Missing in Action

…or rather, INaction. 

I used to blog incessantly, about every little thing, no matter how trivial.  I was constantly amazed that anyone at all visited my blog but somehow over the years I attracted a following of people who, for whatever reason, found my relatively mundane life interesting.

Then I joined Facebook and I slowly stared posting trivialities about my mundane life there instead of on my blog.

Oddly enough, I constantly ask myself now whether a topic is blog worthy – which I never used to do.  And 99% of the time I answer myself with a resounding NO.  So I Facebook said topic instead which, truth be told, simply bores a different audience!

Regardless of whether my loyal readers miss me, I miss blogging!  So I’m making an effort to come back.  Brace yourself more of the truly mundane!

So where have I been, you ask? 

Mostly hanging out here in the Land of Limbo. 

Although my company Sandcastle Educational Consulting is still alive and well (though a bit dormant at the moment), I am looking for full-time work as an Educational Media Specialist (“I create experiences that engage and inspire youth and families”) with my eye and heart focused on one position in particular with Microsoft’s Kinect for Kids.  Just how perfect would THAT be?!

I’ve interviewed twice and now it’s pretty much a waiting game while that team re-structures and figures out what their needs are and where (if anywhere) I’d best fit.  My fingers have been crossed for so long that I have a feeling they’re stuck this way forever – which is fine, because hope and optimism never hurt anyone.

And if that position doesn’t pan out, I’ll do my own re-assessing.  Unfortunately, Sandcastle doesn’t offer great benefits that allow us to save for retirement, which is really where we need to focus now that we’re ONE TUITION PAYMENT AWAY (!!!) from being done with paying for kids’ college – something we’ve done for the past ten years solid!

So instead of waiting until everything is resolved and all nice and pretty, as I’ve been doing thus far, I guess I’ll blog all the ups and downs and ins and outs of my life – just as I did for five years until I… didn’t.

And hey, guess what?  I’m solidly on the road to getting back in shape and finding a new healthy me – or, as I indicate on the masthead of my blog at My Fitness Pal, “steadfastly clawing my way back from the depths of LETTING MYSELF GO.”  This journey is a tough one and has been where I’ve focused the majority of my energy lately.  After almost 30 years of focusing on everyone else’s health and needs, I am finally, finally focusing on my own.  It actually is beginning to feel good and I am actually beginning to look forward to the endorphin rush that I get each day when I work out at the gym. 

I know – that looks funny to me too!  Me?  Working out daily at a gym?  Yup!  I lift weights (a full circuit!), sweat on the elliptical, and swim.  Something every single day.  Me!  Can you believe it?  And for two months now I’ve tracked every single morsel that’s gone into my mouth – which is so easy using the My Fitness Pal app’s bar code scanner!

So ten pounds down, forty to go.  Ugh – that just looks so daunting!  But I’m taking it one pound, one centimeter , one lap, and one carrot at a time, allowing myself a full year to accomplish my goal.  If nothing else, I should feel better this year (my third!) at the Danskin Triathlon… where I plan to actually jog, rather than walk for the first time since breaking my ankle three years ago.

So yeah, that’s where I’ve been.  I promise not to stay away for so long again… as long as you promise that you won’t mind if I go back to posting the mundane. 

Then vs now

Two years ago my days consisted of working as a Senior Project Manager at Microsoft during the day and with our production team in Mumbai at night.  Deadlines were unrealistically tight, pressure was constant, and rewards were few.  My week started on Sunday evening and ended on Friday evening.  I often worked 16 hours a day managing up to 35 technical and marketing projects simultaneously.  This went on for a little over two years and by the end I was bone tired and suffocating under the pressure. 

Today, my day day looked like this:

This represents just a few moments from my not-very-stressful day, an impromptu visit from Abby and her mom.  But it really brought home how much things have changed since the days when my work life balance was so very seriously skewed and I felt like I was slowly dying.

To my friends at Microsoft:

Please, please, please correct this:

Thank you.

Lest you think I’ll be lazing around on my week off…

The coming Friday is my last day at my current job.  It has been a frenetic and intense two years of 12 to 16-hour days managing at least 100 Microsoft marketing projects, each with up to 50 individual components, across at least 25 different Microsoft business units for clients who ranged from reasonable and friendly to unreasonable and unfriendly and I am weary, burned-out, and bone-tired.  It is only fair to both myself and to my new employer to take a week out to clear my head, rejuvenate my spirit, and focus in a whole new direction before jumping into my first day of work later this month.

While figuratively purging the Microsoft-induced mess from my head during my week off, I will be literally purging some messes around the house.  Normally I give the garage a good cleaning about once a year, but last year both my broken ankle and my brutal job kept me from doing much maintenance around the house.

So next week I plan to be busy taking care of a few things around here:

Bills need to be paid…

…a thick file of paperwork, bills, and insurance documents related to my broken ankle need to be organized and (hallelujah!) filed away…

…and two years worth of bills and paperwork (yes, those three boxes are all filled with to-be-filed paperwork) need to be filed into the physical cabinet.  I know… it’s the German in me that makes me hold onto and file physical documents when I know quite well that I probably don’t need to hold on to 90% of this stuff.

Then of course, there’s these important things that need to be done ASAP:

(Seriously, does anyone really feel this way about taxes?!)

And this, times three:

Once I finish all that paperwork and filing, there’s a garage that desperately needs attention – especially after three kids came home from college for the summer and left furniture and household items here after moving to the Greek system or moving into houses with friends.  Oh lordy, lordy – look what awaits me:

My blood pressure rises just looking at that mess… and then falls again at the thought of it cleaned, purged, and organized (and no, I do not want the kids’ “help” doing this stuff!)!

Then there are a few closets in the house that need attention…

…and some bedrooms that, with a little consolidating and spiffing, could pretty easily be made guest-ready:

Then there’s a deck that needs replacing…

…and a roof that I might as well just say is one of those “green” roofs because -- well, it is!  Ah, life in the Pacific Northwest…

Actually, just kidding on those last two, which are definitely out of my realm and into Tom’s.  Or maybe they’re into the realm of we-pay-someone-to-do-it-and-thereby-get-it-done-in-a-fraction-of-the-time.  Yeah, I think that’s the ticket on the deck and the roof!

Tom’s plenty busy doing stuff like this, replacing the track lighting in the living room with fraction-of-the-cost LED lights that I like a fraction-of-the-amount that I like the “normal” lights that were there.

 

So that’s my to-do list for next week.  Do me a favor and keep after me, because you know what I’ll want to do all week? 

THIS:

These bloomin’ crocuses are bloomin’ in our bloomin’ yard – in bloomin’ FEBRUARY!

It’s 60 degrees, sunny and clear enough to see Mt. Rainier, the Olympics and the Cascades from Seattle today!  Glorious!

In sadder news, Boo got a boo-boo and is acting like a big fat baby:

In still more news, this is the line at the Bellevue Department of Licensing at 8:15 this morning, 15 minutes before they even opened!  There were already hundreds of people in line.

The wait inside for an enhanced driver’s license for Aleks and Kat was another 1 -2 hours!  A word to the wise: if you have to go to the DOL… well, geeze – I have no advice because we did get there way early, and we still encountered a helluva wait!  There has to be a better way to get the stuff accomplished…

And the last item in my potpourri-post: my Microsoft v-dash conveniently expired a week before my tenure at Microsoft will expire, next Friday.  (A v-dash identity is connected to a specific sponsored project at Microsoft, not to the agency for whom you work.) 

This means that I can no longer get into any buildings on campus without an escort, that I can’t access the internal Microsoft network, and that I can’t take Puget Sound public transportation anywhere for free. (That one hurts… even if I never used it.)  Maybe next week I’ll write a post on things I’ll miss about Microsoft and things I won’t miss so much.  There are, in fact, items in each category.

Microsoft just got much smaller!

I was wondering if this would ever happen to me. No, I was hoping that someday this would happen to me…

And today it did!

I am still beaming.

So I’ve had an insane day. Got up at 6 AM to do my normal early morning work, which consists of receiving, reviewing, and (hopefully) approving work done by our amazing and wonderful production team in Mumbai, and then forwarding it on to Microsoft people who are anxiously awaiting it. I hurried through that, in spite of a few glitches, then hurried off to Harborview Medical Center where I had a follow-up ankle appointment (yes, 13 months later and I’m still in the process of healing). Harborview days are always insane because I feel like I’m thrown into a (literally) crazy world full of discouraged, damaged and devastated people. It always bums me out.

Anyway… I left Harborview in a hurry because I had a very full day of meetings at Microsoft and I knew I’d be flying from meeting to meeting, from building to building, from client to client, all afternoon. My workload is just about at that tipping point where I’ve reached full capacity and one more task could lead to – shudder and gasp! – dropped balls.

One meeting down. Client happy. Writer writing. Artist creating. Next meeting: GO!

I drove to the next building, scrambled for parking, clipped on my badge, and ran (ok, that’s a lie; I still can’t really run) into the building. Room 2051… where is it? Ah, here it is!

Knock-knock.

The friendly voice on the other side of the door, a new client named Cathy I’d be meeting today for the first time, called “Come in,” so I did.

“Oh my god…” She stared at me and then announced, “You’re Northwest Ladybug!”

Yup – I randomly met a faithful reader who, it turns out, is also a client! Needless to say, we spent most of out allotted meeting time blabbing like long-lost friends! It’s a bit odd to meet someone who knows so much about me when I know only her name, job title and Microsoft office number, but we intend to remedy that soon when we meet for lunch or coffee next week.

Yes, I took a photo, but I refuse to publish it (sorry Cathy) because I look like an overworked chipmunk. (Cathy, however, looks great!)

But I promise you, this actually happened!

So tonight when I pass Cathy’s project to our production team in Mumbai, I’ll ask them to treat it with just a slight extra flair because this new client is, after all, also a dear new friend!

This is exactly what I needed after last weeks “why do I blog?” whine.

Experimenting with Microsoft Movie Maker and dog training. Obviously I'm much more successful at one than the other. Sigh

I really should be working, but it’s Saturday morning and I’m really tired of working all the frikkin’ time, so I decided to experiment with Movie Maker. This movie is my first attempt. I put this together in a few minutes without reading any instructions and just muddling my way through intuitively. Obviously, I need to spend more time on the edit feature, as this is a bit too long. But I’m so thrilled to have finally found an easy, intuitive movie maker program with a true graphical interface.

Oddly enough, I’ve spent the past 8 months managing the development of a series of kiosk demos in English and a gazillion localizations for Windows Live that showcases their applications like Live Writer (which I love), Live Messenger (which I use for work), Live Mail (which I don’t use), Photo Gallery (which I don’t use, but should probably look into), and this program, Movie Maker.

Most of the work I do for Microsoft pertains to applications and programs I don’t use personally – stuff like SQL Server, Windows Mobile, Visio, Surface, Azure, and Office for Mac… but the project I’m working on for Windows Live is much more personally relevant… especially after today!

Building Bridges

A new bridge is being built for Microsoft in Redmond!  With a hundred and some Microsoft buildings in Redmond alone, there’s a whole lot of connecting to be done, too.  The Microsoft campus spans both sides of the 520 freeway, both north and south (and far beyond), and for those of us who work with a variety of Microsoft business groups and in a variety of Microsoft campus locations, we’re constantly criss-crossing the freeway.

At the end of 2010, this bridge will be there to make our lives easier! (Notice the mass transit train on this schematic?  Ha!  Wishful thinking!)

Yes, we have to wait about 18 months since construction began, but this promises to be a pretty bitchin’ bridge!  (Can bridges be bitchin’?!)

I walked from my office to one of the many Microsoft cafeterias today to meet a friend for lunch and happened to catch a few shots of the construction (locations 1 – 4).  Then, on the way home, I grabbed a few more (locations 5 and 6).

Here’s a little tour for you.  First, of course, a map:

And some pictures (click on above map for locations/directions of the photos):

1.) This is pretty much my view of the construction hub from my office parking lot.  It’s no Coke commercial.  ;-(

 

2.) The view across the freeway from Microsoft building 22.

3.) And back toward one of the other many Microsoft buildings (this is building 43).

4.) Yes, that’s a Microsoft security vehicle.  I wonder if that car stops hackers?

5.) Do not snap photos while you drive! Only stunt drivers like me should do attempt such insanity.

6.) Snapping photos while changing lanes is especially stupid .

It’ll be a nice bridge once it’s finished, but until then it’ll be noisy and dirty around the construction zone.  They could at least provide us captive workers a little incentive entertainment, don’tcha think?

Changing with the seasons

Last Fall I snapped this photo from my office:

Fall had arrived.  Warm, bountiful, gorgeous.

A few months later, I took this photo:

Winter gripped us.  Bleak, cold. barren.

Then I fell here (at home)…

…and for the next few months I worked on campus at Microsoft because I couldn’t easily get up the long, steep stairway to my office.  Just as well because I was treated to this:

By summer I was back to my office, and I snapped this photo:

And today, you know what I noticed?

THIS!

If you look very closely, you can see the beginnings of…

The “C” Word

A few years ago, when I was the Executive Producer of a series of DVDs for teens on body image, self-esteem & the media, a member of our production team called me the “C” word.

It was all innocent enough. I was simply carrying a microphone boom to where we were going to be filming the next scene.

“Put that down!” Heather, the Production Assistant, demanded. “Or I’ll have to call you the ‘C’ word!”

Now I know some pretty nasty ‘C’ words and I had no idea why Heather would want to call me any of them.

I smiled at her and kept walking with the boom.

“CLIENT!” Heather squealed, placing her hands on her hips and thrusting one hip emphatically sideways. Then she stuck her tongue out at me and held it until we both started giggling.

“Give me a break,” I insisted. We’re all part of the same team.”

Then Heather handed me the grande-nonfat-one Splenda-latte that she’d picked up for me on her way to the set and I realized that by simple virtue of my label as “the client,” we actually weren’t on the same team.

I’ll be honest: I like being the client. I like that I’m listened to, I like that my ideas are valuable, and I like that people try to make me happy. Hell, who wouldn’t like being the client?

Fast forward a year or so to when I did a relatively short stint as a contract Project Manager at Publicis, a hot-shot advertising agency in Seattle. It was then that I fully came to realize that power of the “C” word.

The pulse of the office and of the work that we did was completely determined by the meeting schedule between our Creative Director and the Client (who was T-Mobile at the time). We were all hyper-aware of when those meetings would occur and we worked at a frantic pace to prepare for them, then caught our breath while the meeting was conducted at the client’s headquarters a few miles away, and then literally gathered around the elevator to immediately receive our marching orders upon the Creative Director’s return.

The Client might as well have been God.

‘Funny,’ I thought, ‘I never felt that kind of power when I was the client!’ But then, the Project Manager at T-Mobile probably had no idea the the kind of power s/he wielded behind the scenes at Publicis, either.

For the past two years, in my work as a Senior Project Manager with an agency that works almost exclusively on Microsoft projects, I’ve found a much more balanced experience around the “C” word, and I’m no longer befuddled by what appeared in the past to be a very unbalanced hot/cold, good-guy/bad-guy client working relationship.

Instead, my relationship with clients now is much more of a partnership. The master/slave approach has given way to a much more cooperative relationship in which there’s a give and take of ideas and a genuine desire to work collaboratively.(For the most part, anyway. There are still clients who think they're God and still agency workers who assume they're basically slaves.)

Sure, Microsoft is still the client – and a potentially daunting one at that. When Microsoft says jump, I still ask how high. But I firmly believe that, done right, business IS personal and that the best working relationships are also positive personal relationships. Because when things get crazy (and you can count on that with Microsoft), it’s not the intimidating corporate name or the big bucks that will guarantee that I’ll get things get done; it’s the relationship that's formed and the willingness (and desire, even) to go the extra mile for someone with whom you now have a personal connection.

I’ve completed a myriad of projects for Microsoft since starting this job well over a year ago and without fail, the most successful ones have been those in which positive personal relationships – yes, even (gasp!) friendships – have formed. It makes sense, too. Wouldn’t you rather work cooperatively and in partnership with someone, even if (hmmmm… especially if!) they're essentially paying your salary and keeping you employed? In my opinion, that’s one of the most important relationships to nurture.

One of these days I’ll write a post about my slightly non-conformist management philosophy. (“The most important thing a manager can do is to regularly ask his/her employees what they need to feel supported and to do their job well … and then to make those things happen, because happy, fulfilled employees are productive and loyal employees... ”)