Category: stubborn

On The Grid

I love this article simply because of the headline:

How Your Brain Is Like Manhattan

The Good Man and I have long debates about cities set on a grid. The very town where I grew up, Albuquerque, has a beautiful easy to navigate grid. I always figured it was due to the city’s start as a military town that roads are well organized into either north/south or east/west.

So simple. Easy. Really tough to get lost.

I gripe about the Bay Area and these roads that are all angled off to Joneses, changing directions midway and stopping suddenly. For example, there is an exit off of 101 where you have to choose the north or south bound exit. However…the road actually runs east west.

Combine this with California’s lack of mile markers and only sporadic use of street signs and I can go from zero to bonkers in about three seconds.

One of the many reasons I love Manhattan is that it’s set up on a grid. Navigating makes sense! A hayseed like me had zero trouble in the big city knowing where to go and how to get there. I never, not once, got lost while in Manhattan. And if I’m not worried about how to get there, then I relax and enjoy the journey.

The Good Man, on the other hand, has a brain that’s a lot more fluid than mine. Where I’ll draw a straight line, he’ll make expressionist art. He don’t need no stinking grid roads, he has a powerful innate sense of direction and an even stronger sense of joie de vivre when it comes to getting lost. He sees getting lost as a fun adventure. I see it as a teeth gritting bit of fear and misery.

Meanwhile both my brain and my road preferences tend to be a little more like the gorgeous city of Manhattan.






Image from Grush Hour.


Vaya Con Bye-Bye

Whew. Yeah. Okay. Unh huh.

My tireless boss has been in town for the past three weeks. I swear the guy doesn’t drink coffee, soda or energy drinks and he can outlast everyone. The man is relentless.

He’s been in a bunch of meetings. I’ve been in most of those same meetings. In that slight half hour before the next meeting, he’s in my office wanting to plot and plan and strategize. There’s a lot going on. Marker boards were used. Action items were assigned.

It has been non-stop. I’m punch drunk and overwhelmed.

Today, at noon, he put on his battered leather jacket, picked up his computer bag, and left town.

It is wrong that I offered to drive him to the airport?

I mean, I dig the guy. He’s brilliant and funny. He hates my iPhone case, told me “you’ll never make it to the boardroom with that case” which makes me want to send him one. Every day. For a month.

He knows his stuff and has a lot of respect from everyone, including me.

I am fortunate to have him for a boss.

I’m also fortunate that he on an airplane until tomorrow sometime.

Wheeeeeew. This is the first 30 minutes I’ve had to just sit at my desk in weeks. I like it.






Image from CentreFlow.


I Think I Can

My lunchtime walking friend, known to regular readers as Worm Girl, has gone and done it. She has coerced convinced me that on cold rainy days (such as today) we shouldn’t just avoid our lunchtime walk all together. We should, instead, go work out in our company’s fitness center.

My god how I hate gyms.

Hate them hate them hate them.

I conceded the points that we need to mix up our workouts, and we need to continue to work out even if weather doesn’t permit. So today, I followed her into the fitness center where we took up residence on two separate treadmills.

I lumped myself up on the walking deck of a shiny new machine and poked and prodded at the buttons and geegaws.

To the left of me, a tall, young, lithe brunette woman running all out on the treadmill. To my right, a shorter, tiny blond woman with loads of attitude. Also running.

I didn’t come here to run. Hell, at this point I wasn’t even walking because I couldn’t get the machine to start. After punching at the up arrow key, the belt started up but it was quite slow, so I didn’t get on it. I kept jabbing at buttons and “hmmm’ing” and “ummm’ing”.

Blondie snapped at me “You should just get on it!”

I thought how easy it would be to insert my foot into the middle of her tiny stride and send her flying. “Whoops! Did I do that? Sooooo sorry.”

See, when I walk on the walking trail, there’s no turning it on. No fiddling with buttons or a recalcitrant machine. I simply walk.

Also, on the walking trail, snooty Blondie would just jog past me and our association would be over. But no, I gotta stand next to her for the next hour feeling inadequate and awkward.

Did I mention that I hate gyms?

In addition, Worm Girl further convinced me to sign up for the company’s annual “fitness challenge.”

Over the next eight weeks we have to get weighed and measured, attend classes, and participate in physical challenges.

Today’s challenge was to log our fastest time to run or walk a mile.

So I warmed up a bit and then cranked up the machine and galumphed my way along.

Blondie and Brunette looked in askance as I became the little curvy engine that could. I huffed and I puffed and by god when it was done, I had turned in a respectable 16:04 minute mile.

I couldn’t sustain that pace, so I did two more miles at a seventeen and a half minute pace.

And now my legs ache.

Did I mention I can’t stand gyms?






Image found at Bottomless Mimosa.


A Reprise: The Best of 2011

While I’m moving house today and somewhere in between old-with-an-internet-connection and new-with-god-knows-what-is-going-to-be-installed, I decided to bring forward my Best Post of 2011.

And by best, I mean the one that got the most hits, by far.

Enjoy. It’s a doozy. Reading it puts me right back in that place, March 3, 2011. Oh what a day that was….

__________________

I Fought The Law, and the Law Won

So it’s 4:30 in the morning and I’m awake and working. At my job. At 4:30 in the morning. It’s dark outside and inside and all hell is breaking loose, business wise, in several of the major Asian countries I’m working with.

The problem isn’t entirely my fault, but it’s my team, and I manage them, so I take the fall because that’s what a manager should do.

The time zones are right, mostly, for talking to my folks already working through the end of what is their day Thursday, pesky time zones being what they are. It’s really right timing for talking to my boss. Four thirty means noon-thirty in London and the meaty part of his day.

He asks me why in the hell I’m up so early. Well, for one thing, I can’t sleep. For two things, there are emails scorching the inside of my email inbox. Someone’s gotta do something about it, and that’s someone’s gotta be me.

So we’re talking. My voice is still creaky from lack of sleep as I make my case. “I’m in over my head here,” I tell him, and he agrees to help.

I’m keyed up on adrenaline and buzzing like a pot of coffee and two five hour energy drinks dancing a polka across a vat of 1970’s diet pills.

The boss and I are puzzling through the problems. We’re working on solutions. I’m trying to answer as best as I can and agree to find out answers to the questions I don’t know.

So the boss is talking, going on a long riff as he’s wont to do. It’s good stuff and I’m listening hard. While I listen, I lean my chair back on two legs, perched there for a moment.

I say “two legs” but perhaps I should say “two wheels” because that’s really the case. I’m nestled into my worn but comfy home office chair. I do this all the time, go up on two wheels, while I’m thinking or listening or just because.

I’m listening. I’m “um hmming” and I’m very into the conversation when I guess the gods that rule gravity decide that it’s time they had a say in this situation.

With nary a wobble or early warning, I go from being semi-upright, let’s say a nice 10 degree angle, to staring at the ceiling, knees in the air, I’m-an-astronaut-strapped-onto-a-solid-rocket-booster-and-ready-to-light-this-candle position.

This descent of Karenkind does not occur without some noise. And by noise I mean a bone-jarring rattle that travels in waves through my seventy year old domicile. I can hear the plumbing pipes rattling below the floor.

The boys who follow earthquakes over in their center in Palo Alto might have noticed a barely imperceptible blip on the screen while taking another sip of stale government coffee. Meanwhile, seismic waves are going off in my home.

The curious cat, a moment ago fast asleep, comes galloping down the hall to find out what’s the deal. The Good Man turns on the bedside light. I see the yellow glow at the other end of the house.

Over there in London, either my boss hasn’t heard or doesn’t care. He keeps talking. I lay there, knees up, and listen. And reply. I continue the conversation, because the last thing I want to hear right now is “what was that?” because I have no good answer. “I just fell over in my chair” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in my capacity as either employee or human.

I half expect The Good Man to come check in on me, and am glad he doesn’t. I assume he hears me still talking and believes me to be all right.

Slowly, making the least amount of noise possible, over a period of several minutes, I slide out of the chair and slither into an Indian-style sitting position on the floor.

I finish my call. I hang up. I put my chair back upright and I pat its fake leather back as if to say, “we’re all right, big fella.”

I walk down the hall to go back to bed. The Good Man is snoozing with the light on. I place my iPhone on my bedside table, and as I do, I knock a stack of hardcover library books onto the floor. They make a sizable crash.

Apparently gravity and me are gonna tussle today. Being as how he has the law on his side, I think gravity is going to win.

I plan to give it a good fight.





Image found from Alex Huges Cartoons and Caricatures, a really fun site. I recommend a visit.



Lessons From a Shredding Machine: Things I have learned about myself

For the past three days, it has been me, a U-Haul box (size Medium) filled to bursting with papers, and a shredder.

I shred and I shred and I shred.

Then the machine overheats and stops shredding. Then I go back into our under-house storage and pull out another box, bag or whatever and go through it until the shredder cools off.

Then I start shredding again.

Today, as I got down to the bottom third of the box of papers, I was sucked into a time warp. I was pulling out bills and correspondence dating back to 1999.

That’s 12 years ago. Twelve-year-old documents. Twelve years is both a very long time and yet a mere blip in the world.

It has been quite an archeological journey through the strata of one medium size U-Haul box.

Here’s a few things I’ve learned along the way:


1. For the most part, the stuff that I kept was the kind of stuff that shouldn’t have gone into the trash. For example: pay stubs with my social security number, account numbers and other identifying information listed. Papers with credit card numbers. Things like that.

Where I fell down was in not having a shredder. When I moved from the South Bay to this place, I burned out my old shredder and didn’t replace it. So I just kept all these papers in a box.

About 2007 or so The Good Man and I bought a shredder and so I’m doing a better job of keeping ahead of this stuff.

That’s growing, baybee.


2. I’m not actually a hoarder. Last evening I was a bit worried. I journeyed deep into the bowels of Google to read up on it. A true hoarder will have stuff filling every corner, including their car.

I abhor having a car filled with crap. Also, I think it’s a travesty to have a garage and not be able to park in it.

So my hoarding side and my tidy side conflict. This tenuous balance is what keeps me on the “not so bad but could use some work” side of the hoarding line.

Whew!


3. It feels really good to shred every remnant from a job I held for just a year and that treated me very shabbily.

Really good.


4. Boxes of crap kept up off the ground don’t mold. Boxes sitting on the ground become a scary experiment in the rapid proliferation of mold.

Just. Ew.

This doesn’t happen in New Mexico.


5. I don’t bounce checks nearly as often as I used to.

I’m sure that’s partly because I don’t actually write checks anymore. But I also don’t overdraw my account like I used to. I shredded TONS of notes from the bank notifying me that I was overdrawn.

I haven’t seen one of those in a long time. Like years.

I think I used to play it pretty fast and loose with the float time on checks. Not so much these days.

That’s growing, baybee!


6. I still keep a copy of all the important payments I make (like a copy of the check sent to the Superior Court to pay a red light camera ticket) but I don’t keep them in paper form anymore.

Don’t gotta put .pdfs in a medium size U-Haul box.

Ain’t no one gonna complain about a cluttered hard drive but me.


7. Getting out from under a pile of twelve year old crap feels really, really good.

So good I uncorked a nice bottle of red and am relaxing tonight feeling pretty happy about my progress.

So the shredding is done and the separating the wheat from the chaff, or the donate from the trash, continues tomorrow.







Image from The Lake Mary Blog.