Alecto's Ophelia

Fluffy the lap bus

When you have two enormous projects coming to a head at one time and your day looks like this:

I had to put it on an Excel schedule grid to make it look right because Outlook can't really do that. It gets all scrunched plus it doesn't show what really happens during the day, just what is meant to happen at the beginning of the day which was really only booked from 9 - 3:30 on this day and only mostly double booked to start. I book myself from 7 - 9 because that's SUPPOSED to be triage. More and more people are finding me. 

If a color is white it means I didn't get there or it didn't get done in that time slot. If a color is blue, it is the only thing I am doing. If a color is red, well, you can read them; it's a humanity thing and my days hardly ever look quite this extreme.

If a color is the color of bondo it means I was doing two things at one time. I can't call this multi-tasking because it isn't the truth. 

You know, if you are in one meeting and a speaker is saying something but someone else might be part of the presentation, you are not multi-tasking just because you are watching them both. You are only multi-tasking if you have tuned one out maybe 95% and are just listening for your name. Or something. I do miss a lot though. This is what I tell myself. It sort of helps. 

If a cell is yellow then I am actively engaged in three things and that's some bad shit. 

Look at the 4 PM slot. That was the height of ugliness. Plus I was so hungry I thought I was going to pass out. The need to pee had passed hours ago and I'm pretty sure my ass was numb. 

By the way, doing multiple things at one time is not bad. The bad part is this: Look at those gigantic conflicting time slots for ECR and Collibra. ECR UAT really just goes in the morning because it's supposed to be going live at the end of the month but then there was the director's meeting where we actually finally ADMITTED THAT THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL we're going live before the end of March and the entire end of project time line and resource requirements had to be rewritten and submitted to multiple people sorta ASAPish because I no longer own the resources and the little bastards have already started taking them out from under my nose. 

Collibra is imploding. Not the product, the project. They've been an isolated team since, forever? I don't know. I've been ignoring them because I took everything else but then they failed to produce anything of value and suddenly I owned them and they still failed to produce anything of value and I started to have heart failure and I put my boss in a box and he may never forgive me but if I can't save his life I can, at the very least, save the project, which is going nowhere.

The thing about these two projects regardless of where they are in their respective timelines is that both require my full attention right this second. I walk out of the room, virtual or otherwise for one second and shit blows up. In ECR UAT the only reason my head is still on my shoulders is BECAUSE we are not going to make it to Prod on time (not us) and because somehow Jalpa missed the part about migration schedules and migration requirements she didn't realize you couldn't just raise your hands and say, hey! we're ready to go now and none of the rest of us thought we had to tell her. Jalpa owns the project timeline, we, I can never really tell how many we are, own the pieces parts.

Um. Hmm. OK, It's changed, So, me, I build and maintain the hierarchies (OK, my team does). IT (who exactly is IT these days) takes my hierarchies, feeds them to the Fact tables, does shit to them and maps the leaf level members to, I guess it's the nSAP feed, and the Business provides the data and the hierarchy definition and properties to us and the mapping to them and.... ah, those are the guys that build the Essbase cube from which OBIEE reporting spits forth. We all have to work very carefully together so that nothing gets fouled up. 

Somehow in there somebody is supposed to know that UAT has to be thoroughly documented (with 8x10 color glossies with charts and arrows on the back) and paperwork with a gazillion signatures submitted to the migration team at IT (who exactly is IT these days) on the Tuesday before the NEXT Thursday that you want to migrate. And also, you cannot migrate during the first Thursday of any month because of where that Thursday falls in the close. And also the business will need at least three weeks to complete UAT when ALL of the data is loaded before you can even begin putting the migration submission package together WHICH will be torn apart with an icepick followed by several toothpicks. And a pie fork. 

As of LAST Thursday which was February 8 we did not have all of the data which means that UAT had not officially started. The date for migration to Production on the calendar was February 15. I was waiting for someone to say it. I had already alerted N. (it's not us, don't worry and thank you for the heads up) To get to a Feb 15 migration we would have had to submit our paperwork on February 6. Jalpa still wanted to make the end of the month. So we migrate on Feb 22. That means we sign off fully documented on Tuesday, Feb 13 and they have one day to do three weeks of testing and one day to put the paperwork together. Yes. No. Yes. No. YES!!! OK, talk to me when you have data and in the mean time I will have Brian fix his error.

Which brings me to the error. While I was not looking at ECR UAT, Uday said, I don't like that the properties in DRM don't match the properties in the FRD. He sent the email to me, Brian and Aparna. I made a REALLY FUCKING POOR DECISION.

Uday USED TO report to IT (who exactly is IT these days) but since this massive reorg happened he no longer reports to IT and is intrinsically an orphan who is on loan to ME because my team no longer belongs to me either, they have been reorged to the same place Uday has been placed and instead of swapping out the project manager they've left in the same horse. Uday now reports to me in this context. I THOUGHT Uday raised the issue with his project manager but he did not. WTH, Uday? So for two days no one but me and my now grown by 1/3 size team knew that Brian was not working on the Intake tool because Uday as upset about the properties EVEN THOUGH WE HAD A SIGN OFF FROM THE BUSINESS. 

When I brought it up on Thursday, the first time I'd been back to a UAT session I thought Jalpa was going to take several pounds of flesh. If Jalpa wasn't my friend I probably would have been beaten senseless in the parking garage and I would have had it coming. 

Brian - You have two days to complete five days of work. Do it now.

Jalpa - This thing is not going live. Please. Can't we just let him off the hook?

Alecto - Do you really want to be the one this project hangs on?

Jalpa - I do not. He will get it done.

Brian - get it done. I will buy you a case of, um, something. Don't fuck this up.

Later - Elizabeth, I totally fucked this up and now I'm killing Brian.

Alecto, I know you are. I can see him over there. You really screwed the pooch on this one.

Alecto.

What?

Thanks for not throwing your team under the bus. I would have had to kill you for that. 

So you see why I had to leave the Collibra sessions. You can see, right? You can see there was no way I could leave Brian,  and Uday, and Aparna alone in there. It's too much to ask of them even if they can ping me. It's not fair, especially this close to the end. And it's good that I didn't because I got to be there while Jalpa twisted and turned on the rope of denial while IT, OK, I think that's Nancy and Dan walked her through the dates over and over again and she finally came to the conclusion that the migration date was going to be on March 15 even though John put his face in his hands and said if Kanwar could march his guys through that fast, he'd be, well he'd just be WRONG. I didn't care. Brian could finish the first week of March which was the next open window. 

In the director's meeting one of the directors asked Jalpa if she wanted to ask for an extension one time or two times. 

Once, I thought, I only want you to ask once and I want you to get it right and please oh please oh please

And there was silence and N said

Alecto.

OH FUCK MY LIFE

Yes, N, I'm here. 

Alecto is my release manager and I expect she's got her arms fairly well around this. Alecto, based on the release schedule for these migration windows and the close schedule, when will this project go to production? 

OH FUCK MY LIFE

pause

N, I believe this project will migrate to production on March 29 assuming we can have complete sign off from all parties wrapped up and turned over to IT on March 20 and I don't see a problem with that.

Alecto, how much of a buffer does that leave you? 

N, that leaves us with a buffer of one week to accommodate the close and any issues we might encounter in the initial data tie which isn't complete yet and the system migration.

Alecto, are you comfortable with this?

N, I'm never comfortable but we can do this.

Alecto, I guess I meant are you willing to commit the team to this?

Yes, I will commit the team to this.

Meanwhile my IM is WAY TOO QUIET.

Crickets from everyone except for the Colibra working session, something horribly wrong has started up over there and I can't quite work out what but I have SOS messages from two of my newly minted senior developers and finally this.

I don't want to work here anymore.

He did not just send me that. He doesn't say things like that. What the hell just happened?

It is now 11 AM and I have been in my seat for four hours. I would give quite a bit to have two of those hours back. Not as a do over, I just need two more hours in that particular space. 

I want to ask N, N, please, did you just make me responsible for the outcome of ECR? You cannot possibly have meant that. I only own the DRM part of it and even now, I don't own DRM anymore and the DRM people are being sneaky and assigning my resources to other projects which means they're too stretched to do this job much longer and now I have to go tell them they aren't getting Aparna back quite as soon as expected. I think I'll not think about it but I do think I'll have to grab that timeline and pretend I'm the release manager at least in my head. 

FUCK MY LIFE I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS SHIT

And I now have hard proof that my boss has lost his mind. We have a new resource starting on Monday. No one else interviewed this guy. No one has seen his resume. We have heard conflicting stories about his skill set and they don't exactly make sense.

• IF you are a solution lead then you MUST have data governance knowledge. Solid data governance knowledge.
• IF you are a Collibra Solution Lead you must also have working knowledge of the product. Better working knowledge then I have which means you had better be a developer (I'm getting there).
• IF you are an SL, then your skill sets MUST contain the front end because that's the part the user uses.
• IF you tell me the SL only knows the backend I am going to be mighty suspicious because the one backend developer we do have, and he's quite good, doesn't know jack about data governance in context. He's tremendously good at creating the custom workflows you want using groovy script and whatever else he's got in his toolbox but he couldn't tell you why the happy path has to go this way and that way and why this Master Data Change Request needs three approvals in a blackout period and that doesn't need much at all and he can do amazing things with that library over there but an asset is an asset, whatever, just tell me where you want it.

So you're going to tell me that Ravi is a Solution Lead, can talk to the customer, figure out what they need, design the solution, feed it to the team in chunks but he doesn't do any front end work?

I don't think you know what the fuck you just hired. Thank god it's a consultant. The last one had to be sent back on day three. Wonder how long this one will last?

I'm scared. I asked Robin to invite me to a meeting because I saw the meeting on my boss's calendar. It's really bad when I find out about a project when it lands in my lap. So I came to the meeting and I listened to my boss agree to insanity. I didn't say a word. Surely there must be some mistake. Robin kept saying, don't worry about those dates so I did not. Mike kept assigning velocity points that also didn't make sense. How the hell was that much work going to get done by him and a new, untried resource in two weeks? I just shut up. At the end of the meeting he told me to get together with Robin and rewrite the stories (small chunks of project) so that they made sense.

The dates were mostly accurate and the dependencies stretch right into April. Holy shit. I had to fix some of it because the stories in the first two weeks didn't work. I dropped the velocity points and questioned her final deliverable for the sprint on the 28th. Yes, that is cast in stone. Are you telling me he can't deliver this? I can't tell you that. If he says he's going to do it then that's on him. I'll just have to make sure nothing else falls on his plate. 

I published the stories, sent him an IM and asked if he was completely clear about this.

Yes.

OK, I'm going to email this to you. I want you to be really sure you're ok with his because if you aren't, you need to tell Robin.

I'm fine. Ravi will hit the ground running.

OK, email on it's way.

OK.

And then what I have come to refer to as goo (because I cannot keep saying shit, it has simply lost all meaning at this point) hit the fan. The Collibra experts told them what they were trying to build was insane. This thing we just told the Decomm team we would deliver before June after months of screwing around and missing deadlines on the original project. After setting up the infrastructure to work with five business units for the next four months, we collapsed that project and rebuilt it to be just the two pieces required to satisfy Decomm.

Decomm is the decommissioning of a freaking god awful enormous system because the replacement they stood up last year can do 80% of the work - the trick is to find the 20% in all it's bits and pieces and rebuild it into the replacement and I have to tell you, that's a terrifying dance - there is no such thing as a lift and shift in this game. Best I can tell, there are over 200 moving parts of this system left over AFTER the analysis part where we took a very large sword and started hacking off limbs before we took the scalpel and carved out what was needed. Mike's Collibra team was already working on a project (that was apparently going nowhere) which was inserted into Decomm with the promise that he'd get to the Decomm part before June 12 but with zero project plan because he was a pilot Agile project. 

I was sent in when it fell down.

fuck my life on a smaller scale until I realized he didn't know how to build it and then everything became measured in increments of goo. How deep is the goo today? Nose level? Well that's not so bad. What can you tell me about the splatter pattern of the goo from that last meeting? Really? A straight arc to the back wall? Sounds like someone's throat was cut with a very sharp instrument. 

So. Much. Goo. The Collibra experts told the team this was a very, very bad idea and I wasn't there to hear it. During the debrief Mike ran away and when they got tired of waiting for him and wanted to end the call I suggested they just start without them. They let me know exactly what they heard. I wrote it all down. When he finally came back I repeated it to him. He denied it. That's when the IMs started flying back and forth.

OMG! What is wrong with that man?!

I can't take this anymore. Everyone is so negative. They haven't learned anything in all these months, they're useless.

I feel like I'm dying. Everything is falling apart and we have no leadership. I don't know what to do. Alecto, please! You've never let anything like this happen before.

And then the bombshell.

Don't worry, Ravi starts on Monday and then you'll have an extra set of hands full time.

Mike! No they won't! Both you and Ravi are allocated 100% to Robin's project the minute he walks in the door.

THAT'S NOT TRUE!

It is!

I sent it to you! I was in the meeting with you. Look in your email.

WHO WROTE THESE STORIES?!!!

Robin wrote them, you approved them, you put the points on them and at your request Robin and I cleaned them up. I actually dropped the points and spread the dates out so that you could do them. The February 28 date is a hard date and the plan waterfalls off that and right into April. It isn't negotiable. You'll need to get on the client's schedule very quickly to make this work.

I never agreed to this. Ravi is only 50% outside projects. 

Well, he has 35 points next sprint and the max for anyone ever is 26 and that's a high velocity performer like Jason and even those roll forward. Those 35 points were originally higher. If that isn't 100% I don't know what you think he's going to do over here but we can't say that the Collibra team has help in the next two weeks because they don't. Also, I can send you the whole plan, I think your name and Ravi's are all over it.

I have the plan.

OK. 

The IMs had stopped so I sent one out to the two of them but they bounced back. They'd actually gone offline at 4:30 and 3:30 respectively. One of them came back later but he lives in CST so I'm guessing he didn't think it was fair to run for the door just yet.

I called Elizabeth and we talked for an hour. 

I named the project Fluffy. Fluffy is a two ton bus with a great deal of very dirty, greasy fur. Fluffy slobbers and thinks it's a lap bus. It likes to have its belly rubbed and it needs to be walked about once an hour. It has a hot pink rhinestone collar and a matching leash. It's a very SHORT leash; we need to get Fluffy under control, whatever that looks like. 

There will be a risk review this week. Somehow I'm supposed to have gotten past the fact that I think I'm betraying Mike and Mike is absolutely going to feel betrayed but I'm beyond trying to save anyone at this point.

I have to deal with Fluffy. Mike is holding Fluffy securely in his lap and rubbing Fluffy's greasy belly. I'm not sure Mike has realized the bulk of Fluffy cut off his oxygen supply a couple of weeks ago. Also, Fluffy is now sitting on Mike's team. Fluffy is trying to roll its butt over on me the same way my cat does on the couch but I'm not having any of it. If Fluffy rolls over on me I'll be less than useless.

I have a short triage list for tomorrow morning (in case you were wondering, this is generally, but not always what I mean by triage). I'm just not sure how to order it. If I'd managed to meet with the team at the beginning of the day things might go differently but I'm going to be meeting with the team at the end of the day. Right in the middle of Mike's review with N.

• Get Fluffy's hair balls out of decomm, swab the deck
• Put ECR in a box and prepare to pack her up - automate Brian's bug report
• Write every single story for Sprint 32 with full velocity and prepare to submit on Tuesday
• Start sprint 8 for Collibra - Fluffy proof it
• Backlog the Collibra project plan out through June - Fluffy proof it
• Backlog Robin's project plan out through April - identify possible signs of Fluffy egress
• Check Mike's calendar for any signs of meetings I should attend
• Get template from Elizabeth and prepare the risk assessment on all three projects

That's not a very short list is it? Maybe some hair clippers?

So there was this one neighbor

This is stale hell, not fresh hell, stale hell and it is my fault. There is an 86% chance I could have killed this thing dead back at the end of April or May or whenever the hell we went to pet the donkey and my friend Lisa told me in no uncertain terms why NO ONE WAS COMING TO OUR BLOCK PARTY. I mean no one. We had a single response from the seventy-four fliers I delivered the first week of April and that response was, NO. We will not be attending this year. Kristin threw her hands up as only Kristin can throw her hands up and said, fine! It's canceled! Right there! That was our out. Print up the fliers, one more walk around, sorry folks, no interest this year, event canceled. Instead I crafted the best apology letter EVER, printed up seventy-four copies and handed them over to Lisa who swore she'd make her husband and kid deliver them, which they did. We dropped the price from $10 per head to $5 per family, fully disclosed the cost of last years party and cancelled the entertainment. 

We collected $15 and six RSVPs leaving us short another $15 and out of pocket approximately $35 for the cost of the the second round of fliers, the bottled water, name tags, ice, charcoal, and lighter fluid. I ate the flier, charcoal, and lighter fluid costs on the grounds that I'd have leftovers and I was perfectly willing to shell out $12 to communicate with the neighborhood. I just wanted it to be over.

At 4 PM a group text message came in from Kristin: Ladies! I'm running behind, just getting in the shower now, I'll be there in 15! 

Me:    I think it's still raining.

Cynthia:    No! The sun came out.

Barbara:    Radio silence...

I went to the porch and listened to the rain coming down through the trees. FML

Earlier I'd gone out to clean up the two coolers which had been sitting under the trees since last summer's very successful block party (don't judge, it's been one of those years where focusing on a pair of coolers under a couple of very large trees just never hit the radar; they sort of looked like lawn ornaments...). I wasn't particularly worried because the only thing we used the coolers for was bottled water although toward the end of the night people started showing up with bottles of wine. I know damn well we didn't have wine left because I personally killed the last bottle. I was expecting rain water and maybe some leaves.

I was not expecting three dozen 16 ounce bottles of water.

You can't drink that stuff a year later. The plastic starts to break down. I emptied them into the grass, crushed them into tiny balls and dumped them into the blue bin. I considered the thought process behind providing water at all. Last year it was hot and sunny. I remembered people showing up with cans of orange soda. Why orange? Why so much? Kids covered in orange soda scattered across the yard. I didn't recall all that many bottles of water in hands. I looked up at the sky. Grey. Wet. Yuck. 

Cynthia showed up at 4:20 with her husband. I was sitting in a low beach chair at the end of the driveway and had no intention of getting up. Someone had dropped off a tent and two folding tables the day before but had no intention of showing up. That would be the extent of the set up this year. Cynthia had table clothes. I remembered the grill which was standing exactly where I'd left it which would have been more or less fine except for the implements of destruction which were also sitting exactly where I'd left them. On the grill tray. I opened the garage door and looked for something with which to remove last year's crud. Paper towels and windshield cleaner. Yeah, that'll work. As long as nobody notices I'm cleaning last year's crud off the grill tools with windshield fluid we should be OK. I'm not going upstairs. For the record, windshield fluid will clean most anything. I want you to think of that cleaning fluid they use in clean rooms. It's a disinfectant that will clean almost anything including your dishes which means it will clean your insides as well. It's all good. 

Our neighbor Eric from one of the spurs showed up at 4:40 and helped set up the tent. He had two young boys, one of which promptly headed for the front door, grabbed the dog's thirty foot leash which is attached to the front porch, pulled it all the way out and attempted to hang himself with it. The dog, crated inside for her own good started howling. She kept it up for the next three hours. My dog doesn't howl like most dogs. My dog sounds like a cross between a Fisher Cat and a shaken baby (I'm not giving you a link for shaken baby because if there is one I don't want to know about it) before the lights go out. When my dog starts howling most of the neighborhood wants to turn her into a shaken baby but I haven't been able to get them to understand cause and effect. Get the hell away from her and her stuff and eventually she'll settle down. 

At 4:50 Barbara's car pulled into her driveway and she came over with several cases of bottled water complaining about the cost of it. It went into the cooler on top of Cynthia's ice. I'm fairly certain it's still in there and if I drank bottled water I'd fetch it but I don't. Maybe I can get Elizabeth to drink it or maybe I can just get Barbara to come back for it. It would get dumped out next year for sure except there isn't going to be a next year. Barbara stood up and introduced herself to Eric by way of announcing that she'd just returned from a baby shower and had consumed her alcohol quota for the weekend but would be attending a birthday party later in the evening and would probably have to sober up in the next hour. She grabbed a bottle of water. Cynthia and I looked at each other. One committee member missing entirely and another about to bolt. 

At 5:05 Kristin's very large SUV pulled up and two small girls got out. 

Stop. Our circle is one mile around. People do walk the circle. I walk the circle. Barbara walks the circle. Elizabeth walks the circle. Nobody at our party walked the circle. All but one of these families lived within a quarter mile. Large SUVs littered my lawn. Note worthy.

At 5:05 Kristin's very large SUV pulled up and two small girls got out. They ran up the driveway yelling: ELIZABETH ELIZABETH ELIZABETH!!!!! HELLO ELIZABETH'S MOM!!!! WHERE IS ELIZABETH?!!! (Elizabeth has been Katherine and Victoria's babysitter for the last fifteen months and is with them on average about twice a week these days)

Elizabeth is still in the house; I'll get her in a minute.

MRS CYNTHIA! CAN WE GO INSIDE AND GET ELIZABETH?!!!

I think you have to ask Elizabeth's mom.

Meanwhile Kristin has exited the beast. She's ready for a party. A party anywhere but here. She looks fabulous and suddenly every mosquito that hasn't actually attacked anyone yet (not really sure why because I live in a swamp) came in for a landing on every exposed piece of skin which was pretty limited, but still. Kristin's face turned beat red and she headed back to the beast for the organic all natural includes nothing but plant oil based stuff bug spray. She emptied the bottle into her hair. 

MOM!!! CAN WE GO INSIDE AND GET ELIZABETH?!!!

I think you have to ask Elizabeth's mom.

They bolted up the walkway toward the door and the dog lost her mind. I heard the crate tray come skidding out of the crate as I ran up the walkway after the girls yelling: VICTORIA! STOP! I WILL GET ELIZABETH FOR YOU! 

We had this conversation, Kristin, Cynthia, Barbara, and I. Nobody goes in the house except kids for the bathroom and Elizabeth walks them in and out because the dog just does not deserve this shit. It is not my fault I have a special needs dog and just because I'm willing to have the block party in my driveway does not mean I'm opening my god damn front door. I AM NOT OPENING MY GOD DAMN FRONT DOOR. I AM OPENING MY DRIVEWAY. 

We gave the dog another benedryl but it was two and a half hours earlier than I wanted to max her out and the worst part was she was maxed out with only four committee members, one committee husband, and one half a family present. That's it. That was the extent of our population before the dog exploded. 

Elizabeth and her boyfriend assumed their posts in the driveway where they stood for the next three and a half hours manning the music station (Elizabeth's phone and bluetooth speaker) and dealing with the kids. For the next week, if you can find one, pick up any paper dictionary and look up the word stoic. You should find their pictures next to the word. They will be standing side by side; he will have his arm around her shoulders loosely but they will both be watching the driveway and yard like lifeguards waiting to tackle anything that looks like it's moving in the wrong direction either into the street or toward the front porch. T is listening to each song as it starts, ready to skip to the next if the lyrics are PG13 or worse. He only misses one time and I find myself singing the very catchy 'I want to fuck you, fuck you, fuck you' under my breath until, horrified I look up and shout, T! I'm singing F bombs! Make it stop! 

Later. Jeeze, Mrs. A, I didn't realize you were so impressionable. 

Elizabeth: T. She probably wrote that. 

I don't know exactly how many families came in total. I think really only four but one large family came in two parts and then left together. One small family came in the middle of the large family and stood awkwardly by themselves for a while and then talked to Cynthia and her husband and then I think maybe the wife of the second half of the first family and then Lisa's husband and daughter eventually wandered around the corner with a soft sided cooler on wheels full of hotdogs at about 7 which is when Cynthia made me start the grill (so. I put half a bag of charcoal in the grill and lit it on fire and by 9 it was ready to roast a pig and I don't really want to talk about it) and at about 8 Kristin's retired neighbors from across the street pulled up and so there was that. In the middle of all this somebody showed up with a lovely cheese plate and said, we'll be back! But they never did come back. I don't really know what to do with the plate because I have no idea who she was. Nobody does. Kristin's husband who was supposed to be right behind her at 5 showed up at 7 without the salad he was supposed to be making but WITH the flask of vodka she would have killed him if he'd left behind. 

Four families. If they'd come at once and talked to each other it would have been one thing but they didn't. They came one at a time and talked to us. We were the welcoming committee on duty for four hours in a state of misery. I know it didn't have to be that way but for some reason it was. I know why I was tired. Everybody was pissed that Barbara bailed. Except me. I think I was just surrendered to everything except for my dog.

Twice I just went in there and yelled at her. People don't get it. Why don't you just bring her outside and let her get to know everyone? Um. Because that's not her problem and that's going to make it worse. Worse for bloody days. Everybody thinks they're effing dog experts. Just leave my poor dog alone. Oddly enough yelling at her worked. I think it shocked the shit out of her. Moving her crate doesn't work. That makes it worse because then I've gone and changed her space and apparently that's one of the worst things I can do to her. A few weeks ago I got rid of a very large piece of furniture which effectively moved the location of her dog bed from where it's been since she came home at 12 weeks and it only moved about three feet but it upset her so much she would lie on it with her whole front half hanging off and cry. I moved the damn bed back into the empty space and then she just sat on it looking confused and ridiculous because the piece of furniture was gone but that was the best I could do. She's working it out. 

The dog is only dangerous to herself but I swear she's going to have heart failure one of these days. 

At the end of the night, we were so tired. T's father came to pick him up at 11 and we all talked until probably 11:20. Elizabeth had to work at 8 so she really had to go to bed. The dog was back in her crate because she was still bouncing off the walls so I let her back out and asked Elizabeth to let her out one more time before she took her to bed. Somehow the leash was left outside so Elizabeth opened the door to go get it and normally she'd leg the dog away from the door and we wouldn't have a runaway but she was so tired she opened the door. The dog looked up, looked out and said, yeah, ok, I'm outta here and out she went.

Elizabeth looked back up the stairs at me. 

I'll sit with you and we'll just wait. She always comes back. 

Mom. I'm so tired.

Elizabeth. I'm betting that dog comes back in five minutes.

Mom. She has rounds to make. It always takes about twenty.

If it takes more than five you can go to bed and I'll deliver her when she gets back.

OK. Why do you think she'll be back so soon?

Because today she lost her mind and she needs her home and her people more than she needs to make her rounds. She left because the door was open and she's an opportunist.

We looked up. There was the dog staring through the door. It was entirely possible she hadn't left the yard and it had probably been less than three minutes. Elizabeth and her dog went to bed.

So that was a bust and we don't ever need to do it again. We are clear on this. We can still get together and drink wine periodically but we do not need to be doing this shit. If the neighborhood decides it wants to know itself, somebody else can put it together in somebody else's yard or driveway. 

That man though. The one with the two young boys and the wife who showed up later with the older half of the family. I got talking to him and it turns out they've moved their family around an awful lot and I mean a lot - as in, what the hell are you people thinking? You spend a few years in New Jersey but you end up working in Manhattan and the commute is a bitch and then you don't like that so you move to Westport and you really love Westport but that commute is a bitch (Westport is a suburb of NYC) so you move to Rye but THAT is a whole other ball of wax both culturally and tax wise and at some point in here, I lost track, you lived in Weston which is where your older kids liked it best, and here's where it gets confusing, the husband either loses the job in Manhattan or leaves the job in Manhattan but gets a job in Basking Ridge, then you leave Rye which is significantly closer to Basking Ridge and Manhattan and move to Weston because culturally it's a better fit for them and the older kids want back into the school system. The two younger kids are new to the school system so it's pretty much all they know. Mom takes a job somewhere in NYC, now here's the part that has my head spinning, commuting from Weston is significantly harder than commuting from Westport because you are off the Metro North line. From where we are it's a 20 - 25 minute drive to get to the Westport station so there's that commute you didn't like in the first place plus the extra 20 - 25 and wait for it... drumroll... Mom, four days a week you are a single parent working in the city because your husband works in Basking Ridge which means, just like me he leaves at 5:45 on Monday morning and returns at 8:15 on Thursday evening. It gets better. Because he is an employee, not a contractor he doesn't have the benefit of his expenses being covered so if he chooses not to make that daily commute he has to work out how to economically live in a part of New Jersey where the average rent for a studio apartment is just over 2k per month.  He has found a room in someone's house.

I stepped back a little and thought about this. I didn't ask him about how he was eating or what kind of life he had because I was afraid of the answers. I thought about all the moving, the upheaval and uncertainty and the conversation I'd had with his wife about so many things from what she wanted for her children to why she chose to work the way she did, the things she wanted for herself, what she wasn't willing to give up. We talked about the age gap between our oldest and youngest children and how old we were going to be when the last one went off to college. I'll be fifty-four, I said. I'll be fifty-nine, she told me. I looked at her. I looked at her seven year old and did the math. I thought, how can you only be forty-eight? You don't look terrible, you look like life has been seriously lifing all over your face. She waited to get started until she was thirty-two and then all hell broke loose. Not necessarily in a bad way it's just that things get complicated and you can either step back and let go which like it or not often involves letting go of who you are or you can step it up and reinvent your life in ways which probably wouldn't seem even remotely possible if you'd been presented with the scenario before you started. 

There was this insipid little meme that circulated the interwebs a couple of years ago which wouldn't have been quite so insipid if the woman in question wasn't holding a glass of champagne and some strawberries. Please. The underlying statement had tremendous merit - the statement went something like this: I want to finish up my life sliding into home base. 

Sliding into home base. Or second, or third, or whatever. Sliding. On my ass, or knees or whatever because I reached with everything I had. The champagne and strawberries destroyed it. 

It goes with the meme that's been out there forever which comes from a quote which I can't even begin to attribute to anyone anymore but it's about using yourself up, about there being absolutely nothing leftover when you get to the end. Now there's a fine line between that sort of thing and burning yourself into the ground, says the woman who burned herself into the ground, but the alternative is to live a nice, safe life of entropy where we believe there is zero risk or close enough to it. There is always risk. Do you want to drive it or do you want it to drive you?

So I don't want their life. I want to look at their life and gather some perspective. I admire her for not giving herself up. I admire her for finding a way. I understand why he is doing what he's doing. You go where the work is. It is possible to make that commute. We talked about it. You get up at 5, you come home at 8:15, you start getting ready for bed at 9:30 to be asleep by 10. You spend close to five hours a day in the car for seventy-five minutes a day in your home awake and seven hours asleep in your own bed. 

I looked at him and said, I am grateful there isn't an airport involved. 

He looked momentarily panicked. 

So there was this one neighbor. 

I'm still not doing it again. For the dog. For the dog, I'm not doing it again. Somehow I just have to get her through the tag sale next week. 

For the love of a dog

This is my doggy. His name is Simon and he's just past 13 months. Best I can tell he's probably about 180 and given his current rate of growth and the massive size of his frame he will probably top out between 240 - 260. I have had a lot of dogs all of them wonderful in their own particular ways. Simon is the best dog ever. Giant breeds tend to be gentle loving giants. That describes my boy perfectly.

That look on his face is stuck there I think. He's gazing at the baby chicks in the chicken pen and he is completely smitten despite the fact that he is inclined to chase them when they're loose and likes to kiss them with his entire giant mouth. Lucia yells, Moooooommmmm, Simon is nomming the chickens again! He's never hurt them. So that's his look unless he's grinning. Or laying on the floor just looking at me as if I am his sole reason for being. I've been loved in my life. A lot. But I've never been loved the way this guy loves me. There is nothing quite like doggy love. You love a doggy like this, even if it's just a little bit (and I love him quite a bit more than just a bit) and he will worship and adore you until the day he dies. And then maybe even more.

This post is for Cookie Crumb. She lost her little guy fairly recently and her heart hurts terribly. My heart hurts for her. I look at my doggy and I am so unbelievably grateful for his presence.

Someday he too will cross the rainbow bridge. I will go with him right to the edge and never turn my face away. Doggies should never cross that bridge without the face of their owners. Because they'll be waiting for you. On the other side of the bridge.

And I will keep his collar and hold it to my face now and then the same way my mother did and still does to this day.

Mr. Fluffy Tinklekins

 

The dog is a beast. He's gaining close to a pound a day with no end in sight. Last checked he was 40 pounds at 12 weeks and 22 pound Homer (on a good day) has lost what little fur like substance he had left due to the constant nomming of the over grown baby.

We were trying not to crate him. It seemed like a good idea at the time. You know, big dogs, fast growing boys, should not be confined and all that. So we installed gates in the kitchen and installed an over sized puppy playpen on the lower level so that he and Homer could cohabitate and I wouldn't have to listen to it all night. And then it became VERY apparent that no one was EVER going to make Simon do anything he didn't actually feel like doing. Ever. His strength is, and will continue to be, greatly disproportionate to his actual weight. The good news is he really wants to please. And we are prepared to make good use of that willingness every second of his very impressionable puppy hood.

So we bought the biggest crate known to man. I swear you could put an elephant in there and it surely will never fit through a door again now that it's been assembled. We assembled said crate and then attempted to insert tab A (Mr. Fluffy Tinklekins, don't worry, I'll get to that) into slot B (door of crate) and failed miserably. He was only 30 pounds at the time. Nomans and I, we are very strong people. Lots of upper body strength and all that. It took two of us. One inside the crate pulling and the other outside the crate pushing. It was very demoralizing to the both of us and not a little disturbing to the puppy.

We bought treats. We bought treats and we slowed the hell down. For the first week it took me an extra twenty minutes in the morning after Little Girl's bus left just to sweet talk him to the door of the crate. But that works, you know, the whole sweet talking thing, because he wants to please so very, very much. And now he's crate trained and goes right in without a fuss and stays in too if you remember to toss in a bit of puppy candy. But here's the kicker, normally you would insert a divider so that the crate was just barely big enough for the puppy. This encourages them not to pee in the crate (or worse). We can't do that too him, I don't think it would be good for him. And in the end I don't intend to use the crate forever, I just need to be able to ask him to go if I really need him there.

Which brings me to the next point. If I ever hope to have friends or family in my house ever again I'm going to have to be able to put him away. Most people do not appreciate 240 pounds of slobbering fur in their lap and as I mentioned above, Simon pretty much does what he wants to do. And that doesn't mean he's not being socialized, he is. It just means I really don't have the physical control to fall back on.

Did I mention he has complete respect for the gates in the kitchen right up until he doesn't?

So here's poor Simon locked up in this cavernous crate and he still wets the bed at night. Not that we would do anything so silly as to leave him a bed in there, it would be consumed by morning. He wets the bed and then rolls in it. Or at least lays about in it. And since we can't wash him easily in the winter and have to rely on baby wipes for the most part he's kind of ripe.

We don't really mind.

We took him to Main Street Westport on Sunday. Main Street Westport wants to be Rodeo Drive East (it's not, that would be The Avenue in Greenwich but please try not to disillusion Westport in these current economic times). We figured that's a perfect place to start socializing him because nobody walking up and down that street has any manners to speak of (including me based on the level of snark in this post). Or sense, but don't get me started. He's guaranteed to get a boat load of attention wanted or otherwise.

He was brilliantly well behaved with the possible exception of stopping to have a pee on every possible patch of leaves because that's where he potties at home. You know, on the leaves in the yard. He doesn't know sidewalks from Adam. He was pet, hugged, cuddled, kissed and slobbered on by at least 50% of the population. He ate it up. He didn't even try to climb into any laps although I wonder what will happen when he realizes he can pretty much make a lap happen anytime he wants.

By the time we made it down one side and back up the other he was exhausted and we weren't much better. I looked down at my angelic fluffy white pumpkin and realized that Mr. Fluffy Tinklekins is mostly yellow these days.

Passing by the open windows

It is really very easy to get yourself lost in the world and wind up serving your soul sunny side up to some cosmic parking lot attendant at the train station. I was sitting in my car at the station this morning, not feeling all that balanced, staring at the platform and thinking, what the fuck? My ears and throat hurt and I've yet to recover from the lost sleep incurred during the trip into the city Tuesday night with the big kids to see one of the final productions of Rent (I'm still crying over that one).

And then I got out of the car and approached the platform. I'm reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road from the original scroll which means it's like reading the inside of my own brains at nine thousand miles per hour minus any sort of punctuation or spell check. I rather like it a lot. The rest of you might get to feeling a bit sea sick as most people eventually out grow the desire to be hanged  upside down by ones feet and spun around until the world forgets the lie of linearity. After awhile I forgot about the soul sucker in the parking lot and got lost in Kerouac's version of reality (I quite like it).

None of this resolved the soul sucking and its really just a bit of a bandaid. Sometimes I need to come home and just get hit upside the head with the desires and textures of my own life. You know, the real part where I operate under the illusion that I'm making up at least a good portion of my own rules. So you know how this goes; I take off my monkey suit, pour myself a glass of wine and head out into the great and mighty jungle which calls itself my back yard.

Some of you might remember this little guy in a prior iteration when he was quite a bit smaller and I questioned Audrey's ability to keep him hanging off the deer mesh. Well, here he is and I suspect he'll hang here, slug free, for quite some time. This is food people. Through the garden walls and into the mini jungle, this is food. It's awfully hard sometimes to find a way back to something real and true in all the muck of soul suckage out there. And to reiterate an earlier point, I do actually love this thing they pay me money to do. I LOVE it. However, it is still corporate america, not my life and a bit of a soul sucker all the same. I need grounding, people, and here it is.

This is a little hard to see but it's one giant mutha of a sugar pumpkin (they are supposed to be TEENSY) resting in a bed of corn. I'm just going to wait and see what it does despite the fact that the slugs (that I thought I didn't have) have finally moved in and consumed the first of my ripening sugar babies (bastids).

When Little Girl shakes this pumpkin it sloshes.

Here is a butterfly stuck in the mesh. We freed him without contact and he flew away...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To the tiny cupola on the roof top. You can see him, he's the little beige spec, on the peaked roof of the cupola.

  You can see the bottom of the new chicken coop behind Little Girl who is doing her own version of geeking the camera (does anybody out there besides me recall the origin of the word geek and it's relation to chickens specifically?).

  And then there's this seven nearly eight year old version of peace. Yeah, I do actually buy it.

In the light...

And finally, I know it's kind of hard to see, but this tobacco type plant I bought two of that got no more than 18 inches high at any point in time suddenly makes this gianormous offshoot that's nearly four feet tall (not that you can tell because those cone flowers are nearly eight feet tall now) and he stands up like some porn star out of the seventies and says, come 'er, babe. let me show you what I've got...

Have a great weekend. I'll be rolling about in the dirt and other such scandalous things.

Speaking the unspeakable

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been asked if I'm going to blog this and I'm not sure I can. There are two things and the second is much easier to write so I'll write it first. Last night one of my six chickens was murdered savagely by what can only be raccoons. I'm not exaggerating the brutality of the death. She was dragged from the coop (I think they lifted it right off the ground), over the fence, across the lawn and into the swamp shrieking the entire way and leaving a swath of blood and feathers that will have to be cleaned up before Little Girl comes home this evening. I was afraid NoMans was going to sit out there in his bathrobe for the remainder of the night throwing rocks but we put the dog in the pen instead and despite his diminutive size (he weighs all of 22 pounds) he sure does have a deep and ferocious sounding bark. And before anyone gets up in my face about it, yes I do know what those raccoons might have done to my dog but they didn't and he won't have to stay out there again.  Tonight the remaining five girls will stay in Homer's old puppy crate in the shed (which is fort knox) and the new fort knox will be delivered by fork lift on Tuesday of next week. There. That's that and I just wish I wasn't so damn upset about it but I am because I should have known better.

Here's the other part. The first part. My son came home last night. I called him on Tuesday because it was Lucia's birthday and he actually answered the phone. I asked him to come to her party but he was working and I asked him to come to dinner last night and he said he would and he did and I kept my judgmental mother mouth firmly shut and it was lovely. 

Doesn't sound like such a hard thing to write does it? Well, unless you're me and you were beginning to believe you were never going to see or hear from him again (it's been 17 months) it wouldn't sound so hard at all.

I can barely breathe and if I start crying now I will probably never stop. So listen, any of you out there not speaking or being spoken to by someone you love maybe now would be a good time to get over it. Seriously. We are all any of us ever has. Good, bad or indifferent.

p.s. there are a boatload of little baby eggs. we are eating all of them as fast as we can.