Dichroic Reflections

A few weeks ago I reluctantly decided not to get a stand mixer. For the amount of baking I did, I just couldn’t justify spending $300 for one, vs $40 or so for a hand mixer. (I’ve only ever used a hand mixer, anyway: it’s harder to miss what you haven’t had.) So of course since then I’ve been baking up a storm, mostly things like banana bread that Ted can take for work for breakfast. (I also made an apple pie when the in-laws were visiting, but the almond flour / coconut oil crust I made for it uses a blender instead.) The hand mixer works OK, except for a tendency to glob butter up as a ball inside the beaters instead of actually mixing it with the sugar, but it likes to make a mess by throwing butter/sugar globules all around the kitchen.

I finally came up with a way to contain that mess this time – I put my mixing bowl in the sink! Much less mess. We’re going to the other house this weekend, and if I can find my straight-sided metal mixing bowls there, I’ll bring them back with me – I think that will help too.

Someday I will have a paying job again, at which point I can justify spending money for things I don’t really need, but at that point I won’t have much time for baking. It’s always something. (On the other hand, by that time I’ll be able to mix up banana bread in ten minutes flat, so if I can remember to start it long enough before bedtime so that it has an hour to cook, maybe Ted can still have his cake – and eat it.)

On the current work front, the exciting news is that I hit 50K words today, the minimum my publisher asked for. I still have a chapter on “facilitating” and a half chapter on “project management for process initiatives” to write, plus some stuff Ted suggested I add to my chapter on managing processes in a system (1), so I told my editor that the question would not be whether I could write the 55K words they’d prefer, but how much past it I’d go. I think I made him nervous – his immediate response was, “Please try not to write more than 65K if possible! …Or at least not much past.” (I have a funny feeling that nobody reading this is at all surprised that I can write more words than the minimum needed, but since this is my first time writing a book, it’s all new territory.)

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(1) Not redundant with the chapter on Project Management; this one is aimed at someone who’s a department manager trying to keep track of several process improvement projects at once and keeping all of them in alignment.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

If I’ve been quiet around here lately, it’s been partly because I was sitting on a big announcement until I was able to make it public.

My book, to be called Fundamentals of Business Process Management, has been accepted by AMACOM, publishing arm of the American Management Association) and will be published in Spring of 2014. And yes, that means you can go buy it in Amazon

I’m pretty excited about this, as you may imagine. AMACOM was the first place I sent my proposal, so it was a shock to have the editor write back expressing interest in just two weeks. I think they are a great fit for my topic. They want it to be substantially longer, though, and to cover all the basics, so I have a bunch more writing to do. (I can do that, I’m pretty sure – there are some places where I just said “now you do this”, where I can add instruction and examples on exactly how to do it. I wrote the whole first draft in a month and a half, and I’m already 2k into the expansion. The trick is just to add words that actually need to be there, rather than filler.)

SQUEEEE!!

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

I’ve been enjoying the week at the lake house; Ted’s back now, which is even nicer, but it was definitely good having the cats here. (Well, mostly.) I was just about to write a post about some recent strange behavior from our cats, when I heard via Facebook that a friend of ours has just drowned. He was the manager of water sports on the lake in Tempe where we used to row, a man who spent his whole life on and around the water, and certainly a good swimmer.

I have no idea what happened. He was diabetic and had previously been in a bad car accident due to insulin shock, so I wonder if it could have been that.

I still sort of want to write the cat post, to record their oddities, but I just can’t bring myself to do it now.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

On the one hand, it’s noon and I’ve just showered and dressed.

On the other, it’s noon and I’ve gotten up before 7, made the coffee (for other people – I don’t drink coffee), responded to a business email, lifted weights, stretched, stripped the bed, washed the sheets and comforter cover, eaten breakfast, vacuumed the entire downstairs including going over all baseboards and any other flat surface I could reach with the dust brush attachment, and remade the bed.

It’s all in how you look at it. Unfortunately it’s still a bit hard to feel I deserve a rest now, given that my parents-in-law are now outside weeding my front garden. I keep trying to get them to relax, but they insist they like weeding.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

Life proceeds apace.

I have been doing responsible things, like opening up an IRA I can roll all my 401(k) accounts from pervious jobs into, and applying for new jobs. (No nibbles yet. I have to say that I’m not feeling reassured by the vagaries of some of the websites these companies are using; yesterday I applied for one that sounds like a great fit, but the website skipped some of the steps it was supposed to do, like pulling previous job information from my resume and asking me to verify it. I did eventually get my information into their system by dint of switching to Ted’s computer, but I’m not sure now if that went to the application for this specific job rather than into their general pool of information. Worrying, since this is a position I’d really want and that I think (hope) ought to be a close enough fit to get me interviewed. I did repor the issues via their contact link.)

We’re into the last few days before competing in the Covered Bridge Regatta, for which I am not feeling at all ready. I’ve been training fairly rigorously, except for that week’s break when I visited my family (though rough-housing with a toddler ought to count as exercise), but what with one thing and another, cold weather and furniture deliveries and house-buying, it’s all been on the erg. I’ve only been on the water a few times. We went to the lake house weekend before last, which was a good thing because the weather was so glorious that we’d have been kicking ourselves otherwise. At least my racing starts then seemed OK. We were considering going last weekend, but Ted’s parents came up to town so we stayed home, had them over for dinner, and then hung out with them the next day. We also went for dinner with them to Hall Street Grill in Beaverton, which was excellent. We plan on heading down tot he lake on Thursday night, so at least I’ll be able to row on Friday before my scheduled race on Saturday.

Ted races on Sunday, then we take him to the airport to fly out on a business trip. Since he’s flying from down there, I’ll be staying in the lake house all week, which will be good, because we really haven’t had enough time there to do some essential work on the house and garden. My in-laws have promised to stay for a few days and keep me company, which I appreciate both because I like having them around and because it’s a very large house to be rattling around in by myself. We’ll be taking the cats, though, so even after the in-laws leave I will have some co-rattle-arounders and can ascribe any strange noises to the cats.

Today we’ll be getting the futon delivered, so we are now guest-ready. That’s the last major furniture purchase, though we’re still waiting for delivery on a few others. Two high chests and a bookshelf should be delivered at the beginning of May, and the major wait now is for the sofa – they brought that last week, but they brought the wrong configuration of sectional! (Partly the salesman’s fault, for writing down the wrong numbers after highlighting the right pictures, and partly ours, for not noticing.) They’ve put a rush order on the new sofa, so it should take “only” 6 weeks. It would really have been nice to have last Friday when we had company!

My new Kindle arrived yesterday, so I spent part of the day getting that loaded up – I didn’t need it, as my Kindle Keyboard is working fine, but my brother and SIL gave me a gift certificate to Amazon, so I decided I needed to use it on something special. I’m not sure I like the way the touchscreen controls work; in particular, when you’re looking at your library in cover view, there’s not much blank screen real estate, so it can be hard to move to the next page without opening a book. I do like the front-lighting, though; our living room is a bit dim so it makes reading easier.

At the moment, I’m reading Riding Rockets by Mike Mullane, a Space Shuttle astronaut, and liking it. Based on my own years working at the JSC, it’s a fair picture, but he’s also mentioned a lot of information that’s new to me about just how risky the Space Shuttle program was. (I worked on the simulators used to train pilots and astronauts.) He’s right that they should have taken the Outpost bar and put it in the Smithsonian. It’s fascinating to see his portraits of some of the people – John Young is a legend to me, but he was less than impressed; he liked and respected Judith Resnick, which is a different picture of her than I have from some engineers who worked with her. It’s also fascinating to see Mullane’s own evolution. He came into the program a complete sexist, his whole schooling and previous career having thoroughly indoctrinated him in that direction; he quotes a guide his wife was given in Catholic school, which claimed that “men are emotionally stable, whereas women are emotionally liable (sic – I think they may have said labile) … men are usually right, whereas women are often wrong.” And then he makes it into the astronaut corps and works side by side with women like Sally Ride, Judy Resnick and Shannon Lucid, not to mention dealing with people who weren’t military for almost the first time in his life. It was apparently quite a culture shock, and it’s fascinating to watch him adapt.

And yes, I should really update more often so the brain dumps are a bit smaller and more coherent.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.