A letter to Grandma Marty

Work sucks. I can literally feel myself wilting away from it. My extrovert-ness is very upset right now. However, I am waiting to hear back from a company I did a second interview for last week. That actually looks like it has a lot of potential and I'm expecting to hear good things. The company is a tech company and I would be working on one team with six other devs who are in charge of the billing system for one of their websites, which has a lot of business intelligence stuff around it, which I find fascinating. 

I haven't gotten my diploma yet but since the semester just ended, I wasn't expecting anything yet. If I haven't received anything by the end of Feb then I'll start creating a fuss :] And I haven't been waiting for the diploma. If people ask I say I am finished, and I have yet to run into anyone who says "prove it!"

In the meantime, I just started doing this small certificate program through John Hopkins on data science. One of the other PMs that I'm working with (who has become a mentor/good friend) and I are doing it together. https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1?utm_medium=dashboard 

I've also been doing a lot of reading lately. Just finished Yes Please by Amy Poehler, and I must say, Tina Fey's Bossypants (both books are along the same lines) is way better. But I think if I was ten years older with two small children, I would relate to Amy's book better. But at the same time, I love Amy's dont-take-shit-from-anyone attitude towards everything, which I feel like I possess as well - which sometimes comes across as bitchy, but I'm getting better as owning it and surrounding myself with people who dont see it that way and still love me when my bossy pants come out.

I read Yes Please for a book club I joined. I joined two girl-power book clubs and this is the first month I'm meeting with them. One is a potluck at someone's house and the other meets at a bar, so two very different settings and will probably attract different women, but I'm excited to meet the women in both.

And I read http://www.amazon.com/Ceiling-Walls-leadership-career-start-corporate/dp/0967312922 which was a serious learning book but a really good read about how women aren't usually mentored regarding business and financial acumen (bc leadership workshops are built around men and men usually fall down on the communication side, which is where we women excel in) and how that makes it so we are passed up on things and how to "force" people to mentor you about these things. 

I'm still feeling very disconnected but I think a lot of this has to do with the lack of routine in my life. I've always thrived on routine so not having one for this extended period of time, combined with the lack of work (I'm back down to working 20 hours again), makes me very bored and I end up just watching tv. Half the time the only reason I leave the house is bc I force myself to. Once I have a job outside of work it'll get better and I'll be interacting with more people. 

I looked fuckin' hawt today

So one of the many reasons I hate working at home is that I rarely get dressed. And what's the point in living in a city and not being able to do fashion? Literally one of the things I was excited about to move here was the fashion. My mom's words were "oh man. Jeff is going to discover your shoe hoarding ability." Which he has! And hates. But shoes are my girl obsession and I my argument is at least they're practical (ya gotta wear shoes) and I don't own 30 purses or 80 shades of brown eyeshadow.

So anyway, today I woke up and decided I was going to get out of the house. So I got dressed. And the outfit I put together was AWE-some. This is the first time I feel like I actually pulled off a nerdy-fashion Heather look. Jeans, tshirt, and cons are a perfectly acceptable fashion statement both in Spokane and the industry I work in. But I love me some cute shoes, so I've always had a battle of keeping it casual while still wearing 5 inch heels. And today I did it! Also, I'm really into slacks right now.

Here's what I love about this outfit:
- bitchin' shoes (Jessica Simpson makes the BEST heels in my opinion)
- Kardashian pants - casual yet sophisticated (yay for pants for women with big butts)
- nerd shirt - yeah that's a shirt that references the Voyager spacecraft
- sweater that seriously only I would wear, bc look at that awesome (most people use the word "70's" and then shudder) color palette
- also, ignore the hair. I was dumb and went to bed with it wet and reaped the consequences)

Shit's about to get realz

I haven't written in a journal in over a year. This is the first time this has happened since I started writing in one freshman year of high school when Nani gave me my first journal. I love my journals. They are an amazing piece of of my life and have stupid stories in them that I would have otherwise forgotten. They usually don't have a lot of mushy deep thinking about things but still full of awesome things.

For the past month or so Jeff has been telling em I should take over this and start writing again. My hesitation has been that this is a public forum and I'm not always going to have nice things to say - about myself or others - but I've ran the idea past a few people and they've all said "fuck it. if people don't like it they can stop reading." So I'm doing it. As of right now this is now my "journal" - which it always has been in a way, but the filter is coming off a little bit more.

You've been warned.

Rekindled hobby

So now that I don't have school in my life, Jeff told me I needed to get some hobbies. So I decided to start actively sewing again. And to start this, I had to call my mother and her ask her the likelihood that I would get my sewing machine back. It was small. So I got to go buy a new one. Now I've had the same sewing machine my entire life. It's the one my mom got me for my birthday way back in the day and it was your basic $100 beginning sewing machine. So imagine my surprise when I walk into the local sewing machine shop and get introduced to all the new things that machines do now. (funny sidenote: Jeff didn't know there were sewing machine stores before I told him I was going to one). And since I didn't want a quilting sewing machine, I was directed to a completely different area of the store than Nani and Sue hang out in. So the really nice gay guy showed me this machine that did crazy awesome things. It threads your needle for you, does the back and forth at the end of the seam itself, and cuts the threads so you dont have trailing threads everywhere. I was in love. It also didnt have a peddle which I thought was weird, but thats how it works now so I went with it. But then he informed me it was a Babylock and it $1200. I asked what else they had.

But then he totally hooked me up. He told me that Babylock and Brother are actually sister companies, and like Ford and Mercury, are the same machines just one has leather seats. So he found the same machine (minus some things I would never use) for $500. So I took that one. It's a Brother Simplicity and I love it. I feel very grownup.

So for my first project I did a basic shirt to just reaffirm my sewing skills. And then I went crazy. I took Jeff to the fabric store and he pointed out some pinky orange sparkly zebra print knit and said "what about curtains for the living room?" Backstory: we bought these tables at Ikea in "high gloss turquoise" and are doing a crazy living room. We're looking at this apartment as the place to have fun. Since we'll only be here a short time we don't have to buy investment pieces and can pick sparkly zebra fabric for curtains. So thats what we're doing. Lots of color! So I made curtains today. Fully lined with grommet curtains. Out of knit fabric. I'm pretty sure the knit fabric part made it about 100 times harder than it should have been, but I used an actual curtain lining fabric for the back so I was able to stabilize it a bit.

Up-close of the fabric 

the finished product

A sad feeling

I took my last final this morning. Now I know that it's not official yet and I'm still actually quite nervous about it since I have to have a certain GPA to graduate (even though I have a lot of wiggle room and really have no need to be stressed about it), but I took it and I'm very excited. I'm excited to have accomplished this thing that I never thought I would do. I'm excited to have grown and learned things I never would have learned in the flow of my career at the time that I started. I'm excited about the knowledge that I now have that has opened doors to new conversations and new career opportunities.

I'm also very sad. The likelihood of me going back to school after this is very small. From now on I'm going to have learn and grow through different outlets that aren't the structure of school. Books that I choose to read, conferences I choose to go to, jobs I choose to go after. These are the ways I will continue to grow. I am now fully responsible for continuing my growth and education.

But sitting in a classroom or reading a textbook is behind me. I have no desire to get my Phd (the idea of writing a thesis is the worst thing ever). And it's a weird feeling. When I graduated undergrad, I was so excited to be done (rightfully so since it took me forever) and so focused on my new grown up job I had lined up that I didn't stop and really reflect on the lack of school in my life at that point. And when we decided that I was going to go back for my Master's, I was focused on the excitement of jump starting my career when I was done. Yet now that I'm here, the main thing I'm thinking is "what am I going to do with all this free time?" I've been working, going to school, and up until we moved, had a full social life. And now school is no longer there. It's a weird feeling.

Going through a manly right of passage while sewing curtains

I have gone through a manly-right-of-passage. I officially killed a drill and had to buy a new one. In my defense, the drill that I killed was only a 4 volt and I was asking it to do things that 4 volts really shouldn't be doing. But anyway, I got a new drill! And thus started my own collection of grown-up tools since I moved away from all the people that I would just borrow tools from.

Manly-right-of-passage gone through.

I had to go get a drill because I was trying to put up curtains in Jeff's office and the drill stopped working. I was trying to put up the curtains that we bought at IKEA this past weekend when we went to IKEA with Sue, Holly, Rachael, and Sean. It was their first time and was fun to watch the overwhelmed looks on all of their faces. Holly and Sean did the entire place twice and had some food in the cafeteria in the amount of time it took the rest of us to go through once, which we felt was making good time.

Anyway, I got some curtains but they were too long. And since my sewing machine is still at my mom's house (there are about 5 things still strewn about Spokane that we will be collecting at Christmas), I pulled out the 1970s sewing machine I bought for $10 at an estate sale strictly because it looked cool. I had no idea if it worked but I knew it had bobbins, which is always the magical question in our family. But it worked! So then I had to figure out to thread it/make a bobbin but the internet helped with that. Then I hemmed the curtains and was pretty proud of myself since they are only about 2 cm different in length.

I felt like this activity from start to finish shows a lot about me. I was just as happy about buying a power tool as I was that my 1970s sewing machine worked.

The week of delicious food

Today Jeff and I should have been in London. At the Destination Star Trek convention. In the front row of the TNG cast reunion talk moderated by William Shatner. And at the Brent Spinner session. And the Patrick Stewart session.

But we aren't. And that is very sad. This was definitely something we were looking forward to for quite some time. But the good news is that it's the last thing we had planned on for our adventures so my Google calendar will stop reminding me about all the cool things I have missing.

Instead we went a cool happening here in Seattle last night. Reeds band was playing and we joined the groupie ranks by showing up during soundcheck because the party doesnt start in Seattle until the time the party is ending in Spokane, and then going and having dinner with the band while waiting for said party to start. And it was so much fun. Jeff and I have been feeling really stuck in the friend category and by nights end had discussed many potential hangouts, which made me feel more at home here so fast.

Jeff is continuing to sleep all day and work all night so I've basically been doing my own thing all day. Oh and I've also decided that I'm telling my boss next week that he either needs to utilize my skills as a designer or as a PM because doing both takes two very different brain sets and they don't mesh well and I'm tired of it.

In other other news, we made delicious enchiladas last night with secret sauce that I can't say the name of because this-is-the-internet-and-SEO-things-might-happen-and-I-was-given-this-recipe-when-we-left-Spokane-under-serious-promise-to-not-talk-about-it. And in other cooking news, I made Alton Brown pizza dough a few days ago and have now ruined this household's tastebuds for anything but amazing pizza. We used to get Safeway's deli pizza dough but now that's ruined. This stuff was so worth the 24 hour forethought time period.

That's some sexy sauce right there

Funny story my mom told me the other day:
*conversation between her and Cody*
mom - we're having pea soup tomorrow for dinner
Cody - we should invite Heather
mom - Heather can't come. She lives in Seattle.
Cody - she has an apartment there. she still lives here.