M2 has discovered the glitter — our house is covered in it, just in time for the magical holiday season. My kids are so sweet. They’re kids, so they get annoying like all kids, but they’re sweet good kids when it matters.

No work this week so I ah… I got sick, lost my voice, my car got backed into while it was getting its oil changed (with an OOF-y estimate, but that’s why we have insurance), and I’m kinda recovering now from being sick, sorta, except my voice seems reluctant to return, and I get tired fast. This is the kind of vacation I hate because it went sideways on me. But even though it went sideways, I’m still so thankful for all the really good things in my life that… so it went sideways. We’ll try this vacation thing again in a few weeks around Xmas. Of course, I’ll be carless probably during that time because that’s probably when I’ll take my car in for fixies, but… Maybe I should get my car fixed before then and figure out how the whole rental car thing works. Decisions for another day. There’s so much that I have to be thankful for and that I’m lucky to have that it seems ungracious to complain about the little stuff.

Also, there’s been pie this week. That’s right. PIE.

It went off without a hitch. This story requires a tiny bit of set up. Jaina and I met a zillion years ago on Lopez. Many years she goes back up to Lopez at various times of year, and occasionally helps out with their Community Shakespeare productions. This year the little kids (1-8th grade) were doing The Tempest, and the older kids were doing The Merry Wives of Windsor. I thought the girls would like The Tempest and love an adventuresome visit to Jaina so I got everything in order and P made trip reservations. Somehow I managed to keep this secret until…

6am (otherwise known as dark o’clock on a Saturday morning). We woke them up with “Time to rise and shine, young ladies, if we’re going to make it to Jaina’s in time for lunch!” Marian’s response was, “reallyreallyreallyreallyreallyreally!?!?!?!?” Yes, reallyreallyreallyreallyreallyreally. We told them to bring puppy & kitty, and Phil (M2’s beloved, bedraggled stuffed groundhog). M2 wanted to know what time the ferry was going to pick us up. I told her we had to drive to the ferry, and then drive the car ON to the ferry. Her eyes got wide, then wider as she took in the implications of driving a car on to a ferry. I told her the ferry carried lots of cars and was a really really big boat. She said, “I guess so!”Then we dropped the bomb that we were also spending the night at an inn. Jaina had plenty going on, and the girls never get to spend the night in hotels, so it would be an extra treat. I packed their suitcase the previous weekend so as not to trigger suspicions.

And then at 6:30, we were off to the Anacortes ferry dock. Which was cold. P mocked me for retreating to the car, but it was really really cold. He marched the girls up and down the ferry line and took them to see if they could see the ferry coming in. M1 eventually spotted it & then they came back and steamed up my car. As promised, we drove the car on to the ferry. Once we pulled away from the dock, P took the girls to the front to look out the window. It doesn’t seem like 17 knots/h (about 20 mph) is all that fast… until you’re standing at the front of the boat. Once he was done, I took them up to the second passenger level & pointed out that there was another level for the steering cabins too, just for the benefit of seeing M2’s eyes widen again at the size of the boat. And then it was time to land.

From Lopez

We drove off the ferry and proceeded to Holly B’s Bakery for cinnamon rolls (the best cinnamon rolls in the world). It’s an island tradition. And that was the place that baked P’s and my wedding cake too. Jaina showed up, we ducked into the little cafe next door for chai, then went and checked into the inn. Jaina waited while we unloaded our stuff, then we followed her to her house for the promised lunch. On the way we stopped at the tiny church that we got married in (top picture there, the cemetery across the street owns the church). The little church only holds about 50 people total, so between family and friends, we had it pretty well filled. Later we came back and found the microcache at the site too.

From Lopez

Lunch was wonderful. Yoram made a “roadside” salmon (Jaina said it was the weirdest roadside stand she’d ever seen with salmon, shellfish, and some other non-fruit or produce goods), an excellent potato salad, and broccoli. I baked bread to bring with us, so we had that as well. It was cozy & lovely & we soon found it time for Jaina to head into town, and we followed, M2 fell asleep in the car. We dropped Yoram off in town, then took M2 back to the inn to sleep (dark o’clock and lots of excitement is very early for a little girl!). Paul and M1 ventured into the village for a bit, then it was time for The Tempest!

The kids all did really well, despite three of the cast being knocked out by chicken pox (can’t get either more community than that, or more classic story about community plays!). The subs did a fine job and it was a lot of fun to see. Jaina was the stage manager. The performance was done ‘in-the-round’, and every time M2 heard Jaina’s voice behind the curtains, she’d say, “MOM! I hear JAINA!” And every time the lights dimmed, and the set was changed, she’d point Jaina’s dark figure out as well. It was all very exciting.

After the performance, we went and fetched dinner from the Galley, then back to the inn. I think we were all pretty much asleep by 9:45.

M2 with Phil in his “bed”.

From Lopez

Both girls curled up and giggling way too hard to go to sleep.

From Lopez

Alas, they did not sleep in. They woke up at 6:30 in the morning. Dark o’clock, as far as I’m concerned. On the upside, there was a Muppet movie on the tv to distract them while we tried to snooze a little more, and then we were off to Jaina’s for breakfast. Tasty local farm eggs, scrambled, and fresh from the oven ginger scones for breakfast. NOM. Then we walked down to the beach. Or rather, we walked to where the beach would be, had it not been a winter high tide. There was approximately two feet of beach. Quilty, one of Jaina’s cats, walked all the way down there with us, and back. Apparently she’s followed Jaina all the way down to another further away beach as well. Quilty is a funny and most adorable cat.

Eventually all good things must come to an end. We left and picked up a few more cinnamon rolls for breakfast, and then hit the ferry landing. Found one of the ferry godmother caches while waiting, then boarded our ferry for home. Eventually the sun broke through briefly, allowing M1 to take this shot as a beautiful end to a beautiful weekend.

From Lopez

The keynote by Axel Roesler was excellent. Of his many good points, one of his sidenotes was that he had been a designer, then an engineer, and was now back to a designer. It was at this point that I started thinking about how management is at least partially about designing an experience for the employees that allows them to be as productive as possible, in both directions — I want the folks above and below on the org chart to be happy and productive. How can I facilitate a work experience for them that will set them up for success? With that in mind, I thought about why I’d been hired again and what sorts of things I would be able to find at this conference that would aid & abet me in meeting some of those larger scheme goals.

To that end, the first presentation I went to was Designing Experiences Beyond the Screen (Ariel van Spronsen) — services design. It was during this that I jokingly told one of my former co-workers that for the weekend I should change my title to Employee Productivity Designer. She laughed at me and said, “It sounds like you’re a manager that doesn’t want to say you’re a manager!” Totally. She then said, ‘and you’d have to work with a lot of people to design that experience, facilities to set up desks, IT to set up computers, HR arranging onboarding…” Um, yeah, I’m a manager, what do you think managers do? Heh.

Then it was lunch. Yay lunch. Met up with P who went to WikiLeaks: Information Between Legal Borders (Brian Rowe), which was the other one that looked interesting to me, but not as likely to provide the lateral ‘I Can Use This’ sort of thing. After lunch we both went to Intro to Sharepoint (Quentin, Greg) — it was *way* intro for us, but as we both have staff we’d like to pull over to SharePoint, it seemed like an optimal time to step back and see what other folks were telling noobs about SharePoint. I also got some good ideas of things I can tweak SharePoint to do, helloooo key performance indicators. I’d love to figure out a way to ping off the incident management stuff to SharePoint to track my team specific metrics there, but have yet to figure out a way that won’t just add a zillion additional steps to the workflow. Still, in time…

The third session of the day, we went to Google Book Settlement (Brian Rowe) — it was good. Kind of a coaster session with fairly minimal cross-over immediate ‘can use’ stuff, but interesting from a copyright and intellectual property standpoint. The final session of the day was Discussion/Idea Generation: Next Gen Internet-making taxonomies & social media work (Pam Green). We didn’t actually get around to the social media aspect of the session, but there were a lot of my peeps there, and Pam is awesome. Looking at how to organize a massive intranet effectively is an interesting exercise. There were a lot of assumptions that had been passed on to Pam by people who tend to make the decisions, and there were a lot of assumptions by people in the room who lacked background and context (not the least, how long Pam had been doing work along these lines). But there was some good signal in the noise.

We went down to the info parties — I had a tasty Manhattan, although the bartender asked me a question a couple times and I just couldn’t hear her, or rather I could hear her, but not distinguish quite what she was saying, to her annoyance. It got made sweet, which is fine. It was tasty. We stood around and talked about random things, then headed to a place down the street with the claim that they had better beers (plus you didn’t have to order food at the bar). That was fun. Would like to do that more often with those folks. I really miss working with them, though I think ultimately I’m in a much, much better place, that’s a much better fit for me.

This morning the presentation was a presentation on search engines, search & the like by Vanessa Fox. It was also a great presentation. She in relation to tracking real time search trends based on tv advertising, she asked how many of us watched the Super Bowl last February. In an audience of around 300, only four people raised their hands. This reminds me of the PM that started out using sports metaphors in a meeting I was in where there were a couple of librarians, a nice content lady, and an Israeli database guy. We all gave him blank stares. He shifted to military metaphors and the database guy got what he was saying and started laughing… I can’t remember if he ever came around to a metaphor that the rest of us would actually get. But Earnest Tom was so earnest that we didn’t really mind. We kinda got it, the metaphors were just really not well thought out for the audience… ANYWAY (it’s my blog, I can go on a tangent if I want to). Apparently 50% of people are on both the computer and tv at the same time (I don’t know where the statistic comes from or the full context, I’m just sayin’ that’s what I heard). I leaned over to P & whispered, “That’s because we only have one computer in the same room as the tv right now…” But search trends and information seeking behaviors are an interesting thing to take a look at, I find my interest drops fairly quickly when the only interest in them becomes focused down to “how do we use this to push traffic to sites”, but that’s not what this presentation was about.

The first, and only session I attended today, was Using Humor to Convey Information (Jess Hagy & friends). It was put on by Jess of Indexed, a site I’ve been following for about three years now. One of the things I need to do is present information about what my team is doing. While at the moment, I need to present my information seriously and get taken seriously, I think that using humor and the unexpected in other areas helps engage people and bring stuff home that would be otherwise much less accessible. For instance, this example of what’s changing in a MARC record is completely amusing to me & made much more of an impression than it would have had the example been, for example Lawrence Whelk.

Then to lunch, where we met a nice library student from PDX, and a SharePoint widget designer & a SharePoint dev, all of whom we had good discussions with. Then when we were done eating, we wandered over to KW and talked to him and I got from him what I was hoping to hear someone at the conference talk about — namely, storytelling and creating compelling narratives. Got some book recommendations, or rather, re-recommendations because he’s talked about them before (and that’s why I asked him, I knew he’d have some good resources). His opinion was also ‘maybe not so much employee productivity designer, but productivity engineer.’ Which lead to an entertaining, brief discussion on design v. engineering. “Don’t call me an engineer! I’m an artist!”

And with that, we went home a little early. It was good, but we needed an infonap & at least a *little* bit of a “weekend”. Also a chance to recover from being around that many people. Introvert much?

Kind of general stuff, we saw more whale tails & ass cracks than we really needed to. Pull those pants up or wear longer shirts, yo. All in all, it was good. From an lateral usability perspective, I got what I needed. Networking and keeping in touch too.

In other news:

• I love my new job. It has it’s challenges, but they’re good challenges and I work with good people.
• M2 is finishing off the last of her medicine for a strep throat diagnosis that turned out to be staph instead. Not the whatsit resistant one, “they usually tell us when it’s that”, just run of the mill. Makes me wonder if that’s what it was the times last year when it was diagnosed as “Not Strep.” I might have to ask from here on out assuming treatment is required for it. It looks and hurts suspiciously similarly…
• Our back deck is now finished and stained. Hoorah! It looks so nice. Now that we’re past the dog days of summer and starting into my favorite season of fall. Not that I didn’t get a massive sunburn on my shoulders. UGH.
• Mmmmmm, fall…
• We went and saw Julie & Julia. It was lovely. We followed it with dinner at Persimmon where we were the only people in the restaurant until about five minutes before we left. The lovely owner brought us two candles to sit at our table with us, since we were re-attempting our anniversary dinner. The dinner was perfect & tasty. It really could not have been lovelier.
• The prior weekend I had a gyrokinesis class with the ever charming Mia. There wasn’t really any doubt in my mind that I would love it. Now I’m just plotting how to get a regular fix. The length of class I want is at the same time I *should* be sitting/exercising at the Y while the little girls take swimming lessons. I could take a class half as long, but… it’s half as long! Anyway. LOVE. No surprise. I am what I am, for sure.
• I gave the tortle a new home this weekend. She has responded by burying herself gleefully in the dirt. She comes out to eat, wade, bask, & wander around, and then buries herself under her little log again.
• Aaand, I think that’s about it. Probably stuff most of y’ins reading this already knew…

At home? Not so much with the priorities or accomplishing or organization. I am a bad wife/mother (by organizational standards, of course — I adore & take care of my family appropriately) & an even worse housekeeper. I was reading the time/productivity book we’re going through at work this weekend & thinking about all this. Thinking maybe I need to create a dashboard for home stuff. And I thought about it. And I thought about it a little more. And it dawned on me that I’m so abysmally organized at home because I spend my 40 work hours so ridiculously well organized & prioritized & hyper-functional, that by the time I get home, I’m all productived out. Try as I might, I can’t muster a whole lot of additional energy to move at anyone else’s pace but my own, to the occasional annoyance of my family’s. The important stuff gets done. Sometimes by someone who is too impatient for me to get around to it in my own time, though I would eventually work around to it.

My own time. Those three words are really problematic. As a wife/mother, “my own time” is supposed to be sublimated into taking care of the hearth. I fail at this miserably. And even worse, I have trouble feeling any substantial guilt about it. That said, while I’m selfish & don’t get shit around the house done in any sort of efficient or organized way, I’m not very good at using the ‘my own time’ that I squander doing actual nice things for myself. I spend a lot of time on the internet. My own [cyber]space, of sorts. Friday night I’m going to the spa with JB. This qualifies as something nice for myself. Something nice for myself would also be learning how to take vacation. No. I really don’t have any idea how to “do” vacation. It’s a fairly alien concept to me & it confuses me & I end up squandering time off in a similar way to my weekends.

I recognize that these things are largely a symptom of an imbalance that requires correcting, but I’m uncertain how to bring balance. I can’t very well become less productive, organized, prioritized, at work…

And that’s about enough thinking along those lines tonight. I’m going to go practice guitar and look at my email and eventually wend my way to bed.

• Admin Metrics 8:00-9:00 Taking a first look at result of metrics. Looking… Ok. As there have never been metrics established prior, there will be some experimentation involved to refine them, as well as this being the first week that we’ve actually kept ‘em and metrics tell more over the long term than they do in the short term. We’ll get there. I’ve got an awesome team now, figuring out where we’re getting randomized and tightening up will just make us even better.
• Admin Meetings 9:00-9:15 Planning for team mtg.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 9:15-10:00 Outsourcing process doc. How we’re going to decide what to send out & technical details of how we’ll pull it.
• Admin Meetings 10:00-10:30 Cat. team mtg. Pretty laid back today.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 10:30-12:00 Outsourcing process doc. Yep, back to this…
• Admin Filing or commenting on bugs 12:00-13:00 Emails to answer a test question about what we would expect a “contains” search to include (string match of the terms entered? keyword “AND”?). What we would expect (AND/NEAR) was not the case (exact string match to be included in rest of the search). Which is fine. I’m glad I know that’s the case now!
• Outsourcing Vendor Management/Review 13:00-13:30 Outsource pilot lead had questions. I had answers.
• Admin Metrics 13:30-14:00 Looking at updates to the incident metrics. They look good. Better, anyway… we’ll get there, we’ll get there…
• Admin Overhead 14:00-14:30 Spilling water on my computer & keyboard because that’s just how I roll. *sigh* Cleaned up, no damage done. Back to more interesting things.
• Admin Overhead 14:30-15:30 Sales/sales support client call post-mortem initial write up, set mtg for Monday review/feedback from team.
• Admin Overhead 15:30-16:00 Planning Monday. (Why, Brain? What are we going to do Monday night? Monday night, Pinky, we’re going to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!)

Came home. The little girls showed up fifteen minutes after me & we had a lazy daisy evening. Although M2 decided to clean her room. I think she did a better job than I do. When she sets her mind to it, she is really an amazing little cleaner upper. I wish she’d take initiative to do it more often, it’s truly amazing.

• Admin Billing 8:00-9:00 Straightening out billing stuff with a MARC record supplier.
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 9:00-10:00 Mtg. to help a sales guy figure out how to approach a current client.
• Admin Billing 10:00-10:30 Send on the billing stuff for signatures.
• Admin Overhead 10:30-12:00 Restarting computer due to updates, getting stuff ready for bugzilla bash.
• Admin Filing or commenting on bugs 12:00-13:30 Bugzilla bug bash! w00t! Taking a look at bugs & figuring out how to put together something our awesome director can go into a meeting with to help us get some leverage for stuff that would improve the cataloging workflow.
• MeSH Meetings 13:30-14:00 Sorting out a MeSh mess, sorted & resolved. Yay! My recommendation to resolve the issue is what the dev was thinking too & we’re golden!
• Outsourcing Research/Gathering Info 14:00-16:00 Looking at top dbs that could be outsourced & what sorts of ‘packages’ we could set up for varying markets (mostly med as int’l has yet to be determined). What can we put together (for example, normalizing the top 25 med. databases to 100% — so MARC records and authority records for all holdings within a particular provider package).
• Admin Overhead 16:00-16:30 Prepping for tomorrow.

I feel like there were some wasted cycles in there. Not because I wasn’t trying, but I wasn’t getting as much accomplished as I wanted to. But I feel like we made a dent in some other stuff. Then I came home, fed the cats, & met my parents & girls at the lake. I had the best intentions to go swimming today, but by the time I got there, all I wanted to do was nap. So I sat in the lawn chair & kinda snoozed without really ever sleeping while crazy beach mayhem ensued around me. Then we had a lovely dinner, ending with sweet tasty watermelon. And then we came home. It’s too hot here.

So I forgot to add yesterday that I’m also the executive producer of a couple other sites & one of them got hit hard with spammers, so I spent about 1.5 hours cleaning that up too…

But today… Took the little girls to Auntie’s & made it to work in an hour. Woo!

• Admin Overhead 9:45-10:30 Email, setting up conference rooms for mtgs.
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 10:30-12:30 THE mtg & half hour to follow up on action items. I hear it all went very well. It’s hard to tell over a bad phone connection & not being in the room, but the folks that were there said it went well. Yay!
• Incidents Incident Resolution 12:30-15:30 Normalization issue for a client libraray. Not finished with all the journals that need to be rematched to their target MARC records yet, but… soon.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 15:30-17:00 Trying to pull together the process, priorities, and workflow for what material goes for outsource assistance.
• MeSH Filing or commenting on bugs 17:00 18:30 MeSH taxonomy bug. Easy fix, just need to use the unique MeSH id to identify paths rather than internal tools path id & we’re golden (hopefully those aren’t famous last words! Last time I said that it was requesting recursive queries in a directed acyclic graph database… And that actually is not, by definition, an easy fix. In fact, I believe it’s impossible. These minor details…)
• Admin Overhead 18:30 19:00 Planning tomorrow…

There was also some time spent after that sending loltaxonomy images due to a polyhierarchy issue that reared its ugly head during the MeSH thing, but that was just muckin’ around having fun. :) Then I logged off & came home. And now here I am, dreading to go inside my 95F house. It’s so much more pleasant out here on the deck, although the only light is from the laptop screen & it’s starting to burn into my retinas. Good times, people, good times…

Round 1 July 2008
Round 2 January 2009
July 27th 2009 begins the Second Annual

Eh, so I’m starting a day late. I’m the cataloging team manager for Serials Solutions. I’ve been in this position about 5.5 weeks & I’m still learning the ropes and wrapping my head around things. I think I’m getting there, but I also have a ways to go before I’ve mastered the finer details. I got my MLIS in 2005 & I’ve been working in various library environments for the last 12 or so years.

MONDAY

It’s an early morning for me. It’s warm in the house already. I get in the car & make it to work in about 35 minutes — it’s a *good* morning. Except I overslept because it was so hot, and so I walk in the door right when I wanted to get there. Woo!

• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 8:00-9:45 Trying to get my ducks in a row so I’m prepared for an upcoming client meeting.
• Admin Billing 9:45-10:45 Reviewing and sorting out billing issues and changes to MARC records provider contracts.
• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 10:45-11:30 Back to trying to organize those ducks for the client meeting.

• Normalization Normalizing 11:30-12:00 NORM! 29 records reviewed, two normalized. Sadly, I think I messed up both records. On the upside, one of my excellent team members caught it & promises to continue to help me out until I have it all down.
• Outsourcing Documentation/Workflow 12:00-13:30 Outsourcing strategy overview. Completed with minor exceptions (Normalization plan, largely…). The volume of materials we have has increased exponentially & to continue providing the services at a reasonable cost in a reasonably efficient manner, we need some extra hands!
• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 13:30-14:00 I know, I’m preparing a lot — there are a lot of details and I want to get them right. This is tying up loose ends before meeting with one of my awesome team members who will promptly provide me with a hydra of questions… :) Also a moment of recursive brain explode-y as we contemplate how things might go with this library. They’re kind of a unique case. Everyone’s library is unique, but this one is even uniquer than most…
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 14:00-16:00 And here’s the hydra. For every question I get answered, five more questions pop up in the first question’s place.
• Acquisitions Research/Gathering Info 16:00-16:15 Reviewing MARC records received from one of our international libraries that I had to do a lot of clean up on last week. Yay for learning regex! Regex is *neat*.

Leave work — the blast of hot air from the elevator warns me that it’s ridonculously hot outside. Drive in hot weather for an hour to fetch The Girls from Auntie’s. Drive another half hour to get home, pick up everyone’s swim suits, a book, and some other stuff. Drive another half hour to meet my parents & husband at the local beach for dinner. Eventually come home to a freaking hot house (91F when we got home at 9ish).

TUESDAY

Late morning for me — that means I take the girls to Aunties. Made it to work in a little over an hour round trip from my house to Auntie’s to work — not too bad, considering I usually chat with Auntie a little.

• Sales/Sales Support Research/Gathering Info 10:00-11:00 New client agenda for the meeting I prepared for yesterday. Filling in what I can as pre-prep mtg prep.
• Outsourcing Research/Gathering Info 11:00-12:45 Composing email response for a library who might help us with foreign language cataloging to help fill in some of our gap records. During this time, my lovely bosslady brought in the book The Time Trap for my team and me. Looking forward to seeing what kinds of things I pick up from this book…
• Admin Billing 12:45-13:00 Responding to library MARC record resource that updated their contract based on info from our lawyer. This doesn’t appear to be a super-easy renewal. We’ll see where things go from here…
• Sales/Sales Support Meetings 13:00-14:00 Prep mtg for tomorrow’s client mtg with my team. Because they are totally awesome, they feel confident that we’re prepared for this meeting. I still feel very new & am nervous about it, but I’m glad they’ll be there because they know their stuff. They’re really amazing & I’m lucky to have another good team. Hoorah! I’d like to bring them with me to InfoCamp & do something, but I don’t have any idea what that something might be.
• Acquisitions Research/Gathering Info 14:00-16:30 *cries when mrk -> mrc borks the int’l records* Send stuff off to library that might help us with it. Really, this is a cross between the outsourcing stuff I’ve been working on and the records acquisition stuff. Ball’s in their court!
• Admin Filing or commenting on bugs 16:30-17:00 Setting up bugzilla bash & NOMS. We need to organize the outstanding bugs that are getting in the way of our productivity for the director. She wants to get some of that fixed for us which would be really great. A lot of the fixes are “well, I guess we do have a work around…” but none of them are efficient & some of them are only barely functional. But other stuff has a higher priority and yada yada… so to have someone with a little more leverage say, “yep — time to add some extra resources and Get That Fixed” will be a good thing.
• Admin Overhead 17:00-18:00 Organizing & planning for tomorrow. I know it sounds weird, but by taking about a half hour to wrap up & another half hour to plan the next day at the end of a day, it makes it much easier for me to come in and get right to work the next day. I don’t have to try to remember where I left off, what needs to be done, what my priorities are, because it’s all set up for me by my very own best administrative assistant — me, the night before. :) As I get more settled, this routine may go by the wayside a little, but at this point I’m tracking so much stuff, I think this might be How It Is for me from here on out. And in the name of productivity, I’m totally cool with that.

In the meantime, I’ve walked across the street to get a pint of blueberries & the heat outside is ugly. At the end of day I head out into the heat. Just straight home this time. Sit on the back deck & eat some fruit & chicken. It’s actually pleasant out there. I surfed for a bit as the computer was out there, then we came in to watch Deadliest Catch & Chopped because clearly we’re crazy. It’s come down several degrees in here since we came in. It’s only 90F. It was 94F when I got home. Uck. We shall see what tomorrow brings!

Yesterday I went for an 11 mile ride on Elby, my electric bike. Came home and took a long hard nap — if I start riding to work (around 13 miles), I won’t have the luxury of recovering from my ride with a nap! I think this will require working up to since the round trip will be closer to 26 miles by EOD. My time is not all that fast, even with the electric assist — I averaged 10 or 11 or so mph yesterday (11 miles in 1h:1m). I’ll need to pick up the speed some too. My goal is to get to work in an hour (or less). I have work to do, kids to pick up, blah blah blah blah. I do wonder if I’ll ever make that time without showing up all bright red. I guess people would get used to it… Hopefully I don’t prove myself to be too much of a princess to do it semi-regularly.

The ride itself was pretty lovely — going past fences of honeysuckle, hills covered in wild roses, the lake. I will say that warm lake was not my favorite smell, though. I will have to get used to the seat too. About eight miles in, my girl bits were objecting. Happily my sit bones were quite content with the state of affairs though, which is an improvement. My hands & arms also didn’t freak out from the ride. Hoorah! I was dumb and didn’t put sunscreen on. I got a faint burn, but it’s gone already today — but for the future, I will be remembering the sunscreen, even if it’s earlier in the day than freaking high noon. I meant to start out earlier, but the first ride was an epic fail when I switched gears… too fast? In combo with a pause in pedaling? I’m not entirely sure what happened, but I managed to derail the chain off the front gear, and it was a bitch to get it rerailed. Things like this make me apprehensive of making a regular commute on bike, although I think it was just noobishness on my part and trying to get gears switched & being uneven, etc. It’s not like occasionally shit doesn’t go wrong in a car too, hello clutch & clutch stuff my first week of my new job…

My new job! Is awesome. I have lots to catch up on that I’ve not been paying attention to, since my focus the last five or so years has been pretty much taxonomy, but… I’ll get there. And since I’m kinda in the deep end of the pool, I’ll figure out how to swim fast. :) It’s mostly a matter of following up on the questions as they come up and making sure the information gets filed away in my brain in a way that enables retrieval.

Today I need to go hack back the roses, they’re getting out of control. I should probably do some weeding & other stuff too. Sounds like not too much — P hacked back the blackberries that were trying to take over the north side of the house. Which means I need to hunt down the sunscreen and a big hat. And thinking of going out in the sun makes me feel suspiciously like a nap would be such a lovely thing… Mmmm. Naaaappppp.