I came downstairs for something, and saw out the window, a little chickadee, and then a lot of chickadees. I came into the rec room and there were a Whole Lot More Chickadeeees! And sparrows! Eating bugs in the leaf layer that we haven’t raked up yet from the maples. In our yard! I was afraid we didn’t have any little critters, but we do! and then there was this brilliant red streak flashing past and landing on a log — I didn’t realized pileated woodpeckers were that big! And at the very same time as the flock of chickadees, sparrows, and Woody, in swoops a flicker!

Best part of my day.

Back to the office for the first time in a week tomorrow. Ugh. My hours & sleep schedule ended up a little feral again. Monday morning will be not all that much fun, but is an excuse to get around to trying to reign in the creeping late nights.

We’re officially out of the storage unit now though. All our stuff, for the first time since around April of 2007, is out. All our stuff is in our new house. I don’t know how we fit all that stuff in that tiny house. I think a lot of what has come home should probably be donated. Discardia, baby, oh yeah. Actually, I’ve been pretty good with getting rid of a bunch of stuff. Now it’s just down to the hard stuff. Except for what will really, really not be hard.

Out front I saw a fat varied thrush and a smallish looking robin.

I may have bit off more than I can chew on something at work, but I think… It’s not that I can’t do it, I’ve just never done it and it’s a fairly ginormous recommendation for someone in my position to be making. The VP and Sr. Product manager leading the project are working together to figure out the other recommendation coming out of this initiative. I wish I had a buddy too. I think I have good resources that will be able to provide me with some guidance so I’m going to see what I can do and if i can’t get where I need to go because I don’t have visibility, I’ll have to (gah!) ask for help. Learning opportunity.

Watching Man, Woman, Wild. Missing half of it, so distracted by what’s on my mind and the cabin fever setting in with the snow. Oh. And it’s over. Time for the babies to go to bed, and then me to putter about a bit longer.

With the snow the last few days, I put out bird food on the deck. No one. This afternoon as I was shoveling our walk, I noticed two tiny footprints at the edge of the front step so I put another little bowl of food and warm water on the front step. I peeked out the window a while later and had two robins. I think they’ll be back tomorrow. I hung the seed bird feeder in front of the kitchen window instead of out the back window. The food is also still on the deck, and the front step.

I think until the little hummingbird, the only bird I’d seen in our yard since we moved was a dead varied thrush that we buried out in the only small bush in the back yard. I’m glad to see some birds. There have been a few squirrels too, but not many. I think better landscaping will help. The fellow that was the landlord here before we bought the house let the ivy go kinda crazy and then round-upped the place. There is almost no underbrush. I think we might want to have someone come out and help us with what to do with the yard. It’s big and has awesome potential.

Up too late. Again. Listening to Mark Lanegan. Again. So beautiful. If I lived alone, I’d play along, but I don’t and everyone is asleep & that’s ok because I would probably more think about it and not quite get around to doing it. Maybe. But it sounds like a good idea, like so many things this time of night. Gardening, going for a bike ride, candle lit bath, playing one of my guitars, singing…

Time to suck it up and go to bed though.

If you need more information before contacting your critter, http://sopastrike.com/strike/.

Thanks.

It seems the fight part has begun. I hope we hold out long enough to win. #99%

In some ways I am afraid I’m not giving any one team enough attention, in others, I think I have good leads in place where I need them, I just am learning about the next level of management — what happens after immediate front lines of management? I’m not sure that has ever been something I’ve thought about in great depth. I’m not sure until about two months ago I ever necessarily thought it was something I’d be considering. I mean, sure, I have made jokes about being a director, but actually putting thought into managing multiple layers? Not so much, yet here I am, and thinking damn hard about how to do it in a way that supports all those levels. I’m glad my team is comprised of who it’s comprised of. They’re all pretty dang awesome and they all work their asses off considering the limitations they’re, we’re all presented with.

*side vent about the state & quality of meta/data, both publisher and library, deleted*

So yes. Work has been keeping me busy.

Also keeping me busy: our house finally sold. I feel like I missed out on fall — there are rumors of first snow on Friday. The leaves are about half way off the trees and… it feels winter-ish to me. Which is fine. I like winter, but I really like fall, and in the crazy of the house stuff, I feel like it passed me by somehow. I imagine at some point schedule will reinflict itself, and I’m looking forward to it. We are sometimes too tied to it, but it gives our lives structure and we can roll along knowing that if today is Monday, I’m going into work before Paul whose day it is to drop the girls off at school, and if it’s every other Monday, then there’s Girl Scouts.

I am not doing enough gyro & yoga, this summer’s stint into pre-teacher foundation training and update workshop aside. I need to recommit to that. Tomorrow instead of scheduling a lunch at noon and bailing on yoga, I scheduled lunch at 1:15. I feel like a better person when I get more yoga and gyro in. I’m more patient, I think more clearly. You know — all the benefits of exercise.

M1 is on swim team now. M2 desperately wants to be. On Friday afternoons, during swim team practice, M2 and I swim and she practices hard so that she can get to the next level. She taught herself flip turns… well, with life guard input — she was trying so earnestly and since most of the life guards also help out with lessons, they will frequently have a helpful word. Especially since in her earnestness, she’s also usually wearing the team suit that was meant for M1 but in the wrong size but fit M2 perfectly, so we just kept it. In the next level, she can be considered for swim team, I think. She wants so badly to be part of the team. Perhaps next time I’m there, I’ll mention that to Jenna and see what the requirements are. Maybe it really is that she needs to be in Fish, but I think M2 does as well as some of the other littler swim team kids. Something to ponder, anyway…

It would take me an eternity to catch everything up and that wasn’t really the point of this post anyway, although that seems to be what it has devolved into.

To say this year has been one massive growth opportunity is almost an understatement of epic proportions.

I think one of the big things that I miss while driving is the smells. Miss in the sense of I just rarely encounter them (except going past a restaurant that does salmon). Miss in the sense that it doesn’t even occur to think they might be there. There are, of course, all the tiny blooming flowers that one misses, but as one moves incrementally slower and slower, more and more tiny things appear.

The ride in this morning was nice. It was spitting and the last drop hit as I was going down the drive way. I was wondering how hard it was going to rain, but it didn’t the rest of the way in. There was no one really on the trail as a result of the recent rain. A few people, but I left a little late, so I missed most of the hardcore commuting crowd and the casual riders were not out in the middle of the day.

The ride home was also nice. More people out, which makes sense — it was nicer, and later in the day. I noticed a lot of grim faces on bicyclists. The runners all looked mostly like they were working hard, but they weren’t grim. The walkers were walking. One dude was bopping along listening to his ipod, some were on phones, some were talking with their walking buddies or children, some were walking purposefully. None of them really grim. There was only one bicyclist I saw that didn’t have that aggro, grim, GRIM!, expression, and it was a big lady riding a ginormous cruiser with an even more ginormous grin, moving even slower than me. Her smile said everything I was feeling, “This is AWESOME!” And it is totally awesome! There was another lady on a bike that probably wasn’t grim. We were traveling about the same speed for a while and she was ahead of me. It’s hard to tell from the back if someone has that concentrated GRIM! look on their face (although sometimes one can tell). Her body language wasn’t grim though. I hope all those grim people were able to work the grim aggro out and feel better after their rides.

Both times I’ve ridden in, I get really really cold. I think I didn’t get cold on the long Sunday ride because we stopped a bunch. But when I go consistently for an hour or more, when I stop, I get cold cold cold. It’s bizarre. After about a half hour I ended up putting my coat back on.

Am thinking though, it was so nice to ride in, perhaps I can find nice quiet side streets to get to work on. Not every street through town is a crazy busy thoroughfare… *ponder*

Also? Shoulders are Totally Not Aerodynamic.

We got the tag-along bike added to my electric bike today. First P & I went out for a short four mile ride to see what it was like to get down to the Burke, to gauge how we were going to get the girls down there safely. Having deemed it… ok, though a few cars didn’t really give much breathing space… about two miles in, I decided if I had to take the back rack off to get the tag-along on, then by golly, that’s just what we had to do. So glad I did. I think today’s ride would have been a lot less fun for me if I hadn’t had a little extra help, mostly in getting started at major intersections, and by about three miles in, and it was *awesome* on the last hill home.

Going one way down to the Burke is fine. The road has a wide shoulder in that direction, so there’s room to pull off safely if something needs fixed like shoelaces (an issue we encountered yesterday, but thankfully not today). On the way home, there is no shoulder and a narrow sidewalk that tends to actually get used by bicycles & pedestrians alike with not much safe passing space. Any error lands you in fast and aggressive traffic. My preferred route home, while much more uphill, is also back residential roads and much less traveled so it at least feels safer.

On today’s ride M2 was enthralled the entire time, and M1 had no problem keeping up (and on occasion even passing ahead of me). The recurring chant for the duration of the ride from my little backseat driver was, “Faster, Mommy! Faster! Faster! SUPER FASTER!” Gotta get that one on her own bike, then I can catch up the tail end of our little caravan, and she can try to keep up with P who claims, “I mostly coasted today.” So glad I could provide him with the hilly route on the way home a couple times so he had a small challenge. Heh.

Things I learned: it’s a challenge to balance for two people, one of whom doesn’t quite get the hang of balance yet. Steering, likewise can be a bit more of a challenge when the balance is slightly awry. I didn’t run into anyone/thing, but my direction wasn’t quite as stable as I wish it were. I expect this to improve, especially since while P & I were out this morning, M2 was apparently dedicatedly trying to figure out how to ride her own bike. The Ms were out in the culdesac when we got home, and we were informed she was THIS >< CLOSE!

There was a showing while we were out today, they wanted to see the house, “between 1 & 3.” Which. Whatever. As we were pulling up to the last leg of the ride home, we’d have gotten home about 15-20 minutes early. We decided to get ice cream fortification. Nom. It was the perfect time killer and we arrived home at 5 to 3. No idea if the realtor ever showed. If so, she didn’t leave a card. Grar.

But we had an awesome bike ride & the girls couldn’t have done better, & P got to spend time with his newly beloved (his bike), and the rest of the family too.

Taxes knocked out gyro teacher training. Still doing Orcas & the pre-foundation training, but… Ah well. Perhaps it’s for the best. There are, after all, only 24 hours in a day.

So much I should probably be doing. Like, oh, getting presentation stuff together for the Thursday night UBC presentation.

I’m not one to really like flying by the seat of my pants. When given the opportunity, I do really try to make sure I’m prepared, but lately there’s been so much flying towards me, that I’ve been getting better at just rolling with it and trying to fly. Sometimes there’s a Wiley E. Coyote moment, but pick up, dust off, move on… can’t wait around, more stuff coming!