First No More

Today is the last day of school. When I pick her up at 12:30, she will officially be a second grader.

Dammit. How did this:

turn into this:

so damned fast?

At any rate, I'm working from home with her this afternoon, and then tomorrow I'm working from home all day. I'll have her with me in the morning, and then after my lunchtime meeting, she's going in to hang out with Matt at his office for the afternoon. (Yes, it might make sense to take her in to Matt before my lunchtime meeting, except that I'm planning to hang around and say hi to various folks, and I've promised Penny that if she's very good while I'm on the meeting, we might get a treat on our way in to Matt's office.)

Patentable Idea

Hey, Internets! You know what I want right now? I will tell you! I will tell you for free, Internets, and then you can make it for me and I would even pay you for it, after giving you my awesome idea for free. That is how much I want this thing:

I want a device, approximately the size of a cell phone. It could be a little bigger, if it had to, but it wouldn't need a display or a keypad or anything. The cell phone would contain the standard internal workings for each of the major wireless carriers (ideally, actually, it would be modular, so that you could build the device to spec for each customer, but that's not a requirement, it's something that would be nice to have). It would also contain some memory -- it wouldn't need much, just a few MB, really.

I would rent this device for... a time. A few days, maybe a week. And I would carry it around with me, like I do my cell phone. And every 5 or 10 minutes, the device would check its signal strength (for phone and data) for each of its chips, and record that in memory. And at the end of my rental period, I would bring the device back to its home base, and plug it in, and be presented with a graph, charting signal strength for each of the major carriers (or the carriers I chose to track, if it's a modular device) across the period of my rental. For special bells and whistles, I suppose the device and its resulting graph could do other things, like tell me the device's physical location at each reading, but that would take a bit more memory, and anyway, it's not all that necessary: I know where I've been and approximately when, over a week's span. And if I were renting this device with the specific purpose of trying to make sure that I'm going to get a cell plan that will work everywhere that I'm going to be, then I would be extra certain to make a note of when I'm at a place that I'd especially want the phone to work.

'Cause here's the thing: I love my iPhone. I really, really do. And in 9 out of 10 locations that matter to me, my signal strength is just fine. But that tenth location, Internets? That tenth location is my office, where I spend something like half my waking hours. And when I'm in my office, I get no signal. About once a week or so, on particularly clear days, sometimes signal will eke through long enough for me to receive a text message. But it doesn't last long enough for me to send a reply. If I want signal when I'm at work, I have go to out to the lobby and wait five minutes or so for the phone to realize it's found a (weak) signal again, and then make my call or send my message.

I've been living with it, because I do love my iPhone, and anyway I had a 2-year contract with AT&T. But that two years is ending in about a month. And the new iPhone 4G is shiny and all, but it didn't blow me away. There are other smartphone options now. Some of the Android phones look pretty slick. Braz has an EVO 4G, and it's very pretty.

So I've been asking around my office, and have gathered that T-Mobile's signal sucks in the building, but the people with Verizon and Sprint are both pretty happy and can make calls inside and everything. Though they aren't making them in my office, which is not only windowless, but it doesn't even have a wall on the exterior of the building. I'm in a tiny little shielded cinderblock cave -- which will be awesome if ever there's a tornado or a radiation leak or something, but as far as cell signal goes, pretty much blows chunks.

And even if I can get those people to bring their Verizon and Sprint phones into my office so I can see signal bars there -- then I'm faced with wondering how their signal is at the places I spend the other half of my waking hours. Like my house, say. Or the gym. Or my parents' house. How about down at KT's? How about elsewhere along my daily route? It sure would suck if I got a flat tire halfway to Alex's daycare and didn't have a signal on my phone to call AAA with. And I'm pretty sure my officemates aren't going to loan me their phones for a few days so I can check it out.

Why doesn't this device exist, Internets? Or does it? Help me out, here, Internets!

Distraction

Mondays always feel insanely rushed and busy, and then I get to the end of the day, and almost nothing has actually been done. And looking at my schedule, I fear today and Wednesday are going to be similar: both days have meetings at 11, and then again around 2 or 2:30. Which, admittedly, is not a particularly onerous meeting schedule, but it does serve to break the day down into chunks.

I might be able to get things done in the mornings, before the first meeting. But after the first meeting, I'll need to go and get my allergy shots (today) or hit the gym (Wednesday), getting back just in time to set up for the afternoon meeting. Both afternoon meetings promise to be on the long side, so once they're done, I'll only have an hour or so left in the day. Obviously, I can get some work done then, but I won't be able to settle into any really big projects.

Thursday, I'll be working at home in the afternoon, taking Penny after her last day of school is done. And Friday I'm working at home all day -- once again, with Little Miss Distraction hanging around.

I guess it's just not going to be my week for big projects.

Did Anyone Get the License Plate for that Weekend?

...It just went so fast.

Saturday afternoon, Braz came over to help Matt fix our grill. Since he had the girls with him, the kids played and they stayed for dinner.

And while the boys were out getting replacement parts, Penny's teacher called to give me her end-of-year summary of Penny's progress. The summary of the summary: awesome. Penny's reading on a fourth-grade level, with comprehension on the second or third grade level (she said it was normal for comprehension to lag behind a bit), and her only real difficulty is that she's sometimes very easily distracted. Her math abilities aren't quite as solid as her reading, but she's not lagging behind the pack there, either. Her teacher said the best improvement was actually in her writing -- somewhere around late winter, something finally clicked and she started throwing out fantastically imaginative sentences and stories. Matt and I had noticed this ourselves at home -- Penny took pride in telling me the silly and descriptive sentences she came up with for her spelling notebook. So though there's another week of school left to go, she's pretty much finished first grade and Matt and I can feel proud of her for her growth and accomplishments.

Sunday, I took Penny to Chuck-E-Cheese for a classmate's birthday party. We wound up being half an hour early (I tend to overcompensate for traffic when I'm taking the interstate, and then there wound up being none) so we walked two doors down to the bookstore. I found the next few books in the How To Train Your Dragon series, which Penny's really enjoyed, and she browsed for a bit, herself.

Then we went over to the party. I haven't been in a Chuck-E-Cheese since I was ten, I think, and Penny's never been to one. She was a little worried, at first, that she wouldn't know how to play the games, but she got sucked right into the hamster-tube tunnels, and then completely lost her little mind when she was given her share of game tokens and realized that the tickets the machine was spitting out could be exchanged for STUFF. It was a little like watching a documentary: Evolution of a Casino Zombie.

We did something a little different for her food, there, too. Like most kids' birthday venues, they served pizza. I was bracing myself for a 24-48 period of high blood sugars when a friend at work mentioned to me that she really liked the cotton candy at Chuck-E-Cheese. And I got to thinking -- this party was 2:30-4:30, right across snacktime and in no way anywhere near an actual mealtime. So why not see if she'd be willing to trade pizza for cotton candy? Cotton candy, being pure sugar, would hit her blood sugar hard -- but it wouldn't linger in her system for a day or longer, the way pizza does. I ran it by Matt, and he agreed. I offered the deal to Penny, and she took it: she gets cotton candy far less often than she gets pizza. And even better, when I actually got the cotton candy, it came in a huge single-serving bag (volume is nice -- it meant she didn't have to feel cheated) and had nutrition information already printed on it. One slice of pizza: about 45g of carbohydrates. Huge bag of cotton candy: 15g. Yeah, I think this was a good deal.

While we were at the party, Matt took Alex over to Braz's to swim, and then afterward, everyone came back to our house for the cookout. By the time Penny and I got home, everyone was in full swing.

Braz made brazburgers and stuffed chicken with cheese and apples, and we had chips and baked beans and corn on the cob and ice cream. I'd bought a watermelon, too, but everyone was too stuffed to want any.

You'd think that having that many kids together would turn things into an incredible mess, but I think there's an upper limit on the amount of mess you can achieve as the number of kids goes up. And having so many kids helping to clean up made it go much faster. And as a bonus, since all the kids had someone to play with, the adults actually got to talk to each other in more than ten-second bursts! (Which is not to say that we weren't frequently interrupted. But I think the average got dialed back to every 30 seconds instead of every 10.)

You know what's really awesome, though? The sight of four girls, ages four through eight, all curled up on the couch with books.

And the boys looking like they'd really like to join them.

We're All Mad Here

I've been writing like crazy, the last couple of weeks. Almost every night, I take my laptop upstairs, settle on the bed, and write for about an hour and forty-five minutes (the length of the mood playlist, and not incidentally, just about the duration of my ability to concentrate on one thing).

I've been making a special push because there's a submission deadline at the end of the month that I want to make. But whatever the reason, it's been working out well for me: my word count has been steadily increasing, and last night I broke 1500 words, and got (I think) within shooting distance of the end of the story. (I sure hope so, because my goal was to finish it by the end of this week, and I've almost hit the word count ceiling as it is. I expect the story to shrink in editing rather than grow, but I don't want to have to cut too much.)

At any rate, my point is that I've been writing like a madwoman. And, possibly, turning into a madwoman, if my dreams last night are any indication... Seriously, did I need waste precious sleep-time on a dream about participating in some variety of tractor race or contest, and then more time on trying to find a Diet Coke to make a rum and coke with, and then panicking because I'd accidentally made the rum and coke with regular Coke? Seriously?! SRSLY?

I don't even like rum and coke! Combining soda with alcohol reminds me too much of college and cheap bad alcohol. My mixed drinks of choice are fruity frozen girl drinks or a bloody mary.

And yet, here I am wasting more time on it. Sigh.

Apparently, I am too brain-drained to function today.

Stormy Weather

I haven't had much work to do at work, lately. I've been cleaning up things that have been allowed to languish in disrepair, and straightening up paperwork, and dusting off old projects -- but none of these are high-priority tasks. To be perfectly honest, for the last month or more, I could have handled all the really critical elements of my job (and I'll even include attending meetings in that lump) and still taken about half my time off, if I had that much vacation saved up.

And if there's not much work for me, there's not much work for my minions, either. (They're technically someone else's minions now, actually, because of stupid corporate paperwork nonsense, but I'm still doing everything but the timesheet paperwork.)

I know that at least two of our project managers are scraping for chargeable time, too. We had to furlough several engineers last month. (Furlough is basically forced unpaid leave -- it's only one step short of laying them off entirely, except that if we get work again, we don't have to go through the corporate paperwork hoops to re-hire them.)

Yesterday, my boss told me outright that we're going to have to lose one of them if we don't pick up, not just one, but several good-sized projects in the next couple of months, and he tacitly implied that the chances of that are... not the best.

My boss is Mr. Optimism -- when we first saw a reduction in work about six months ago, he was not very concerned about it. "This is a normal business downturn, it happens, we'll recover." So for him to say things are looking grim, is... pretty grim indeed.

Now, I'm fairly certain my job is secure, at least unless the entire office folds. QA and CM are required functions, and I'm the only one on the staff who's fully trained for both. Add in the fact that I'm also the lowest-paid manager in the office, and I'm probably one of the safest employees here. But I'm worried about my minions.

It could be a stormy summer.

PMS

I realized something a bit odd yesterday.

About two years ago, I was having these horrible mood swings. I mean, really, really horrible. I seriously contemplated running away on several occasions. At the worst point of the downswings, I was utterly convinced that my marriage and every friendship I had was failing, and the only reason I hadn't already been abandoned was that everyone was too nice and couldn't figure out how to tell me to just fuck off, already.

In the upswings, I knew those feelings were irrational; that I wasn't perfect but neither was anyone else, and that my friends and family loved me well enough.

It got to where I could recognize an oncoming downswing by the preceding few days of increasing restlessness. I would try to warn Matt that it was coming, and pile my most depressing books by the bed, hoping to bleed off the depression under controlled circumstances.

Eventually, I finally realized that the downswing was linked into my menstrual cycle. That wasn't as obvious as you might think it should be, because the birth control I went on after Alex was born did strange things to me. It turned out I was still having the same monthly hormonal cycles, but only having an actual period every sixty to ninety days. There were also some other confusing factors, like what I still believe was a mild case of post-partum depression, and the stress of trying to adjust to a second kid and a new diabetic, and the additional stress of an insanely tight schedule.

I wound up in therapy for a short while, until I got frustrated with the therapist's obsession with my weight and my sex life. After I realized it was linked to my cycle, I complained about it to my OB, and he made a few suggestions. Those helped a little. The passage of time helped more, as the PPD passed and I adjusted somewhat to the stress factors.

The last six months or so, I've been feeling pretty good most of the time. No crazy crying jags. No sudden impulses to pack a bag and flee forever. Occasional ups and downs, of course, but that's just life. Nothing really out of the ordinary.

Except that for someone who's always been an introvert, I've been going through these irregular phases of not just wanting social interaction, but craving it.

I'm in the middle of one, right now. I almost made myself crazy this past weekend because I wanted to go out and do something, but Matt's suggestions of taking the kids to the library or park weren't doing it for me. I clung to the hope of Rock Band Night on Monday, only to be disappointed when it fell through. Another thing fell through for later this week, and I was beginning to actually feel upset about it -- when I realized that this restlessness is exactly like the restlessness that preceded those emotional downswings.

Apparently, I've replaced the emotional nadir of PMS with a driving, insatiable need for social contact.

Hey, it's progress.