ice water and ocicats

Well, we can start with vacation. I've found that some vacations make me say "ah, I feel like myself again", and other ones elicit a "heh, I haven't even bothered to try to be myself in like five days." This was one of the latter ones. I hung out with friends in Seattle, ate two giant unhealthy meals a day, very slowly worked on getting over a cold, used a lot of Kleenex and watched a ridiculous number of movies. Most of them bad ones.

I did finish knitting the scarf I thought would never end, and I had a lovely visit with Birdie the biological child (who is now nine!) and her daddies. We visited the Pacific Science center -- she was too shy to pose for many pictures (even in front of the funhouse mirror), but we got a few good ones. Check this out... me and my cute genes.



Every time we visit them I feel like I give her parents bad news ("why yes, I WAS a really picky eater as a child"), but overall it's delightful to see them. Birdie is growing up happy and oh so middle class. She has her own iPad, and friends, and she's all "how old were you when you got email? I was seven." That's what I wanted. If I lived with her I would possibly feel a lot of bitter, unacceptable raging jealousy over the whole "happy childhood" thing, but I don't, and so I like it. She gets more interesting every time I see her, as she gets older. This time we very solemnly traded email addresses.

More fun was had with the brass caterpillar. Oh, oh yes, brass caterpillar, YES!



Came back, still sick, and set about falling back into the work vortex... and getting ready to move later this week.  I freecycled a bunch of stuff last weekend, and hauled a couple of loads of stuff to the Goodwill, and helped heisenbug clean out his basement workshop. It's amazing how much physical stuff was down there -- tonight's garbage and recycle chores are going to be epic. And I made it worse by having us haul back the styrofoam and other trash from assembling two flat-pack dressers over there on Sunday. 

As for work, despite having missed a LOT of days over the last few weeks, I feel a fierce satisfaction with how things are going. I've driven some aggressive design decisions and I'm getting what I want out of several high-stakes discussions. If the price is occasionally going into a reverie and working on updating the design document until midnight on Sunday, then so be it. My manager is out on vacation so he's not even observing the current awesome, but I guess when he gets back I'll simply tell him.

With all of the above, something had to give, and that something was workouts. I'm in really depressing shape. I lifted weights on Saturday for the first time in, um, I'm not telling you, and the same for yoga tonight. UGH. I'm weak, and I have about as much acrobatic precision in my body as a wilted turnip. I care about this, but let's face it... fixing it can't reasonably be priority #1 until we've moved and I'm somewhat settled in the new place (I'm quick with that) and I'm 100% sure that my cold has gone away.