Just Some Random Things

I thought that perhaps when I stopped posting on Twitter I might write more here, but it hasn't worked out that way. I do occasionally post over on Post or Instagram, but mostly I lurk. I haven't stopped lurking on Twitter but increasingly it feels like I should. 

I thought that maybe I'd waste less time scrolling and spend more time reading, and that has sort of worked out. I am finding it depends greatly on how much I am enjoying whatever book I'm reading. I think I need to get more ruthless about abandoning books that don't grab me in a couple of sittings. It is not like there is a shortage of things to read. 

I have started using my library to borrow ebooks instead of just buying from Amazon. Now that I'm reading more, my habit of just buying the book was going to get expensive. I try to buy the book more often if it is a less well-known author but to be honest it sometimes just comes down to whether there's a waitlist on the book at the library. 

I just posted a comment with some books I've enjoyed recently over at Grumpy Rumblings so I won't repeat them here. I will say a bit more about the books that didn't make the list, though. Over the Christmas break I reread The City and the City by China Miéville and loved even more the second time through. It is just such an interesting, mind-bending book. So I went looking for something similar. I utterly failed. I found a list of books other people had recommended as similar and while I could see the reason for the recommendation they were both so disappointing that I won't list them here. One hinted at really interesting things in the world they built but never did anything with them, leaving the world feeling flat. The other did a good job world building but fell down on characters. Both wrote women characters that didn't feel real at all. They often read like the enactment of the author's fantasies. It was terrible. I had forgotten what a hard time some sci-fi writers have with writing women or even making a world in which women can have some true agency. Blech.

The closest I came to the William Gibson or The City and the City feeling in reading recently was The City Inside by Samit Basu. This book had a believable and interesting world, believable and interesting characters... but ended without really tidying things up. Maybe there's a sequel planned. If there is one, I'll read it, but I prefer books to leave me feeling like I read something complete, even if there is a sequel.

In other news in my life... I had two business trips in January. I caught a terrible cold on the last day of the second trip and brought it home to share with my family. My husband and I are still coughing - it is a month later for me! - but my kids got over it really quickly. That was a nice stark reminder that we're aging and so are our immune systems. 

The business trips were good, but as much as I like to travel, I'd be happy not to have any more trips for quite awhile. Business travel is its own class of travel and now that my kids are old enough to let me read uninterrupted at home, the business trip has very little to offer me. (I used to enjoy getting to snuggle into bed and just read in the evening - a rare treat back when my kids were little.)

Work continues to be intense, but I am slowly getting a handle on things and am cautiously optimistic that by the time it is beach weather here I will actually be able to deliver on my promise to take more half days to take Petunia to the beach.

Now that I only cough occasionally and not constantly, I am trying to get back into my exercise routine. So I think I'll sign off and go out for my Sunday morning run/walk. It is a glorious day here. I hope you are all keeping well!

Hello 2023

Happy New Year! 

I have had such a bad run of success with New Year's resolutions/intentions/goals that I decided to try something different this year. I wrote a list of all the things I'd like to improve upon. I did this quickly, without thinking too much about it. I figured this would get me the list of things that are most on my mind. Then I looked at the list to see if there were any themes. And there were - three themes emerged:

- Own my age

- Make healthier habits

- Enjoy life more

My plan is to try to let these three themes guide my decisions in 2023. Petunia wanted a specific "wellness journal" for Christmas. My sister and I got our wires crossed and both bought it for her. I was too lazy to take the one I bought back, so I gave Petunia the cash and kept the journal for myself. It is not at all what I'd have picked if I went shopping for such a thing, but it will do. I needed something like it to track my diet and sleep as I try to identify possible triggers for the supraventricular tachycardia episodes and so I will use it for that and also for setting monthly goals for my three themes. We'll see if that helps me actually do the things I want to do this year!

What do the themes mean? Well, owning my age is the category that encompasses things on my list like "find a new 'uniform' now that my old one isn't so flattering anymore" (my "uniform" is my go to easy type of outfit - I had one for casual and one for work. Both need updating.) Making healthier habits is probably self-explanatory. It includes things like "do something active for at least 10 minutes every day" (I feel so much better, physically and mentally, when I do this!) and "decrease my alcohol intake" (it crept up in the lockdown phase of the pandemic and I never did a post-pandemic reset - now is the time). Enjoy life more has things like my ever popular "take more walks on the beach" and "read more" - but also "actually do all the things on our family fun list" (our performance in 2022 was abysmal). 

We'll see how this system works. Maybe if I do well with it, I'll be shopping for a wellness journal of my own next December!

Goodbye 2022

I've written so infrequently here that I can't do the type of wrap up post I used to do, where I picked my favorite post from each month. I don't know if I'll ever get back to posting regularly. I enjoy writing but I am not sure what I want to write about here these days. Perhaps that will become clear in 2023. I just read through the few posts I did write this year and it was nice to review them, but more and more things need to be left out of my public writing because my kids are big and my career is changing... and so even writing sort of anonymously there are things I feel like I shouldn't share. Sometimes I think I should just get a journal, but I know from many past attempts that it would not get used much. 

Anyway, I felt moved today to look back at the year.

In January, Petunia got covid and we spent a week with windows open and masks on. She recovered uneventfully and none of the rest of us have had covid yet, as far as we know. I have to go on two work trips in January and I half expect that one of them will bring my covid-free streak to an end. However, when we started the school year in August with no mask mandate I was sure my kids would both get covid soon, and that hasn't happened. So what do I know? I'll wear my mask on the planes and hope or the best.

I also learned that the occasional weird heart incidents I had were supraventricular tachycardia. It is, in the words of my cardiologist, annoying, not life-threatening. I've had a few more incidents this year and am slowly getting to the place my cardiologist predicted I'd get to: more annoyed by the incidents than creeped out by the cure (an ablation). So far, I've just been trying to remember to carry metoprolol with me everywhere. However, it isn't an instant fix and I am not particularly good at the vagal maneuvers that will reset my heart without the metoprolol, so the annoyance factor is growing. Also, the metoprolol pill is just a little bit too big for me to swallow without water and so technically I should also carry water with me everywhere. 

The year was dominated by my career decisions, at least in my own head. I am glad to have the decision made, and am happy with how things have turned out... but still not 100% sure I did the right thing. Time will tell. Or at least, time will march on and the path I'm on now will continue and the alternative one I chose not to get on will drop away.

I turned 50 this year. I celebrated with my sister and my closest friends in Big Bear. It was lovely. I do not find it bad to be 50, but yesterday I came across this McSweeney's article about wearing tunics and had a good laugh. I had just been thinking that perhaps it is time for me to start shopping at Chico's. "How old am I? I'm tunic years old."

I was thinking of starting to shop at Chico's because I've failed to lose the weight I put on in the lockdown year and although I have plans for a healthier 2023 (of course - every new year I plan to adopt healthier habits, and sometimes it works) I doubt I'll slim down enough to avoid the need to shift my style to the tunic years. I'm surprisingly OK with that, too. 

I've been thinking about how little we actually know about what a woman's weight should do throughout her life. Everyone struggles with weight gain around menopause and maybe there's actually a reason for that. Maybe we're putting on weight to get us more healthily through our older years. Of course, my fondness for cookies, ice cream, and beer (not necessarily all at once) exacerbates any natural trend and so while I wish for better data on what normal actually is for women as we age I will also make my annual attempt to develop healthier habits. 

This year, I bought a rowing machine and for awhile I had a good 2-3 times per week habit going. That got disrupted, but I still row at least once most weeks and I still like the machine. 

Last night, we did the "family wii tournament" that Petunia had put on our family fun list for the year, and while I sucked at Mario Cart and broke a wine glass playing tennis (our living room is just not big enough for a four person game!) I had fun with the dance game. Petunia said I should do that instead of rowing, and I told her that I like rowing but that maybe she and I could have weekly dance tournaments, too.

This year saw a surprising amount of travel for me. In February, we spent the long President's Day weekend at an AirBnB in Desert Hot Springs. There was the birthday trip to Big Bear and also a family vacation to New Zealand - our first time seeing my in-laws since December of 2018. In October, I flew to the UK for a work event and then on to Berlin for a conference. It had been a long time since I'd done any serious travel on my own and it was good for me to have to find my way around London and Berlin without my husband's freakily good spatial sense to rely on. I had a good time. In early November, I had a very short visit to NYC for an interview (one of the job options I ended up not taking) and then Mr. Snarky and I had a weekend in LA for a concert. I jokingly called that short stretch of time my great cities of the world tour.

We celebrated Thanksgiving in Arizona with my family. We no longer all fit comfortably in my parents' house, so we rented an AirBnB nearby. I enjoyed being able to walk around downtown Mesa - it has changed a lot since I lived there, and is actually now a place I could encourage people to visit. If you ever find yourself in downtown Mesa, be sure to get empanadas and also check out the new fry bread place nearby.

My parents came here for Christmas. It was wonderful having them here. I took the week between Christmas and New Year's off and powered through a list of some of the things that have been sitting undone most of the year. My desk is now clean and we finally took the last of the kids' Lego (and 6 bags of other things) to the thrift store.

It was a pretty good year, all things considered. I am hoping for 2023 to involve less time thinking about my career directions and more time just enjoying the damn good life I have. I hope you all have a happy, healthy new year, too!

Decisions

I finally made my job decision. After much agonizing, I decided to take the promotion at my current company. It was a really hard decision, and I don't think I'll ever really be certain it was the best decision, but it was the one that felt most right. I decided it gave me the most chance for growth and also for feeling like I have true ownership of something. 

The interviewing and deciding process was a weird experience. I realized that the last time I'd had to really choose between career options like this was when I took my first job out of graduate school. All my previous moves had either been forced by layoffs or driven by a really strong need to change due to something outside work. This was purely a job/career driven thing and it turns out that made me really uncomfortable. That's something for me to think about! 

Anyway, the decision is made and I'm settling into my new role. 

One downside of this decision is that I don't get to take a few weeks off between jobs. I was going to use it to take care of some things around the house. Instead, I will only have a little over a week that I can take off around Christmas. Hopefully, that will be enough time to get some of the long-standing items off my to do list and also have some true downtime.

Another decision I've made is to move away from using Twitter. It is sad, because there was a time when I learned a lot from Twitter. I will miss the way it would show me new things to think and learn about and how it helped me find smart people to learn from. But that Twitter has been fading for awhile now, and the latest events there have made scrolling my timeline feel unpleasant. So I'm pulling back and I think I'll eventually delete the app from my phone and then lock and ignore my accounts.

Before I stop using it altogether, I need to develop new habits for finding and reading news and other things of interest to me. I've been trying out Post, and I think it has promise but it is not a full replacement yet (I'm there under my real name - if you are on Post and want to find me and cannot, send me an email and I'll send you the account name). I've considered reviving my Tungsten Hippo tumblr account and seeing if that has some of what I miss about the old Twitter. But I'm also going to be consciously less online. I'd like to write more longer things, here and elsewhere. I'd like to read more books and magazines. And I suspect spending less time online will also help with the "clear some long-standing items off my to-do list" goal.

I actually have more things I'd like to say about the "read more books" goal - but I have publishing royalties to pay, chores to do, and a school career week presentation to prepare and show to Petunia so that she can confirm I will not embarrass her terribly... so I'd best get to those things. I won't be tweeting out blog post links after this one, so if you want to make sure you don't miss my occasional ramblings here, I'd recommend setting up an RSS reader, just like we all used to do back in the pre-Twitter days! I use Feedly and like it, but I'm sure there are other options.

Almost Thanksgiving Thoughts

It has been awhile! I, like many people on Twitter, have been watching Twitter the company self-destruct. Or, more accurately, be destroyed by their new CEO. I said on Twitter that the place to find me when it goes belly up is here, because I may actually just pull back from social media altogether. There are things I'll miss and things I won't miss and I'm not in the right headspace to go set up someplace else right now. Everyone seems to be heading to Mastodon but I may not go anywhere. We'll see.

I don't much care if Musk destroys Twitter, but if his ego and over-reach also manages to take out Tesla I'll be pretty mad. Not so much for me - we can buy a new car if we need to - but for the fact that Tesla still has the best charging infrastructure and that's what we need to make the electric transition. People who think than range doesn't matter need to drive from San Diego to Phoenix sometime and see what range actually means! Mr. Snarky is much more sanguine and figures that if Musk's chaos reaches Tesla, their board will replace him or they will get bought. He's probably right. I don't have the mental space to give much thought to that right now, either.

Almost all of my mental space is being consumed by a career decision I need to make. Everyone who matters knows this is going on (even my boss and my boss's boss and my boss's boss's boss... long story how that happened but it involves beer) and so I decided I can write a little more about it here.

So, as I mentioned in the last post (several months ago)... I stopped saying "no" when people reached out to me about other opportunities and I ended up with 4 different possibilities. I got pretty far with all of them - one went away after a final interview and I can't disagree with their decision not to proceed based on where my head is at right now. Another I decided wasn't a fit, even though a few years ago I would have jumped at it. I am left with two really good options and (because of the aforementioned long story involving beer) a really strong counteroffer from my current employer.

Reader, I have no idea what I'm going to do.

Like NONE. Ask me on a different day - hell, ask me in a different hour - and I have a different front runner.

All three options in front of me are good. The offers all involve a significant pay raise and substantial equity. The potential equity upside on all of them is good and on one of them is sort of mind-blowingly huge (that one is also the least likely to pay out, of course). 

This is an amazing situation to be in and I don't for a minute take it for granted. I've been out of work with no offers before and this is by far a better situation. I am so fortunate and am already charity shopping to figure out where the guilt check goes once this is all sorted out.

Still. I have no idea which offer I will take and that is stressing me out.

I have asked for and received a little extra time to make this decision from all three parties. They all know I have other offers because once the aforementioned situation with the beer put me into a radical transparency situation with my current company's senior leadership I figured I might as well extend the same courtesy to everyone. Everyone has been gracious and understanding and I actually truly believe they all wish me the best no matter what I decide.

(Back to that WOW. I AM LUCKY feeling)

Sooo... anyhow, that's what I've been up to and why I can't get my head around finding a new home on social media or much of anything else right now.

Also, the great bra search continues and I have determined I was wrong about what size I thought I was and if I get stupidly rich from any of these options in front of me maybe I should start a bra company. Seems a better way to blow a fortune than sinking a social media company because my feelings were hurt, but then I'm no tech genius so what do I know?

I hope you are all well and I'll let you know how it all turns out in the same oblique minimal details way I've written this post!