Memorial Day Weekend

My four-day weekend was a nice, long, sleep-filled heaven. It rained and rained and rained some more. Everything seems to have grown an awful lot over the weekend. I need to mow my lawn, I need to clean out my rain gutters, and I need to trim my hedges.

The only things of note that I did involved hiking. I did another loop on Cougar Mountain on Saturday. It was pouring and quite cold, but I was one of the only people on the mountain. It was raining so hard that I was afraid to take my camera out, which is a shame. It was very wet and foggy, and it was beautiful, but I didn't want to wreck my camera to get pictures.

Monday I hiked up Rattlesnake Ledge. It has been two years since I did that one. I used to go up it two or three times a week while I was training to do the Enchantments in August 2004. I had forgotten what a nice little hike it was. I started up very early so that I could miss the crowds that I knew would eventually show up. I got to the top in an hour and managed to catch a full 3-minute sunbreak before it started to rain.

As nice as it was, I may not do it again for a while, unless it is after work. Some of the bigger weekend trails are becoming available as the snow melts. I just found out this morning that the trail to Nada Lake in the Leavenworth area is totally snow free, and you don't need a permit until July to camp there. That makes me wonder what other Eastern Washington mountain trails are snow-free. I plan to spend the Fourth of July weekend at Lila Lake, and at least three days in August at Robin Lake for my birthday, and I know they'll be snow free by then but I'd like to do a few difficult day hikes before then to make sure that I can carry a 30-pound pack up the 5 or 6 miles to a campsite. I could easily do either of those hikes without the pack, but carrying that much excess weight up those long, steep trails is a little different. The trail to Lila is notorious among local hikers. It has the reputation of having the worst mile of trail in the Cascades, gaining 1300 feet of eleva tion in a mile. And that's the fourth mile of the trail! It looks like a ladder of roots and rocks. Not fun, especially with a heavy pack altering your center of gravity. But I'm going to do it. There's a meadow filled with whistling marmots near the lake, and I'm hoping to finally get some good marmot pictures this year.

Otherwise, my long weekend was essentially wasted. I did no homework or studying. I slept a lot. I watched seasons 2 and 3 of Scrubs on DVD. I think that covers it. It was nice. I look forward to doing it again someday.

Oh, the irony...

My replacement threatened recently to quit her job. She blamed me. She said that I was rude to her whenever she asked me questions.

 

That validity of that accusation has been slightly rent asunder by a recent development. My officemate told me today that she is glad we all have to go to a seminar titled "How To Work With People" because my replacement is rude to her whenever she asks her questions. My officemate is not the complaining type. She's one of the happiest, friendliest, most accepting people I've met in a long time, and for her to feel that she is being treated unfairly is not in character. That makes my replacement look rather bad in light of the fact that she accused me of the very same thing to her. You'd think that if she doesn't want to be treated that way, she wouldn't do it to others.  

 

Vengence is mine!

I miss all of the fun

I wandered out of the office momentarily to get water to make coffee, and a guy in the office building across from ours waved at my deaf officemate. I wonder how her girlfriend would feel about that? She thinks he may have been waving at me, but I doubt it. And yet, she's all giggly about it.

 

And in more important news... FOUR DAY WEEKEND! WOO HOO!

I love maps!

My officemate found this fantastic resource. You can download a map of Cougar Mountain! Yes, I'm a geek. I dig my maps. But hey, I never get lost.

Its like a people aquarium!

I love the new window office, but... Stupidly, I just realized that there are about 100 people who can look at me all day long. Now I am strangely self-concious.

Cougar Mountain

I got a bee in my bonnet on Friday and decided that this weekend I would go hiking. There's still too much snow at altitude, so I chose Cougar Mountain. I headed up the Wilderness Creek Trail on the Southeast side of the mountain. At the junction with the Long View Peak trail, I decided to head West to Long View Peak. Not much of a view, but on nice days you can see the Olympic Mountains. I turned around and headed back to the junction, then turned North and then Easet on the Wilderness Peak Trail and headed up to Wilderness Peak. Naturally, I signed the little notebook in the Tupperware container. It was full, so I just put a little blurb on the back of the notebook. I may take a new notebook up next weekend if I go up there.

After resting at the peak for a minute or two, I headed back down. Instead of taking the same trail, I took the Wilderness Cliffs Trail to make a loop. It meets the Wilderness Creek Trail about half a mile from the parking lot. It is also the location of one of the only viewpoints of Mt. Rainier on the whole trail. Not a great view, but a view nonetheless. The whole loop was about 6 miles, and it took me about 2 1/2 hours. As an added bonus, I saw a multitude of slugs, snails, ferns, and wildflowers, not to mention a hairy woodpecker, a frog, and a garter snake. I also had the joy of seriously pissing off a couple of Western Red Squirrels, who threatened to tear my throat out while I made kissy noises at them for being so cute. One of them gnawed a tree in my general direction and threw bits of bark at me while the other beeped at me and charged at me every few seconds. Adorable! There was also the standard tree fungus that I seem to be so very enamored of, so naturally I took a picture to include it here. Please do not fail to notice the abundance of slug slime under the fungus, and the marks in the fungus that tell of a small furry mammal of the squirrel persuasion gnawing on it at some point in the recent past.

Granted, the so-called views from Cougar aren't impressive, but it is a nice little hike when there's nothing else available. You can tailor the trail to your needs. The mountain is covered with trails of varying difficulty, so you can pick an easy or difficult trail, a short one or a long one. They even provide nice little maps at the trailhead so that you can decide what you want to do before you go, and all of the trail junctions are signed with trail names and distances so that it is harder to get lost. All in all, this was a great way to spend a Sunday morning.

I'm not who I am

Many years ago I had a dream that came true.

 

In it, I saw the woman that would replace me in the relationship I was in at the time. She was, at the time, living in Rhode Island and I had never met her. The first time I saw her in the office two months after the dream, I knew who she was. I sent an email to a friend that I had told about the dream and said that the woman in the dream was here, and in 6 months I would be dumped. And it happened.

 

The dream started out with me, legless, in a tiny rowboat. I was drifting through heavy fog along a shoreline with a concrete seawall, about four feet high. I drifted to the shore and stepped out, legs intact. I walked up a steep slope, switchbacking through deep forest until I reached the top. There was a restaurant there, all natural wood and brass lamps and mirrors. I walked in and saw the man with whom I was "involved" and sat with him. He didn't want to be seen with me, and he got up and sat with one of his friends from work and this woman that I didn't recognize. I looked to my left, where there was a mirror. My hair was longer, and I was wearing a dark blue turtleneck. I said to my doppelganger, "I'm not who I am." Then I woke up.

 

The part about being legless and drifting through fog certainly speaks volumes about my state of mind at the time (and even now, for that matter). Knowing that the man in question didn't want to be seen with me and my outward willingness to accept that also speaks volumes. The comment I made to myself in the mirror is interesting. I still feel that way. I'm meandering through my life with no real purpose, pretending to be someone that I'm not and knowing full well that I'm doing it.

 

Right now, I'm pretending to be an upwardly mobile, ambitious, motivated staff accountant when I actually want nothing more than to just hike and take pictures. I don't want to work for a living, I don't want to spend all of my daylight hours commuting to my office or sitting in my office, regardless of how pleasant the office. I want to sit around and watch movies and eat junk food and harass my cat. On the other hand, I am a practical person by nature, and I know that reality dictates that I work for a living and I have to work at something that will pay the bills. All I know how to do that will cover the mortgage is accounting work. And I am good at it. Unfortunately, this leads my superiors to think that I want to do more than I do, and they want me to get involved more so that I can further my career. How do you tell your boss that you don't want to further your career, that you want to be just a cog in the machine and stay at one level because you don't want more work or more responsibilities or, gods forbid, more hours in the office? Well, you don't. That is career suicide, and though I don't necessarily want a career, I need one, so I need to protect it. So I go along with it and hope that I don't end up being in the office more, with more work, more responsibilities, heading for a middle-management position.

 

I am also, as of late, pretending to be a much nicer, emotionally balanced person than I really am in an effort to get along with my more irritating co-workers and not get wound up to the point where I have a stroke from frustration and stress. I don't like pretending to be someone I'm not, but it seems to help me get through my life.

 

Such a dichotomy.

 

Sold or taken over?

My company is in flux. Granted, most companies these days have their challenges, but many are not under threat as mine is. First of all, the stockholders are pissed off because of continuing losses. Granted, the losses get smaller and the revenues get bigger each year, but all they see is that they cannot make a million if they sell their shares. We've lost three executives in the last month, and there's another one on the way out shortly. There's also word that the board of directors is actively searching for a new CEO. This may not bode well for the company. On the other hand, it could be a great thing. We could get bought out, we could go private, we could be taken over, we could end up with a great CEO who creates a successful business plan and rescues all of us from our thousands of underwater shares. Whatever happens, I'm sure that I'll come out of it OK. It may be rough and scary, but I've always landed on my feet before, financially speaking. (Emotionally, not so much. T hat is why I gave up dating for Lent about 5 years ago and never got back into it. But I digress...)  I have a friend who knows a recruiter who is always looking for accounting people, so I may actually come out way ahead. I stand, currently, to get about five months severance if I lose my job, and if I'm employed elsewhere nearly immediately, all will be well. That five months could pay off my student loans! That would just about rock. Not that I want to lose my job, or even to get a new one, but that would leave me in a very good position. I just hope that in my next job, I still get a window and my iPod.

The love affair continues

I still love my new office. I'm totally enamored. The light, the warmth, the seagulls running into the windows, the clouds, the sun, the airplanes. All of it. Sharing an office with a deaf co-worker is great, too. I hate to make light of her lack of hearing, but it works very nicely for me. I don't have to listen to phone calls, she doesn't complain about my iPod, there's no idle chitchat while I'm trying to work. It is lovely. I'm very happy. My plants are happy, too. I can see the courtyard in front of Starbucks reflected in the windows of the building across from me, so I can peoplewatch when I get bored or just need to focus on something other than my computer screen. Normally, I just stare at the sky. Its very pretty. So blue! And very distracting.

 

A group of my strange friends and I might be going bowling soon. More later, if it happens. It should be amusing for all.

 

School has taken a nasty turn. I no longer have the nice, convinient drive to Tukwila on Saturdays for class. I now have to deal with the helltraffic around Bellevue. For some reason, they've moved three of the programs at Tukwila to Bellevue. Well, I suppose it is a good reason. They don't need a Renton branch and a Tukwila branch, so they consolidated the Tukwila programs into Renton and Bellevue. I am unfortunate enough to be in the new Bellevue group. Argh. Now any time I need to do any shopping on Saturdays after school, I will have to either shop in Bellevue (not an option), Issaquah (not the worst option), or drive all the way to Tukwila, where I know where everything is. That, or I'll have to drive to Tukwila to catch the train and go shopping after work, also not the best option. Argh again. I'll have to work something out eventually. Or just never go shopping again. I think I like that idea a lot. That is what the internet is for anyway, right?

Room with a view

Today is my first day in my new office, and I love it already. But then, I knew I would! I get to spy on the people in the building across from me. I get to watch the birds and the weather. I have more space. I can turn my iPod up because my officemate is deaf. It is nice and bright even though it is overcast, so it is better on my eyes. I may actually go back to wearing contacts now that I'll be able to see all of the time.

 

I can't explain the contact thing very well. According to my optometrist, I have really flat corneas. (And I quote: "Your corneas are really flat!") They make contact lenses only in a certain range of curvatures, so even contacts with the flattest of curves don't quite fit my eyes unless I'm in bright enough light that my eyes change shape to deal with the light. In low light, I get a pocket between my eyes and the lenses, and it hurts and I can't see. I think the light in here will be just fine for me.

 

I just hope I can take my eyes off of the sky more often to do my job!

Monochromatic Oink

I finally get to move into my new window office tomorrow! I can't wait! It is south-facing, so it will be nice and bright in there. It is going to be as close to heaven as an office life can be.

I spoke with my new officemate about the furniture arrangement. She's currently crowded into one corner of the office, so as soon as the other two people are out of the way we're going to rearrange her furniture so that she has half of the office and I have half. That's only fair, right? There is one minor problem though. At some points during the day, the sun really glares on her monitor, so they've rigged up a sun screen of sorts using - of all things - orange "out" cards that you use to indicate that a file is missing from a drawer. It is truly ugly. I went over to Uwajima to see if they had anything that would work better and/or look better. I found one or two solutions , but I have others in mind, for which I'll have to hit a few department stores.

On the other hand, I found things that I totally did not go over there for but I medically needed them. One is a midnight blue tea pot. I like to buy loose tea, brew it by the pot, and get all hyped up on it. There's a tea shop nearby to feed this new addiction. Another thing I found is a Japanese tea cup with The Great Wave on it. The third thing is... harder to explain.

My company buys office supplies by the crate. I don't need to buy my own. But why would I want to use yellow squares to write notes when I can write on white squares with pairs of black and white piggies that are saying "Boo" on them? I wouldn't want to, of course! And that is why I blew five bucks on white squares with pairs of black and white piggies that are saying "Boo" on them. Apparently these pigs are quite big in Japan (incidentally, that's a song by Alphaville) from a company called San-X, apparently responsible for Hello Kitty and other well-known icons of cuteness. They're called MonokuRo Boo. MonokuRo means monochromatic, and Boo is really Buu in Japanese, the "oink" sound a pig makes. They're adorable and stupid and useless, since they don't actually stick to anything, but they're cute and they make me smirk (sometimes smiling is just too much work), so they're going to live in my line of sight until I get bored of them and use them to make tiny paper airplanes to throw at my co-workers.

And speaking of spending too much money on crap. Uwajimaya currently has about a thousand really cool things that I really like, but have nowhere to put them or money with which to acquire them. For example, paper lanterns with a water colored cherry blossom design. Night lights with Japanese artwork on them. Kimonos. (Well, maybe I do need one of those... someday.) A Samurai helmet. All kinds of food I've never tried. Chopsticks. Sake sets. I could go on and on, but you should probably just pay them a visit. You've got to see the stuff to truly covet it.

Fun with tofu

I've gotten in the habit lately of bringing curried tofu and vegetables to work for lunch. It is good, healthy, easy to fix, and easy to heat up in the microwave - I don't like high-maintenance work lunches. Today, I brought in a particularly curried meal. I seriously loaded it up with the curry powder and ginger. I was working while eating, minding my own business, when I managed to lose my grip on my Ziploc lunch container, and I got curry

 

all

over

everything.

 

My desk. My keyboard. My wrist rest. My pants. My floor.

 

Now I get to walk around all day smelling like curry. There are worse things, but I can imagine what innocent bystanders are going to think when they get a whiff of me.

Sweet dreams are made of cheese

http://www.cheeseboard.co.uk/news.cfm?page_id=240

You might find this interesting. This study came to my attention as a sidebar in the current “Eating Well” magazine. After reading what type of dreams each type of cheese causes, I had to eat some Stilton before bed last night. I dreamt of 19^th century Chicago sewer barons fighting over how to cure a rabies epidemic.

If you have trouble sleeping, Cheshire is apparently the way to go.

Careful what you ask for...

It never ceases to amaze me how things work out unintentionally. It also never ceases to amaze me how they don't work out, but that's another topic entirely.

Work kinda drives me a little crazy. I'm not a people person. I don't like being surrounded all day long with people who want to chat about things that I really don't care about, and I'm not good at hiding it. There are some people who irritate me endlessly, so I work with them as well as I can and try to ignore their garbage and move on. On the other hand, if I irritate someone, they go crying to my boss. If I went crying to my boss every time one of them wrecked my day with their crap, none of us would ever get anything done. (That's what blogs are for, anyway.) I don't understand why I am expected to change who I am to make them happy, but they won't do the same for me, and I'm a shade resentful about it.

For example, my latest replacement threatened to quit. She blamed me. She has talked to me about one thing in the last month, and it was a month ago, so it seems like scapegoating to me. Our boss talked her out of it, but they expect me to baby her through yet another month-end close to keep her happy. Read these instructions and see if they make sense: copy this, paste it here; copy that, paste it there; change that month to this month; save the file. Clear, correct? I doubt it can be easier. Yet, I have to stand over her and pat her on the head and encourage her. I think that is a bit ludicrous. She has 15 years of age and experience on me, so why can't she act like a competent adult?

Additionally, she has been going on and on about how miserable her work conditions are. She has a window office and half the workload that I had in that position when I had no window office, yet she feels overworked and that it is unfair that I only work 9 hours a day when she has to work 11 hours. When I was in that position, I worked four 10-hour days, and I had twice the work. Do I sound sympathetic to her plight? No. Why? Because I am not.

Her complaining finally paid off for me in some respect. They are taking the two accounts payable people out of the big window office and putting them in cubes, and they are moving me into the big window office with our other staff accountant. The funny thing is that this arrangement will not solve her complaints. She goes on about how people come in to talk to the other AP person and it is too distracting. When she moves back into the cube farm, she will be able to hear about a dozen or more people talking all day long, not to mention that a few of them are unbelievably loud and like to shout at each other over the cube walls. There are people walking past all day long, so rather than seeing only the people who come into the office, she will see everyone. She complains about how bright and hot it is in there, but it is cold and dark in the cube farm. I doubt that anything will ever make her happy, but if I get a window office out of t he deal, I am happy.

Junk food versus working out

I found a benefit to "Take your child to work day"! They bought a ton of snacks for the kiddies that the kiddies did not eat. I've been bingeing on the new Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers in bright, candy-like colors! They came in a case of individual serving sizes, little milk cartons full of crackers. I've been hoarding them. Every time I walk into the kitchen I grab one or two of them and stash them in my desk for snacking emergencies. I also copped a pen with a head on a spring and troll doll hair. I don't know why I felt compelled to take that, but hey, free pens are always a good thing in the office.

I decided before my trip to Oregon that my weight training routine had gotten too easy. I took the week off from working out, and when I started up again I started with 5 pound weights instead of 3 pound weights. I can still get all the way through the workout even after nearly doubling the weights, but boy, do my arms shake by the end. Not to mention that I'm pretty stiff from it. That will go away in another day or two. I am committed (nay, obsessed!) to getting back in the shape I was in a few years ago, so I'm going to keep it up until I have to add another pound or two of weights. I don't want to get all bulky though. I'm nearly 6 feet tall in my shoes, so the last thing I need is to start looking like a bodybuilder, which on me translates to looking like a guy who doesn't know how to feminize himself when he's in drag. Sure, I have long hair and such, but I also have broader shoulders than most women because of the Norwegian side of the family, and it can translate as masculine to the less observant among us. I really don't need that kind of mystique surrounding me.

So disturbing...

When I first moved here in 1984, I noticed that there seemed to be a really high number of people with multiple sclerosis. First I thought that maybe it was because we have better-than-average medical care here, especially for MS patients. Then I thought that maybe I was just so dense that I just didn't notice anyone with multiple sclerosis until I moved here. I never noticed Volvos until I moved here, so I'm sure there are more things that escaped my attention for whatever reason until I had a reason to notice them here. For a while I forgot about it, but every time I saw someone with MS, I would wonder why they are so common here.

Apparently there's an actual reason for it. From the train, I saw a billboard suggesting that one of the triggers for MS is the climate. I Googled it, as I am wont to do, and yes, climate is a trigger for MS.

Score one for me. I'm not as dense as I thought I might be.

ASS out of U and ME

I have a funny way of making certain assumptions in spite of the evidence that making assumptions is a pointless waste of energy. For example, I tend to assume that the people I work with are all sensible, responsible adults. I maintain assumptions such as this right up until I am given a reason to make a new assumption. It simplifies life to pigeonhole everyone, you know? A number of office events have taken place that have forced me to reassess my assumptions about my coworkers.

• Though we have community kitchens, there are those who feel that they are not required to participate in the communal responsibilities, such as rinsing out the sink and the sponge after use, replacing empty paper towel rolls, making a new pot of coffee when they empty the old one, wiping up their microwave oven messes, and opening a new box of plastic silverware after taking the last one. I'm sure that every office has these people in one incarnation or another.
• Even worse, we had a charming female employee who developed a habit of wiping boogers on the bathroom wall.
• I've seen gum on the ceiling, which made me wonder just how hard you have to throw a wad of gum to make it stick to acoustic tiling 10 feet over your head.
• And to top them all off, our men's and women's locker rooms were vandalized a few months ago, probably by the same person. Now we have to sign up to use them and have our card key coded for access to them.

I work in an expensive new building in downtown Seattle in a reasonably high-tech company, and yet we hire people of this caliber. It is disheartening. I like to believe that we, as American adults making between $40,000 and $500,000 a year, are a bit better than that, but obviously I should not labor under that impression any longer.

My new assumption? From Profe Noteboom of North Kitsap High School, I learned in 1986 the following saying in Spanish: Aunque la mona se vista de seda, mona se queda. Though the monkey is dressed in silk, she is still a monkey. I think it applies nicely, and it is always fun to invoke the power of monkeys.

ACHOO!

This morning started out totally normal. Woke up, ate, got dressed, did hair, left home, swore at other drivers, sat in the parking garage listening to Adam Carolla until it was time to walk out to the train platform, stood on the plat form for a whopping 4 minutes. No news there. Nothing different. I stepped onto the train, walked three steps to the stairs, turned the corner and BAM! Allergy attack. It has been going since 6:20 this morning with no end in sight. Sneezing, sniffling, runny nose, itchy eyes. I can't take allergy medicines because they all either don't work or they knock me on my ass, so I have to suffer through it until it gives up. Eating chocolate shortbread cookies not only does not help my allergies, but I'm reasonably certain that eating that much fat and sugar in one sitting isn't healthy in any way, shape or form.

Sniffle.

I assumed that missing four days of the last work week would leave me with a pile of work to do when I got back. Wrongo bongo. I've already gotten through it all. I'm bored already. Maybe more cookies will help the boredom go away.