A Long-Overdue Brain Dump

It happens on the regular: I put off writing about what I need to write about because I have other topics I “should” be posting, like the monthly cataloging of the blooms in my garden, or the annual missive to my son on (or around) his birthday.

Screw that. I keep this blog around for me. It’s no longer the angsty ramblings of a twenty-something who’s trying to keep in touch with all of her friends at once. This is the public journal of a middle-aged working mother. Basically, it’s a lot easier to find references to life events after the fact using an indexed database of words than it is to rifle through a handwritten journal.

The thing is, though, that there haven’t really been very many life events to record this year, with the global pandemic and all. No tropical vacation, no visiting friends and relatives in other cities, no local bands and food trucks downtown, not even any photo walks along the river.

I guess that’s one reason why I haven’t been sitting down and pouring out the contents of my brain lately: there hasn’t been anything that I especially wanted to record for posterity, or to share with others by crossposting to Facebook. I sew stuff, I grow stuff, I work, I pretend to be a badass martial artist, but it all feels like Groundhog Day.

And now autumn is settling in.

The fall foliage is beautiful, and I’m definitely a big fan of hoodie weather… but I’m solar-powered. It must be the string of chilly, overcast days that are getting to me.

Or maybe it’s the sameness of every day working from home and supervising my son’s remote learning. Maybe it’s our geriatric cat pissing on the carpet by my sewing machine, instead of her litter box, making one of my primary hobbies difficult if not impossible for the time being. Maybe it’s that jowly, puffy, saggy, tired, worn-down face staring at me from the bathroom mirror every morning. Maybe it’s my Krav Maga class getting pushed later and later in the evening, so that I leave for class about the time I’d normally be starting my son’s bedtime routine, meaning that a) I feel like I can only go once a week for his sake; and b) when I do go, I’m already tired and not at my best by the time class begins.

Maybe my brain meds need adjusted. Maybe I need more than just brain meds. Maybe I need to get off the brain meds.

Maybe everybody in the world is having a hard time right now, or maybe it’s just me.

My 12-Year History of Step-Tracking

Last Wednesday, I woke to discover that I’d let my Fitbit battery drain completely overnight: my sleep data ended abruptly at 1:15am.

My Fitbit Charge 2 never quite recovered. Despite following all the instructions I found on all the knowledge bases and forums, the heart rate function remained borked.

Within two days, I found myself online with an AT&T sales rep, purchasing an Apple Watch (Series 5, 40mm).

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Year One as a Senior Data Warehouse Engineer

This morning was my annual performance review with my boss.

I generally feel like I’m going to the Principal’s Office when it comes time for my review. I was promoted to a Level 2 Engineer back in 2013, but even then I was concerned about my performance. The year after that was the year of me being consistently and flagrantly late to work, along with planned late arrivals and early departures for appointments, so much so that one of my Areas for Improvement was to “respect [Corporate] business hours.”

For my 2015 review (which turned out just fine), this excerpt sums up my usual state of mind before a review:

On the night before my review, I thought about all the crap that’s gone wrong this year. I thought about how epically I’d messed up during one of my on-call rotations, going back to bed without alerting the DBA to implement my fix. I thought about how often she would stop by my desk when I had something on my screen other than work — kind of like when I was a kid cleaning my room, and my Mom would walk in just as I’d started to get distracted by a book or toy I hadn’t seen in a while. I thought about how monkey-minded I’ve been lately — my mantra for 2015 was the Zen adage, “Do what you’re doing while you’re doing it,” but I haven’t once felt like I was living that.

 

I didn’t write anything about my 2016 or 2017 reviews; looking over my hard copies, they were generally positive, so I guess there were no surprises or twists to report. Last year, I was pretty confident, since we’d had prior discussions about how I could earn a promotion, and I knew I had nailed it.

So, how about this year’s review?

Unsurprisingly, it went just fine. In fact, my boss told me that I identified “ways to assert more leadership and ownership in projects,” and she was pleased overall with my first year as a Senior Engineer. I got the standard merit raise, and I even managed to suggest an additional goal to add to the list she had already prepared.

Quite honestly, I attribute a non-trivial portion of this year’s success to my ADHD diagnosis and treatment. As they say, pills don’t teach skills… but I feel like I do much better work when I’m able to concentrate on the task at hand.

It’s not like I brought that up in my review, of course. I will gladly take all due credit for self-improvement and stepping up to the challenges posed to me.

It just feels good to know that I’m not broken, or lazy, or generally less-than. I’m good.