Week in Pittsburgh

Quick update from the road.  Wade and Jessi had a beautiful wedding in Farmville, VI, with close friends and family coming in from all corners.  I've been in Pittsburgh for the following week, working and catching up with old friends.  It's been a little hard to keep up the pace of work that I have at home with fun distractions like meeting friends for lunch, but I'm glad I chose to make this a working trip because it means I can spend more time here.

My manuscript (the bulk of my graduate work has been unpublished so far) was submitted, and FINALLY accepted.  This is the last thing that needed to be finished out from my time in graduate school.  There is still some discussion of other brilliant ideas we might toy with later, but getting that paper published will actually make by CV look like I am a scientist again. 

But the real reason I opted to come at this time was for my labmate and classmate Karen's defense.  That happened yesterday.  She was very poised, and gave a very thoughtful, scholarly seminar.  Her defense took hours, but was very friendly.  She emerged as a doctor, and the lab swept into action to make a big departmental party.  It was perhaps not quite as amazing as the party I had, but we are all holding back since she is hosting a party this afternoon.  There is going to be inflatable jousting.  It should be fantastic.

The final moves...

Connie has celebrated her first week of retirement by supervising and executing the next step, excavation from the old beach house and dividing the household into our essential apartment life assets and putting the rest in storage. The first day, Monday, she got the piano and computer desk up all the stairs at both places. Tuesday and Wednesday involved getting the 10,000 pounds of family assets up to the Highway and waiting moving vans. I was home for that. The movers talked tough about not really needing to wait for the funky family winch to haul the stuff but after a couple of laps, I was enlisted to push the buttons up and down with much gratitude. In the midst of the move, our final repairs for the engineer's report were put together. The contractor replaced 2 back bedroom windows to allow fire "egress" and I found a middle school kid to crawl around in the aptly named crawl space to spread plastic underneath the house. This being retired is a lot of work. Sandlin connected us with a Seattle area realtor who has been bombing us with options for a first visit in early August. Until then, we'll just keep trying to settle in and explore the final step of my retirement. Will not be easy or soon, that's for sure.

Well this is Clearly Unacceptable

Has it really been nearly 6 weeks since I last posted on here? Six weeks? And I'm the one around here who is supposed to be doing updates for a toddler. Six weeks in toddler time is like 3 years in regular person time. Let's get back with the program.

Tyler has been in the toddler classroom for a few weeks now, and is starting to adjust. He had a nice transition, where he spent the last few days in his baby classroom hanging out more and more in the toddler room. He still gets a bit fussy when we leave, but there is a security camera that cycles through the rooms on the way out of the day care place, and on the days when it is pointing at his room, we see that by the time we've reached the lobby, the fussing is pretty much over. He is a big fan of the slide they have in the classroom, and really likes all of his older friends who walk around and do big kid things like singing songs and having circle time and reading stories and doing dances together and stuff. You know, like grown-ups do. The day care has also almost finished up the renovation. I'm most excited to see the new kitchen and new activity room. I'm told it may have computers for technology education. I approve.

Also, we went on vacation. Abandoning all the rest of the siblings who congregated up in Juneau (though we did miss them) we decided to head over to the much warmer (and closer) state of Florida to see the other half of our family. Some of us aren't so lucky to get both halves in the same zip code pretty much ever. It did expose something I didn't know about vacationing with a kid. Most vacations you have a little bit of relax time and a little bit of activity time. It takes work to get over to Europe or to plan hotel visits across a continent, but you do the work and you get a nice memory out of it. But it's also important to have some relaxing time, or you'll just feel more and more stressed out the more you try to do. When you have a kid, though, there's no real relaxing time, and any activity has the focus taken away from the cool event you're trying to do, and put on trying to keep your kid from, let's be honest, killing themselves. We hit the beach in Florida, and I'm glad I went, but you have no idea how excited Tyler was to get himself killed all the way to death in the ocean. When we left Tyler behind with the extended family for a few minutes, we got to enjoy ourselves in the waves, and for those few minutes it felt like a real vacation. But as soon as we got him back up, we're trying to keep him from eating watermelon that has fallen in sand. We were lucky enough to have some grown-up time when we left Tyler with grandma and went out *dancing*, and again when we drove down to do some snorkeling in the Florida keys. We'll put up some pictures eventually, but we have to finish off the underwater camera we bought. Anyway, it was a nice glimpse into the difference between traveling with kids and without them. They are quite different animals.

I changed jobs. I'm still at the same company, but I'm in a different group. The reasons are varied and probably best not discussed here, lest they sound too much like wining...or lest people I work with read this (and why wouldn't they? I good writing!) But I'm really liking my new group. I've been instantly plunged into exciting and important work, and people appreciate what I do. Plus, I get to travel in a few weeks, which is nice because hey, travel! But a bummer that I'll miss Tyler for the week. Yay for video conferencing.

Can I update Tyler's dictionary?

Ah-Oooh has become uh-oh, though he still doesn't know when he's supposed to use it.

We got a 'Wa-Wa' out of him this weekend and are trying to associate it with water.

Cats are now 'Dee-Dee', though he hasn't learned to differentiate between the one that always runs away and the one that gets patiently manhandled until the cat gets treats.

Bah is sometimes 'bath', now.

And Tee means 'teeth', specifically brushing them, often as a precursor to bedtime.

Those are the highlights. I'll try not to take so long before coming back with more stories, but I do keep myself pretty busy these days.

-N

If this were my life, it would be ok

Our trip to Juneau was a fantastic last hurrah, and Matt and I came back to Washington energized to conquer the beautiful summer here.  And Matt's bestie left his kiddo with the grandparents in Juneau for another week, so they are acting like maniacs trying to get in all the energetic, difficult to coordinate with daycare activities they can this week.  And a friend of ours was snowed out of her post-defense hike of the Pacific Crest Trail (Canada to Mexico), so she has been staying with us, and enjoying not being in grad school from the suburbs instead of the middle of nowhere.  She'll be with us until the NEXT wedding next week (OMG Wade and Jessi!!).  AND I've got some good contract work right now.

I mention all this, because my life has suddenly become really acceptable.  Basically, I get up to work all day, and when I wander downstairs for more coffee or apples, my friend is there to give me a weather update on the trail or remind me what normal people learned in health class.  (The next contract is to design some new Health modules for high schoolers.)  And then when I am done working, or just feel like I've made enough money, we go do something fun like run around downtown, or see Shaoshu demonstrate his latest Latin Dance performance (it was AMAZING!).  I know things are a little different now since we've got a guest, and summer seems like a big time for curriculum development. But if this where what my life turns into for a while, I think I could be ok with that.

Happy Fourth of July!

We are having a great week in Juneau.  The Fourth of July is always a great holiday here- there are fireworks and parades and often a break in the crappiest of weather.  And now that we are older, we notice it's a holiday other people come home for- Kelsey was here (awesome), and a bunch of Matt's friends are in town for this wedding.  We took in the fireworks with the bride's family (and Betty!), and spent the actual fourth of July hiking the West Glacier trail with Kelsey's friends.  It was a great day for it.  And then Mom made us some AMAZING BBQ Salmon and a huge spread of BBQ feasting things.  We ate until we were paralyzed and felt very patriotic about it.

Today is the much anticipated wedding.  Matt got up early this morning to unload wood for a bonfire and help with last minute set-up details.  I'm slightly regretting my choice to wear the same dress I got for an outdoor wedding in Virginia in two weeks to an outdoor wedding in Juneau, so I am raiding the house for warm under- and over-things as my form of preparation.  It promises to be a fun filled day of friends and family!

Visit home!

Matt and I are leaving tomorrow for a week in Juneau, for One Last Trip to the Ol' Homestead... but mostly because one of Matt's besties is getting married.  We are very excited for them- they are adorable together and it's going to be a great Juneau wedding.  I want to specify that the few details I have heard about the wedding make think it's going to be a Juneau wedding- they are getting married at the Thane Ore House (converted mine, now local fish feed place), the mother of the groom is leaving her car at the ferry terminal for the band to drive themselves in on and the bride asked for help picking wildflowers for her bouqet.  Right?  You wish you were coming to this wedding too...

While Matt is going to be adventuring around with all the assembled friends all week, I am taking a working vacation- hoping to put in some hours on my current contract.  And can we talk about how much I dig this contract? The work is really enjoyable- I spent this week reviewing new material and then coming up with test questions to assess the learning objectives.  Learning AND being creative, brilliant!  And the work is pretty high through-put, I get assigned tasks from an unending list of things to do, and most tasks are 1-3 hours.  I feel like I am accomplishing things, which is great!  The bulk of the content is IT related, which you might think I would feel underqualified for.  (I'm not OVERqualified, it's true.)  But having spent so many years thinking about educational standards and assessment, I actually feel like I have something unique to offer.  At least I feel like I've come up to speed pretty quickly.  The other awesome side of this work is I am finally in a position where I need to find one of those people who helps you figure out what you are going to do come tax time, is this an accountant or a financial adviser in my case?  Yeah, I've got self-employment problems. 

So I will be working as much as I can stand, and Kelsey is coming in, and Mom and Dad are moving and it promises to be a pretty wild week.

Final fix-ups...

Maybe 18 years ago, when we first moved into the beach house, we hired a local contractor to expand the front yard and form a seawall out of beach rocks. Tucked into that project was the placement and connection of a new septic tank. In order to redirect the "blackwater" to the new system, we had to dig under the edge of the house near the second deck. I was watching when the backhoe reached in to the foundation just a little too close and broke the siding board on the edge of the house. For the last 18 years, that missing chunk of siding edge has faced the world like the unapoligetic face of a toothless hockey player. Today, I fixed it. Can't remember why I waited so long but with the fresh paint job from last summer, the new board looks seamless. For some reason, selling the house makes me want to fix it up a bit for the next people. You know, to show some pride in ownership and to honor 20 good years of family life. Very satisfying.