Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week felt fairly typical.  Nothing too new or out of the ordinary happened.  I am slowly working through projects on the house.  Although it does not feel like I am making much progress.  Other then that life continues slowly.

Incapacitation

Long before having kids, I was driving with a friend, chatting about our lives past and present. I noticed a trend in my friend's tales. In each case, completely unrecognized by herself, she had great ambitions about something she would like to do or change in her life and then something happened to make that ambition impossibly difficult. Most of the time, it was something to do with her kids. I couldn't understand it. How could such a motivated, creative, and energetic person suddenly be incapable of meeting her goals? This scared me as a prospective mother and I wanted to know how much time I had before the chaos started, "At what point did you begin feeling incapacitated?" My friend burst out laughing, "What on earth do you mean?"

"How old were your kids when you suddenly couldn't do the things you wanted to do anymore?"

My friend laughed even harder at this, and I didn't understand why. From my perspective then, it seemed a simple question to answer. I thought about my life at that moment: trucking through grad school, husband with a stable job, good friends close by. Then I thought about her life: interrupted, spontaneous, butting heads with kids, always craving more time with friends. When would my life transform into her life? At what point would my family make my ideas and expectations fruitless (i.e. incapacitation)? I never got a straight answer from her.

I think I was asking the wrong question (and making the wrong assumptions).

Anyway, I'm thinking about all of this now because somehow in the last few weeks, I've felt incapacitated. Is it the new house/routine/car schedule? The kids getting older? Me getting older? Whatever it is, I just don't feel as sharp as I used to be and that's bothersome. Not quite worrisome, but certainly worth noticing.

I forget about appointments or arrive 30 minutes late, therefore I look like a flake. I lose my keys and wallet at least once a month. I can't work start-to-finish on anything, anytime. Just name one thing that I should be able to do start-to-finish! I can't seem to manage it. It's hard to remember words when I need them, so half of my sentences go unfinished. Alice is even finishing them for me sometimes. I've lost the ability to plan effectively on-the-fly (even installing a retractable clothesline in the laundry room proved too complex a task for my incapacitated brain...measure twice, drill once...twice...three times...oops, just once more...got it).

It sounds like sleep deprivation, but here's the kicker: I don't always get to determine how much sleep I get. Interrupted nighttime sleep is about 100% these days, between the two kids. I go to bed on time and still don't wake feeling rested.

Now I just sound like I'm whining. That's not my intent. Not productive, either. It's just this creeping feeling that I'm turning into a flake with an unpredictable vocabulary and no way of knowing that my measuring and planning is actually going to leave THREE extra holes in my wall. That kinda bothers me. A lot.

Incapacitation = not being able to do what I want to do the way I want to do it = no longer feeling like myself.

Putting it down that way just changed everything. Holy cow!

With that equation, I just realized that I've been happy with the amount of control/focus I've had in my life up until now. That's actually pretty AWESOME. What on earth am I complaining about?! Pbbbsh. It sounds like I've got to give this a little more time and a little more rest. Lots more rest. No use spiraling into a self-pitying state prematurely ;)

Bobby's Sunday Summary

We are slowly making progress on setting up our house.  We bought some new furniture yesterday.  It should hopefully replace the cardboard boxes Susan and I have been using for nightstands, and let us not have to move chairs around the house so much when we want to eat in the dinning room.  I am also making progress on fix it projects.  Not too much to report there.  Just doing more of the same, wrapping insulation around the duct work in the crawl space.  We should may be doing more with lighting and some electrical in the near future.

As for work it is going well too.  At work I work on an open source project called Hadoop.  Because it is open source it is almost like I have two different jobs.  Or perhaps one job with two different sets of bureaucracy.  Either way my life should get a lot easier soon as another member of my team and work, and myself have been made committers.  What that means is that before this we had lots of responsibility and almost no authority to get what we want to do done.  Now we have just as much responsibility, but a little bit more authority.  It should make our lives less stressful.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week has been a bit crazy.  This is mostly due to work.  Because of our move I switched around when I would be on call.  Which means that if something bad happens that the people who's job it is to handle bad things cannot handle it then I get a call to come help figure out what is happening and fix it.  Well this past week while sitting on the couch with Susan watching a show I got called.  It was bad, but it was not that bad.  It was not something that we had done.  It was human error by someone else.  By the time I got online to help out they had already fixed the problem and were monitoring everything to see if it they had to do anything more.  So for the most part I just had to stay up until midnight looking at graphs showing that things were returning to normal.  This is the first time since coming to work for Yahoo! 4 years ago that I have been called while on call.  Which is really nice.

The rest of the week was good.  I was able to get a few more projects done around the house that have been bugging me, so we are slowly getting closer to being done.  But we still have a long ways to go.

We also got to go to a "Progressive" dinner that was not very progressive.  Several years ago a friend in our ward had the idea for a progressive dinner.  Unfortunately there was a lot of interest in the idea, and not enough time to really plan it all the way so it ended up being half way in-between a potluck and a progressive dinner with a bit of a lottery thrown in.  So it ends up being everyone who wants to signs up.  Couples are randomly divided up into tables with 4 couples at each table, and each is assigned a part of the meal, appetizer, main dish, side or dessert.  We made enchiladas, and someone at our table brought chips and 7 layer dip.  So our table was designated the mexican table, despite there also being Caesar Salad, and a Black Raspberry Cake, neither of which really are all that Mexican foody.  Overall it was fun, and delicious.

Snow Day

Too cold to play in all this new snow, so we made it a party inside. We made a huge mess in the kitchen preparing a double batch of Cranberry Pumpkin Orange muffins together, then ate them like the crazies we are:

Once Buddy was down for a nap, "Alice and Mommy" time commenced with a (slightly modified version) of Trouble. 

 

Alice got into it, eventually singing her little pegs home as she won by a(n engineered) slim margin. Then we colored a page in her new Strawberry Shortcake coloring book (from a birthday party yesterday) and she settled into quiet time with a new wall decoration:

Robert and I worked on this while Alice was at preschool this morning. I did the cutting and sewing, he turned the sewing machine on and off, on and off, on and off. Final size is about 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide.

I never, ever, ever wanted to decorate any of my own girl's rooms with Disney princesses. I'm still a bit mixed about this development. I have several reservations when it comes to Disney movies for kids, but the biggest annoyance is all the merchandising. When a kid thinks that Tangled is the first and only Rapunzel story out there, and that every item purchased and consumed is better simply by bearing a character's image, it gets my goat. I even like the movie Tangled and love to watch it with my kids---wait, I see a soap box inching closer, so I'll just change the subject and tell you how the decoration came together.

It was originally a "Happy Holidays" door-hanging poster I bought for $0.25 at a Wal-Mart Christmas clearance sale a couple years ago to use as a waterproof layer in some other project (something one would sit on or poop in, preferably, mwah ha ha haaaaa). The project didn't progress as planned and I scrapped it, leaving a pristine door hanging in my fabric stash. Alice discovered it one day and we hung it up on her door for a while. She would ask about the princesses in the picture and I could tell her each story however I liked. It gave me practice as an oral storyteller and fun memories with Alice, so I guess it's not all bad ;)

One day, it disappeared from her door and she never noticed. Why did I hang on to it further? I don't know. It was just $0.25, but it had potential. Today, we realized some of that potential. I cut the princesses from all the "Happy Holiday" froof and used my handy-dandy rolled hem foot to finish the raw edges. Double-sided tape holds it to the wall, so far. Ta daaa! Now Alice has something on that great expanse of an empty wall. I have the materials on-hand to make her a shaggy pink rug for the middle of that ocean of a floor, too.

Now I'm off to organize my fabric stash...any helpful hints? Please?