Released

Stingy New England April has finally managed to give up a couple of warmish days and we've been able to take K to the playground.

She explodes onto the playground, shrieking and laughing, climbing everything in sight as fast as she can; hurling herself down the slides. You'd think she had been released from 10 years in a dungeon!

"You can't get me..."

I've caught some of the smaller kids watching her with a fascinated admiration... "Look, Mommy... Look what that kid can do!" Then I watch the mommy in question swallow hard and hope that her kid doesn't try to follow K's lead... but they always do. :-)

She's like a flame, this little girl. She grabs your attention and you can't look away.

Bad Lamb

So, I'm putting Kassia to bed last night and we're reading stories and being silly... the usual stuff :-)

She reaches for a stuffed lamb that she's had forever, but never paid much attention to, holds him up and says "He's a bad lamb."

I say "A bad lamb? Why?"

And with an evil little grin, she says in a deep voice...

(are you ready for this?)

BAAA HA HA HA HA..!

Laughed so hard, I nearly choked.

Blue Monday

Damn! I knew I should have taken that picture when I had a chance... But I couldn't bring myself to look like a tourist on the T by digging out the cell phone camera..!

I was on the train, on my way into work. The "red line" comes above ground long enough to cross the Charles River from Cambridge into Boston. (The view is a favorite with tourists... hence my reluctance to break out the camera...) Anyway... it was about 7:15, and the sun may have been up, but through the blizzard that was Boston's morning, you couldn't see it. You couldn't see Boston for that matter... or Cambridge... or even the river! Everything beyond the bridge was completey obscured by the snow. What you could see was blue. That's it... just blue.

Kinda like the background color here... but mistier.

A little creepy actually... but very, very cool. Usually nobody even looks up from their "Metro" when the train comes above ground. But this morning, a whole car load of jaded commuters sat staring out the windows with their mouths half open. And that, in itself, is something to write about!

Dialog

The scene opens on Kassia experimenting with centrifugal forces by spinning her macaroni and cheese bowl around on the counter with her fork... Mom watches dubiously.

Mom: Be careful with that... it's going to go flying.

Kassia: (starts singing to herself; continues spinning bowl which does, of course, go flying...)

Mom: (getting down on hands and knees to clean up the macaroni and cheese) Grrr. Are you a menace??

Kassia: Yep. That's ok. That's my job! (resumes singing)

End scene

November Haiku

acrid tomato-
smell of dry vines uprooted
autumn's desolation

a few rasping leaves;
a snail's green shell, abandoned
whisper in the chill

Friday. In a BIG Way.

OK. This week has been a complete nightmare.

No, my house didn't burn down... nothing was stolen... no accidents or illness (well, not for me and mine anyway, but more on that momentarily), or marital strife. This week was simply a stress-fest. A shining example of how cutting too many corners always leaves somebody painted into one.

(Warning... this journal is about to get all tech-y and work-related. If you're still here, you might want to have a comfy pillow handy since it's probably not of much interest to anybody but my stressed out self... lol!)

I work for a small IT company. Did I say small? That's much too generous. Let's try..... tiny. No... not quite. microscopic! Yes, that's the word I'm looking for. I say I work for the company, but I'm actually part owner... albeit a pretty small part. At present, there are exactly two of us here on a full time basis with a constantly rotating retinue of contractors doing everything from design, to development to network stuff. Contractors are good. They are very helpful when you're stuck for someone to do a given task. They are absolutely worthless when you need someone to "remember that project we were working on last spring?" That said, usually things run pretty smoothly. I handle all things development. My partner handles all things network-business-y. It works. He's a great schmoozer. He makes the best first impression you'll ever get (the French accent helps). He's also pretty good in that tangle of wires and menacing blinking boxes that populate our server room.

Network... LAN, WAN, IP, DNS, reverse DNS, A record, MX record, start this service, stop that service, open this port, close that port...

AAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I hate it! I don't want to know!!!! I just want to come in and hide in my cluttered office and write my if...then loops!

Last Friday, with the help of some of the aforementioned contractors, we did a major network overhaul. Without getting too tech-y, this involved a whole new batch of IP addresses for all of our clients and us. Ugly under the best of circumstances. Again. I don't get it. I don't want to get it. I already know more than I ever wanted to! I can feel bits of useful information dropping out of the back of my head every time I learn more about it!

I came in on Monday morning to a voice mail message from my partner. He's got pneumonia. O.M.G. I get to work at 7:30. By 8:01 the phones were ringing off the hook.

"I can't send/receive email."
"I can't see my website."
"I can't ftp into my site."

WTF??! This was supposed to be DONE! I get on the phone with the consulting company and it takes me an hour just to get in touch with one of the guys who was actually here! Nobody knows nuthin'. They don't want to come back. God forbid they finish what they started! They'd rather walk ME through their diagnostics and repairs on the phone!!

This has gone on ALL WEEK. It's Friday and I have got NONE of my own work done, plus I've made myself look like an inept idiot for 5 days as I BS clients trying to sound like I know what the *)*&^^! is wrong with their email. Have I mentioned the boat-loads of verbal abuse heaped on me by those clients? That's been especially nice.

It's going to be even nicer next Monday when I have to explain to all my development clients (you know, the ones whose projects have been in the drawer all week?) why their projects are now a week behind!! I'd say I'll have to work from home all weekend, but...

I CAN'T CONNECT TO THE NETWORK!!!

Me

I get annoyed with myself when I write here's-how-I-feel today entries. They all seem to have escaped from high-school journals... the ones you wrote when you still believed that writing could change something. Anyway... here I go on this self-examination trip because I just feel like this stuff has been bumping around in my head for too long. (There's that word... "feel". Ick.)

So. How do I feel? Gray. Someone said that to me once and the image stuck. That person said that they felt as if there was a gray cloth draped over the world. I feel like there's a gray cloth draped over me.

"Me". Closed for the season.

All the things that I thought defined me are gone. The ones that remain don't seem to matter any more, and other things are much more important now. I waited too long to make the shift. When I made it, the shift was too abrupt. Too much got lost in the move. Music. Worthless. My daughter doesn't even want to hear me sing any more, and it's not like I have the time to go out and audition for something. Acting. ibid. I seem to remember travelling and taking language classes. I seem to remember being a fairly good converationalist. Not any more. Unless we're talking about kids, or .Net... and even then the well runs dry fairly quickly.


I don't look like the Me I remember. I've grown older in the past two years than in the 39 that went before. I feel old. I never did before. It's absolutely terrifying. I remember feeling attractive. Now I feel completely disconnected from myself physically, or worse, I feel like I'm apologizing for myself. (Now, that's something I do remember... circa 1979... age 13.)

I think I used to like Me. I want to remember why.