Seen whilst skimming the Washington Post’s Style page in the “bite” for their bridge column –
“I’ve got to take the rest of the week off,” Unlucky Louie told me. “I’m as broke as the Ten Commandments.”
Clean in-bins
I’ve finally managed to trim my in-bin at work to 10 messages, give or take a few depending on what’s going on for the day. What a pleasure to see everything in my in-bin in one screen! How unlike me, in general… Coworkers swear that they keep their inbins empty, regularly either deleting their email or filing it. I had never been able to keep up with the flow, no more than I can keep up with the stream of industry magazines that crosses my desk at work, or the pile of mail that threatens to overwhelm me at home. This empty in-bin thing is giving me hope that I’m not doomed to endlessly be digging through information.
Great Evening
Guess what’s missing (yet not missed) from this list of things done tonight?
* Ran 3 miles
* Went to dinner with my husband (oooh, a date!)
* Perused the magazines in the bookstore whilst we waited for the latest torrential downpour to pass by
* Cleaned the cat boxes (bleah – I’ll never own another cat)
* Picked up the basement
* Sketched out a list of things to take and things to do before our camping trip with the girls (look sometime next week for a description of success or failure, taking a 2 year old and an 8 month old tent camping)
* Edited 1 blog entry, wrote another one (this one!)
* Went to sleep at a nearly reasonable time
Give up?? Nothing about work. Nada. Nichts. Not even writing this from my work laptop – left it in my office. Left it sitting lonely in its docking station, thinking whatever thoughts lonely laptops think when they’re deprived of company. In case you’re scanning the ‘Net, little laptop, looking for something to remind you of me, I dedicate this blog entry to you, ‘puter. But I hope you start coming up with hobbies of your own, ‘puter – I’m hoping to spend a little less time on our relationship.
Back to school daze
I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person. Did a little bit better than OK in school, worked hard (_really_ hard) at a couple of classes in college, but other than that, the main work there was time management to get things done. So, have been looking forward to returning to school in the fall to finally (!) get started on that MBA I’ve been thinking about since my junior or senior year in college. The timing was never right. First I wanted job experience to make the MBA that much more worthwhile (and hey, maybe easier if I already knew the stuff). Then we got married. Then we had a kid. And then we had another one. School takes time, time that’s always spread a bit thinner than one would like. But still, the MBA beckoned. I’d peruse the course catalog and wish I could take the class, just for the material covered. I’d plot out how many years it’d take to complete the degree part-time (too many!). I even went so far, last fall, as to write out my application essay for a local school. Never actually sent it in… Jason and I were looking at baby #2 coming and then some minor upheaval in the Coleman household as I returned to work and he took over primary care for the kids. Didn’t seem fair to load a night out to class on top of that.
In the meantime, my interest in the courses haven’t waned. And each time they come around at work to check where we individually fit on the GSA schedule, I’m reminded yet again that I never got that advanced degree. So, today went and took the GMAT exam. It’s required for the local biz school where I hope to earn my degree, one class at a time over the next several years. I’m quite certain evenings spent watching Law & Order will now be spent poring over economic and accounting tomes. Jon Stewart’s monologue may be the refrain behind research for papers. Signup’s coming up for the fall semester – need to get my application in order, including that application essay and a copy of my resume. Good excuse to get it up-to-date, anyway. Lots of things to add, of late, including (tada!) a paper I’m listed as a co-author on that’s going to be presented at a conference at NIH in a couple of weeks. (If it’s posted anywhere, I’ll post a link here… paper describes some cool work we’ve done at the National Library of Medicine).
It’ll take me long enough to get through the MBA program that Cora may be doing her homework while Mommy works on hers. One class at a time, baby, one class at a time.
Minor ASP.NET / Microsoft documentation rant
Bug 6619, assigned to me on my project, innocently asks, “Should prev next appear at the bottom of the list, if there is no prev or next page?” The page uses an ASP.NET DataGrid, which nicely provides me an easy way to turn on paging, which is the idea that I don’t present to you all 300 records you asked for at once, but I let you get 25 or so at a time, with buttons to traverse through the set. In this case, prev/next buttons.
Turns out, Microsoft easily grants me the capability to turn on paging and easily grants me the capability to say that the buttons should say prev or next, but doesn’t easily grant me the ability to turn off, say, the prev button if that button shouldn’t exist. It’ll happily turn off the link itself, so it “knows” there’s no previous page, but the effect of that is to just display the text ‘prev’ without a link. Attempts to update the text of those links on the fly, say to an empty string, are happily ignored by the page… Grr….
So, I start investigating other options. Turns out I can put in my own custom navigation controls, and bypass the prev/next button stuff. Great! The document that tells me how to do that says ‘One of the options on the Pager tab of the Property Builder is Show Navigation buttons’. Hmmm… option on the what tab? Not seeing that in my Properties window…. Oh, that’s because it’s only available on the Property Builder, one of those wizard things I usually avoid because they end up doing stuff for me that causes problems later. Flipping the switch there gives no obvious indication in the Properties Window, no obvious indication in the HTML code, no obvious indication in the code…. but somehow things work differently. Grrrrrrrrrr…
I’ve now spent almost an hour and a half on this bug. Microsoft, your documentation leaves much to be desired. Those of who want to do things beyond your basic behavior run into too many stumbling blocks that don’t have to be there. Don’t box me into your default behavior. Particularly don’t box me into your default behavior without giving me a big ol’ warning that this default behavior can’t be overridden in rational ways. At least spare me the time of running down those fruitless reasonable paths by pointing me in a direction: if you’d like to do X, you should consider using Y instead of our normal recommendation of Z.
Frustrated…
If Mommy gives us chocolate…
Just in time for Mother’s Day, advice on food selection for your child:
“If Mommy gives us chocolate when we’re kids, that is what we grow up to like,” Yosses said. “And if Mommy gives us hissing cockroaches, then that’s what we learn to like.”
— From ‘The Scorpions Taste Kind of Fishy’ in Wired Magazine
Now I know what to serve Cora this weekend: the cicadas are coming. Save us a trip to the grocery store and broaden her food horizons. Callie’s off the hook this time around: no teeth to crunch ’em means she’s spared until the next 17 year cycle.
Run with Perseverance
I’m working on a habit. A good one, I hope. I’ve been slipping the sneakers on at the end of the day, and going for a run around work. Even picked up a running partner lately. Steve’s training to run a 5K in memory of his wife, who passed away from cancer. I’m running for a much less worthy reason, for the most part. It feels good. I feel like I’m accomplishing something everytime I can run a bit farther than I did previously, or run the same run without giving up and needing to run that last hill on the last quarter mile back to work. And I really like the idea of the jeans fitting a bit better as a result. Gives me the motivation to skip the chocolate that my project lead so sadistically keeps in his office.
It’s time I take from my family, I realize. I try to trade that off by eating my lunch at my desk for the most part, so hopefully I’m not chaining Jason to two youngsters for longer than necessary. And I try to make it up to him – (hint, hint- I’m feeling guilty, Jas – you could work this to your benefit). My habit is fast becoming an addiction, though my speed doesn’t similarly count as fast. For me, a long run is 3+ miles, though I have dreams of marathons… maybe even this year, if I can figure out how to fit in the time necessary to run the LSDs (an addiction of their own, but means Long Slow Distance) necessary to build up to 26.2.
I looked up Biblical references to running – came up with a few. Heb 12:1 seems to fit – I’m trying to earn the perseverance to run the race. Something to cogitate upon to redeem the time – it’s Bible study time, honey. Really.
The Ecstasy of a Clean Floor
Daddy’s been gone for the weekend. One of the girls is sick and on the upswing from it, and the other may be getting it. It’s honestly been a reasonably fun weekend, even given that one girl got me up at two and then the other was not only awake, but hyper(!) at six this morning. I’m definitely looking forward to Jason getting home – a hair cut and a long run are on the list, as is mowing our lawn if the rain holds off. But I got a miraculous chunk of time this morning. The six o’clock riser (our two year old) was convinced to take a nap. Not threatened, locked away screaming, ‘you shall take a nap!’. But talked into climbing into her bed and getting tucked in for a nap, with the promise of a lunch with chocolate milk afterwards. An hour later, the infant collapsed (and it took that whole hour to get her to do it, too!). So, surprisingly, I’ve had about an hour so far with two napping children. That never happens for us anymore . The two year old never takes naps, and then the odds of synchronizing naps – well, let’s just say I’m not in church today (sick kids aren’t particularly welcome in nursery), but I’m thanking God for a miracle.
I’ve actually had a list all weekend of the set of things that I’d do if I only had one awake and the other were reasonably happy. Cora and I worked on the garden yesterday (that’s a blog entry in and of itself of the fun a two year old has with pipecleaners that Mom’s used to try to mark where she’s planted things) and got most of the herbs and vegetables planted. That was a major score – too many more weekends and the vegetable garden would have been relegated to a weed garden this year. But today’s bright spot of freedom granted me – a clean floor! A stick some CDs into the stereo, grab a wash bucket, and get on my knees to scrub the floor clean floor. No baby food spills around the high chair. No formula powder near the sink. No dog drool around the dog food bowl. Got the pancake batter Cora “liberated” as she tried to help make pancakes yesterday. I can see my floor, and it looks good, and I’m ecstatic.
Baby Blog
Some folks keep baby books up to date, marking first smiles, first teeth, first crawls… We attempted it with Cora, but I’m afraid I’m not conscientious about recording that sort of stuff. With Callie, it’s been even worse. I don’t have any sort of baby book for her.
Just scanned back through some blog entries, though. I give them a category as I write them, and I have a category for MommyHood. Some comment spammer left a comment on a way-old entry that talked about a prediction that Cora would walk by 10 months. As it turned out, she didn’t walk by 10 months – she sort of stalled and waited until she turned a year old – but the entry lists other milestones, like when she scooted backwards (6 1/2 months), and when she crawled forward (7 1/2 months).
Cora’s little sis, Callie, is a little bit over 6 months old. Her latest exciting milestone was rolling over – she did it for the first time on Easter this year, much to the excitement of Aunt Paula and Daddy, who were coaxing her at the time. Now, that little fact hasn’t been entered in a baby book anywhere. But I can now look at the archives for our blog and see the previous entry for Cora, and now this one for Callie. And then hop over to our image gallery to see pictures of the girls at the appropriate ages.
So, my Creative Memories consultant isn’t making anything off of me, but I’ve got the info I want as both images and text, interspersed with other blog entries that show what was important enough for me to write about it at the time. Works for me, baby book or no…
April 15th
I’m one in 30 million… That’s the number of folks who supposedly wait until the last week to submit their tax returns. I used to turn my in as late as possible in years where I owed money, just on the theory of getting every last cent of interest on that money in my bank account. This year, though, we were one of the many Americans getting money back that we’d “loaned” the government for its use during the year. Just work has kept me so busy that we didn’t get around to finishing up our paperwork until, oh, 3:00 in the morning this morning. More specifically, I put down my Jane Hancock early this morning – Jas did all of the various wrestling with various forms that took an hour to complete and made an impact of $1.11 in the final amount of our tax return. In our favor, at least, but $1.11? For an hour’s worth of work, between examining instructions, tracking down the info, and then doing the calculations? That hour’s worth of work would be of more value to me and to society if I spent it helping in a soup kitchen. Heck, if I sold drugs on a street corner, I’d provide more value, just in the terms of the sales tax I’d generate when I bought my fancy car, jewelry, and other trappings.
I heard an interesting piece of trivia the other day that said that 45 cents on every dollar collected goes to the cost of collecting the other 55 cents. Boy, that’s a lousy ROI – I’d never give a charitable organization any money that told me their cost of fundraising was 45%.
Interesting tax trivia (whether they’re true or not, I can’t vouch):
* National Retail Sales Tax – Virginia Chapter
* Cato institute facts and figures
The government needs money to do its job for me – I get that. But don’t make me spend hours trying to figure out whether I’m doing the right thing, paying the right amount, filling out the right forms… the tax on my time and my stress is worse than the cost of the dollars. I owe the gov’t the dollars… I don’t owe them the time and stress.