Sticks and Stars

Wow, so much candy. Including eight (eight!) full size bars. Much to my dismay, the boys went for the Rolos instead of the KitKats but eh, what can you do? As it is, I’ve already quietly sequestered the Butterfingers and Milky Ways for myself (but let’s just keep that between you and I).

The costumes were a hit. Last night when my four year old tried on his costume for the first time and I drew a cat face on him, he stared in the mirror with rapt amazement. He was a cat! Tonight, when we were going to the store to buy a flashlight (which we didn’t even use) he had to stop every. single. person. to tell them that he was a cat…as if the ears and tail and whiskers didn’t give him away.

Our real cat was terrified of him. She turned sideways and puffed up and hissed when he walked toward her. While the costume was cute, trust me, it was not that good.

My one year old’s costume got the most praise around town. I returned the puppy sweatshirt thingy for a $3 thrift store ladybug sweatshirt thingy and everyone thought he was adorable…probably because I bundled him up so well and the costume was a little big so he was somewhat lost in all the layers. Without fail he tried to go into every single house at which we trick-or-treated and he tried to grab both fists full from every candy tray that was offered. Last year, when my then-three year old tried to take multiple pieces of candy, I recall people admonishing him to only take one, but this year people just laughed and told me to let them have as much as they wanted. I guess that people in this city get a little more into the Halloween spirit.

Here’s a link to my small photo set of the boys in costume.

NaNoWriMo or NaBloPoMo? The former is more impressive…but the latter is more achievable. Last year I attempted both and achieved neither. Anyone else giving it the old college try this year?

Finally, finally, finally I managed to upload new photos to my flickr account. Highlights include my patio before and after the container garden (and during…and a cutie), our trip to Ocean Shores, summer fun (and more fun), bath time and, of course, many gratuitous cute boy photos.

(Oh, and I purchased FlickrExport to use with iPhoto and I must say, that’s the best $23.55 I’ve ever spent).

I’ve decided to stop dating for a while. This is a decision I make every so often and then after a while I change my mind and start again until I get sick of the whole thing and stop for another while. I don’t really have any good concrete reasons for making this decision right now except that I’m tired of having the same conversations over and over and never meeting anyone interesting and wasting my lunch breaks and/or evenings on dull yet anxiety provoking dates when I could be at home or sitting in my chair at work reading a book. Thus far, the books are far more compelling than my dating life.

It would be nice to be in a relationship with someone, it would be nice to meet someone with whom I click and with whom I could have fun, but so far I’m just meeting people who are irritating or who have serious issues…or who just aren’t interested in me (yes, amazingly enough, that sometimes happens…I can hardly believe it either!)…or, most annoying of all, are already involved with other people, which is territory into which I just will not delve, regardless of how open their relationship may or may not be.

I have a friend who’s all about dating. He belongs to just about every personals website out there and is constantly contacting new women and constantly going on dates with the ultimate goal of getting into a relationship with Ms. Right. He figures that this path makes sense, that his methods expose him to the most possibility, that it’s the most direct path to what he wants.

I have another friend who wouldn’t touch an internet dating site with a ten foot pole. She believes that if you’re meant to meet someone you will, that if you’re meant to fall for someone, you will, that you can’t force love.

I guess I fall somewhere in the middle. I definitely believe that you can’t force love, but I also believe that it makes sense to meet as many people as possible. However, I think I’d rather meet people by way of doing cool things instead of meeting people by way of looking to meet people. Thankfully, I want to do cool things, so perhaps all the magic will come together.

Alas, I have too much happening in my life right now to pursue any type of cool thing, but maybe by the beginning of the year I’ll be well settled in my job and we’ll have finished moving and life in general will feel calmer. Until then I think I’ll just play with my boys and work my way down my extensive reading list.

I just finished another big project at work, this time importing data into one of our databases. The process involved writing queries, matching data (by writing additional queries and then matching a few stragglers by hand), writing more queries and a hell of a lot of switching back and forth and dragging files across various servers. Everyone in my department is more than comfortable with the linux command line. It’s their natural interface of choice and it’s so basic to them that it’s almost foreign to them that somebody might actually not be familiar with navigating in that environment. But of course, I am not. So I watch surreptitiously, scribble mad notes, google like crazy and guess, guess, guess as I try to figure out how to move files and copy files and look at files, etc. As always, I am learning a lot.

I remember when I first started my last job, the one I started after I had just moved, the one I started during the busiest month of the year for that job, the one for which I had to learn, do the work, and also correct a year of incorrect data. It was overwhelming and exhausting but the exhaustion was good. I felt like I could barely drag myself onto the bus at the end of the day and that loud, guitar-driven music from my iPod was the only thing keeping my cellular structure intact and preventing me from melting into a puddle on the floor, but it was also intensely satisfying in that my brain was being worked so hard. That’s how I feel right now.

I feel like I’m doing a pretty good job. I pay very careful attention to what people teach me so that I don’t have to make them repeat themselves and I think hard about how to find my own answers or how to apply what I already know to my situation. And by my own standards (which, I can admit, are probably too high, I am probably excessively hard on myself) I am doing a decent job. But still, sometimes I make a stupid mistake and it about kills me, like yesterday I was running a query that kept throwing errors (which is not at all unusual for my queries) and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t seem to fix it (usually, with enough attempts, I can fix my own messes). I finally had to ask for help and the guy who helped me look at my code for about two seconds, said, “your slashes are backward,” and walked away. I felt so stupid. That’s a mistake that I know better than to make. I used to (mentally) belittle folks I was helping when they couldn’t keep straight their forward and back slashes. I pride myself on having at least some basic computer knowledge but at that moment I felt like someone who had maybe just hit the power button on a computer for the first time and was holding her arms in front of her face, waiting for the inevitable explosion.

At least you can be damned sure that I will not get my slashes wrong again.

Linux command line things I now know: grep, scp, cd, mv, more, opening files in various text editors, logging in to various servers as root, . , .. , assorted attributes, | , pg_dump, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t recall at this moment.

On Friday we attended my four year old’s aforementioned Fall Family Festival. I won’t deny that I had absolutely no desire to go, that I in fact had negative desire to go, that in fact I would have turned down several moderate sums of money that they might have offered to pay me in exchange for going. But my four year old had been talking about it all week, counting down the days until the damned event, so there was no escaping.

The evening was just as useless as I expected (I was the only single parent, every other lone parent made a point of specifying where their missing husband or wife was, and I was definitely the only one wrangling a small(er) child) and it was even more stressful because my one year old wanted the tray of brownies that was located conveniently at eye level and so I was stuck wrestling him for control all night long. Plus, we were a little late so I got stuck sitting in the very front row in one of those tiny little kiddy chairs that isn’t big enough to hold one cheek, let alone the full expanse of my glorious ass.

However, the evening was (almost) entirely redeemed when I got to watch the kids get up and sing.

When the kids were directed to come to the front of the room, my four year old wound up in back off to the side. But as soon as he recognized what was happening he moved to his rightful place, in the center, in front of all the other kids. And I really mean in front. All the other kids were in two rows and he was in front of them in his own row of one.

Then the singing started. Some of the kids mumbled along with the words, some of the kids sang quietly, but no one joyfully shouted the words at the top of their lungs…except my son. The whole audience was chucking at his exuberance. And indeed, he was just so excited to be singing. For the rest of the evening parents kept coming up to me and commenting that he was hilarious and was quite the star of the show. When we got home and watched the video clips I made of his performance he asked me why everyone was clapping and cheering. I told him they were clapping and cheering because he did such a good job and he smiled a very satisfied smile and said, “Yeah.” It makes me smile just thinking about it. He was so fucking adorable.

The one thing that bugged me was that the director of the school (who was leading the singers) kept trying to quiet him down and by the time they got to the last song, she succeeded. Yes, the singing was much more…I don’t know…on key? Socially acceptable? But these are three and four year olds. I would much rather hear the overwhelming cacophony of all of them exuberantly shouting the lyrics then the barely audible sounds of them singing “appropriately.” I love all of the other teachers at my son’s school. They handle him so well, they treat him so kindly and they clearly all adore him (and indeed, what’s not to love?!). But the director, man, I don’t like her, and this is just one more reason. Let the damned kids sing how they want to!

However, this whole experience does make me think that I should find some kind of kids’ drama program or music group for my four year old. He is fearless and bold and entirely a ham and, speaking as a super shy introvert who feels intense anxiety in any group of more than two people, I’d sure like to keep him that way.

(Wanna see the cuteness? Here and here.)

I just finished this project upon which I have been working ever since I started. I know you don’t care, I know it means nothing to you, but I feel like I’ve achieved a major victory. I took these two insane queries, rewrote them entirely so that they actually make sense, got them to do what I wanted (which, at the beginning of the process, I couldn’t even conceive of), and discovered that the queries upon which I was basing them, the ones written by my predecessor, were actually wrong. When I think back to first undertaking this project and how confusing the whole mess was, how I couldn’t imagine getting through it, how reading the queries almost felt like staring blankly at a foreign language, I feel so fucking proud of how much I accomplished.

I mentioned a while back that I felt like I can only do about 20% of my work without having to ask questions, but I almost never asked questions while I was working on this project. I googled everything I could think of, I played around with different ideas, I drew diagrams, I read the code over and over and over and over and stared into space for a very long time. When I did ask questions they weren’t, “How do I do this?” or, “Where should I go from here?” they were questions like, “What’s the difference between DISTINCT and DISTINCT ON?” (and no one could even answer that one, so I had to figure it out myself anyway).

In the end, I figured it all out, almost entirely by myself. I scaled that damned mountain and now I’m standing at the top shouting, “Woohooooooo!!!” and listening to my glorious echo. I feel like I understand so many things, so much better. I feel smart, I feel so smart. And I feel so much more hopeful about my future in this job. I didn’t despair that I wouldn’t be able to learn it all with time, but I did worry a bit about my anxiety levels in the meanwhile and whether the head/wall beating was actually even remotely productive. Now I think it’ll all be okay. More than okay, even, because really, I am doing a pretty kick ass job all things considered. I have three more projects stacked up waiting for me, three more that are just like this past one, but I feel ready.

Things I really get now: distinct vs. distinct on, unions, left joins, case statements, order and group by, creating temp tables, coalesce, aliases, subselects, in and not in, like and ilike, functions, and so much more.

Today was a pleasingly productive Saturday. I managed to clean the apartment, do laundry, get groceries and make some serious headway on the whole costume situation.

Really, the costume situation pertains only to my four year old. He didn’t even get to go trick-or-treating when he was 1.5, so I figure that my one year old’s costume can be pretty minimal. And indeed, I spent $13 on a hooded sweatshirt made of fake fur and colored to look like a dog and figure that with the addition of black sweats, I’ve done my job. He will be entirely oblivious to his costume anyway, so he needs a costume to which he can be entirely oblivious (yet still warm).

My four year old, however, requires a bit more effort. You may recall last year’s Thomas costume and I was fully expecting to tackle a similar undertaking this year.

When I first started asking him what he wanted to be (I figured there’d be much asking and many changes until something just seemed right), he told me he wanted to be a moon. A moon, huh? I thought to myself while mentally scratching my head. I wasn’t quite sure how I’d do it, but I was up to the challenge.

However, after only a few repeats of wanting to be a moon, he started talking trains again, which is what I was really expecting. After a wide range of trains were discussed over many asking occasions, he finally settled on Percy, a small green train, and I started looking at images of Percy to see how I might proceed with my masterpiece.

But then, after a while of contenting himself with Percy, he decided he wanted to be a ghost. I checked with him several times to make sure he was certain about changing his mind and he confirmed that he was, so I started thinking ghost. I myself was a ghost for Halloween one year and I recall that my parents’ greatest struggle had been how to get the white sheet to stay on my head and the eye holes to stay at my eyes. Finally, they settled on the questionable solution of tying a “noose” around my neck, which was presumably meant to imply how I had become a ghost in the first place. I wound up looking more like the “ghosts” we made in kindergarten by placing a tissue over a sucker and tying some yarn around the stick to keep it on.

I figured I could do a hell of a lot better for my son. First of all, I didn’t want one uniform sheet. I envisioned several varying layers of sheets, all cut jaggedy at different places, maybe even some in pale grey to give depth and clarity to the layers. Further, I would sew all these layers to a white hooded sweatshirt, which would solve the problem of the eye holes staying in place, and would allow him to use his arms without throwing the costume off…plus, no noose required.

However, before I could implement my genius vision, my four year old changed his mind again, this time for the last time he assured me. What is my newest and final challenge, you ask? A black cat.

I feel simultaneously cheated and relieved. Black sweats with a tail sewn on back, a black hooded sweatshirt with ears sewn on, black eyeliner to create nose and whiskers. I tried to suggest he at least be a black and white cat so that I could sew a white fake fur belly to his shirt front and get him white mittens, but no, he wants black. I had girded my loins for a far greater challenge, and thus far the biggest challenge has been finding black sweats (we had to go to two whole stores). But really it’s okay. While I would have gone to great lengths to create something very cool for my son, I’m also pretty content taking the lazy route, especially if he’s just as happy.

It’s really difficult to not know how to do your job. I feel dread every time I see a new error message arrive in my inbox (error messages mean that reports are broken, and I fix the code for broken reports), or every time a work order comes in requesting a new report (I write the code for new reports), or every time I look at my list of stalled projects, at which I usually spend hours staring each day with little to no progress.

I keep telling myself that it takes time, that it’s stressful in the beginning, that I need to give myself a month (or three) and by then it will all be much easier, but that’s not much reassurance. Indeed, I *do* get work done, it’s just unfortunate that the process first involves me banging my head against the wall for hours until I finally find inspiration in the Rorschach blood stain left by my shattered skull. Although let me tell you, when I do have that moment of clarity and actually resolve something and can close a work order, I can practically hear the angels singing…although again, that could entirely be a head bashing, brain damage inspired hallucination.

I know that I’m learning. I must be. I have this new report that I’ve been working on pretty much since I started, one that requires the partial combination of two existing reports and then some add ons and rearranging and such. In theory it sounded easy enough, but in reality, the two reports report on two similar sets of data but go about doing so in entirely different ways, and the code itself is poorly written, convoluted and redundant (as noted by someone else, not me — although that was kind of my impression too). It has taken me days to figure this mess out and I finally had to resort to annotating both sets of code, line by line, so that I was clear on what was happening. I am much closer to the end than when I started, but every time I scale a small portion of this mountain, I look around only to discover new and just-as-confusing terrain ahead. It also happens to be really foggy at this elevation so I can’t even see much beyond the general confusion.

One weakness I have that is coming into sharp focus is how very bad I am at being bad at things. I know this about myself. I know how I tend to not try new things unless I’m reasonably sure I’ll be reasonably good at them, and when I do try new things I come up with good justifications for quitting if it turns out that I’m not so good. Usually, it’s not a problem. I’m a reasonably smart cookie; it’s not too hard to be reasonably good at things — as long as said things don’t involve excessive levels of physical coordination (which is not to say that I’m a bumbling oaf, I am just significantly more adept at, say, grasping a complicated funding system than I am at grasping up a complicated dance routine) — and so mostly I don’t have to quit things. But oh this space of not being good at something yet not being able (or really wanting) to quit is so hard!

You know how photoshop has that history pane (or whatever the hell it’s called) where you can step back through each step you took to completely fuck up whatever you were trying to make pretty? I sure as hell wish I knew of a text editor that would allow me to do the same with my code*. Ctrl+Z is fine and dandy but usually the changes I make involve multiple steps (and, in my case, multiple, multiple mistakes that then need to be fucked with until they are right) and it sure would be nice to have a broader sense of how exactly I proceeded to fuck things up.

At least we have a candy jar. And while the jar itself is nearing empty with only tooth-yankingly unpleasant milk duds left in the bottom, I know where the secret stash is.

*It still thrills me to write that. My code. As in, code I’ve written. Me! I wonder which will come first, the thrill wearing off or me figuring out what I’m doing.

I already complained about how my son’s Montessori preschool requires parents to provide lunches and snacks for their kids (preferably with nothing sweet, we have all been reprimanded via the school’s monthly list of parental reprimands newsletter). And at the beginning of the year we were provided with the expected list of school supplies as well.

Then, it turned out that the cool activities provided by the school are actually subcontracted and must be paid for separately.

Then, it turns out that each month every family gets an additional supply list of two or three craft-related items we need to provide for the upcoming month.

A couple weeks ago there was a big notice informing parents that it would soon be time for the annual “Fall Family Festival,” which includes, among other things, a parents-only dinner cooked by the staff, a special dinner for the kids, games with prizes, etc. I was pleased to see that they finally wanted to do something nice for the families who support the school, instead of always asking us to spend more and more money.

But of course, the very next day there was a sign up sheet so that parents could provide the special parents’ dinner, the kids’ dinner, and even the freakin’ prizes for the games.

This all wouldn’t bother me so much if the director of the school didn’t drive a very new BMW.