smile.

Sooo, although my new site is entirely bare bones (I haven't even changed the tag line under my blog title), I am primarily posting over there now. If you'd like the link just email me or leave a comment. I am determined that this new site shall be my permanent home. No more blog hopping every year. At some point I'm even going to import all my archives from the past five years and then pretend like that's where I've always been. That will be very exciting!

Tonight for dinner we had corn on the cob, strawberries and homemade sausage. Let me tell you, I never dreamed that I would become a purveyor of homemade sausage, but then I discovered that homemade sausage consists of nothing more than ground pork and spices/flavorings, and that ground pork is really cheap. Voila! Homemade sausage a la me. And let me tell you, it was quite tasty, definitely more tasty than the stuff you buy in the store (if you buy the stuff in the store) and infinitely more customizable. My boys liked it more than I expected, which is at all. The five year old deigned to eat half a patty and the two year old ate (shockingly) a whole one. The two year old also consented to nibble on my corn (after which he immediately expressed his displeasure) so really, it was quite the dangerous safari adventure as far as his eating was concerned. Now the two year old and I are snacking on the last of this weekend's oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (the five year old, after an afternoon swimming lesson and then an hour or so of family swim, is passed out on his bed).

I've posted a couple (non-password protected) entries to my new blog but I haven't given out the link to anyone yet. At first it was because I wanted to give out the password at the same time but couldn't come up with a clever password, and then it was because I decided that I really should make use of the domain I registered right before I learned that wordpress no longer requires you to host your own site, and so I didn't want to give out the url if it's only going to change once I get around to moving stuff to the new domain. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that you're guaranteed to lose readers every time you move your blog, even readers who actually really like reading your blog. My first blog had by far the most readers I've ever had, and I lost many of them when I moved, then more when I moved again, and now I am lucky if there are ten of you out there [stops to count] maybe fifteen. And really, I definitely do not care how many people are reading my blog, it's just that I like all of you and I want to make it as painless as possible for you all to keep reading so that we can keep being bloggy friends.

In other news, my life plods on. I'm feeling pretty tired and overwhelmed lately but no differently than how I always feel tired and overwhelmed. I am getting pretty used to operating in this state, used to it enough that I can find ways to make the best of it. It's been a long time since I made dinner that consisted of more than just sandwiches so I'm happy that I made dinner tonight. I took the boys swimming last weekend and this weekend and I feel happy about that. And this Thursday I'm taking the day off so that the boys and I can have a special day that will consist of a trip through my city's downtown subterranean bus tunnel, a trip to the art museum (first Thursday of the month is free and apparently they have a cool kiddie play area), playtime in the fountain in front of City Hall, gelato, and then maybe a trip to a toy store near where I work. Despite the fact that I feel overwhelmed and so very tired, I can still manage to keep my shit together enough to not only keep my household functioning at least at a basic level, but I can even manage to go above and beyond when it comes to my boys. Hopefully a time will come when I can stretch myself just enough to go above and beyond when it comes to me too. But hey, I'm tough, I can take a little neglect.

I feel compelled to be productive today but pretty thoroughly incapable of carrying it out. I did make blueberry pancakes for breakfast this morning, so that's something. That's one thing I love about summer. I made two batches of raspberry muffins this past week, blueberry pancakes this morning, and strawberry freezer jam after this afternoon's trip to the farmer's market. My mom used to make freezer jam every year and I liked the idea, the pioneer (plus freezers) feel of it, so once I was on my own, I started making it too. However, one or two people can only eat so much jam. It wasn't until I had two peanut butter and jam loving children that I really appreciated why one might want stacks of freezer jam cluttering up the freezer. And indeed, once I buy another lemon, I'll make another batch of raspberry jam too. Thank goodness freezer jam requires almost no effort.

I set myself up a wordpress blog last night and stayed up late playing with it. I had no idea that you don't have to host your own wordpress blog anymore so that was a pleasant surprise. No bother with registering a domain and finding a webhost. Once I manage to get some content up I'll let you know. Although I don't plan to keep the blog so carefully anonymous (that's what the password protected posts will be for), I think I might still have people specifically request the url rather than just posting it so that I know who's reading, at least in the beginning.

Five years and five blogs.

My two year old talks so much. I have no idea at what level he should be speaking (and frankly, I don't care, he's speaking a hell of a lot more than his brother was at this age, and that's enough for me) but he uses tons and tons of sentences and is really good at communicating what he wants and needs and how he feels. One thing I adore in particular (which does not at all relate to what he wants, needs, or feels) is how he doesn't call me "Mama" but instead calls me "Mom Mom." Last night, after a long and tiring day on a number of fronts, when I was tiredly nursing him down and trying not to express my impatience with his constant desire to jump up and play instead of peacefully falling asleep, he stopped nursing, flung himself onto his back and said, "Mom Mom, I yuv you," for the very first time.

Everybody say it with me: Awwwwwww!

I adore my little two year old. He is pure sweetness and joy with only a hint of mischievousness. Okay...maybe more than a hint, but even in the midst of feeling frustrated when he gleefully kicks and kicks while I try to put pants on him or when he runs away in the midst of a diaper change, I still see the sweetness and joy. He's just happy, that's all.

I'm finding that, at least when it comes to my boys, two year olds are infinitely easier than five year olds, but my five year old brings his own sweet adorableness. One thing I want to be sure to write down lest I forget as the years pass is his love of the word "lobby." A while back we read Beverly Cleary's The Mouse and the Motorcycle, which takes place in a hotel. I think this might have been the first time my son heard the word lobby and when I read it he interrupted me and said, incredulously, "The lobby?!?" And then burst out laughing. He thinks it is the funniest word he has ever heard and any utterance of it immediately reduces him to fits of giggles. Even now, months later, when the word casually comes up in some random context, he stops everything and shouts, "the lobby!!!" and dies laughing. It is so adorably funny to watch him be so greatly amused by something that is amusing just to his own little individual self. I loving seeing that evidence of his personality every time it happens.

Today is the kind of day when I wish I could password protect posts. I think I will have to pursue the ability to do that because I've been thinking of all the things I could write about if I felt freer to write, and there are a lot. And I think it would be very useful for me to get my shit out there because if nothing else, writing helps me process and think things through, and my blog is the only place I write.

Today I am merely tired, so that's making everything seem much more terrible and dramatic than it really is, but it still feels that way right now and bedtime is a ways away yet.

I need to get more sleep.

I've finally decided what I want to be when I grow up (aside from a grown up, of course) and I feel pretty excited to finally have a path. Ever since I started on this new techie journey I've been so certain that it's right for me but less clear about where I should go, what I should aim for. I knew pretty clearly what I could expect in my old path (nonprofit management/administration) but this new path walks me through a foreign land and the local customs are unfamiliar and somewhat unwelcoming. I keep asking people what I should do, what jobs I should look for, what knowledge I should obtain, whether I need to go back to school, but their answers are always, "Well, it really depends on what you want to ultimately do," and that's not the answer I'm looking for.

Last night I took the plunge and registered myself for a certificate program offered by my local big university. It's "Web Development Technologies" or something like that and while I usually shy away from the whole idea of a flimsy, flakey little certificate (as opposed to a big, heavy, solid, something-to-stub-your-toe-on degree) I feel like the fact that it's offered by my well-reputed university, in an area for which my university is particularly well-reputed, is a good sign. Plus, I need some help. Yesterday at work my boss sent an email suggesting a solution to a programming problem we're facing. He asked for my feedback and I not only had absolutely nothing to offer, I didn't even understand the functions of the code well enough to fully understand the problem. This certificate program will give me a good foundation in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL and PHP and, even more importantly, how they all fit together. Some of it will definitely be review (although the SQL will be mySQL instead of PostgreSQL (what I use now) so at least that's something) but I figure that even if I already know a good number of HTML tags and a tiny drop of CSS and a big bunch of SQL and a cup and a half of PHP, this program will fill in the gaps and make the connections that keep me pulling up short at work these days. I'm excited and hopeful (although I can't deny that part of my excitement is having an excuse to buy books).

When I was walking back to work after my lunch break I was thinking about a coworker's response when I shared my new educational pursuit. I could tell she wanted to be supportive but that she thought it was unnecessary to do something like this when I should learn all of this in the course of my job (apparently she missed the fact that I'm not actually learning in the course of my job...or at least not much faster than at a glacial pace). I was mulling over the certificate program and whether I thought it would be a good addition to my resume and was picturing it on my resume except I couldn't remember the title and could only remember something like "web developer" and then it sort of hit me that, DUH, this is what I want to do when I grow up! I want to be a web developer. I want to design databases and write PHP (and more) to build websites. I want to do the job I have now, except more so (and better). For some reason I've been thinking that I could either go the route of becoming a database administrator or I could go the route of becoming a programmer, and it made me sad that I couldn't have both because I really love both. But duh, this *is* both.

Always before when I considered web-related work (yes, I've considered it, along with pretty much every other career out there), it was web design and making things pretty. I shied away from back-end development because it seemed so dry, so absolutely lacking in artistic merit. Of course, I see it differently now. Yes, still not much artistic merit I suppose, but oh so creative! And oh so well paid rewarding! I look forward to walking this path.

When I joined my gym I got a free session with a personal trainer. The session was kind of annoying because he was kind of condescending ("Wow, you're doing so great we might just have to hire you on a staff and give you a t-shirt like mine! Har har har!!") but I did learn a couple of things about how to work out more effectively and about nutrition. This came at the same time I happened to be reading a book about nutrition, or rather a book about "intuitive eating," the notion that society has beaten out of us our natural instincts around food and if we start actually listening to our bodies instead of following the latest supposed health craze, we will eat exactly what our bodies need and be healthier as a result. I'm not necessarily so concerned about heating "healthier" per se, but I am interested in training myself to pay attention to the cues of my body instead of whatever random food rules/neuroses I've internalized from our culture at large and so the book provided interesting fodder.

Both the nutrition-related personal training and the intuitive eating information suggested that the best way to eat during the day is to essentially eat all the time. Condescending Personal Trainer said six times a day ("But no carbs at night and nothing after dinner and a huge breakfast in the morning and [many other rules I almost immediately tuned out]") and the intuitive eating book said whenever I get hungry (the key, of course, being to pay careful attention so that I recognize that onset of hunger, rather than waiting until I am a starved wild animal when my eating becomes less...discriminating).

So for the past few weeks I've been giving it a try (heavier on the intuitive eating than on the personal training) and it's been interesting. I eat breakfast in the morning whether I'm hungry or not but after that I wait until my body cues me. I find that I'm constantly thinking about whether or not I'm hungry, but I suppose that's to be expected because I'm trying to figure it out after so long of trying to ignore it and argue with it. In general, my body seems to cue me to eat about every two hours (sometimes more or less depending on what I eat), and in response I eat some kind of snack (for example, a few of today's snacks included yogurt and a raspberry muffin, cherries and string cheese and pretzels, a Hot Pocket and sugar snap peas). After I eat I check to see if I'm still hungry and eat a little more if I am...although usually I'm not. Sometimes I want to snack when I'm not hungry and it's very interesting to check in with myself, recognize that I'm not actually hungry, and try to figure out why I want to eat. Usually, I'm just bored but sometimes there's something tasty in my kitchen (like a pound of Rainier cherries) and I want a bite (or two...or three). If I want to, I'll eat anyway, but when I want to eat out of boredom I usually try to find something else to do instead (because eating is not going to make me less bored), and when I want to eat because there's something enticingly tasty to be eaten, it's nice to be able to appreciate that, to know that I am eating for the sheer pleasure of the sweet firm ripeness of Rainier cherries instead of just to fill my mouth.

Just to clarify, this is not any sort of diet. I eat when I want and I eat what I want. The only difference is that I pay attention to what my body is telling me, how I feel before and after I eat and why I feel like eating. The results, though, have been pretty amazing. Until I started this experiment, I never realized the pattern of my day. I'd skip breakfast, be starving by 11am, force myself to wait until 1pm, wolf down a huge lunch, be sleepy and sluggish all afternoon, get hungry just before leaving work, be starving by the time I got home with the boys, wolf down anything in reaching distance while fixing the boys dinner and then continue snacking through the evening. Now that I'm eating all the time, my days are so even and I feel so much more productive. I never realized how distracting it was to feel so hungry during the day and so tired in the afternoon. It's also a lot easier to make better choices about food. Since I have to plan in advance to make sure I have enough food to last the day, I have the opportunity to choose a tasty and wholesome range of food instead of grasping at whatever's closest. And since I eat as soon as I notice that I'm hungry instead of when I'm starving, I'm happy to eat a reasonable portion instead of feeling like I need to desperately scarf down everything in sight.

I have no idea if it's related, but I've also been in a better mood and felt like I had more energy since I started eating this way. And my usual PMS symptoms of a sweet tooth gone wild were completely gone this month, gone to the point that I was shocked to find myself bleeding this weekend because I entirely missed my week long binge.

Now that I've been doing this for a few weeks I've gotten into the mindset of trusting my body and it's so bizarre to me that I used to not trust it, that I used to think that my feelings of hunger were trying to work against me, trying to make me ever fatter, and that some random rule from sources unknown about when I should eat was taking precedence over what my body was telling me. It seems so silly that I would choose some random food commandments from a clearly eating disordered society over millions of years of evolution. And really, I thought I had pretty good politics around food and eating. But at first I still thought that if I allowed myself to eat whatever and whenever I wanted, I would never stop eating. And let me tell you, while I work to accept my (fat) body every day, I sure as hell don't want to be any fatter. But lo and behold, I actually feel like my relationship to my body is improving now that I'm listening to it and that my relationship with food is becoming healthy for maybe the first time in my life. I don't have to eat everything because I can truly have whatever I want, whenever I want it. I always thought I gave myself that permission, but really I didn't. Really, I still felt guilty about eating certain foods or certain amounts or at certain times of day or whatever. This change is pretty cool, I must say.

The thing that I hate about blogging these days is that I feel like I'm being watched. Ever since my boys' dad starting threatening to use the contents of various posts as justification for taking my boys away from me, I've felt pretty stifled. I don't know that he reads this blog and I'd like to naively think that he respects my wishes that he not, but given the veritable treasure trove of incriminating evidence he might imagine finding on my "anonymous" blog, I can't imagine he'd stay away. And this blog wouldn't be hard to find, especially if he was specifically looking.

He's not currently making threats. That ended months ago and although I am intensely wary of our current interactions, we are managing civil conversation (as long as we avoid everything but the most banal of topics). I still don't trust it though, and I certainly don't trust that anything I post on my blog, anything that could possibly reflect me in less than a saintly light of perfection, won't be twisted against me at some yet unnamed future date.

I really hate blogging like this. I start blogging about something, anything, and I start feeling more and more tense. I delete and rewrite and delete and rewrite and eventually I just stop writing because it feels too dangerous. What angle am I missing? What small detail am I overlooking that could lead to my downfall? I feel pressured to write only posts about my good examples of mothering or my good examples of [insert endless array of topic demonstrating that I am a mature, highly competent adult]. And of course, I really am a highly competent adult, but I always think of my blog as the place where I can let my hair down, snarls and gummy tangles and split ends and all.

I desperately want to blog about the difficulties of parenting. Right now my five year old is having a rough time and as a result we are all having a rough time. I am handling it as best I can and when I can step back and look at it objectively, I don't think I'm doing a bad job, maybe even a good job despite the fact that nothing I'm doing is working. But I really want to blog about it all and I can't. Because of course, if my five year old is having a hard time, it must be my fault, right? It must be evidence of my terrible, terrible parenting that my children aren't specimens of perfect emotional health, that their every moment isn't peaceful, serene, precocious wisdom. Of course, I am saying that facetiously, but I know for sure that's what their dad thinks. He's made it clear on many occasions that everything bad is my fault and everything good is good in spite of my poisonous contamination.

The hardest thing about parenting alone (or one of the hardest anyway) is not having anyone to help you have context, to help you see that other parents aren't perfect either, to back you up in the choices you make. I find myself constantly, constantly reading between the lines of all parenting tales I encounter to see whether I am the only one who [insert potentially questionable behavior here]. It's much harder, though, when you feel like someone else is watching too, waiting for you to slip up and reveal your ordinary, well-intentioned, imperfect horrendously abusive ways.

I don't know what to do about this. Do I create a super duper secret blog somewhere else and never reveal even the most vaguely identifying information? Do I just stop blogging and give up this form of expression that I've been doing almost every day for the past five years (almost exactly five)? I don't know. But that's why I blog less than I ever used to and why I never post about anything interesting. Just so you know.

My house smells so sweet. I never notice until days like today when I've been gone for a month day and I walk in the door to smell of my home that is comparably foreign compared to the smell of campfire and woodsmoke and hotdogs and grass and trees that has surrounded me until now.

In other words, I took my boys camping for the first time this weekend. We had very moderate ambitions, planning as we did to camp out in my dad's yard (in the woods), and I must say it was a success. Given the fact that it drizzled the entire day today, we opted to leave this evening instead of early tomorrow as planned (in order to get home in time for swimming lessons), figuring that it didn't make sense to spend another uncomfortable night in a tent just to leave first thing in the morning.

No trip is perfect, of course, but my boys had a blast (always most important), hanging out with my family, roasting marshmallows over a real campfire, running freely all over my dad's property, playing with the hose, riding (with my dad) on his riding lawn mower, and eating a diet of almost exclusively crap (barely supplemented by the fruit I brought from home). And, of course, my dad has cable, so there was some prying away from the fifty or so cartoon channels.

I can't believe we were only gone a day. Or a day and a half. Maybe a day and three quarters. Anyway, a short while. But camping, especially camping for the first time in probably ten years, is pretty damned tiring. Although camping at one's dad's house, where he took care of the fire, the wood for the fire, the food, the cooking and serving utensils, the outdoor furniture and eating area, and provided the on site bathroom (and backup beds should we need them), is a hell of a lot easier than "real" camping (and of course, by "real" camping I mean car camping, which is pretty non-real, but was a very, very regular part of my childhood summers, so that's as real as it gets for me). I thought that this would be a good way to try out camping, to see if it was something I could handle alone with my boys, but now that I can see the convenience and benefits of camping at my dad's, I kind of don't see a reason to do anything else, at least until my boys are, I don't know, adults maybe. If nothing else, there's no way in hell they could run and roam like they did if we'd been at a typical campground. I would have constantly worried about cars and strangers and river banks and sasquatches, etc. But instead, I got to sit by the fire and chat with my family while I watched them run and run, stopping occasionally to peer at bugs in the grass, excitedly point out berries in the woods (ah wild blackberries and thimbleberries, the fruits of my childhood summers), and playing any number of shouting laughing games that wafted over to us on the breeze.

And let me tell you, if I had had to manage that whole camping experience and deal with the fire and food and all the hasslesome little details, I would have been a hell of a lot bitchier than I already am. And my regular level of bitchy impatience is quite enough, thanks.

Right now I am exhausted after a five hour trip home that should have taken slightly over two (which was comparable to our trip there -- again, five hours instead of two...damned parades, delayed ferries, sports game traffic and car trouble) so at present I can only feel a bit melancholy about the trip and can only immediately recall the times I snapped at my boys for no really good reason and feel worried that maybe they didn't have a good time, but I think that tomorrow, once I'm reasonably rested and once I hear repeatedly from my five year old what a great time he had, I'll feel better. And maybe I'll post a photo or two -- don't worry, just the cute ones...and the ones that will impress you with our wilderness survival skills.

I shouldn't be blogging at the moment because I have a ton of work to do, but today at our team meeting our boss, the director of our department, announced that he's planning to leave at the end of the year. This is big news, he's been with our agency for quite a long time, and it's largely been his vision that has brought Information Services at our agency from pretty much nothing to the very cool set up we have today, almost exclusively using open source software and recycled computers, tracking massive amounts of data in our database software that we built ourselves. I work for a large social service agency (about 350 employees) and we have a pretty amazing tech setup. It feels a little scary that the person who put this all in place is leaving.

However, more immediate to my own selfish little frame of mind is the fact that he's leaving so soon! I fully admit to having designs on his job. It would have been a logical and reasonable next step for the person in my position. But I think that the possibility of my being able to take over his job in a mere six months is a little lofty, even for me. It did work out for me in the past, my loftiness. I mean, the person in the job I have now gave his notice when I had been in my first IS job for only a couple weeks, yet I still managed to get his job. But that was a stretch, and getting my boss' job would be a stretch, and I think stretch plus stretch equals ...I don't know, too much stretching.

When we got back from the meeting one of my coworkers exclaimed disappointment that the announcement came so soon because she thought I should take his job, and that made me feel a little encouraged. When I agreed (about the disappointment and my own interest in the job) she became even more enthusiastic, telling me that I should apply anyway. I don't know if I will. As I sit here I keep thinking that I could sit down and talk to my boss about it, ask him what I could learn in the next six months that would make me more qualified, and then take the chance, but I'm not sure. Too much stretching or whatever.

People who love me (or even who just like me, like my coworker) are going to encourage me to apply, knowing how something like this would make me happy, knowing how something like this would be such a coup for me. And really, I suppose there's no reason not to apply...except that they might well laugh me back to my cubicle...or at the very least laugh in secret to each other about my overblown estimation of myself. I remember when I applied for my current job and how sometimes I would feel like there was maybe a good change they'd hire me because of my extensive knowledge of our very unique and complicated data and how other times I'd feel like my knowledge paled in comparison to my lack of programming knowledge and that there was no chance in hell they'd hire me. That's how I feel right now, except way, way, way more on the lack side.

I'm a climber, I can't help it. I'm ambitious and I am always planning for the next step. I doubt I was in my current job for a day before I started thinking about where I'd go next and how that might work out. I really kind of expected that my boss would leave in a couple years and I'd step into his position. Or, after, say, four years in my current position, I'd move on to get a private sector techie job and see what it's like to make a lot of money for once (and, considering how very saturated this area is with well qualified techie folks, I'd likely consider moving away too, so that my qualifications might not seem so bottom of the techie barrel). But I preferred the first option, staying where I am, gaining in responsibility, doing work for an organization that's doing work I think is important.

For now it's all neither here nor there, I suppose. I think I will talk to my boss though...although I'm not sure what I'll say.