My brother was right
I just glanced back through some old posts and saw that I had noted that my brother said we’d finish construction in September. Technically, he was right with that guess, because we did the punch list last week and they are finishing the items on that list this week.
So my brother was right about this one thing. There, I said it.
Dustpans
Exciting topic today, eh?
As with most things, there is a story behind that one word. We had the final walk-through and created the punch list on Friday for my home addition construction. My architect included a note that I would list missing things, including a cost for the items, and deduct it from the final bill. A terrific idea, because several times during construction I posted sometimes long emails to the contractor and architect over things that have gone missing.
I know where everything is in my house, or I did before construction. One of the strangest feelings is to reach for something that you’ve kept in a particular spot for, say, ten years, and find it missing. So, if you ever have construction in your home, be prepared for your property to disappear. No matter how much you complain, it just happens.
I got a bit angry as all my flashlights disappeared and basement lightbulbs were broken every week, but I got angrier when I realized that no amount of complaining on my part would stop things from disappearing. There seems to be a universal truth that construction guys have sloppy boundaries when it comes to a homeowner’s personal property. If they see an extension cord, they use it. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t get returned after they use the cord they borrowed. They also take bottles of water, orange juice, and, sometimes, food from your refrigerator.
Once a construction guy picked up the phone when it rang and scared my mother.
I complained regularly about all of these transgressions.
After one of my big tirades, the guys did manage to return a shovel. It wasn’t mine, but was close to the one I described to them that they had taken. They returned a big plastic tub that I used in the garden, too, but it was cracked and broken. The battery lanterns, flashlights, extension cords, and other stuff never returned.
Someone took my ancient ipod, too, but I figure I got the last laugh on that one, because it doesn’t hold a charge at all any more — I left it in an ipod speaker in the basement to use during workouts. I am upset that someone took my old ipod, but I’m relieved that they thief didn’t take the little speaker thing when he took the ipod.
The missing dustpan situation strikes me as funny because I didn’t notice until last night that they were all gone. I wonder what else I’ll discover missing in a month or so, long after this list is done and I’ve paid the contractor.
Around the middle of construction, I became hyper-vigilant about my brooms, because they were regularly commandeered by the construction crews until I rescued them (usually from the yard right before a rain storm) so I could sweep something up in the house. Once I realized that the guys kept what they borrowed, I did my best to hide the brooms.
What I failed to notice until this weekend was that some time in the last few weeks, my dustpans disappeared. I know the big one that I use to pick up leaves in the fall was in the basement as recently as a month ago, because I used it then to pick up errant plastic shipping peanuts in late July and early August when I was cleaning up the basement after most of the construction work was done. Of course, I used my big yellow flashlight a couple weeks ago, too, but it was gone when I reached for it so I could look out into the crawl space under the new addition on Thursday night during our walk-through with the contractor.
Of course, hiding things from contractors has its downside, too. I still can’t find the screwdriver and hammer that I hid when I realized the guys were taking stuff they could see.
Terrorism that was personal — remembering a friend
Sometimes it is hard to believe that ten years have passed since September 11, 2001. At other times, it feels like a lifetime has passed because so much has changed in the ten years since we lost friends and loved ones in the random acts of violence perpetrated against us because we are Americans.
Our whole world changed that day because it demonstrated to us in the most horrible way imaginable that we aren’t immune to the sort of crazy foreign terrorist attacks that, until then, mostly seemed to happen in other parts of the world. Sure, we had our own home grown crazy terrorist in Tim McVeigh, but this was different.
I sometimes feel that in the politicization of September 11th, we’ve lost sight of the real people who were lost that day. That fact makes me very angry because I lost a friend — a real person, not some political thing — that day.
Her name was Catherine Gorayeb. She was a single mom of a toddler (Kate, then 2 1/2, now almost a teenager), and was a Marketing person for a firm called Random Walk Computing. Her office was in midtown, but she was in the World Trade Center that day for a meeting. I learned of her death a couple days after September 11th. She was there by accident of timing, but then again, was anyone really supposed to be there to endure the insanity that was terrorism on that day? The point of terrorism is its horrid randomness. They attack without any reason. We lose friends and loved ones as a result of their idiotic acts.
I wrote a really long piece about Catherine last year, so I won’t repeat it. I posted a tribute on legacy this year, as did several other friends, but I cannot let this day pass without posting a short remembrance of her here, too.
The Journey from Cautious to Fearless
The journey from cautious to fearless is fraught with peril.
Since July 1st, I have been in a new job. Technically, my new job started June 1st, but I spent the first month doing things to wrap up my old job so I didn’t have time to really dive into the new one until after the July 4th weekend. That first week, I dove into the deep end and have been swimming hard ever since.
Swimming hard, not treading water.
Treading water is not an option. My new job is one that didn’t exist before, so there is no model I can hold up and say “that’s what I’m supposed to do.” It is a new job and involves skills I haven’t used in several years. Once I got through refreshing some of those old skills, I realized that the key to success in this job will likely be the ability to jump in with some fearlessness and just do things. We are tasked with starting with a fresh perspective to replace old processes that weren’t working, but we are doing it for a 600+ person organization and in a very short time span, so we have to just figure out a direction and go, hoping for the best and relying on our ability to talk our way through things with all those different stakeholders.
I have to be fearless. That’s something I haven’t done in a very long time. My bosses for the last decade have encouraged caution. Most have actively discouraged fearlessness. After that many years of that message, it does sink in. I have to re-learn fearlessness. This is unexpected, but not unwanted.
At times I am afraid of being fearless. At other times, I’m exhilarated by the prospect. While I am still learning how to be fearless after so many years of caution, I am excited because learning to be fearless at work is having an interesting impact on how I approach the rest of my life.
Part of being fearless is taking that leap with the hope you will succeed, but acknowledging all the while that you might fail and you have to be ready to accept that possibility. This aspect of my new work situation is exactly what my writing needs right now.
2011: An Unexpected Transformative Year
2011 has become quite a transformative year for me. I’ve changed jobs twice, had an addition built onto my house, gotten a dental implant drilled into my jaw, and began getting fit. All of that happened in the last eight months.
Only one of the job changes was on purpose. The first change was an opportunity to go do something a little different from what I had been doing in a part of our organization I really admire. The second time my job changed by force because the division I joined was merged with another division and started a massive reorganization – a transformative change, not just a moving of chairs – about the time I started the new job. Let me just say, that alone was very stressful for me.
But job change wasn’t my only stress. I waited for months for permits and got them and we began construction shortly before I was notified that my “new” job was being terminated. I was scrambling to create a resume for entirely different jobs at work as I was living through troops of construction men invading my house on a daily basis as they worked to build an addition onto my little row house.
Living through those two things didn’t allow time for much else, so I decided to set my writing aside for a few months and get everything else in order. I made this decision because it seemed wiser to officially set writing aside than to beat myself up because I didn’t have time or energy to focus on the stories. At the time, I worried about that decision, but any of you who have ever lived through a reorganization OR a home renovation project know that either one of those can and will consume your life. Living through BOTH at the same time is an exercise in survival without going insane.
Throw in dental implant surgery right in the middle of that, and I’m amazed I lived through all of it with my sanity and new diet and exercise regime in place.
Actually, the diet and exercise might have helped me weather the storm. I started by ordering a fitbit back in early March. By then, the reorganization crazies were setting in and construction was about to start. I knew I had to do something to keep myself steady, and I was already worried about weight I had gained in the last few years. My friend Jeanne Adams had been raving about the fitbit, so I decided to give it a go. I’m competitive enough that it didn’t take me long before I was trying to personal best the number of steps I took each day. When I started out, I was happy to make sure I hit 10,000 steps each day. Six months later, I’m disappointed if I don’t get at least 13,000 steps each day. So far, I’ve lost twelve pounds and I’m not in my “fat” clothes any more. That works for me!
I have to stop now, but I have more to say about this transformation I’m going through this year…
Happy Birthday to me!
Today is my birthday. I won’t say How old I am, but I will tell you I had a good day even though I was at work. My friends took me out for a nice dinner at one of my favorite french restaurants, so the day ended very well.
A new Titanium tooth
I haven’t blogged much in the last few months because I have been entirely too busy. A new job, a reorganization at work, construction on the addition at home, and a few other things all going on at once — a sort of perfect storm of individual things that can cause tremendous disruption in life all happening at once.
One of the many “little” things that has filled in the spaces between the bigger ones is that I finally got the dental implant that I’ve needed since I cracked a back molar through the root and it had to be extracted a few years ago. I put the implant off too long because I was scared of the procedure (and the cost), which meant I have a lot of other dental work necessary to save the tooth opposing the one I lost, but that’s a story for another day.
Two months ago, the dental implant specialist placed a titanium screw in my jaw. The procedure only took like 90 minutes and wasn’t that bad. I didn’t feel a thing during the surgery, but my jaw was sore from being open that wide for that long as they drilled the hole in my jaw bone and worked to get the implant placed in exactly the proper position before the dental surgeon literally screwed the Titanium implant into place. I’m not kidding. If you want to know more about how dental implants work, go here. Wikipedia has a surprisingly good, detailed explanation of how dental implants work.
All the details are good, but experience is a different thing entirely. My recovery from the implant has been more difficult than I expected, and more emotionally weird.
First off, it took days for the swelling to go down even though I followed every bit of advice and put an ice pack on my jaw every 20 minutes the first day, used the medications and special mouthwash, and so on. But since I had experienced serious trauma in the form of a drill making a hole in the jaw bone, I had to allow for recovery time.
The bigger surprise was that for the first week or two, I felt twinges of pain from the area of the implant if I talked too much, laughed to loud, or yawned too wide. This may all be because the implant is at the very back of my lower jawbone, but it was a challenge for me since I talk a lot and tend to laugh a lot, too. Every time it twinged, I worried, because I do a lot of that, too.
Luckily, the twinges subsided with time.
Still, I worried for weeks that the darn thing might not “take.” I’d read enough about implants to know that some fail, sometimes for reasons no one can explain. I love drinking from straws, but have done so only once or twice since I got the implant because I don’t want to risk messing things up (even though I think they only encourage you to not drink from a straw for the first 3 to 5 days).
So I’ve worried. More than I should, but that’s how I am.
However, I have to say that this week — really in the last couple days — I’ve finally begun to feel like the implant is “normal” and staying in place. I think this is going to work! I looked at the calendar and realized that my two month mark with the implant was Tuesday. Maybe it just takes that long to adjust to this new thing in my mouth.
No worries!
The Dalai Lama and Darth Vader
Two subjects I doubt you’d see together, except for the fact that as I was walking by the Verizon Center during lunch time today I was listening to the VW Darth Vader ad and watching streams of monks in saffron robes on the sidewalk.
The Dalai Lama is in town for, as a friend said, his version of a concert tour. His Holiness is holding a ten day long Kalachakra for World Peace at the Verizon Center. Judging from the garments of the crowds on the sidewalk, I’d say a lot of people came here from up and down the Mid-Atlantic seaboard for this event. I’ve seen many women in gorgeous formal Tibetan gowns, more monks in red and gold than I can count, and plenty of T-shirts for one or another Tibetan group.One large group from New Jersey is sporting sunny yellow t-shirts.
So, they are just another large group of tourists, but with more colorful and interesting clothing than the run of the mill T-shirt, shorts and flip flops that we usually see on summer tourists in Washington.
Plus, there is a Tibetan marketplace set up in a series of tents along F Street in front of the National Portrait Gallery. I will have to shop those tents before this week is over.
Construction is underway!
Even though it has been a bit overcast and rainy, the construction firm started work on April 1st. They hung a big blue tarp off the back of the house to cover the site as they prepare to start the footers.
My back yard is all clay, and they had to dig by hand because there is no alley or street access of any kind to my back yard — the kind of access you need to bring in the sort of equipment they might usually use to place a foundation for an addition like mine.
Today they dug the holes. My sister-in-law was freaked out by this picture because she said it looked like some body disposal site (holes next to something long under plastic. That’d be one tall body, though, because my yard is 19 feet wide and that plastic stretches almost from fence to fence.
Holes are dug for the footers