A Virgen a Day, a Blog a Week?

Good Morning -

Perhaps I should say "A Virgen a Day, a Blog a Fortnight" - except that no-one outside of classic literature really uses the term "fortnight" anymore. Either way, it's hardly a Blog a Day to go along with the daily Virgen.

And what could I have possibly been up to that has kept my fingers from keyboard lo these many days (as my use of "lo" demonstrates, I'm clearly not too, too impacted by the idea of not using words that don't exist outside of classic literature...)? I've been up to a lot and I've been up to not much.

Certainly, certainly work is keeping me busy and I've allowed it to get a little out of hand. I had a talking to with myself the other morning, reminding myself that I have better skills than this and that this sort of work stress is something I haven't had since my mid-to-late 20's when I was still so into gathering skills that I was willing to work obscene hours in the name of getting ahead.

Now, though, I know the silliness of such behavior, and understand that careers are mostly full of pomp and circumstance, signifying nothing, so I'm a little frustrated with myself that I've let work get the best of me this last little bit.

Mostly this can be remedied by setting and holding firmer boundaries with my jefe, who seems to (unfortunately, in my opinion) eat, breath, and live work so she's constantly coming up with new projects, ideas, plans, and schemings. Because she's the jefe, though, her work stops with the generation of the idea, which allows for plenty of energy to continually produce ideas. Actual follow-through becomes the work of others, one of whom is me.

(Another co-worker recently shared with me the painful reality of organizations, in that directors only get work done in meetings, and those below only get work done out of meetings. A healthy organization has a balance, so that there are meeting hours that allow the jefe to feel as if she is getting things done, and there are non-meeting hours that allow those below to actually put into action some of the millions of ideas generated in the meeting hours. Currently, we are not healthy.)

So, bad work boundaries is part of what has kept me away from my blog for so long. The other part is stress, sadness, and lots of big hard feelings around some family stuff. Happily, happily I have a fellow social worker I'm paying to listen to my woes every other week and I've been giving myself the space to just be with these not-so-fun feelings, but it takes time. That, and when I'm working through the big emotions, I tend to retreat unto myself, which means that I'm not really in the writing mood (or, rather, not in the public writing mood, since this space here is a public sort of writing).

Throughout, though, there have been the Virgens, so let's hush here and see what those are about.

The one above is an image of roasted pumpkins fermenting as part of a beer recipe and it seemed to adequately describe my mood that night (Thursday, January 8th) - burned, soggy, but fermenting into something delicious.

This is a problem with too many Virgens - we get out of sequence. This is actually from Sunday January 11th in which the Denver spa ad for "urban renewal" spoke to both my love of being clever with words (although this ad is a bit clumsy and obvious) and my desire right now to grow something beautiful in the sewer (metaphorically speaking, of course).

This is Friday, January 9th, and is all about growing and digging deep into the soil and hummus and cultivating all that is dead and rotting into something quite spectacular.

Saturday, January 10th - perhaps we ate potatoes that night, perhaps I was wishing we had eaten potatoes that night - I'm not sure the "why" of this image. Either way, it's lovely and I do love a good potato dish, so it all works out (I really need to chronicle these more regularly...).

Monday, January 12th - snow, snow, lots of snow here in Denver. I was supposed to go to a meeting in Golden, but our little coche got stuck on Colfax at the Colorado Mills. I've driven in lots of snow, but our little 2006 Suzuki Aereo who was born in southern Arizona has not (well, that's where she was adopted. She was probably born in a plant in Asia somewhere (Japan? Korea? I don't know)).

She's all air and plastic and happy thoughts - which is fine when one is looking for good MPG, but bad when one needs a bit of traction to get up an unplowed, wet-snow-packed street. With the helpful push on her tush from a stranger, I was able to get through the intersection where I was spinning and left her to rest in a Whole Foods parking lot. I called my jefe to explain the situation and took the Colfax bus back into Denver so I could work from my office and salvage at least part of the day.

Tuesday, Jan. 13th - work stress got the best of me today and I found myself feeling en fuego most of the day. I have better skills than this and am determined before the clock chimes Work tomorrow that I'll have recentered my working woman and can start the week with firmer "Sounds like a great idea. We can either put it at the bottom of this long list of other great ideas you've had, or we can move it to the top, with the understanding that one of these current Top Three will get moved down" boundaries. Yes.

Wednesday, Jan. 14th - these are from a package of cookies my sister gave me at Christmas to go with some tea she had also gotten for me. They were delicious and I love that, not only do we have similar descriptors (small, soft, spicy), but I can now tell someone in German that I am "kleine, weiche, wurzige" - which may, without proper accenture, wrongly state a love for poodles or express tennis abilities that I don't have. (While I'm certainly never English-centric, I do admit to the convenience of not having meaning-changing accenture on any of our letters.)

My goodness but it was a hard and dramatic week. This image from Thursday, January 15th is all about how cold and hard and frozen I was feeling, courtesy of work and family stress. Goodness.

Ah, but Hope, she springs eternal, does she not? Here we have Friday, January 15th in which my partner and I ate Chinese food and watched a movie on Vancouver (my new career, methinks, will be making informative travel DVD's that don't make use of really bad, synthesizer-based muzak). We're going in May to Seattle and were considering taking the ferry on up to Vancouver while we were at it. We've since decided against that, but the story of the trip is wonderful, so I'll share it quickly. (Before that, though, notice how nicely a printer with a full color cartridge (like, say, the one in my office) reproduces Virgen images...ahem.).

Last weekend my partner and I both had moments in which we procrastinated from the work we had brought home by playing online. We both had, independently and without the other knowing, done searches to see if we could find where the poet extraordinaire Mary Oliver was reading next (neither of us have ever heard her read and she is a big ingredient in the recipe of How We Came to Be as a Couple). I found nothing, but my partner found her reading in Seattle on May 26th. In a moment of impromptu magic, we bought a couple of tickets and then started forming a trip around this event.

As it stands, it appears that we'll be arriving on May 22nd, leaving on May 31st, and spending the time between moving back and forth from the city to little cabins on different islands. Oh, it'll be wonderful.

Coincidentally, it will mark the end of the Year of the Virgens (May 22, 2008 - May 21, 2009) and matches up with the original plan of leaving Tucson on May 22, 2009, camping up the west coast, across BC, down through the Rockies and landing in CO in August. The trip has changed and (clearly) the plan and timeline have changed, but still, it will be nice to be in the Pacific Northwest in May like we had originally visioned.

Finally, finally - this is the Virgen from last night. I thought the image of St. John's Wort was so delicate and peaceful and just what I want to be cultivating right now.

Since we've been go so long, here's a shot of our Current Now. Sadly, so sadly, my partner has to spend the weekend writing another state grant proposal. Happily, she can do it at home where the dress is Braless Comfort, the coffee is fresh, and the potential for nap-breaks is high.

We'll let Boris, my better, albeit more toothless, cat take us home. Monday during the big storm while I was trying to get our little Sweetness and Light mobile to move on compact slush, Boris was deep in Drug Land as the vet pulled a number of really infected teeth. The hope is that by doing this, his body will be able to regulate on the insulin and he'll start to feel better (apparently infections work a number on diabetics). So far, so good. It was expensive (thanks be to the payment plan my wonderful vet offers), but I know how much one cavity or impacted tooth can hurt - a whole mouthful is no good at all.

Here's to that. Here's to healthy mouths, here's to feeling better. Here's to trips built on poetry and here's to having moments that are kleine, weiche, and wurzige.