It's A BEE-U-TEE-FUL Day In Paradise!

The rain has passed through and things are looking up on the water front here in Northern California. It's not back by any stretch of the imagination, but the lake shown below (Lake Folsom up near Sacramento) has risen by 28.5 feet this winter:

www.dailymail.co.uk

That helps a lot, but there's still water table depletion that has to be restored. Smaller lakes and ponds are still leaking out into the aquifers so they still look dry despite the rain we've been getting. If we can get more and more and more through April we'll be in pretty good shape for the summer. Then we'll need at least another winter like this one if we're going to recover much at all.

This morning coming toward work I looked up and it looked as if Mt. St. Helena had a dusting of snow on it. I was far enough away that I thought it might be clouds, but they just stayed there and I wondered. Coming across the hills I hit the ridge above the northern Napa Valley, a perfect view of the mountain and, sure enough! There was snow - a dusting that's probably gone by now, the time I'm writing this hours later, but it was there and it was pretty.

We are looking at more rain over the next few days - into next week if the weather gurus have it right, so more chances of snow and filling up of dried out things.

Aside from that, looking inside the four walls, my billings are caught up for the moment and I've been able to turn attention to other things. Not quite at The Stack, but close. Perhaps by this afternoon, after I get my Gantt chart project done? Hmm.

I do have a lot of quickie things in The Desktop Stack that I can probably get done in a matter of hours. Then I have The Box No. One Stack. That's a box of stuff I inherited a couple of months ago that I haven't done more than glance through. I'll combine it with The Box No. Two Stack that arrived just before Christmas. That Stack is small and has interesting looking keys intermixed. And they're real keys - as in they fit in locks - but they're more interesting than your garden-variety keys and I'm curious as to what they might go with. Uh oh. I hope it's not the equipment we recently auctioned off. Hmm. That is worth a phone call.

From there I can swing into The Box Nos. Three and Four Stacks. Those are things I received almost a year-and-a-half ago. I pretty well know what's in those, I just have to organize it and make sure stuff isn't inter-mixed with other stuff. All part of the job and part of the interest since I do occasionally find interesting things. Like those intriguing keys I have to call about.

We got the carpet laid yesterday and it is gorgeous! I was worried about the color. It's predominately red and gray - kind of like marbled meat if I'm honest - and I was concerned that once it was laid I was going to have a serious case of buyer's remorse. After all, I didn't want the room to look like a crime scene bathed in blood.

The carpet guys talked to me and I talked to them and we agreed on how to lay it out to minimize the bloodbath appearance and it came out beautifully.

See, I worry about this stuff now after my experience thirty years ago. Then I was office manager for a company that occupied the entire floor of a downtown San Francisco office building. Our landlord's representative came in one day because she was updating the elevator lobbies in the building and wanted to change things up from floor to floor to make it more interesting. She showed me a little swatch and I said "that's nice" and she showed me the carpet samples and I said "that's nice". What I did not do was visualize the end result. Two weeks later I got to the building, got onto the elevator. A few floors later the doors opened and... I swear to god it looked like a whorehouse! It was horrible.

The "soft pink" that she had showed me on the little paint swatch? Glaring! The royal purple carpet had a band of pink running through it as a border. In the context of someone's private home (providing it's a brothel) it might work. In the context of a professional office building? NO! A resounding NO.

I immediately got on the phone to her (as soon as I got into the office and to my desk since this was the days before cell phones) and said NO! She came and took a look and agreed. A week went by and I refused, flat-out, to get off the elevator on that floor. Instead, I would go to a different floor and take the stairs because I didn't want to be associated in any way, shape or form with that mess. Finally, the weekend after I nearly had heart failure, they came in and repainted the walls plain white. The pink was so glaring it still showed through, offering a soft, shell-like pink glow, but it was at least tolerable. Not the full fix since the carpet was still there, but at least I didn't want to die of mortification every time I got off the elevator.

After that I know to visualize BIG. Get the big paint swatch or, better still, get a sample you can put on an unobtrusive spot on the wall so you can get a sense of what the finished product will look like.

This time around, when we were selecting the tile, I got squares - full-on two-foot x two-foot squares in a couple of different colors and styles. Then I had my roomies weigh in and we all agreed on the color. Then it was the execution and, as I say, I did not want the executed room to look as if an execution had taken place. And it doesn't. It's very nice and goes well with the floor in the rest of the space which is brick reddish concrete - a bit redder and darker than the terracotta of a Spanish tile floor.

Other than that, things are quiet and happy and calm. I don't know how long it will last, but I'm reveling in the situation now.

Here's wishing you a happy, quiet and calm day, too.

Best~
Philippa

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A Whirlwind In My Brain

It's a bit like having an E4 twister in my head. Since waking up this morning, I have had a parade of thoughts of things all over the landscape. No one thing has stood tall, front and center. Just random things like the weather, the cat, work, home, future, general stuff, The Stack, The Project, the weather, food (recipes, what I'm going to make for next week's lunches), etc.

Thinking about the home front and the work front and the carpet and all sorts of other things are keeping me busy. That's a good thing, except that the thoughts keep bumping hips, falling over and crumbling to dust when they hit the bottom of the brain pan. Then they coalesce, rebuild into something new and take another turn.

I had to stop and fill the tank this morning and, baby, it was cold outside. I had been listening to the news while I got dressed, for the traffic and weather more than anything else. At 0-dark-thirty it was 32d in the surrounding area. Getting gas was made semi-demi comfortable because I bundled up and wore gloves.

Coming over the hill a little later, it was misting and cold enough that I thought I might get to see some snow. I didn't and was/am a little disappointed.  Just a little snow would have been nice, like a dusting of powdered sugar over the top of a cookie or cake. But it just misted through the cold.

Normally the phrase "what are you wearing" is laden with all sorts of meaning. Most often that question touches on the suggestive. This morning I might as well have said "I'm wearing a wool union suit".

What I was / am wearing are: My heavy pair of jeans, a polyester short-sleeved tee under a synthetic blend sweater under a silk scarf under a plush-lined jacket under a synthetic fleece vest, under a synthetic knit scarf. Upon arrival I did take off the synthetic knit scarf and gloves before trying to type. And, despite the polar bear look of the fleece / jacket / scarf / sweater I was still chilled. Not cold, per se, but decidedly chilled with vaguely tingling fingers. It took a fair amount of hand rubbing to get the blood to flow and warm up the digits, but they're working now, so it's good.

The one thing that really made my morning was, believe it or not, a hot flash. Don't let anyone kid you. Menopause during the winter isn't all bad because there are times when the timing is perfect. Like this morning or, my favorite, when it's two o'clock in the morning, the house is freezing, and you wake up because you have to use the bathroom and... hot flash! Your very own portable heater that makes the freezing room comfy while you take care of what needs taking care of. By the time you get back to bed the worst of it has passed and you're ready to settle in and go back to sleep. Those are the good times for a private power surge.

Of course there are the other times, the summer times when it's 100d outside and you're spiking into the internal ionosphere. That's no fun. Then it's all you can do not to strip off completely, no matter whether you're on the sidewalk, in a restaurant or meeting, or someplace private. And in the someplace private I will confess to having done that until the requirement passes. Cool cloths only do so much, after all.

Front and center, on the work side of things, The Project I worked on came back to me again, for the third time. I hate when that happens. I feel as if I've failed when, more than anything, it's probably just a miss-in-communication. My understanding of what's needed isn't as clear as it should be, and I don't know enough about what I'm doing to ask cogent questions. That's one of the problems with stepping into another person's responsibilities with someone you haven't worked with before and are expected to hit the ground running while wearing a blindfold. Zero training. Zero real explanation. Just here's this and this and this and... it's all yours.

I've been around the block enough that this isn't unusual. It's still difficult and uncomfortable, but not unusual so I've done what I thought needed to be done. Nope. Came back and I took another swat. Then, with clearer understanding, I asked a couple of questions, parroted back what I thought I'd heard and got the green light.

So, now that it's clear and I do understand that further analysis is required, I'll get started. I even have a plan (yay, me!). First, I'm going to analyze the hell out of it. How many which ways to Sunday? That's step one. Step two is doing it, checking it, and then I'll toss this fish back across the fence. Once that's done, I'll dust my hands and head to the sink to wash the scales away.

After that there are other things. Like The Stack which, because it reached the point of ANNOYING, I spent an hour working on this morning. Things are better. ==> That side of my desk is clear, except for the coffee cup rings I didn't know were there are now showing. Obligatory wash down and at least the plastic surface will be both clear and clean. <== That side of my desk is piled a touch higher, but it's all good because it's now all in one place.

There are other little things swirling, but the big ones have stopped popping for the moment. So now I'll head off to do my analysis of The Project and then I'm going to get started on The Stack. Maybe I'll even dig down to China (or Japan or Korea or whatever characters those things on those documents are).

Have a lovely day!

Best~
Philippa

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