiday Manor out Brownsboro Road to Goose Creek. It's a nice ride, except that the shoulder is one continuous 6"-wide rumble strip and nothing else, and at least one driver in a white Lexus seemed to think that was where I should be. Ms. Lexus needs an education in bicycle law, but we'll save that for later.

Goose Creek to Westport Road -- four very civilized lanes. Yes, the traffic moves faster, but the lanes are wider, the shoulders are a good four feet across for the most part, and people aren't inclined to cut as close as on Brownsboro (or worse yet, Herr Lane, which is a cyclist's nightmare -- I'd rather ride on Shelbyville Road at the malls). Then down Frey's Hill past Tom Sawyer Park, over to Evergreen and down to the Middletown Breadworks, where my daughter was working. Last stop, both yesterday and last November. Then was for bread; yesterday was for the house keys.

When you're chilled at the extremities and slightly sweaty otherwise, you can make a great lunch of peanut butter and a multi-grain bagel with a glass of diet Sprite on the side. And it's just the right amount of fuel for the last four miles home.

16 miles altogether -- not a bad ride for the first real commute of the season.

Pedal on! WOO-HOO!!

Working from home

I've been laid off before. It was scary as T-mortal hell. No idea how I was going to pay the bills, pay the rent, feed my kid(s) [quantity depending on which time we're talking about]. So if you're there and you're scared, I know how that feels. Please don't take what follows as instructions for how you're supposed to respond. Although if you can find some truth or a little bit of a deep breath in it somewhere, that's a good thing.

The point I want to make is that taking a deep breath helps. Whether you know what you're going to do next or not - whether you have time to think about it or not. Stopping and breathing deeply is good. It helps you calm down.

It also helps - when your workplace in those last few weeks is a nest of disgruntled people, some because they're about to be out of work and others because they're not happy about being left behind, stuck in the mire - to have a manager who believes in you in spite of it all. One you can go to and say, "May I please work from home a couple days a week? I have to get out of here..." and who responds, "Sure - you work wherever you want. I know it's going to get done, and the finished product will be good, wherever you do it."

(On the other hand, it does once again beg the niggling little question, "How did they decide who was getting let go and who was staying?" And then, sometimes there's no answer, and you just have to move on.)

So for the duration - middle of May-ish, until the agency they've hired to take over for us is ready to take over - I'm home two days a week. Maybe more, by the time it's all said and done. Mondays and Fridays, I can sit in my kitchen in the sunshine, or in my home office once I get it moved back upstairs, and work in peace. No one complaining about having to be there, no one in a panic about what they're going to do when 2/3 of the staff is gone, just me and my assignments and my e-mail account and in-house IM, if I decide to turn it on. If people use it too much for what they perceive as emergencies - things that consume their whole being for the moment but actually fall much lower on the scale of "Grander Scheme of Things" - I'll turn the IM off.

The company will still get its 40 hours out of me each week. As always, it will in fact probably get a little more most weeks, simply because I still love what I do, and I'm notoriously NOT a clock-watcher. But two days a week, I will have the freedom to break when I want, to play with the dogs for a few minutes, to walk outside to the garden for a stretch. I will be able to walk away for a whole hour or more and ride my bike as far as I want, then come back with my brain untangled and be able to focus better, longer. I'll be able to play my music as loudly as I want, sing out loud and dance in the kitchen and not look foolish, and walk around in my bare feet without raising eyebrows. (Let's face it, some of us think better if our feet aren't cooped up. A couple managers back, one of them caught me dashing to the printer - about 4 yards - in my stocking feet and asked where my shoes were. I told her they were under my desk where they belonged.)

And if I work from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., then 3 to 5, then break to cook dinner and eat and then come back and work from 7 p.m. to 9 - or 10 if I feel like it - there won't be anyone walking out the door at 6:30 or so, calling back over her shoulder, "Why are you still here? Time to go home!" I won't have to explain I'm still at it because I'm having fun, doing it right, and I'll leave when I get good and ready.

Snow days

I know everyone in the higher elevations and the Frozen North figures we're wimps and wussies down here. Seriously - it's only in the 20s, with lows only down in the 'teens, and we're calling snow days. To which I can only say, "Yeah, yeah, whatever!"

It started snowing early Thursday morning, and it hasn't stopped since. Sure, most of what's fallen in the last 24 hours has qualified as "flurries," or even just "spitting snow" - not much to speak of, and we only have 3-4 inches accumulated - but I could do with a bit of sun at this point.

It does this once a winter, maybe twice, so there's not much call for spending big bucks on snow removal equipment. We have some, sure - more than we had in eastern NC, where there was even less need - but we don't worry so much about clearing the roads and keeping the schools open, because we know it's not going to go on all winter. Give the kids a break - they can make it up at the end of the school year and complain then.

Of course, we "big kids" still have to go to work, unless it's actually icy and they do close down business. That's happened maybe two or three days in the almost 10 years I've lived here. (And I believe they were all last year.) So out I went Thursday morning, dutifully skating my way up the hill in the little Saturn, and finding it was not so easy getting started again after stopping at the second stop sign. And even less so, stopping at the third... It took me an hour and 15 minutes to get to work, even though the interstate was clear, but I did get there.

As the day wore on, the snow continued coming down, but all reports were that the streets were improving. I didn't worry - met my friend, Paige, for margaritas and a mini-bitchfest after work (that's "margaritas" - plural - because I had one and she had one and that makes two!), then drove over to the public library branch at Mid City Mall for our monthly meeting of Women Who Write. Four of us actually made it, where we usually have 10 or 12. Ms. Emily wins the Nanook Award - she walked several miles rather than take her bicycle out in this weather. She's an adorably hardy soul!

We made short work of the meeting - even with critiquing a short story by one of the members, we were done by 8. I decided we didn't need groceries, stopped instead at Feeder's Supply for dog food and treats, and was home by 8:30.

I'd sent work home via e-mail Thursday afternoon, guessing that I might not be able to get out on Friday. Too much to do to be able to really relish an enforced day off... To get to our house, you have to go down a short but fairly steep hill, then back up a shorter but steeper one, and the driveway takes another sharp up-tick. I made it in, and I had no intention of even trying to make it out unless things were vastly improved. Our neighbors - none of whom has as steep a drive as we do - had wimped out and parked randomly around the culdesac, which is a little tight in the best weather. And since our drive is one car-width, we had to do the Vehicular Shuffle to get everyone in the order they needed to leave, which was a tight squeeze, what with about 40% of the street space taken up with two sedans, a station wagon, and a long-bed, king-cab pick-up truck...

I got a lot done yesterday, though. I'm usually more productive at home than at the office, to be honest - I pace myself better, and I don't have the distractions here. And when Ed got home, we went to Perfetto's for pizza.

They thought it was funny that we'd thought they might not be open. "We're from Wisconsin," Cindy laughed. "We're going to be here!" We knew that, but pointed out that most of their Friday night regulars aren't from Wisconsin, and we'd thought maybe business was slow and they'd decided to pack it in and cut back on overhead. But no, she said - Thursday night, they'd had two carryout orders and no dine-ins, but they were there. It's a family shop, so I expect the overhead for staying open in spite of the weather doesn't extend much past utilities.

Today, I've worked a little more - it was here, so I might as well make some headway on a couple of those projects - and done laundry. Youngest Child is moving in with a friend in a couple of weeks, and we're trying to get him organized so he can load his Vue and get moved with some degree of efficiency. Puts a damper on my plan to have the house back to pre-holiday order by mid-month, because I'm having to focus instead on his space and the rubble therein - but it will all happen. I just need to maintain my focus and hold my intention, even when I have to adapt the master plan. The thing is, my office space and the family room are now his staging area, which pretty much precludes any more organization in there until we're done with the moving thing...

I've been to the door in the past two days to let dogs out, let dogs in, put the cat out, bring the cat in, and only once to go anywhere. I've done three handbook revisions, a third revision on a "how it works" presentation, and written this one blog because I've been gone for weeks and I have to get back in the swing of it. The snow is lovely, and I've enjoyed sitting for a few minutes here and there by the back window, watching it fall while I drink my coffee. But more than ever, my muscles are twitching and my mind is racing, up the road and into the wind on my blue bicycle, which sits in the cold shed waiting for a warmer day.

Thanksgiving

After a while, four-day weekends start to feel kind of like the fifth or sixth really good downhill run on a long bike ride: it finally dawns on you that what goes down must go back up, and you stop saying "woo-hoo!" and start focusing on gathering steam for what comes after. It's not a bad thing, just not the wild, unfettered jubilation it started out to be.

I mean, hills are good. They're where you feel the strength you've gained since the last ride. They're where you push and test yourself, where you build more strength still, where you feel it surging up through your calves and thighs and lungs even as you wonder whether you'll make it to the top. They're where you learn your limits, and where you learn to bull your way past those limits. There aren't many things as potent as cresting a hill that scared the crap out of you when you saw it coming, and realizing that you did it, and you never once had to get off and push the bike.

Which is a similar feeling to that which comes on the second day back at work, when you get tossed a project that's big, requires a total rewrite -- with imagination thrown in, because the business owner doesn't even like the format as it exists -- and has a two-day turnaround request attached. It takes two hours to beat it into a form that's workable. The Word file is uneditable because it's in a fragmented table format that refuses to be converted to text; the PDF has to be exported and sorted out first. By the end of the day, it's starting to make sense, but now you've got to figure out what to do with it.

I love what I do -- translating "corporate-speak" into real, everyday language so our customers can understand it. Much of it's legalese, and almost all of it's obscure and jargony, and I take pleasure in wrestling half-page paragraphs down to a few concise sentences that actually make sense.

But Wednesday, I had other things to do. I'd ridden the bike to work, and I was grateful to have the only director to show up in our department declare the holiday to officially start at 1 p.m. instead of 5. It gave me time to ride home by way of Spring Street (Clifton Community Garden at left), Frankfort Avenue (the Wine Cellar), Shelbyville Road (Breadworks), and Evergreen (Anchorage -- big hills and bigger money). By the time I arrived at the house, my panniers were loaded with two bottles of wine, two large loaves of bread, and of course, my shoes and dress clothes from the office. We stopped at Paul's Vegetable and Fruit Market on the way back to church.

Thursday, I shared the kitchen with my daughter. In summer, we share space in the garden -- in winter, it's the kitchen. We work around each other very well, and when called for, we collaborate effectively. Mostly, though, she has her areas of expertise and I have mine and we negotiate timetables. Briony bakes, I do sides, Ed smokes the turkey on the grill (a charcoal kettle grill that's about three feet tall, 18 inches in diameter, and has more versatility than you could ever imagine). Bri mixes, I wipe counters, Ed brings the turkey in after two hours to finish up in the oven. I chop, Bri rinses mixing bowls and implements to use again for the next project, and Ed goes to watch a football game.

Eventually, my daughter always saves the day, because eventually -- inevitably -- I sustain some kind of inadvertent injury and have to take a break. This year, it was the finger that found itself under the knife blade as said knife was slicing through the whole-grain cranberry loaf that went in the stuffing. Not sure how it happens, but I always manage to NOT bleed in the food. But bleed I did...

Bri's fiance, Rob, helped me with bandaids. We got four on the cut, and it immediately soaked through and started dripping blood onto the floor. I held a paper towel over the cut, tightly, but every time I let go, it started running down my hand again. We put on four more bandaids, tighter. It dripped. They were talking stitches, I was arguing that it would be ridiculous to go to the ER for a cut finger on Thanksgiving Day. The cut was a whole quarter of an inch long, on the side of my finger between the nail and the pad. You wouldn't think that much blood could come out of such a teensy slice.

Finally, Ed called the urgent care clinic at my request. I agreed I'd go there if they were open. They weren't, so Rob wrapped the finger in several layers of gauze and tape. It soaked through pretty quickly, but it didn't drip. I sat down for a few minutes to catch my breath and manufacture a few replacement red cells, Bri finished constructing the stuffing, and life went on.

The turkey was perfect. Early in the day, we'd had Lynne Rosetto Kasper on the radio with her Thanksgiving Day "Turkey Confidential," and she'd inspired me to try something I hadn't done before. I'd loosened the skin from the bird's chest and thighs and rubbed butter and seasonings densely under the skin -- parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. A Scarborough Faire turkey. More butter and seasonings in the chest cavity, two hours on the grill, two more in the oven, and I don't think we've ever had a more perfect turkey. It was juicy, tender, and actually even easy to carve, a task that's always been a challenge for us.

The key ingredients in the stuffing were Andouille sausage and the cranberry bread -- rich, dark, and spicy. Bri made spicy sweet potatoes, I made Brussels sprouts in cream. (I was the only one to eat any of them, but the rest went into a vegetable chowder last night, and it seems to be something of a hit, at least!) I'd found a recipe for cranberry-citrus chutney, but forgot to get the lemon and orange it called for. Fortunately, I still had half a box of clementines, three of which went in the chutney. It was probably sweeter than it was supposed to be, but still lovely. There was a savory pasta salad that had been marinating in the fridge for two days -- the perfect amount of time for something like that to gather flavor -- and apple pie and ice cream for dessert.

The best part of the meal came when I asked for an opinion on the stuffing (the recipe called for cornbread, and I'd just decided on impulse to substitute the cranberry bread). There was praise for the modification, and then Rob said, "It's all good. I mean, you remembered to put the sugar in the cranberries this year!" Bri started giggling and said, "Yeah, and the pies are actually cooked!" They were recalling Thanksgiving three or four years ago, when they'd only just begun dating, when I had indeed missed putting the sugar in the cranberry chutney, so it had "pucker power" that couldn't be beat. And Bri had pulled some diced pumpkin out of the freezer and made pies, only to discover the pumpkin had been put up raw -- when the pies came out of the oven, the pumpkin was still frozen in spots.

I think it was last Christmas -- or maybe it was Easter -- the kids were suggesting we pack the rolls up and send 'em to the Marines. The yeast hadn't done its job, the dough hadn't risen, and the rolls were basically the consistency of artillery shells. This holiday, the rolls didn't come until Friday morning -- I didn't start them early enough, and they didn't have time for their second rising -- and they weren't a whole lot better, although you could at least bite into them without risk of breaking a tooth. Eventually -- someday -- I will locate that good recipe I used to have, and we will have rolls again. Until then, I think I'll stick to my fallback position, which is a third stop on the way home, at Plehn's Bakery in St. Matthews. It's right on my way, just a couple miles east of the Wine Cellar, on the bus route to Middletown in case the bike and I decide to ride, and they have rolls that can't be beat!

Friday, the kids were off to work and Ed and I sat around and digested, for the most part. Saturday, I actually got out for a ride with the Louisville Bike Club, from Waterfront Park to Shawnee Park and back. I only rode as far as Shawnee Golf Course -- a couple miles shy of the round trip -- but between that and the ride home, I put in 30 miles altogether. Unfortunately, I left my fleece headband at home. The damp chill and the wind settled in my left ear, and it's been aching ever since.

But it was a wonderful weekend. I've felt rested and glad to be at work this week, and I'm thankful. As I said at church Wednesday night, when the mic came around to me, I'm thankful for music, for laughter, for my garden, and for people to share them with.

And, I might add now, for my bike, my kitchen, my family, and Lynne Rosetto Kasper. For Andouille and for cranberry bread. For brussels sprouts, heavy cream, and clementines. And for sweet potatoes, apple pie, and Breyer's ice cream.

For every good gift and every perfect gift, thanks be to God.