Agog is the word...

Thought this deserved wider distribution for the sake of our lurkers: From Nana's E-mail.... Not sure you all are agog about how this retiree is managing but I'm offering a sample: Seriously wake up at 11 a.m.(it's been a party-ing weekend remember) and half hearted efforts don't count. Gulp orange juice (thank you Sandlin) go for lunch and then join the every Monday 1:45 WALK IN THE PARK. THE van picks a different place to go each week , there are a lot of options. This week we four residents " democratically" decide to skip Edmonds (too cold & windy there) for Community park in Woodinville (I may have the name wrong).( Smallish but memorable because of man giving workout to his prize winning golden lab retriever using whistle and hand signals ala Scotland sheep dogs. Dog also on TV as show winner. There is also an inactivated rope landing gear climbing tower connected to rope-and-plank walkway about 25 feet long leading to another tower w/rope landing-gear exit. My imagination gallops along. speculating on the excitement on a warm summer day. Back at 3:10--start reading Seattle Times in lobby when LaVerne reminds me of once-a-month book club in library at 3:30. Join 10 residents for discussion of THE MAN WHO LOVED BOOKS TOO MUCH--led by a retired Chateau marketing manager- (bubbly vivacious-)-who will try to arrange coaching for three of us with Nooks, but don't really know how to check out public library books. Brisk discussion that runs a "little long"--then ascend to 3rd floor dining room . Book Club custom is to eat dinner together and wine drinkers have choice of white/red. Menu in Dining Room changes daily, always has LONG salad buffet and GREAT variety of desserts. Special of The Day is Repeated as Eating Light that skips rich sauces, Has always been delicious as far as I'm concerned but old hands cluck and are greatly pleased that a new chef starts this week. My strategy is to ask for half orders--"small" milk. Singing group practises on B1 level 4th Monday at 5:30 Frankly, I'm ready for bed. Needless to say I'm a happy camper. Blessings to all. MP

More reasons it's awesome Nana lives here

1) Since Nana lives here, sometimes Mom and Dad wanna 'just come by for the weekend.'  They never did this when I lived in Pittsburgh.
2) Since I get to see her all the time, I get to hear Nana stories.  It's refreshing to be reminded that I come from a long line of women who work really hard, and manage to be successful even while juggling many needs.  Last night Nana was telling me about how her Mom had made her and her sister a little play house, complete with furniture, at their home in Wyoming.  And that she always made all the cabinets, clothes and food for the house.  Yeah, my people are handy and industrious!
3) Nana provides great excuses to see other people I want to see.  Party with the family next weekend!
4) Nana does stuff I only imagine doing, so it's like a preview to adulthood.  She is selling her house.  "Buying/selling a home" is no no longer on the list of things I know nothing about.  I've been a privileged observer to the proceedings of offers, negotiation, financing factors etc.  I'm looking forward to seeing how the various inspection/assessments play out, but the theme seems to be "Lots of Paperwork."  Who knew?  (oh, and in case you didn't know, Nana has accepted an offer on her house from a young family, and everyone feels good about it.)

I expect to be adding to this list quite a lot in the near future.  In other news, I am spending the day catching up on PM homework.  I've got like a hundred pages of reading to do before Monday, but considering how... um,... not dense it is, this will be no big.  It's weird to go into a field that is meant to describe an abstraction, I keep skimming past the 'vague stuff' only to realize that's the entire discipline.  It makes me wish I were taking the class in combination with having some big project.  Perhaps I'll convert my job hunt to a Project- and then manage the heck out of it.

NON-STOP ACTION

I like to be busy.  Well, not busy, but I'd rather have my time accounted for then to have nothing to do- and that sometimes means I overfill by time, but I'm happier that way.  I may have gotten ahead of myself this week, but I'd rather hardly have time to sit down then to be stuck at home.

I got a project at my internship with an imminent deadline, which gave me something to work towards.  I've been trying to stay on top of the job hunt, and have had some more phone calls and meetings crammed in between other things.  I started taking a project management course at the community college, it probably won't be hard, but there is a lot of reading I ought to do to get my money's worth. 

And then I got sucked into some extra hours at the bank as a result of something we aren't supposed to talk about, but we are calling "the Russian mobster incident."  I used to think that there were some jobs where there was so little responsibility that you could NEVER have a bad day.  I take it back.  Also, I don't think banking is my calling.

And Nana got an offer on her house!  This is great news for her, and a sweet primer for me a on the paper-work involved in buying/selling a house.  (hint: a lot).  Someday, when we are DINKs, we'll get to put all this practical knowledge to use.  Actually, this was double awesome because having Nana over to talk about counter-offers provided me the motivation to actually cook something for the first time in ages. 

Both of the professional societies I am a board member for had meetings this week, and I got a new writing contract that will take a couple weeks.  Busy-ness is just part of my future.

Matt's CDL class is keeping him very busy, but hopefully this weekend they'll get to shift gears (literally, they've driven miles in the parking lot in first gear).  We are hoping to go see Tulips again this weekend, so I'm going to be mad productive until then so I can enjoy a few unhectic hours with my family.

I'd write more, but we all have the plague

Tyler managed to pick up a cold a little bit before his birthday, right when all of the family was coming in to visit. I don't know what it was, but it's set off a chain reaction of illness that's kept the entire family busy with doctor visits for the past few weeks. It's pretty staggering.

I started it off, with a fever and a cold that eventually clogged up my throat with gunk and ended up giving me an ear infection. I'm a grown man! I'm not supposed to be getting those anymore. Anyway, I did, and managed to get over the worst of it before my throat got really sore. I ended up going to see the doctor for that one, which meant that he as able to tell me that my ear was still infected and my sore throat was not, fortunately, strep throat. It was still horrible, though, so I got some antibiotics and am feeling much better, thanks.

Tyler's ear infection has stubbornly refused to go away, and ended up spreading into a pretty severe fever a couple of times. Unfortunately that meant that we had to graduate him past oral antibiotics and onto a shot! It was horrible! But it seems to have helped his ear. Anyway, he's going into the ENT doctor tomorrow to get evaluated for tubes, because he's been getting a lot of infections and they're becoming progressively harder to cure. I don't want to be giving him a shot every time he gets a cold.

Jess managed to skip the worst of it, but ended up with a voice-clearing sore throat yesterday and she ended up with a couple of doctor appointments too. So between the three of us, we have been keeping the American health care system well employed. You're welcome.

Micro news! Tyler is really good at walking now. He does more walking than crawling. This means that we get a lot more calls from the day care telling us he bonked his head on something. He's also taking naps on a Cot now and is being gently weaned off of bottles and on to real person food. They cook good stuff at that place, I'm actually kind of jealous I can't join him for lunch. He'll be moving up to the toddler class pretty soon, I suspect. I'm trying to make more music, but so far haven't been successful. I'm trying to find a way to come at a new composition that allows me to, well, make something, mostly. Work was boring, so I went off and found my own work. It's much less boring now. I've become totally addicted to supporting video games on kickstarter. It lets you pledge money to support a thing (music, art, a physical product, anything, really) before it gets made. It's just like putting in a pre-order, really, but it's a pre-order that helps the development of the item in question. I like it. I finished the first book of the Hunger Games. Quite pleased with myself. A good, fast read, high on quality. Recommended.

-N

If you are jealous, there is a solution...

I had breakfast with Mom and Nana in Nana's apartment this morning.

Clearly, this is an above average Tuesday.

Also, Nana lives here now!  Like, 100% official, all the time.  Woohoo!  I need to send around invites to the welcome home party, but if you can't come, you should probably plan to come to visit Nana.  Her place is pretty sweet, and my place is pretty sweet, and between the two of us there are good times to be had.

I'm on page 8!

Check me out!  Also- I'm on the newsletter committee, so I kinda helped make the whole thing happen.  Sweet!

Today just headbutted my optimism

Let's level- job hunting is lame.  It's a constant drain on my confidence, my time and is giant hurdle I have to get past before I can really have a future.  When I am not looking for a job, or meeting people who can help me get a job, I am thinking about it.  When I am job hunting, I am faced with jillions of jobs for which I am NOT a good fit.  There is nothing good about job hunting, and I know that, so I try REALLY hard to stay upbeat about it, to keep at it when I can and just cry about it when that's all the more I can do.  It makes me hypersensitive to my failures and reiterates my shortcomings (OMG- Did I just send that recruiter a note about an 'oppurtunity'??  What is wrong with me??). One of the best things about getting a job will be that I can stop looking.  Point made?  Ok, this is just the backdrop then to what might have seemed like a typical day at any other time in my life, but today just made me want to crawl back in bed.

It started out good- I applied for a job I really liked last night, and I was feeling anxious about how my application came across.  I put a lucky penny in my shoe today (because having my life feel out of my own control reinforces my superstitions) and headed out to my internship.  I was able to find a parking spot in South Lake Union, where I met a new team of investigators who are in crunch time about their upcoming grant.  And they are studying one of the few major diseases I don't know ANYthing about, and a class of regulated substances I am also totally naive about.  The manager just throws me in like I belong there, but it isn't long before everyone is throwing questions to "the market analyst" and "I will check that out too..." doesn't seem so helpful.  But no one stormed out of this meeting (unlike their last one- did I mention it was tense?), and I went back to our regular office.

Parking on campus is a drag, but I've found a lot nearby that usually has a spot for me- but today I didn't have the right change, because I left my $1 coins ...somewhere.  I decided to risk feeding half the money now, and half the money later when I broke a $20, because -dammit, I was ready to have a good day.  I had a networking meeting further down on campus, and for some reason I didn't bring a coat.  Obviously, it was raining cats and dogs.  The meeting was ok, but it reinforced that I am not doing enough to get something useful out of my internship.  And made me soaking wet.

Traffic was TERRIBLE.  When I got home, the cat managed to rip a hole in my work pants (of course, in the bum) while I started a late dinner (made even later by the fact that Matt is gone to CDL school).  And then I burned the speghetti sauce- I know, I didn't know that was possible either. 

Any other day I might say "I got a new project, I didn't get a parking ticket and I got to meet some new people," but not today.

Hey, guys, pictures!

These are going backwards, chronologically, because I'm too lazy to flip them all around.



The family underground. Underground! Inner Space caverns. We'll totally take you there if you come visit.



A very proud daddy and a very messy son.



Tyler spent more time making a mess than eating any of the cake. To me, this means he has more experience with finger paints than candy, which is a pretty good track record, if you ask me.



I don't know if you guys remember, but there's a series of pictures from when Jess and I were first dating and I was meeting the nephews. They're watching me play games and sloooowly crawling over until they can see what cool toys Uncle Noel is playing with. This reminds me of that.






Showing off his walking and playing skills for the whole family.



And, finally, modeling his sexy new Carhartts. Thanks, everyone!

-N

Lots of family over here. And sickness.

Meanwhile, down in Texas, Tyler has turned 1 year old. That's right! This time last year I was staying up from 2 to 6 in the morning, monitoring a baby who couldn't even open his eyes all the way. When you pinched his cheeks *nothing happened*. All he could eat was formula. He didn't sleep through the night. I didn't have to go to work in the morning. It's been a heck of a year, watching this little guy grow up from his larval stage to a fully functional pupal toddler. He's walking a lot, he wants things and has figured out ways to ask for them, he has emotions and desires, he can learn things. He's a lot more fun, now.

And being as he's a toddler, and will be soon tearing around the world with reckless abandon, everyone got him adorable Carhartts overalls. Which are great, because the knees are double-stiched, perfect for all the rowdy activity Tyler will be getting up to as a toddler now.

So we threw a birthday party for him...okay, if we're being honest, the first birthday party really isn't for the kids. Maybe not even the second, either. It's for us. We invited over a bunch of friends, mostly ones with kids, and had cake and made hot dogs and socialized. Tyler was busy nailing the transition from two naps per day to just one, so he was asleep from 12:00 to 2:00 and missed the early parts of his birthday. But never mind, it let me have more time to grill hot dogs.

The cake was, as predicted, my favorite part of the proceedings. We got him his own cake, dropped it on his high chair and let him do whatever he wanted to it. We took video, I'll let you know when we put it up somewhere. Anyway, ht started off a little tentative, but really started to enjoy getting this stuff all over his hands. Jess would feed him little bites here and there to eat, but he seemed less interested in eating, and more in making an *incredible* mess. He was wearing his Carheartts, though, so he was well protected. Then at the end I sat all close to him so he could make adorable messes all over my face too. I was a very proud dad.

We got some nice presents, too. We got him a little kids laptop, which he seems to enjoy a lot more than I thought he would. He gets really into pushing all the buttons and then opening and closing the laptop to hear it make noise.

Also, it's visitor time for us! We had Jessie's sister and her mom (who is still here) visiting us this weekend. Mostly for the birthday, but also because we like them. So we took them out to Innerspace Caverns, a natural cavern formation near us that we actually hadn't been to before. In the grand scheme of all the caverns everywhere it's probably not the greatest you could visit, but it's really neat to explore even just the areas to which they've put trails. Makes me want to maybe come by sometime to try their more extreme expeditions. The ones where you squeeze into tiny spaces. Maybe. We'd have to see. I'm not really shaped for tight spaces.

So after sending sister and her boys home, Tyler and I have been alternating illnesses for a while. He had a fever that hung around for a few days over the weekend, and when we took him into the doctor, she noticed that he had a couple of really bad ear infections. Which is crazy, because *we would never have known*. Seriously, the kid doesn't make a fuss, and I have no idea why. I've had an ear infection recently. It sucks. For some reason, he doesn't feel like making a big deal of it. Anyway, we got him some antibiotics yesterday, and then I went off to Judo, which has been going swimmingly, by the way, and then I got home and...got really sick.

I was pretty fevery last night, and very, very achy. It's died down, thank goodness, but I'm still making sure I'm never more than a few steps away from some painkillers. Which is a bummer, because there are some classes going on at work that I really wanted to take. I'll catch days 2 and 3, but I had to review the day 1 stuff at home. Which turned out not to be too big of a deal, because I knew a lot of it already. Bad time to get sick, though.

So I definitely owe you guys pictures from the party and the caves and the like. I'll let you know when I get those up. Also, this is post #750 on this blog. Numbers, right?

-N

So,... when are you coming to visit?

The big update of AWESOME that happened today is Nana moved to Bothell.  Woohoo!  I pretty much live down the street from my own grandmother- my life is finally on track!

I'll give you the run down of how this went for me- but just to update, Bart and Matthew rocked out some major home repairs last weekend, and Mom and Dad have been doing more of the same, and Dave (Berry) and some other Spokane people loaded the truck.  We can presume this was a lot of work, since none of them have complained about it. 

On my end, I went to work this morning after a a text to say the truck was rolling out.  Toward the end of my VERY short shift, I got a text saying "We'll be there in an hour."  Dave had given me all kinds of warnings about the snow in the pass, and his "not taking our lives into our hands" driving mentality, I just figured they've be arriving after I'd gone home and spent the afternoon with my feet up.  Nope. I sent a hasty message to the team who assembled themselves like champions.  It occurred to me that while I could ask my cousins to do all the moving because they are cousins, I also have a fair amount of moving karma to cash in, so I asked Jeffrey and Shaoshu to swing by too.  By the time I showed up (as quick as I could- I swear!), Matt and those two were ready to grab the couch, while Dave was organizing the truck for return (because it was all but empty), and Nana was resting on her chair by the window of her new apartment looking delighted, if tired.  She directed the boys where to put the rest of the furniture as it came in, and we sent them away to get pizza and beer. 

Kate and Liz arrived a couple minutes after me, so to earn our pizza and beer, we tried to make a first attempt to unpack, or at least organize what was there to be unpacked.  In the couple minutes it took Nana and I to sign the lease, Kate and Liz had unloaded Nana's clothes, moved a lot of stuff into the bathroom and sewing areas.  We hung out for maybe an hour until we decided we were all hungry (or maybe just me- I'm a great consensus builder) and needed to clear out the TONS of empty boxes to make room for our exit.  Oh yes, my cousins rock at moving help.

We had some pizzas and beers to celebrate a job well done, and Jeffrey's family joined us.  Having a three year old around makes any party feel like a wild time, and it was nice to just call up a few armloads of people I really care about to hang otu.  Nana trundled off to a early bedtime, and the rest of us hung around swapping stories, enjoying the company and making plans for more fun times together. 

Tomorrow Matt will be drafted in for his two other types of expertise- setting up the computer, and assembling a desk, and we'll endeavor to get the basics set up- bed, bathroom, finding all the stuff we hid unpacked yesterday.  We can keep working on that all week, too, so we might break for some fun or relaxing as the mood strikes.  Or Skyping- anyone??

Anyway, the point is, everyone who is awesome lives in King County, and I am getting really good at throwing parties for everyone in the world I care about, so if you want an invite, just let me know.  You should come and visit.