Fly, fly away

In a random series of events that demonstrated the occasional value of forgetfulness, I had an insightful and engaging conversation today with the pilot that flew our plane from Portland back to Spokane.

Unused to having a piece of carry-on luggage, I walked past the ala carte cart on the way into the terminal at PDX, without my bag. Once inside, J asked, "Where's your carry on?" Yikes! I usually only have a purse and laptop bag; a long stop-over in San Francisco with my generous aunt - "Take these sweaters! And boots! And here's a suitcase for it all!"- disrupted my normal travel flow, allowing me to zone out and walk right by my new carry-on.

I went back out onto the concourse - this was a small plane with tarmac deplaning- and there it was, all alone on the cart. As I pulled it down, the pilot exited the plane and we ended up walking back inside together.

As we were walking in step together, I started a conversation by thanking him for the flight. "It was a wonderful flight; thanks again," I said, or something along those lines.

He replied with an apology. "I'm sorry it was a little bumpy." (It wasn't. Pilots must be sensitive about these things). He continued, "The autopilot wasn't working (!!) so we weren't able to climb up to 35,000 feet like we normally do. We had to keep it lower at 20,000 feet."

I tried processing this information as quickly as possible and then try not to say something in reply that was stupid-sounding. I came out with a series of stuttered replies, "So then, okay, so, the auto pilot, it was off, that means then... that means you were flying, by your instruments?" I ended with a question at the end which I didn't want but was battling my complete and utter lack of pilot and plane knowledge with the desire not to sound stupid.

"No you're right," he replied graciously. "And amazingly, yes, we were asleep."

I thought this was incredibly hilarious and laughed quite hard. Asleep! Because the autopilot wasn't working! A pilot with humor!

So I continued, "I thought the flight was fantastic. I didn't feel anything at all and I really meant it when I said thank you." Now warming to the conversation with someone that liked to poke fun at themselves, I expanded and said, "Really, anyone that has a problem with a flight like that just shouldn't be flying."

On this, he smiled and shook his head. "Oh, you would not believe it, really. You would not believe what people get picky about. Thankfully this was an Alaska flight. (It was a SkyWest plane). If this had been a United flight, we would have had all kinds of complaints. You wouldn't believe what United customers are like."

"Seriously!?" I said, sort of shocked.

"Really," he replied.

By now, we were inside the concourse and past our gate, crowds starting to emerge. As our ways were obviously parting, I said, "Have you heard of Louie CK? He's a comedian?"

"No, no I haven't," he replied.

"Well," I began, "He has this great comedy routine based around this idea that we have lost all perspective on what is truly amazing in life, and that every time we sit down in a plane, instead of nitpicking and complaining, we should be saying, "Ohmygosh!! I am about to partake in the miracle of human flight! I'm going to be... flying! It’s amazing! I'm sitting…in a chair…in the sky!”

He actually thought this was quite funny and he definitely got the joke. As we finally parted ways and I found John, I said thanks again and wished him a good afternoon.

So I guess in closing, a couple thoughts. 1. United Airlines customers: Chill out. 2. Pilots do more than fly planes. 3. I am grateful for the fact that air travel is the safest form of travel still in the US (When did you hear of a major airline crash in the US? A car crash? See...) 4. Louie CK, thanks for the laughs. Wish I could post a link to the video but the original clip w/ Conan has been taken down by NBC.

Cheers!

Skunk Patrol

Apparently God in all of his or her humor was concerned I might be lacking material, what with the girls in college and my uterus gone.

Last Sunday night, we arrived home from a weekend in Seattle. It was dark and drizzly and we began unloading the car in the driveway in front of our house. Hazel, our dog, went on the trip so she was thrilled to be back frolicking freely in familiar territory. In her earnest sniffing explorations she discovered a skunk hiding by the side of a house.

Skunks are stealthy and unnatural-looking when they move. They sort of float and are very fast and direct when challenged. There it was, a black, motor-controlled wig, jerking its way across our lawn, charging Hazel and doing the spray-down.

Literally one second I have luggage in my hands and I'm walking to the house, and the next I freeze while my brain is registering, "Is what I think happening, happening?" The air is filling with very potent, acrid skunk spray and Hazel is doing a doggie flip-out.

When dogs are sprayed by skunks, they sort of reel back, hop around a bit, then frantically slide their face across anything nearby; the lawn, the shrubs, a porch mat, or maybe - before you realize what is happening - your nice Michael Kors raincoat. They might also bolt back into the car they just exited ten minutes ago and wipe their face across the back seat.

As chaos erupted on the front lawn, I kept walking into the house, closed the door, and stood in the living room. I stood there for a minute, looking around at our furniture, humming. That didn't just happen, I told myself. It's 9:00 pm on a Sunday night at the end of a long weekend. That didn't just happen.

I opened the door and came back out. Yes in fact, it really did happen. There she still is, whining and sliding her face across the lawn, and luggage is everywhere. The air and my coat, everything smells wretched.  Even John, lacking in a sense of smell since a nose injury at the age of two, comments, "I think I smell burning rubber." Yes that, mixed with rotten eggs, sulfur and a strange splash of gasoline.

John at least is mobilizing, trying to get the dog into the backyard.  In solidarity, I decide after maybe the whole three minutes this has taken to transpire, to mentally change gears, stop unpacking and get the home-remedy ingredients rounded up.

Now more engaged, I search frantically online for the skunk-remedy recipes, then jump into the car to get to the store, but oh wait, I forgot.  It's like the skunk is still in the car, spraying with gusto. And the stinky raincoat, yeah, still wearing that too.  At the store in the check-out line, it didn't take a rocket scientist of a cashier to figure out what my life was all about right then with my skunky-self, hydrogen peroxide, baking soda and soap. And beer. I was checked-out with amazing speed and thoroughness.

Back at home, we mixed our home remedy and gave Hazel a bath. There was a lot of grunting involved, a whining dog and frantic energy expanded in many directions. The bathroom became a watery disaster zone of black dog hair, dog slobber, towels, wet clothes, rags and buckets, all covered by a wet skunk smell.

Finally, the ordeal was over. Hazel found every place not already wet or stinky in the house to shake her fur and spray skunk water everywhere. We cleaned up slowly, went back to where we left off two hours ago and brought in the rest of the luggage. She slept on the porch and we collapsed into bed.

This burst of chaos actually got me thinking quite a bit about the difference between my life now and when our kids were toddlers, when chaos was the daily hum. I used to live with predictable unpredictability every hour. A skunk spray here and there? That's for rookies. Living a more chaotic reality for years, day in day out, changed me and changed me in good ways that I don't want to forget.

More on that later but for now, grateful Hazel is mostly skunk-smell free, the luggage is unpacked and life is back to normal, which I was told once, is just a setting on a dryer.

Laundromat Barbie

Odd things happen when your kids get ready to leave home.

You might be experiencing just the tiniest bit of emotional fragility, but there is too much going on to be reflective. Your house is getting turned upside down by kids who are main-lining frenetic energy as they pack and sort stuff scattered in every room of the house.

In some ways, it's almost like reverting back fifteen years to when they were toddlers and you would get sick and want to lay down but couldn't, because in the twenty minutes of nap-time you desperately needed, they would find the shampoo or the yogurt or honey and use it all like art supplies. It would only take about five minutes but they could ruin your house in just that short of amount of time. I remember.

You'd like the universe to slow down as everyone lurches toward this new season of life but it isn't happening. Instead, you are deep in conversations about all the stuff, new and old; what to buy, keep, sell or toss. There are questions about budgets and the year ahead. Everyone is trying hard to be mature and deferring but it's tiring so when things are a little too tense or teary, thankfully you're still a crazy family and comedy relief is around the corner.

In September we had a garage sale. We spent the better part of the summer preparing for it, going through old stuff. We started cleaning the garage and a lot of stuff from the house had somehow made it out there including a Rubbermaid chest of drawers we'd used to hold toys. The chest was covered in dust and inside were mostly Lincoln Logs, action figures and Barbies (Yes, Barbies, all you judgmental pre-parents. They're insidious. Just wait and see).

We decided to sort all the toys, so we drug the chest into the basement and got to work. Upon opening the bottom drawer, we all shrieked and groaned in unison; a truly distinct and familiar odor wafted out. Somehow a random, rangy cat had wiggled into our garage, found the bottom drawer of Barbies and confidently whizzed a few dozen times on all the dolls and their outfits. It was positively, stupendously filled with cat pee, a giant litter box lined with tiny sequined prom dresses.

This created some emotion and a discussion. Do we go ahead and try to save the Barbies? Just chuck them all? Save only a few?? We delicately poked around the drawer, trying to decide. We finally settled on the fact that a few needed to be saved for posterity so a plan was formed.  We threw everything into the washing machine: Barbies, bleach, detergent, more bleach, hot water, all the ridiculously tiny Barbie shoes and some random rags for cushion. Then we just stood there, staring in.  

The whole scene seemed ridiculous in a way only Americans can appreciate with our boxes and drawers of excess stuff. But I wasn't really in the mood for consumerism angst; I was saving memories.

In the process of getting everything into the washer, I noticed we had a Ken doll.  Up until that moment, I had no idea we had a Ken doll. I held him up, sort of surprised he'd snuck into the line-up a decade or so ago.

I also had no idea he liked pink pajamas. It appeared someone in our house, in the last ten years, had decided the Barbie storyline needed some variety, had brought in a Ken doll, then decorated him with a nice jammie outfit.  Oh, how my day was improving!

So Fem-Ken of the orange skin and rippled abs joined the Barbies for what could only be some version of a very happy dream for a male doll.  (Insert whatever Barbie/Ken, baby-making-washer joke you have in your head right now, enjoy that for a minute and now we can continue.)

As the washer chugged away, I stood staring at the only toy in the drawer that didn't stink or need to be washed, which, in an odd twist, was a cat.

It had kind of a prissy/hissy expression, all mean-girls like. Cats as a species had pretty much fallen out of my good graces, so I just threw it away, out of spite.

Bad cat. 

It took four washings but the Barbies and Ken were finally rid of all cat-pee. They came out smelling assaultingly clean, as in, I would be suspicious if I bought a doll at a garage sale with that range of clean odors. It is sort of a tell, that maybe there was a reason for the lack of even basic smells, like the doll had been drug around the house by a toddler and doused with shampoo, yogurt and honey, then a cat peed on it.

Regardless, we kept the few the kids wanted and put the rest in the garage sale.  Mission accomplished.

The kids are now in school, clean Barbies are tucked away and things have finally slowed down. I don't know what's next, but for today, I have a cold, which means I'm going to take a nap, with both eyes closed, for a very long time. Because I can.

Weekend Update: Cooking, Ahoy!

I'm not sure how, when or where the imparting of food knowledge is traditionally supposed to transpire between a mother and daughter.  In our family, having the oldest child move into an apartment was a nice trigger event for everyone and why not Aisle 7 at Fred Meyers for the location?

I decided a long time ago I wasn't particularly concerned that our daughters weren't that interested in cooking. I did all I could to avoid it as a kid and started sharing cooking duties with my husband out of necessity. I figured if I could learn in my 20's, so could they.

We definitely did our fair share of cooking together as a family; cookies, scrambled eggs, pancakes, burritos, salads, etc. (The youngest daughter actually cooks quite a bit and makes killer grilled cheese and crepes.) Mostly these were basic staples that you could live on for months but without much excitement or variation. It appeared E. wanted to get serious about veggies, meat and crock pots so off to the store we went.

Watching her get serious about cooking made me reflect back on what is it about this part of domestic life that is so interesting and often freighted in some way.  For women, it can be a loaded topic if you are married or sharing domestic life with someone. Is this a shared responsibility or something that just comes along with being a woman? What do you do if neither of you like to cook? Shop? Do dishes? Especially for a daily chore that takes so much time, expectations abound but hard to define.

I also grew up reading all of the books in the Little House on the Prairie series.  I read the parts about their Thanksgiving and harvest dinners over and over and over.  It seemed like Gilligan's Island to me, with the impossible exoticness of how they made food and where the ingredients came from. How could they have made bread, cakes and cookies without electric stoves? Did they really use a butter churn to make butter? What could possibly replace a fridge? And who makes egg-nog mid-summer with their own eggs and winter ice kept cold in the barn?

In addition to pressure from the 19^th century Ingalls and Wilder families, I also grew up in a family with amazing cooks who made everything from scratch: my mom, grandmothers, aunts and later my mother-in-law. Our holiday dinners contained a quality and variety of dishes I realize now was a reflection of their collective talent.

Regardless of my historical or existential baggage, the bottom-line is there has always been something about cooking that forces me to slow down more than I prefer and takes way, way too many steps for an outcome that can be gone in minutes.  Case in point:

How to Make a Meal! Analyze what food you have in your kitchen, make lists, go to the store, buy food, take it home and put it all away. (If you garden, do about 100 other mysterious soil and seed-related tasks.) A few days later, take some of that food back out again (or go to your amazing garden where things never turn brown or die), organize it, start making it, set the table, and finally, eat. About ten minutes later, clear the table, compost the scraps, put leftovers away, and have a small argument about who does dishes. Repeat in four hours.

Most of my friends that find cooking relaxing enjoy some of the steps besides the eating part.  They love looking through cook books and they like grocery shopping. Many of them also just like the process of cooking; they find it relaxing, with or without wine to sip along the way. Gardening literally makes some people I know radiate with excitement, especially going through seed catalogs in February.

I would say over the years, the positive experiences I associate with food and cooking has warmed my heart to this daily chore.  I experience food-love on occasion in grocery stores, still try new recipes and exotic imports. I've found my own style, what I like to cook and eat, and stopped comparing myself. The biggest draw of it all for me is I love eating good food and I like doing it around a table with friends and family. Cooking for a family, while full of challenges, is a wonderfully gratifying experience. There is nothing quite like that and often, those moments make it all worthwhile.

Truth be told, however, what would help the most with my attitude toward cooking was if I cooked about once a week. If I cooked only once a week, I could get very, very excited about cooking.

So back to the task at hand: Here we are with only a moderately prepared 21-year old about to move into an apartment. As a result of having a child now out on her own, I decided it was time for some brief tips. Since they were going to be brief tips, it didn't make much sense to waste time writing them down before we left for the store. Aisle 7 seemed quite appropriate:

• Buy healthy, simple ingredients and until you get your own stocked kitchen, supplement spices with packets and sauces
• Get a crock pot and throw stuff in
• Canned soup and grilled cheese
• Always have eggs around
• Cook meat in volume then freeze in Ziplocs for later
• Chocolate
• Buy organic when possible

That's it! That's all I could think of. We were so thrilled with all we accomplished. The two of us zipped around with younger sister K who was dorm-room shopping, bumping into other families who appeared to be doing the same thing with their college-age children. In fact, it would have been interesting to stop a few families and get a sampling of all the cooking tips and suggestions that were being thrown out as kids moved into apartments for the first time. 

In the end, it was a choppy, slightly inelegant way to transfer a bit of experience to a younger child. That is how much of our family has been however so it seemed comfortable and familiar. I know E ended up with several dinners and a decent supply of breakfast and lunch food. I took an interesting trip down memory lane and was happy to eat dinner out on the way back home.  Hurray for cooking, for the fun times and work that goes into it too. 

Home Care Update: Sinks & Drains

If by chance you decide to make refried beans and you put dried pinto beans in a pot to soak overnight, then forget them - because you work and your kids are leaving for college and you're having a huge garage sale- and you forget them for maybe like, five days, and then you notice your kitchen stinks and you remember the beans and you're like "Ohmygosh! I have rotting beans in my kitchen!" and in a flurry of non-thinking, you decide to try and grind them up in your disposal, you need to know that in all cases, in all homes, in all states of the Union - and here comes the salient tip - this will not work.

Why do I know this? I know this because when after five days of home plumbing repair attempts, I called Mike from Freedom Plumbing and he said, "Refried beans and rice, that's sort of out of my league and something for the drain experts."

A few modest observations:
#1 I had no idea there was a difference between a plumber and a drain expert. 

#2 It's true that you cannot grind up refried beans in your disposal but it's a great way to do several other things, like practice your sink unclogging skills, ponder if you're comfortable using a bathroom plunger in the kitchen, track down your entire set of plumbing tools which consists of a roll of strange white tape and a special wrench, clean out under your sink and ultimately, and you knew this was coming, spend $80 with a drain unclogging expert. 

So the week unfolds sort of like this. You realize as you are grinding your stinky beans that this is a horrible idea as you listen to your disposal change tones with each wad of beans you push down. Facing your stupidity, you watch both your sinks fill and stay filled with brown, grainy bean-water.  After several days of various home plumbing experiments with your moderately good-tempered spouse, trips to the hardware store and enough Draino to toxify the entire Spokane River watershed, you finally decide to face your ineptitude and call the plumber.  His magnet is on your fridge from the last time he came to fix whatever large object you pushed down a tiny drain pipe, and so you call him and this is the part where he mentions in a roundabout way that I'm now in a special Stupid Customer category and he's busy for a few years so try this other guy. With your remaining shred of adult self-esteem, you contact the drain guy, the expert, and you wait.

Donny the Drain Expert comes and somewhat anticlimactically, uses a fairly giant machine to unclog your drain. It is loud and there is quite a bit of vibrating and it's a bit more energy than the kitchen is used to seeing. It's very mechanical. There is a small bit of drama at the end ("How did it go, Donny? Well....") that involved a 90-degree pipe turn that was tricky but in the end, he was reassured that all was well.

As these things go, you write your check while Donny knowingly reminds you - in a way only people with real skills and uniforms can - of the basic facts most people are ignorant of regarding proper drain care: You really shouldn't ever actually use your disposal ("Your pipes are rusting from the inside out so that food, you know, it just grabs onto those pipes and sticks), you should never use real tools on your pipes ("These plastic pipes, they'll snap, just snap, if you use a wrench on them"), a general age prediction regarding your pipes ("These here are about 47, maybe 48 years old, solid W9221 galvanized steel... blah blah more incomprehensible metal and pipe facts") and finally, an earnest request not touch or mess with your pipes again as most Americans misplaced their handy-person skills somewhere in the vicinity of the iPhone charger.

So really, you can go ahead and give this a whirl if your weekend seems sort of sparse, if you need a burst of handy-man and handy-woman activity. For me, I am quite happy with a clean, pleasant smelling kitchen and my can of Western Family Refried Beans.

Happy Camper: Part 1

I come from a long line of non-campers. 

If you asked me as a kid what I thought of camping, I would have missed the verb distinction and provided breathless detail of my love of going to camp. 

My only point of reference for camping was the place you go for a week that had cabins and a lodge perched on the edge of a lake. You swam, practiced archery, canoed and built campfires. I wasn’t really sure I could be missing much when I was already in camping heaven, at camp.

When I realized there was another kind of camping, I found it to be a curiously mysterious activity and for families much more healthy than mine. This kind of camping required a tremendous amount of teamwork and willingness to do manual labor, skills we did not possess in large quantities. 

I also missed the logic in spending days preparing to take belongings with you in order to do all of your inside activities, outside. I apparently shared a similar view with my grandmother. When I asked her if she was going to go with us on a rare camping outing, she replied, “Why would I go camping for fun? No thank you honey, I camped the first thirty years of my life.” That pretty much summed up the great outdoors legacy my father inherited and passed along to me. 

My mom, on the other hand, desperately wanted us to be a camping family. She tried many times to get us primed for camping with camping-lite activities like picnics, hikes, walks, books about the great outdoors, etc. I believe Mom saw camping as something she could add to her toolkit of techniques to ward off the evils of modern culture. Camping combined chores, the outdoors, potential contact with wildlife, limited television-time, physical activity and being together as a family. Really, all that was missing was Sunday School.

Despite her earnest and clever attempts, my father’s mindset prevailed. He was simply uninterested and his lack of cooperation was the same as a direct counterattack. By the time we actually went camping for the first time, my brother and I were teenagers, and with no connection to camping, we viewed this new activity as a form of work as well as social and technological deprivation.  It was three against one and ultimately, my mother would lose.

Now strangely, here I stood as an adult in my own living room, crying over the camper I was selling. My camper. Crying.

But really, what’s not to love!? Here it is in a great little RV park in Lincoln City, Oregon, the last time we took it out together as a family with our own kids in August of 2010.  

This turnabout of core life interests and beliefs surprised even me.  Even as I gush the words, “RV park,” I feel a strange disorienting affection for the way the asphalt pads are laid out, the tidy bathrooms and cheery community centers.  Mind you, I still practiced my self-righteous loathing of true RV’ers.  I fancied us somewhere between Sierra Club backpackers and those who’d sold their souls to take a stadium of home comforts with them on the road.

Regardless, that I would transition so dramatically over the course of twenty years to become a champion of the benefits of camping, this will go down on my Life’s Little Surprises list for sure.

I nosily wiped my eyes and nose, and through the picture window watched our little Jayco Jay Series 1007 camper slowly slide down the driveway behind the new owner's gray Ford pickup. It moved the way I knew well, made a familiar wiggle and ca-chunglk sound when it bounced from the driveway to the street and then it was gone. I watched an inappropriately long time, straining voyeur-like, until it truly disappeared from sight. 

Wondering if I was overreacting, I checked in with the hubs. “I’m sad,” said my stoic, engineer-husband, standing next to me. Yes, this was a hard thing.

Why camping then? Why not just watch movies, go on walks, eat out, make dinner? Crafts, games, volunteering? I guess because in many ways, camping takes pretty much all of those amazing things and makes you work just a little harder for them.  You also are forced to do them together, outside (Mom is crying happy tears right now, I can just hear it).

There is also an element of shared work that seems almost impossible to find in any other city life-setting. Even those of us compelled to give our kids chores will admit we work mostly isolated from each other. Clean your room, vacuum the floor, mow the lawn. Alone.

How did I get from camping newbie to activist? That is for next weekend, Part 2. For now, this is the photo of a family that spent a week in a camper, together. Somehow, the joy of our lives wasn’t diminished by lack of comfort. I am convinced in many ways, it enhanced it. 

Empty-Nest Report: Holidays

Last weekend was my birthday and Mother's Day, and for the first time, the girls were gone on both days, away at college. 

I did what I think any mom would do in similar conditions; I spent the weekend:  

a) Trying not to cry

b) Trying not to think about "life changes" 

c) Crying

Here's the deal: celebrating a mom-focused holiday without your kids really sucks. It's a bit like being allergic to dairy and in an ice cream store where all you get to do is stare. You want to be happy for all the ice-cream eaters but deep inside, you just want some ice cream. For yourself. Selfishly.

Disclaimer: It really was a wonderful weekend! John took me to one of our favorite restaurants. He asked wonderfully creative questions, bought flowers and a card.  The girls sent emails. My parents hosted a potluck dinner and I saw siblings, nieces and nephews. Friends indulged in lovely lunches and gifts, and two of them even planted my veggie garden (!), proving creative gift-giving is alive and well.

I have nothing to complain about and felt warmed by the love and depth of my community.  It is just that I was having a distractingly painful experience of missing the girls all weekend.

Here they are, on my birthday to be exact, having a blast on a Puget Sound dance cruise.  This is exactly what I would want them to be doing on a Friday night in Seattle.  Live life! Enjoy college! Carpe diem!

Which is why I ... cried? All weekend?! 

Bwwwahhhahah! Snif. Snif. Snif. 

I juggled Happy, Sad and Confused all weekend. I moped around, did the forbidden empty-nesting things that generate angst: looked through old photos, peeked in their bedrooms, counted down the days until summer break, texted. "Restless" would be a word that comes to mind. And rattled. Especially rattled as I didn't see this coming. Goodness, we hardly even celebrate Mother's Day and I acted if some giant tradition had been abandoned. 

So I just cried. And then, I would feel better for a while. And then I would cry some more, and be fine again for a while.

This seemed a better approach than pretending I was stoically cruising through the weekend, fine that for the first time in twenty years, my children were not present for the two holidays of the year where I can count on some part the day being about me. (That sounds horribly selfish but it's true. And we all secretly think it.)  

Even when our finances were tight or the business was unstable or someone was sick, birthdays and Mother's Day were always a pause of at least a few hours, to push back the tide of life a bit and say, Not now! Today, we get out the Special Plate and we will have tiny shrimp for dinner! Or hamburgers, applesauce and anchovies! Or whatever that person wants!

There was a tangible sense that I needed to sit in this space, to not fight what was happening and what I was feeling. As I explored this strange cocktail of joy mixed with sadness, I heard my mother's voice in a new light for the first time:  Honey, I just want us all to be together for my birthday.  Really, you don't need to get me anything for Mother's Day. Whatever works for your schedule, I'll be there. 

Oh. 

Ooooh.

You really do get to that point, where all that matters is being together, where you're not mad that you don't get a present or the right present. It takes work to get together, especially when people are spread hundreds of miles apart. And if you have to choose between one or the other, you take the gift of presence.

So, my universally shared quest for control and predictability appears to be edging toward extinction. In its place, random grief, random happiness, random life. 

In other words, more of the same. 

Oddly comforting and a wonderful gift.

Beam Me Up

Every Wednesday is breakfast day at work. So, today was breakfast day.

That means that once a week, we have a great breakfast lovingly cooked by my amazing mother. I am not sure there is a better way to start a work day than have your mom pop her head into your office and say, “Your pancakes are ready.” What? Is this my life?! I have no idea if anyone else in the world pays their mom to cook breakfast but we all love it and she loves it.

There is an awful lot that can happen when nerds get around a conference table and eat toast and eggs together for fifteen minutes. For example, we ponder what is happening in the world, like whether it might be a holiday. With a few dozen million computers and an equal number of smart phones in the office, still none of us knew for sure if it was really Groundhog’s Day.  Untethered briefly and hindered by eating, it was a bit of a throwback to like, ten years ago when you just talked about things without resolution, without someone starting off with, "Just a sec... wait... oh yeah... yep... here we go, it says here that Groundhog's Day in ancient Rome was actually Ground Log's Day, or in Latin..."

And so it goes.

Other topics... there was a deploy tonight so there was also a lot of chatter about computers. All of our computers have human names. The computer in my office is George and he is so cute and small and friendly. We are very attached to each other.

This naming convention is taken quite seriously by our staff. It is a bit like the hurricane system where you start with A and work your way through to Z, alternating genders or something like that. I can't figure it all out but it seems the computers have more interesting lives than I do. Overheard at breakfast: Are Brian and Andrew talking to each other? Things don't go well if they aren't connected. What about Frank? Is Frank ready to go? We really need all three of them talking to each other before tonight.

Dr. Who, meet Dr. Phil.

We're in a very classic English lit phase right now with our generic males names: Stephen, Andrew, Richard, etc. Things weren't always that way. Years ago, there was a very strong Middle Earth/Sci-fi vibe going on. Gandalf is doing fine but Picard needs a lot of help, a LOT of help. And don't you think Bilbo needs an upgrade? We should switch out Worf with Eldrond so everyone is on the same platform. Honestly, I wish Kirk was still here.

Most recently, we have added Irene and apparently she is very fast and very good. This has added a whole new dimension to the conversations and I have informed staff we need to keep breakfasts strictly G-rated, what with my mom standing by making pancakes.

Honestly, we’re all just crazy busy and our hair is on fire right now. Breakfast, together at work, seems like a way to bring a normal part of daily living into our twirling, swirling world. And we get to catch up on whether Frank has the hots for Irene and what they were doing in the server room. Ooops! Sorry Mom. Forget Downton Abbey… bring on Maplewood Heights anytime.