Happy New Year! I just looked back on my few posts in 2023 and well... it was a year.  It wasn't a bad year, really, but it wasn't one where I can look back and think "yeah, I really got what I wanted out of that." Some great things happened, but I never really felt like I was in control of things in 2023. Rather, things controlled me. I let work eat my life far more than I would like. We got super busy with the kids' activities and I never really found a rhythm to things. We did exactly one thing off of our family fun list, so last night we decided to just roll the list over to this year ..read more

Friday evening, Petunia told me one of her best friends at school had tested positive for COVID. Her friend had a scratchy throat so had worn a mask to school, but went home early and by evening tested positive. I opened more windows, turned our main air filter up a notch, and moved our little air filter into Petunia's room. We tested Petunia the next morning - negative. But her luck did not hold. By Sunday evening her throat was scratchy and Monday morning she tested positive. She went into her room and the rest of us nervously hoped for the best. It had been about a year since our last boost ..read more

We're recently returned from our big summer vacation - it was a bit of a friends and family tour in that we saw friends or family at every stop. But it was also a really great vacation to wonderful places (Rarotonga and Australia) so I'll try to write something about it over on Adjusted Latitudes soon. We came back to some busy weeks at work and with Petunia's summer activities, and since we once again took our summer vacation to places where it is winter (albeit some of the places have pretty mild winters!) I want to take advantage of the San Diego summer now that we're home. Which is a long ..read more

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 sho ..read more

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 "wel ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ei ..read more

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 ..read more

 Happy Labor Day! It is a much needed long weekend for me. My work situation is still muddled. Back when I was actively angry about how things had gone at my current company, I stopped saying "no" automatically to people who contacted me on LinkedIn. That didn't lead to much right away, but I think word has gotten out in the industry that things are unsettled at my company, because in the last month or so I have some several much higher quality contacts and now I've got three potential different options to explore. I am trying to decide what to do about those.  I have had a couple of ..read more

 So, it has been awhile, eh? Work continues to eat up more of my life than it should. I am doing some stuff I really like but it is clear that the core thing I bring to this role is my ability to navigate patiently through various roadblocks and Get Stuff Done and I am not sure what I think about that. Part of me thinks I should just lean into that since it is the thing I'm good at that differentiates me from other people. But part of me thinks that is just a recipe for always being the person behind the scenes who gets all of the headaches and very little of the credit. In other work new ..read more