glishara

I just made what is seriously the BEST MEAL OF MY LIFE. As in, ever.

Tonight was my 8-year anniversary, so I wanted to do something special. I've gradually come to the conclusion that for special meals, we are way better off eating here than going to restaurants, because we get better food for less money.

We agreed we'd start with beef of some sort, and drove to the local butcher shop, where they raise and process their own cows and pigs in humane, open-pasture kinds of ways. We bought a pound and a half of tenderloin steak, fresh, and brought it home. I made Steak au Poivre with it, using Alton Brown's recipe, including the Cognac Cream Sauce.

I wanted to do something special for a side, so I made up a small portion of Kimberly Morales's Warm Shrimp, Quinoa & Spinach Salad from Poor Girl Eats Well, which has very quickly moved into my favorite meals ever list.

I don't usually photograph my food, but I did today, because I wanted to immortalize the experience. The entire meal, counting meat, shrimp, cognac, and all, came to around $33 for the both of us. The steak was unbelievable tender. It felt like cutting butter. It just slid apart under the slightest pressure from the knife, and had an amazingly rich flavor. The shrimp was excellent, and the spinach gave the whole dish a fantastic hint of crunch.

So, I've been refraining from doing this for a while, but I think it's time to reach out.

The company I work for is currently undergoing a major hiring drive, looking for people in all kinds of fields from registered nurses with experience in drug interactions to project managers to IT folks.

One of the openings we're having a hard time filling is on my team, for a Java developer with some spring/hibernate/sql experience. If there's anyone out there who's looking for a job and would be willing to work FOR A FANTASTIC COMPANY in Billerica, MA, bounce me a message or a comment here, and I'll pass your stuff on to my manager.

The only real REQUIREMENT is Java experience in a senior/principal level, though most of the people we're bringing in have some spring/hibernate, and if anyone had GWT or SmartGWT, that would be awesomely awesome.

I know it's a long shot, but I figured I'd reach out. If anyone knows anyone looking for work in the area, too, feel free to bounce me a note and I can get some of the particulars of applying to them.

Job still rocks. Have vacation next week. Life is good.

I am celebrating Super Tuesday by writing a letter to Olympia Snowe telling her why I fangirl her and thanking her for her commitment to her own ideals and our country's best interests. Also, I am saying that I am sorry she's retiring, but I understand why she is.

It has made today much more happy-politics than it otherwise would be.

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I keep thinking I've been desensitized and numbed to the kinds of rhetoric that happens in elections, and then something happens to set me on fire with rage and hatred.

This is the most openly ill any election season has ever made me feel, though. I can't even get to anger, because I am stuck in queasy horror.

Seriously, this was my PARENTS' fight. How, HOW, did the issue of BIRTH CONTROL and PRENATAL TESTING come up again, in the year 2012?

And what the everloving FUCK is wrong with Virginia? For real, you guys.

This feels like a bizarre twilight zone version of an election. Are these HONESTLY the candidates we have? Honestly? How the hell did this HAPPEN?

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Kids are hilarious.

Wes just lost a debate with me and started to slink off in a half-pout, falling dramatically into the doorframe and saying, "I need to have breakfast! I'm sooooo hungry. I am SPANISHED."

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So, as promised, I update again.

To start out: man, having a cat is AWESOME. Katie is awesome and wonderful and absolutely the perfect cat for us. She loves to play and chase and climb, but is also a cuddle factory. She will climb onto laps and demand petting and scratches from anyone in the family except Sebastian, of whom she is (sensibly) wary. She slept on Lorraine's bed Thursday night, and our bed last night. She's wonderful.

In work news, things continue to go really well. I was worried, taking this job, that I'd been demonizing my last company, since it was my only really serious long-term job. I saw the bad, but not the good; I was going to be shocked by the realities of a big company and bureaucracy; I was going to find that a lot of what I hated was just the nature of the world; my skills were too specific to the proprietary system I was working in, and I was therefore going to fail.

But the reality of this place has been fantastic. There are more meetings, but they're good meetings, and well-run enough that they don't take up huge amounts of time. They also involve design and business decisions, so those are being formalized and dealt with in defined periods instead of being discussed over lunch and fallen into. I'm learning new technologies and writing quality code, already making some real, sizable contributions. I'm also benefiting from a fantastic support network, where people are doing a great job of helping me along without stepping on my toes. It's pretty remarkable.

The hours are reasonable; the commute is a little rough if I do it late, but no problem if I'm out the door by 7:30; the corporate climate is streamlined and effective; the work is interesting and challenging; and the whole team is empowered to make real decisions about what is best for the project, as long as they are willing and able to defend them to our tech lead.

It's been three weeks now: I suspect by 6 months I'll have my own host of things that bug me, but right now I'm kind of floating on a cloud of good-feeling about the whole thing. Life is pretty darn good.

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Everybody, meet Katie!



Katie is a very, very playful and intrepid kitty. When I went to fill out her paperwork today, she leapt right onto my lap to chase my hat. She talked to us all the way home. When we got here, we put her in her bathroom, which is the space you see in that first picture.

Of course, as you may deduce from the photo above, she did not STAY there.

When I slipped up to try to get the picture, she was waiting by the door, and came out, rubbed against my leg, and started picking her way downstairs right away. She explored the living room, then ran back upstairs when she heard the kids.

Did she go back into her bathroom? Oh, no, not Katie, Kitty Extraordinaire. She turns her nose up at bathrooms. Instead, she sniffed around the hall. With my cunning human brain, I said, "Hmm. I shall get her fun feather toy and lure her in with it."



Katie loves her fun feather toy, and went "Yay! Jump! Jump! Pounce! Catch! Ca -- wait a minute. That's going in the BATHROOM." And then she went to explore Lorraine's room.



She likes Lorraine's bed, and the slats of Sebastian's old crib. And the toy closet. And then she was back at the door, and I lured her with the feather toy again. Dance! Pounce! Play! Bath-- HEY.

She looked at the feather toy, looked at me, lifted her tail high up, and went in very deliberately to claim her prize.



I closed the door.

I acknowledge that she totally let me win, but it was satisfying anyway.

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So, I am getting a cat!

I was kind of expecting the adoption process to take longer, but this afternoon we went to meet the cats. The kids really wanted to meet a black cat they liked, but he refused to come out and see us. One of the other cats, though, was standing at the gate peering at us, so I asked if maybe we could meet her instead. She's a bitty little thing, 3 or 4 years old, but very little. She's black and white, and her name is Krinkles, with which I am distinctly meh, but hesitant to change, because opening it up to change means the kids will want input. For perspective, Wes's suggestion for what we name Sebastian was "Squashypom." We'll see if anything new springs to mind in the next little bit.

Anyway, Krinkles sprang right down and came to sniff at my hand and demand ear scritches. The space was very small, and we had three adults and three kids, so it was a bit overwhelming for her, but she loved all the petting, and when we got her favorite toy, a feathery thing she had forcibly detached from one of those fishing-pole style cat toys, she started pouncing around after it. We were intensely charmed.

So anyway, we got home and I filled out an application. It said I'd be contacted the next day, and we could talk about the situation and schedule a home visit, so I expected maybe a week to tie everything up. But they called tonight, and we chatted for 20 minutes, and they asked me to just send over some photos in the morning instead of a full home visit. Oh, and they'll be at the PetSmart tomorrow, so I can go by at around 6 to fill out the paperwork and take her home.

I will post pictures when I have them. I am so excited!

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So, I will post more about my awesome job of continuing joy in the next few days, but for right now, I have a question for my very knowledgeable and slightly cat-crazy friends list.

So, we have decided to adopt a cat. Decided enough that we've already bought most of our non-food supplies (I'll list them at the end of the post, and people can tell me what I'm missing).

We're going to adopt from a shelter, and we are currently considering whether we would be willing to adopt a cat with FIV. I've been reading up on it a lot, and the basic sense I'm getting is that it requires more expensive diet, more vet visits, and careful attention to when the cat gets sick so you can get them promptly to the vet.

We're willing to take on a cat that needs more attention or money than most, but I'm a little concerned that my info is coming mostly from websites that are basically "FIV cats are totally awesome" propaganda to convince people to adopt, which may be underplaying the downsides.

Does anyone have any firsthand (or secondhand) experience with FIV? If I'm not really confident about it, we won't undertake it, but a lot of the shelters around here have a 50-70% FIV-positive adoptable populations, and I know those cats have a harder time finding homes.

So, the list of stuff I've bought so far:
* Litter box
* Food bowl
* Water fountain
* Scratching post
* Cat bed
* Toys

We still need a carrier, but I didn't like any of the ones which were there. We also need some of the bitter spray to use on our computer wires, and a pair of cat nail trimmers. And a collar, which I don't want to get until we've chosen a cat.

Anything else I'm missing?

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So, I started my new job on Tuesday.

This has been a really tiring week, not because the work has been hard, but because I've had so little to do, and the sitting around is really exhausting. I had a full day of orientation on Tuesday, and a half-day of IT orientation on Wednesday, followed by 4 hours of sitting around waiting for a computer and rereading the same 40 pages of documents over and over again. They finally said, "Just give up and go home" at 4PM.

Thursday, I spent the morning reading a book on Hibernate which I brought in, and my computer showed up at noonish. I did a lot of online training and got it set up with my dev environment by the end of the day.

Friday, I played around with the app and attended our sprint planning meeting. I also retested some bugs, and, at the very end of the day, wrote some real code to fix an issue. It was a very heartening process, because while I needed help to figure out what class to be looking in (new UI, still feeling my way around), I spotted the actual problem before the guy who was helping me, and figured out the solution all by myself. My skills are definitely transferable.

So far, other than the stultifying boredom of being unable to get started midweek, I really like it. The team is smart and dedicated. They have a fair number of meetings, but they are really skillfully run, without a lot of waste time (our project manager is off-site, so a certain degree of administrative overhead is really necessary). There's good communication between the team and upper management.

What's really bizarre to me is the way the team gets in between 8 at 9 every day and leaves in the range of 4 to 5:30. And no one brings their computers home. Coming from a place where it's just expected that people keep their email active through the evening, and pings on IM come all the time, this has been kind of a shock, though in a very, very good way. I left at 4:50 on Friday, after fixing my bug (hooray!), and I was the last person there from my team.

So far, the only negatives that I can find is that the office building is incredibly dry. INCREDIBLY. When I wash my hands and dry them and step out of the restroom, they are instantly freezing as the air wicks all remaining moisture out near-instantly. I've ordered a good 1L water bottle from Amazon, and will probably be emptying it several times a day.

Oh! Also, there's no soda machine on my floor, just a coffee machine, so I have to go down to the mini-caf (which also has soup, salad, sandwiches, pizza, yogurt, fruit, etc) if I want a drink. Or just bring them in, which is what I'll really do.

The commute has been better than I worried. Traffic is sometimes slow at the end of my highway commute in and the beginning of my highway commute out, but it hasn't added more than 10-15 minutes to my overall drive, which ranges from 25-40 minutes. Generally, it's faster in the mornings and slower at night, mainly, I suspect, because the evening commute is all left turns.

In non-work news, Wes is reading his first real kid novel, instead of the little chapter books which are intended as easy-read books. He received James and the Giant Peach for Christmas, and is reading it completely independently. He's around a third of the way through now, and is enjoying it greatly.

Lorraine is a bouncy pile of awesome. She loves music and dance, and spent a lot of the holiday season regaling us with Christmas carols. Her reading is progressing a lot more slowly than Wes's did: I suspect there's less urgency, because Wes is always willing to read to her.

Sebastian is growing up fast. We've started moving him out of his crib by putting him in Lorraine's bed with her, which both of them really like. We have to be pretty firm about proper bedtime protocols, and have been making it a rule that after a warning or two, if he keeps trying to play with Lorraine or get out of bed, it's back to the crib he goes.

I'm having a bit of a hard time finding energy for leisure activity, around work and kids. When I get home in the evening and get dinner done and the kids down, it's about all I can do to take a bath and spend a few hours reading or watching The Wonder Years on Amazon Prime video. This weekend, I want to make cupcakes with Lorraine and do science experiments with Wes and laugh with Sebastian. And sleep. I need to get my body used to the new reality here.

I AM continuing work on Emperor, which is trucking along steadily, but I think I've decided not to post anymore until I'm done with the entire fic, since I can't say whether there will be a week or two months between chapters. In a few weeks, I'll start bringing my netbook into work to do some writing over my lunch break, which will mean steadier progress, but since the action is going to start to heat up in the next chapters, I don't want to end up leaving a cliffhanger for months. I'll finish it, hopefully by sometime this summer, and post it all in one go (or maybe a chapter every day or two).

With this decision, I can also feel less guilty about writing non-Emperor stuff. I want to try my hand at writing Doctor Who, and possibly Downton Abbey, with which I have fallen in love, hard. And there are so MANY Vorkosigan stories I feel like I need to write. I want to write the epic secret romance between Princess Kareen and Lady Alys not-yet-Vorpatril, which has been lurking in my backbrain for ages, and I still want to go back to my Ahn and Metzov fic from ages ago, and I want to play with Nikki Vorsoisson growing up in Vorkosigan house as a non-child of that dynasty, similar to my Growing Up from years ago. There's so MUCH to write in Bujold's worlds.

Anyway. That is where I am and how I am. More updates to come later, I'm sure.

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