The View From Here

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This is nowhere near a bad thing to look at while you eat your breakfast.

Posted in Up and Away | 4 Comments

5 Degrees

You know, the grass is green, the pansies and primroses are blooming, the croci are coming up, I saw blooming azaleas andapparently the cherry treeswill start their show in just a few weeks.

You feel badly complaining about anything, you do.

But 5 degrees, when it’s damp and drizzly is still cold enough to make you wish you had a warmer jacket.

Posted in It's a Wonderful Day in the Neighbourhood | 8 Comments

This Important Safety Briefing

The thing with air commuting is that I spend a lot of time listening to air safety briefings. Now, if I can’t get a direct flight and must connect through Vancouver, I will listen to the same briefing 2 times.

In less than 2 hours.

In 2 official languages.

At an average of 10 minutes a go, this means that I will lose 40 minutes a week to instructions on what happens if the plane crashes.

You might nod and tell me that this is good, that we should be conscious of safety. You might say that repeated instruction means that I am more likely to survive a crash. You might, if you were that sort of a person, suggest that this is the best 40 minutes of my week.

I dearly hope you are not.

Consider this – flying is, conservatively estimated, over a thousand times safer than driving. If you drive in a very major metropolitan area, you will die a great deal more often.

Now, if we really are so namby-pamby about safety, tell me, why on earth do I not hear a safety briefing when I get in my car to drive it to the airport? Indeed, while I was discussing ranting about this to Mr. Spit, some moron in a jacked up pick up truck cut into our lane and very nearly killed us both.

Yet, no one would stand it if we had to listen to a safety briefing on the finer points of signaling and braking and going the speed limit every time we sat in the driver’s seat. No one would stand it, although we actually drive the car, and I assure you, I don’t drive the airplane.

Consider also this salient little fact. As near as I can tell, from an exhaustive 10 minutes poking around the internet, if you are in a plane crash, you are in one of two potential scenarios.

Either the pilot and the air traffic control tower will figure out a way to bring tons of screaming steel to a stop on a handy horizontal surface, or they will not. Oh, sure, in the case of the landing, you may not actually be able to use the plane again, and the 50 year old business man in the seat next to you, who really needs to lay off the beer and hot wings may have his heart attack a few years sooner, but you aren’t actually going to die. Indeed, it’s not likely you are going to be mortally wounded.

If they cannot figure out how to bridge the gap between air and ground in a sensible manner, you will die. No, really, I mean that. There actually is no middle ground. Either the plane lands and people get off it more or less in one piece, or they don’t get off it at all. You don’t hear of a situation where the people who listened to the in flight safety briefing and read the stupid little card survive, and the rest of us dolts who were contemplating what we could buy from the in flight liquor options and whether or not we were getting cookies or pretzels, died.

Interestingly, from both reading and from Mr. Spit (who did actual things with actual fighter planes when he was in the actual air force) I have gleaned a single safety tip that might actually make a difference. Not particularly between living and dying, because I’ve established that has nothing to do with you anyway, but from what makes  the difference between walking off the plane, wading through the stuff  they spray on the runway and having to be wheeled off with two broken legs.

Wear your seat  belt when you are sitting down. Stay seated most of the flight.

So, I vote that we skip the in flight safety briefing and the stupid card. You can use that 10 minutes to settle my mind about whether or not the airline has run out of little bottles of gin on this flight and the eternal question about pretzels or cookies. You could replace the stupid card with a magazine that I might actually want to read.

And you wouldn’t have made me any less safe.

Posted in Up and Away | 9 Comments

Better

It was hard to leave my small little corner of the world. It was hard to chuck it all in, and go from being the client to being the consultant. It’s going to be hard for a while yet.

I’ve had this thought though.

At 33 years of age I am finally internalizing what people have said to me for years – that starting a new job is hard and stressful.

This – all of it – is stressful.

Now, in some ways at least, it’s a good kind of stressful. I’m learning new things, doing new things. It’s enough of a stretch that it’s just outside of my comfort level, and I believe, at least when I’m not in the middle of the stress, that this is a good thing.

It is still stressful. The Holmes and Rahe Stress Index indicates that this is more stressful than the death of a close friend, more stressful than getting a mortgage or a change in your financial state.

When we add in the stress of changing living locations – at least 4 days a week, we get to a stress level that’s up there with personal illness or injury.

I tend to be very hard on myself. Maybe you have noticed. I tend to expect far more of myself than others do, I tend to think that I must be perfect, all the time.

I suppose in this – the acknowledgement that this week has been very hard – it is enough that I have made it through.

And that, it seems to me, is a better way of living.

Posted in Learning Life | 3 Comments

The Comfort of a Friendly Face

Invariably, when I paint a room, I pick the colour, I take it home, I tape it to the wall. I put on the first coat, I like it.

Then I paint the entire room. At some point, when I have removed the tape for masking and I’m about to move everything back into the room, I walk in, flip on the light and I hate it.

I look at it and I think “what on earth was I thinking?” I suddenly hate everything about it. It’s too dark, too bright, too saturated, too everything. I am convinced that I have made the stupidest mistake in the world.

Mr. Spit, having seen this phenomenon for 7 years now, refuses to let me change anything. He tells me to live with it for a bit, to see if I start liking it again.

I have, for the record, never continued to hate the paint colour. After about 3 days, I start liking it again. There’s something about a room bare of furniture that just makes it too intense. You start to put familiar things in again and the newness of it is diluted. There are touch points you knew.

Jen, who does not blog, emailed me about a week and a half ago, and asked me if I wanted to meet for dinner this week, my first week in Victoria.

I was thrilled. Rather like the paint, I find by day 3 in a new job, which is 72 hours of trying to find a bathroom and not get lost and remember 40 new names and figure out what my piece of the world is – I find by day 3 I am completely overwhelmed and wondering if I have made the biggest mistake in the entire universe.

Day 3 was obviously yesterday.

And yesterday, as I was looking around and wondering and overwhelmed and homesick and lonely and wondering if I would ever fit in (because let’s be honest, those terrible feelings of first day at a new school are exactly the same as the terrible feelings of new job), I kept telling myself.

Dinner with Jen tonight. There will be a friendly face. Even if you have never met her and don’t know what she looks like, you have corresponded and she’s left comments and she is a friendly face.

At 6:30 last night, she was a very friendly face indeed.

So, I just wanted to say – thank you Jen.

The company was wonderful, the food was great and the comfort was much appreciated.

Posted in Friendship | 6 Comments

Would that I could

I’m trying to be interesting, I swear to you.

It’s just . . .

Well, I don’t have much interesting to say.

I met the client yesterday.

I like them.

I have most of the functionality I should have to work.

My new lap top seems to heat up, alarmingly.

Very alarmingly.

I found a shoe store in my walking around last night.

I didn’t buy anything.

Yep, that’s about it.

What’s new in your life?

Posted in Salmagundi: A collection of various things | 8 Comments

All My Love

Dear Mr. Spit:

I walked down the street last night, down to the inner harbor, looking for a place to eat. Mostly, after being upright for more than 12 hours, flying a province away, coping with a lap top that seems to despise me, well, mostly I just wanted you.

You were right, I love it here. It’s beautiful and lovely. There’s something magical about walking past places we’ve been together. Even if you aren’t here, it’s a bit less lonely.

Never mind being my valentine, I’m so very glad that you are mine, all the time.

I love you.

Posted in Mr. Spit | 3 Comments

Monday Miscellany

The sitting in the departure lounge edition.

  • The work fish I got from my old job died on Friday. That’s ironic.
  • I hate tourist travelers in airports already.
  • I hope that my work bag has my work bottle of Tylenol.
  • every road warrior blog for men I read said to never check luggage. Not a single one for women made that suggestion
  • I feel like I should tell you I have only packed 2 pairs of shoes.
  • I’m going to miss Mr. Spit like crazy!
  • Posted in Salmagundi: A collection of various things | 9 Comments

    The Moon Illusion

    I went out on to my front porch last night and I saw the almost full moon. It was just rising and I looked at it out over the field, behind the elm trees that are almost 60 years old.

    I started my working life 11 years ago, as a receptionist at an oil engineering company. I was a temp, the lowest possible person on the ladder. From there I was an admin assistant, an EA, and then, 6 years ago, I took a job as a policy analyst.

    It was a big leap, you know. I went from doing some policy work, but also being the person who booked meetings and travel, who brought the coffee into meetings, who took minutes. I went from there into meeting rooms where I was running the meeting, where I was determining what went into policy and what didn’t. I negotiated with an editor who didn’t understand gerunds or semi-colons. Who understood only passive voice because MS Word told her about it.

    From there, I went to be a business analyst, but in title only. I really felt like a fraud, I had no training. Then I started to make decisions, to work harder, to learn things. I found myself teaching, managing staff. There were the weeks that I had only 6 hours a night to sleep, and I woke up every night at 4 am, it would take me an hour to get back to sleep.

    Then I didn’t have a job, and then I found another. For a while it looked like everything had been snatched away, I had given it my all and been found wanting. I found another job, and there was the night at 1 am that I had the VP on my left shoulder and the CEO on my right, while I tried to look intelligent as I sorted data. They were kind to me.

    Today, I will leave that company, the one who has taught me so much. On Monday, I will get on a plane at six in the morning, and I will fly to BC, and I will introduce myself as the new management consultant.

    It doesn’t seem real, sometimes. Sometimes I still think I’m that receptionist from a decade ago.

    I’m not ashamed of it, but I am overly prone to think that it was just dumb luck. I am overly prone to thinking I don’t know very much, that I don’t deserve this.

    And yet.

    The thing with the moon, where I started this – it’s called the moon illusion. It’s only because we see the moon in reference to objects that our brain knows the size of, that we understand the true size of the moon.

    Oh, there has been luck. There has been luck and kind people, people who were willing to teach me, willing to let me make mistakes. I’ve been allowed to do things for this company, and I’m thankful.

    I didn’t know much back when I was a receptionist, and that was the only job I was qualified for. I didn’t know much when they made me the EA, and then when I took over project control duties because I had some extra time. I didn’t know much when I became a policy analyst, and then when I took over as a Business Analyst.

    I didn’t know much when I started managing people. I didn’t know much when I started again as a Business Analyst in a new team. There are lots of things I don’t know, still.

    So, I head into Monday, and I think “I don’t know if I know enough”.

    I realized, watching the moon. The moon illusion and these fears, they are a lot alike. I may not know much, although I probably know more than I give myself credit for.

    I don’t know much, but that’s ok. That’s nothing new, not really. I don’t know much, but I’ll learn.

    That’s enough to know, at least for now.

    Posted in Flying with Warthog Air | 5 Comments

    My Friend

    As Promised.

    When I took the job, I had this thought.

    You see, at noon today a thing is happening. It is the same thing that has happened for almost 5 years, and I didn’t want it to pass unremarked.

    At 5 minutes to noon, Kuri and I left our desks, at 2 different companies, in 2 different office towers, and we walked to a coffee shop. Sometimes we catch up to each other, and sometimes we meet each other there.

    We order more or less the same thing, and we sit in the same chairs. The shop has changed, indeed we have gone to 3 different coffee shops over the years, but the the idea, well it hasn’t changed.

    We stop what we are doing and we grab our knitting, and twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday, we meet for lunch and we knit.

    We knit, in our suits. We talk. Sometimes about politics, sometimes about life. We have met through the storms of job changes, the failure of a relationship, the death of a child, struggles and sorrows, joys and celebrations.

    We meet.

    And I didn’t want it to pass unremarked. It is a wholly remarkable thing, this idea of meeting twice a week for lunch and knitting. In a world that is transient and changing and so often illusory, we have managed a remarkable thing.

    And I wanted to say this – I don’t quite have the words, but I wanted to say thank you. For five years of listening and conversation and forcing me to think about things a little differently. For asking good questions and for talking about serious things.

    Thank you for being such a very good friend.

     

    Posted in Friendship | 7 Comments