Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity.

So I’m sitting on the back patio with my laptop for the first time in 2013. The air is very still. Clouds have moved in. I think we are going to get a storm. This is awesome.

Tom is 18 years old this year but he’s bounding around like a kitten. He’s liking the warmer weather. He likes to lay in the sun.

There are very few sounds from the natives in the woods behind the house. The only thing I can hear is an occasional chirp and traffic on the expressway down the road. Otherwise it’s very calm, very quiet.

I love it.

When my alarm buzzed at 0525 this morning I felt like I hadn’t gotten nearly enough sleep. I didn’t have to start work until 8 a.m., so my head was screaming at me to go back to sleep until a more reasonable hour. After all, it was 39ºF and after all, you’re not really getting any younger, so you should sleep in, all tucked into bed and as snug as a bug in a rug.

I couldn’t do it. Yesterday it was 37ºF when I went for a bike ride so logic dictated that I should be happy that it was 39ºF. I heaved the covers off my rapidly cooling body and groped around in the dark, looking for my cycling gear. I then remembered that the husbear was out of town for the night, so I turned on a light so I wouldn’t fall into the dresser drawer or something.

Geared up in the same clothes I had worn yesterday because after all, nothing says “fierce” like the ripe smell of a sweaty cyclist, I made my way downstairs and got on the bike. At the end of the driveway I turned left, which in our case, means “up”.

I’m pushing myself pretty hard with the cycling this season. I’ve already ridden down the long hill to the house twice in the past two weeks and that fun is usually reserved for at least six weeks into my routine (because climbing that hill takes a lot of work), but I’ve managed to do this twice already and my body, while complaining, does feel better for it.

I ended up riding between 15-16 miles this morning in 70 minutes. That’s not too bad. I rode out by our old homestead, where I noticed that someone is building a house nearby on the land we used to own. I went on some back roads that I haven’t been on in years; I enjoyed some countryside I haven’t seen in a while. I noticed that there’s quite a few people that get up at the crack of dawn so they can work in their yards. I didn’t expect that.

This was the first morning that I’ve broken the 15 mile barrier for my pre-work ride and it was a good accomplishment. I need to keep pushing forward with my cycling; it truly makes me happy to ride the bike. I do get a little concerned with the repetition of routes; I’m only two weeks into riding this season and I’m already seeking out the back roads. I don’t dare ride the canal trail yet because in the early morning hours there are still skunks doing their thing and while I like to smell ripe, I don’t want to smell skunky.

I need to just keep pushing forward.

So I just put a letter in the mailbox at the post office. Not a big deal, right? After all, people have been doing this sort of thing for a very long time, and though people don’t do this as much as they used to, people still put thousands of letters in thousands of mailboxes on a daily basis.

To accomplish this small feat, I walked to the local post office. Again, it’s not a big deal. The post office is 1 1/4 miles from the house. I was able to walk to the post office and back in 35 minutes. This added to my daily exercise tallies.

I don’t know if I was inspired by the fact that the couple across the street are rebuilding their house that was gutted by fire a couple of years ago, and have enlisted the Amish to build the house for them, or what, but it was kind of refreshing to walk to the post office and back this evening. It slowed me down for just a bit and gave me the opportunity to look around the neighborhood a little bit. I noticed things that I don’t really see when I’m on my bike or whizzing along in the Jeep.

Sometimes it’s good to look around at a slower pace.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written about being on-call for work. Working in a technology-related field, especially in the telecommunications part of it, on-call is somewhat of a given. I can handle that. It’s something that I have learned to live with, though it has occasionally given me nightmares, cold sweats and twitchy-like responses to anything that resembles the beeping sounds of a pager.

I am in my third employment scenario that included officially sanctioned on-call duties. The first scenario, and the one I used to blog about the most, is the one that set the stage for me and there are several things from that experience that became Pavlovian-like responses. For example, my instinct for an on-call weekend is to complete wipe my schedule clean of any sort of activity outside of staring at the closest cell phone or pager, waiting for it to shriek out some sort of distress so I can shriek out in some sort of distress and them become hostile and throw the closest lamp at hand.

You think I’m kidding.

The thing is, my current on-call scenario is nowhere as hellish as the scenario that I cut my teeth on and quite frankly, this is something that I need to be reminded about from time to time. This is where my husband comes into the picture.

My husband is a smart man. Not only is he a smart man, he is a reasonable man. And not only is he a reasonable man, he is left-brained, so he can easily remove emotional response from a situation and think about things rationally. This is something that I am in awe of, though quite frankly, I like to think that I am slowly moving in that same direction. I don’t know what side of my brain I use. Probably the back half.

Earl reminds me that I’m not on-call nearly as much as I used to be. He follows up that reminder with the fact that there are always people at the various locations at work, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I don’t get called to fix things for everyone, I get called to fix things for the people using the tools I have created and/or support. He also reminds me that I only have to deal with the folks that I work with now, whereas in the original on-call experience, I had to deal with customers and vendors and telecommunication monopolies that really didn’t care about much of anything. Old on-call scenario, I was “first defense”. This on-call scenario, I’m “last resort.”

As I said before, old habits die hard.

Earl suggested that we spend the night at the casino on Friday night to celebrate Jamie’s birthday. We’d have a nice dinner, maybe gamble a little and then get a decent night’s sleep. On Saturday we’d head to Syracuse for some lunch, some go-kart racing at Destiny USA, perhaps some shopping and then a nice dinner before heading home.

Knowing that I was on-call, I panicked. I didn’t want to show that I was panicking, but in reality, I was like “ohmygodwhatamigoingtodoifsomeonecalls”, complete with irrational thoughts dancing around in my head. Earl reminded me that I could bring my laptop, I’m always connected to the world with the cell connection on my iPad and iPhone and really, what was the worst thing that could happen?

Rational thinking slays irrationality for the win.

I had one call yesterday, and that call was just a question because *I* had not changed one link on one list of resources due to a change in maintenance schedules. Nothing was broken, no one was hysterical and quite frankly, it was handled with two phone calls and a quick log in with my iPad to fix my mistake. Other than that, it has been quiet. I have no reason to think that it won’t continue to be quiet. I work with good people. We support each other. I sometimes forget that.

So after over three years of experiencing the “new” on-call scenario, I’m finally getting the picture. Calm down, relax, deal with it and enjoy your life.

This may set a real tempo for me.

I did not recognize the young lady behind the counter at Dunkin’ Donuts today. She appeared to be on her first or second day on the job; she seemed a little disoriented as to where important things like donuts and coffee were located. Because of this, I decided not harass her with a “why isn’t my tea waiting for me?” type of attitude. The prince can be reasonable.

The woman at the customer side of the counter, who was two people ahead of me in line, ordered nearly a dozen cups of coffee, all with differing sidearms. She seemed impatient and conversely very relaxed at the same time as she counted out pennies and nickels on the counter. After the cash portion of the transaction was completed she stood there at the counter. She didn’t head to the “pick up” area that is common in places like Dunkin’ Donuts, Tim Hortons and Starbucks. She planted herself right there in front of the register. Her roots went deep. She was shaped like a potato.

After all the differing cups of coffee were inefficiently assembled and distributed, the potato woman left and the balding woman in front of me (I notice things, what can I say) ordered her coffee and donut. She paid and then planted herself in front of the register. This slows down efficiencies by half, because the person that could be assembling the drinks is constantly reaching around the person that is taking the orders instead of working in her work area over near the pick-up window. The balding woman likes change as well. And since the customer is planted in front of the register, there’s that awkward moment where the cashier asks for the order of the next customer in line whilst screaming around the customer that is planted in front of the register, forcing the very dignified gentleman (that would be me) to yell his order and have his view obscured by a prominent bald spot on the back of the woman’s head.

I don’t mind bald people. I am proudly a bald person. But I do find it disconcerting to see a bald spot surrounded by the remnants of three different dye jobs in a woman’s hair and quite frankly, this type of balding is entirely too prominent in this part of the state. Someone needs a license revoked somewhere.

Now, I knew that when I got to the counter there would be mayhem because I am all wild and crazy and tend to pay for my order with the Dunkin’ Donuts app on my iPhone. When the overpriced iced tea came to $2.86, I showed the screen of my iPhone with the barcode prominently displayed.

The new cashier asked, “do I scan that?”.

Ok, I had a brief moment of “and then there’s Maude” and I was going to say something like, “Why don’t you call President Obama and ask him for the money?”, but that would have been extremely rude, especially to an employee on her first or second day. So instead, I simply said, “Yes, you scan it but after you press the MPAY button in the lower right hand corner of the screen.”

In another life I write cash register programs. In an alternate universe I am a secret spy that can easily memorize computer screens without even thinking twice about it.

She did as ordered and all was well.

“Thank you for your help”, she said sheepishly as I shuffled over to pick-up area, determined to get the precedent back to where it should be.

I like the newbie behind the counter. I hope to get her trained to have my unsweet tea ready and waiting.