Dichroic Reflections

I am not sure giving Macchiato-cat a treat was a good thing: it just led to her getting up in my face to see if there might be More. I deliberately gave it to her in the living room, not near the pantry, to try to combat her (correct) belief that the pantry Is Where Good Things Live, because now every time I open the door she’s there in a flash and has gotten on the bottom shelf a few times. However, I don’t think it worked because she may well be smart enough to remember that I had been at the pantry minutes before.

Oolong does not eat kitty treats; she eats pretzels and gets very excited about popcorn, which makes sitting on the couch and eating a bowl of it a bit of a kitty-fending ordeal. Today was an epoch in their little lives, as they had TUNA for the first time (I decided to have a sandwich of it for lunch). They ate it, but neither one seemed as excited about it as they do about treats / popcorn respectively.

They’ll be coming with us to the lake house for this long weekend, which will make their third time there. They like it there, but are not so thrilled about the process of getting there. The first time, we put calming collars on them, which just meant we had the ordeal or getting those on plus the ordeal of getting them in the carriers. Last time we gave Maka calming treats on the way there (Oolong won’t eat those, either). We didn’t really think they had much effect, until the way back, when she was agitated and biting at the cage, and we realized we hadn’t given her any – luckily, they were packed where I could reach them and she became much calmer after having one. She’s pretty easy to get in the carrier, though, and will even investigate it on her own, though she doesn’t actually get in. Oolong is harder to catch, and doesn’t like being handled. Once she’s in, though, she stays calm and just glares at us the whole way.

We’re not sure they really understand the whole transportation concept. The lake house has is built on a slight slope and has two floors: a main floor with living areas and bedrooms, and a lower floor with some extra rooms that are on ground level at the back, and have nice sunny sitting places for cats. This house has three floors: bedrooms on top, living areas in the middle, and entry and garage below. Both times, after getting back home, they’ve gone downstairs and seemed to be looking for the extra rooms. I think they’re convinced that the car is just a place where we go sit while the house transforms itself.

Now that we finally have the sofa here, we were planning to take one of the rocking chairs back to the lake house, but I think we’ve given up on that idea for the moment.

Ted’s got some offsite meetings this week in a place with a cramped parking lot, so he’s been taking the car I usually drive, leaving me with the Mighty Big Truck. (There’s a current country song which contains the line “He can’t be much of a man by the look of that little truck.” I expect hair to begin sprouting on my chest any second now.”) However, in true girly fashion, though I can drive the truck just fine, I can’t park it worth a crap. This is mostly because I can’t park for crap in general – never really learned to parallel park because a week after getting my license I moved out of Philadelphia and since then have never lived in a place where it’s needed, and I can’t back in well (which is a thing you need to do with big trucks) because I have terrible depth perception. Hey, I have a doctor’s opinion on that last part. (Had another eye doctor appointment yesterday. She’s got me wearing reading glasses for reading and computer work, on the theory that will prevent eyestrain and help my eyes relax for distance when I drive.) However, it doesn’t help that the truck doesn’t fit in a single parking space, lengthwise – you have the choice of finding a pull-through spot and taking up all of one space and part of the other or sticking out into the roadway.

Yesterday, I got up early and went to the gym. Getting changed int he locker room afterward, I had a nice conversation with another woman there, in the course of which she asked me what I did. I confessed to being unemployed (well, I think I did mention working on the book) and she kindly mentioned a few local places that may be hiring. We waked out to the parking lot together, and I felt a bit silly climbing into that big truck. She probably thinks now that all authors get huge advances and guaranteed royalties. Oops.

Today I booked a massage, and I know that parking lot is usually pretty full, so this may be challenging. If I have to, at least I have the option of parking at the big box stores’ lot next door and walking. This may be the very definition of first-world problems, but it’s the only vehicle I have today. It’s only a few miles, so I suppose I could bike, but it’s cold and rainy today and the route is all uphill and mostly on big roads. (I’m not frittering away money on the massage; it’s the second one on my birthday giftcard.)

Things are moving on the job front; I had a call with one recruiter and submitted forms requested by another yesterday, and I have a screening call on Thursday with a company (I mean, directly, not a recruiter.) One of the ones from yesterday would be a step up, but it would mean moving again, and I like it here. I’m talking to them just in case the job turns out to be really wonderful. The one tomorrow sounds exciting – nearby, reputation as a great place to work, in a new industry but interfacing with one I know – so I hope that call goes well. The book editing is being a bit difficult, but that’s because I’m working on the most complex chapters of it. The editor is being responsive, though he sounds a bit disappointed that this isn’t as simple and clear as the intro chapters, and I think his comments and criticisms are accurate.

Today’s good news is that I may get to see a former colleague; he’s responsible for the US Western zone, and he’s here this week and in meetings with Ted, so we invited him for dinner. He may need to cancel, though, if work dinners are required. I was planning to make a brisket anyway, with new potatoes and spinach salad, so whether he comes won’t affect the amount of cooking I do, just the amount of leftovers. Possibly I should straighten the house this morning, so that it’s done before I find out whether or not he’s coming. Otherwise, plans for this week are to blitz ahead on the book, though of course further revisions will need to be done after the editor reviews them. I’d like to have as much done as possible while I’m still at home.

I am a Jew.

(Apparently there have been some “disturbing” results for Google searches on that term, so I figure it’s good for those of us who are to say so out loud.)

At the moment I am a happy Jew who made some decidedly non-kosher and decidedly tasty tapas for dinner – grilled andouille, shrimp / cherry tomato skewers and asparagus on the grill we bought a couple of weeks ago, plus summer sausage, salami and a bunch of cheeses, plus crudites and the aioli and mayo-with-balsamic-vinegar sauces I’d made to have with artichokes yesterday, plus French bread and sesame crackers.

Also, just in the last few days I’ve been getting some responses on my job hunt, so that’s good. Meanwhile the editing on my current chapters is a bit knotty, which is not surprising because this section ( on process systems) is the most complicated in the book. Hopefully the changes I’ve made will please my editor, and the rest will be simpler.

A few weeks ago I reluctantly decided not to get a stand mixer. For the amount of baking I did, I just couldn’t justify spending $300 for one, vs $40 or so for a hand mixer. (I’ve only ever used a hand mixer, anyway: it’s harder to miss what you haven’t had.) So of course since then I’ve been baking up a storm, mostly things like banana bread that Ted can take for work for breakfast. (I also made an apple pie when the in-laws were visiting, but the almond flour / coconut oil crust I made for it uses a blender instead.) The hand mixer works OK, except for a tendency to glob butter up as a ball inside the beaters instead of actually mixing it with the sugar, but it likes to make a mess by throwing butter/sugar globules all around the kitchen.

I finally came up with a way to contain that mess this time – I put my mixing bowl in the sink! Much less mess. We’re going to the other house this weekend, and if I can find my straight-sided metal mixing bowls there, I’ll bring them back with me – I think that will help too.

Someday I will have a paying job again, at which point I can justify spending money for things I don’t really need, but at that point I won’t have much time for baking. It’s always something. (On the other hand, by that time I’ll be able to mix up banana bread in ten minutes flat, so if I can remember to start it long enough before bedtime so that it has an hour to cook, maybe Ted can still have his cake – and eat it.)

On the current work front, the exciting news is that I hit 50K words today, the minimum my publisher asked for. I still have a chapter on “facilitating” and a half chapter on “project management for process initiatives” to write, plus some stuff Ted suggested I add to my chapter on managing processes in a system (1), so I told my editor that the question would not be whether I could write the 55K words they’d prefer, but how much past it I’d go. I think I made him nervous – his immediate response was, “Please try not to write more than 65K if possible! …Or at least not much past.” (I have a funny feeling that nobody reading this is at all surprised that I can write more words than the minimum needed, but since this is my first time writing a book, it’s all new territory.)

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(1) Not redundant with the chapter on Project Management; this one is aimed at someone who’s a department manager trying to keep track of several process improvement projects at once and keeping all of them in alignment.

Well, I guess I’m not making a cake tonight. I’d been planning one, and couldn’t make it today because I had a brisket in the oven all afternoon, so I thought about making it tonight (a spice cake with caramel icing, suitable for breakfasts). However, it turned out to be an … um, unusually aggressive brisket. We make them in baking bags: throw in some beer, tomato sauce and seasonings and cook at somewhere around 250-300F for 5-6 hours. This one apparently decided it didn’t want to be confined in a plastic bag. I put it in a bit before 2:00, and I thought I’d gotten all the air out, but an hour into the cooking, I checked the oven to find the bag had leaked and the pan was full of the brisket source. Since it hadn’t been in all that long, I decided to rebag it – in fact, I double-bagged it, and once again I was careful to get out as much air as I could. A few hours later, I found that the bag had exploded – not only was the pan full of sauce, but it was splattered all over the oven. This time I removed the bag and just covered the pan with foil, and the brisket came out as tender as moist as usual. But when I went to preheat the oven for the cake, it turned out that the difference between the 270 I’d had the brisket at and the 350 the cake needed was enough to char the remains of the sauce and send up smoke.

I guess I’m cleaning the oven tomorrow. At least this time turning on the fan and opening the window provided enough ventilation, and the smoke alarm didn’t go off.

On a happier note, the logging year just ended for Concept II. It’s alwas interesting to see how much I’ve rowed in a year.Counting both erg and water meters, here’s data for the last several years:

2013 (which is what they call the one just ended): 1,388,850 meters
2012: 1,144,296 meters
2011: 1,051,641 meters
2010: 1,181,688 meters
2009: 1,863,169 meters (this must be the last time I went all the way through marathon training and did a marathon)
2008: 640,559 meters (I think I might have been injured that year)
2007: 1,417,328 meters
2006: 1,669,092 meters
2005: 1,360,557 meters
Before that I only logged test pieces and the Holiday Challenge on the website, so the rest of my data is buried somewhere in old paper logbooks.

I’ve just received author guidelines from my publisher, and there’s one bit I’m extremely pleased with: they specifically note that their readers have diverse backgrounds, and ask specifically for examples using men and women, and people of different ethnic groups. I’m pleased about this on two grounds: inclusivity and pure laziness. I’d already done that, and am glad I won’t have to argue about using people with names like Jun and Truong, and using “she” as often as I use “he” when I need a pronoun to refer to a generic project leader or other person doing this work. They also say to use examples and metaphors that work for an international market (check – I spent the last six years trying to talk that way!) and avoid mention of religion. (That and sexual preference are irrelevant to me anyway, this being strictly a business book.)

If I’ve been quiet around here lately, it’s been partly because I was sitting on a big announcement until I was able to make it public.

My book, to be called Fundamentals of Business Process Management, has been accepted by AMACOM, publishing arm of the American Management Association) and will be published in Spring of 2014. And yes, that means you can go buy it in Amazon

I’m pretty excited about this, as you may imagine. AMACOM was the first place I sent my proposal, so it was a shock to have the editor write back expressing interest in just two weeks. I think they are a great fit for my topic. They want it to be substantially longer, though, and to cover all the basics, so I have a bunch more writing to do. (I can do that, I’m pretty sure – there are some places where I just said “now you do this”, where I can add instruction and examples on exactly how to do it. I wrote the whole first draft in a month and a half, and I’m already 2k into the expansion. The trick is just to add words that actually need to be there, rather than filler.)

SQUEEEE!!

I’ve been readin God is an Englishman, by R. Delderfield, and having a reaction that can best be summarized as “I like it but…” I think I’d like it better if I’d never read Middlemarch, and possibly also if I’d read it in the early 1970s, when it was new. The problem for me is that it’s of its time, which is neither my time nor the time of its own story. It’s set in the late 1850s/early 1860s, but doesn’t have the voice of that time, like Middlemarch, or a god approximation thereof, like Patrick O’Brian’s work. (Actually, Middlemarch is set in 1830, but if there’s a difference in culture between its 1860s publication and the time of its setting, it’s not visible to me at this distance. Given the turbulence of the 1840s, the Corn Laws and such, there probably are changes that I’m just not seeing.) One problem for me with this book is that because the voice and diction of the book feel like 1970 even when the characters are thinking like people of the 1850s, when the characters go against the conventions of the time, as with women professionals or an interrracial marriage, it’s not clear how much of that is the conventions being false pictures of the time, and how much is Delderfield grafting 1970s values onto 1850s people.

These are basically just background niggles in my brain, though; otherwise the book is both fascinating and educational. But I think I might go reread Middlemarch soon.

I’ve been enjoying the week at the lake house; Ted’s back now, which is even nicer, but it was definitely good having the cats here. (Well, mostly.) I was just about to write a post about some recent strange behavior from our cats, when I heard via Facebook that a friend of ours has just drowned. He was the manager of water sports on the lake in Tempe where we used to row, a man who spent his whole life on and around the water, and certainly a good swimmer.

I have no idea what happened. He was diabetic and had previously been in a bad car accident due to insulin shock, so I wonder if it could have been that.

I still sort of want to write the cat post, to record their oddities, but I just can’t bring myself to do it now.

Today I: cleaned 2.5 bathrooms (one more to go), Swiffered all hard-surface flooring downstairs, rowed, weeded horsetails and mushrooms about of the the back and about a 3 feet square part of the overgrown front area, walked to the pick up some stuff at the local grocery store and stopped by the diner and new Mexican place to get take-out menus to keep around, and cooked myself a tasty dinner (gambas al ajillas, golden-crusted Brussels Sprouts, and some of the leftover lentils – one advantage to being alone is getting to eat whatever weird combination you feel like). I did not, however, write. Or read the book I brought to do research in.

I really do need to do some of that. I spent a little bit of time making notes on stuff to write about, so at least that’s something, but I think I need to spend more time on that kind of work tomorrow. Or maybe tonight, but my brain gets tired later in the day even when I really haven’t been using it. (Rowing, weeding, and cleaning are actually activities that work best without too much thought for me, in fact.)