Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Weekend Warrior

You might not agree with me on this one, but that's the chance I take when I put digits to keyboards.

I think the success or failure of a weekend is dictated by my war wounds. Do you? For some reason, when I go to bed on Sunday night and face another five (or six, or seven, depending on the projects and deadlines going on at the time) days of office work, I review my pain level.

This past weekend, for example, was a bit low on the work-to-rest ratio. So I didn't feel nearly as accomplished as I would have liked. Sure, I spent much of the weekend in my near-constant battle to clean and re-locate things that I'm constantly losing in my house (I'd love to call myself organized, but that's a lofty goal). But that's a given. Cleaning is a never-ending battle. And when you live with two males (The Boy and The Man), you'd better throw a healthy dose of disinfecting and desoccerating the house. But when the chapter closed on the 2nd weekend of the new year, I was feeling a little blah about my to-do list.

Not nearly like the weekend before. I spent the first 09 weekend deeply entrenched in checkmarks. I chalked up not one, but TWO, trips up the top of the ladder. Once when I climbed on top of our house to trim a tree that was forever "resting" on our roof. And once when I climbed up into the top of our garage to pull down one of Jacob's old bikes. Now before you ponder the wherabouts of The Man during these 2 jaunts, let me put your minds at ease. He was safely ensconced inside the house making sure the television and computer still worked. Phew. He was making sure that the electronics in our home are at the ready. Not that he refused to help me. He was never consulted on these endeavors, and didn't know about the tree-trimming until The Boy tattled. And he found out about the garage-attic scaling when my sister-in-law helped me back inside the house and we informed him that I had fallen from the top of the ladder (which, just so you know, is NOT A STEP), bounced off the top of his old Honda parked in the garage, and landed in an awkward position where I was half-leaning on the now-lopsided ladder and half "hugging" the car to stop my fall. Yeah, it hurt. Quite a bit. But I have quite a giggle when I imagine what it looked like in slow-mo. I actually enjoyed the ensuing hours of propping up my leg and forming a bag of frozen peas to my knee.

I really have quite a lot of Lucy (of "I Love" fame) moments on the weekends. Mostly because I don't take the time to prep something as I should, or take safety precautions as I should. I don't sweat the details until I have to ice some part of my body, basically. And then I cover the evidence in various ways. Move certain rugs or bookcases in my house and you'll discover where I dumped out gallons of paint (or actually stepped IN a gallon of paint ... whole foot ... in primer, no less).

But I digress. At least last week I ended my weekend with bruises and aches and the remnants of red spray paint on my wrist from finishing a few craft and home projects. And I loved it.

I'm hoping that this next weekend brings achiness and crankiness of a different sort. We're in the midst of the process of adopting a rescued German Shepherd, and the timeline works, we'll be spending much of this 3rd January weekend playing catch and running around with a new pup.

Wish me achiness!

Friday, January 2, 2009

My (Soon Not to Be) Secret Love of All Things DC


I've taken a trip back East to our nation's capital three times, all for work-related conferences and meetings. Each time I go to DC I try to bookend my stay by a day or so coming and going so I can take some time to be a monument-ogling, Metro-surfing, politico-watching tourist.



My most recent trip put me in DC at an odd time. We were knee-deep in presidential ads and mud-slinging. Knowing first-hand how Cali was reacting to the muck, I was more than curious to see what the atmosphere in the eye of the storm would be like. I was impressed -- but hard-pressed to find do-dads that actually slammed either candidate. And believe me, I looked ... mostly because a colleague begged me for some anti-McCain trinkets.


Elmo went along with me, of course, because that's how my son finds out about my solo trips. And our flight back was scheduled for September 11. Many of my fellow travelers around me seemed nervous for the timing. Not me. I figured it was likely the safest day of the year to travel. But as I took my last tours of the city in the morning on 9-11 before my afternoon flight back to San Diego, I marveled at the pomp and circumstance of the day. All around the city, flags were at half-staff. Soldiers of every branch of the military, in full dress, spent the day visiting the memorials and marching around the Mall.


For one day, I felt like everyone around me wasn't concerned with who would be our next President. Each and every tourist and Washingtonian alike seemed to just take a moment to breathe, to take in the world around them, and to remember. And I was never more proud of my country and the world in which I live.