Darkness and the PNW

I would have titled this “Hello Darkness My Old Friend,” but darkness never has been my friend, really. The darkness I am referring to isn’t Satan, Voldemort, Darth Vader or Trump. It is the appalling lack of daylight and sunshine in the winter months in the Pacific Northwest.

I’ve lived in Seattle for more than thirteen years, so you’d think I’d be used to winter darkness. But during those thirteen years, I didn’t have a day job. I was home or out and about during the day. Now I walk the dog in the dark and ride the bus home on the dark. January is grimmer without Christmas lights up.

I don't think I am suffering from seasonal affective disorder, but I am finding the darkness to be oppressive. It’s not as if I live in Alaska or Norway, but this is worse that what I experienced in the Midwest. When we went to New Zealand a few years ago over the holidays, I felt little like I skipped winter.  That was the year of two summer solstices. We grilled chicken and lamb on the beach for Christmas.

I decided to take pictures to capture the oppressiveness of the darkness--sunrise with Fox, city lights on the way home from work. Maybe the darknesses isn't as bad as I thought. Still, I'm glad the days are getting longer.

Commuting

My bias against driving started in high school. Mr. Elwood, my European history teacher, said the two biggest wastes of time are driving places and sleeping. I disagree about sleeping, but I am 100% with him on driving. I started my training program a few weeks ago, and I am now commuting to south Bellevue five days a week.

I hate commuting.

It sucks.

I was reading The Enlightened Cyclist by Bike Snob NYC where Eben Weiss discusses the perils and inherent dangers of daily commutes. We are taking our lives into our hands when we travel from one place to another. I feel this when I am trying to merge on to 520 at 8:34 a.m. A friend of mine does a similar commute to Redmond. When I told her where and when I go, she immediately felt sorry for me. "I carpool with my husband so we pass all of the crazy traffic waiting to get on the highway."

Of the ten people in my training class, I live the second closest to the training location, and I bitch the most about the drive. On my drive home, I pass a sign that tells how many minutes it is to Everett. I've already been in the car for forty minutes, and I am one exit away from home when I see the sign. I think about the two people in my class who live near Everett who have 77 more minutes to go. I can't imagine.

Until I started commuting, I had also been incredibly naive about the traffic in Seattle. I know it was bad, but I didn't realize how much time it can shave off a person's life. I spend almost two hours each day driving less than nine miles. During non-rush hour times, the same drive takes about twenty-five minutes. And this is a reverse commute. The people coming in from the suburbs into the city are parked on the highway. The traffic I am in moves slowly, but at least it moves. Today, I was crawling, which means my car was moving forward, but my speedometer was reading 0 miles per hour.

I never did like driving, even schlepping my kids around. I had a short radius of how far I would drive my kids for an activity. One summer when Claire Adele was five and the Boy two, I signed Claire Adele up for a half day class at the Pacific Science Center in the summer. I would drive her down there around 9:00, and I would pick her up around noon. In rush hour, it took about a half and hour to get there and about twenty minutes to get home. Round trip, that was about 110 minutes with a toddler in the car. Instead of driving home, I'd find a park nearby for the Boy and I to hang out at, and then I'd get Claire Adele.

I hated it. If I only had one kid, it might have been fine, but with two, it was a disaster. Claire Adele has a friend who is an only child. This mother would sign her daughter up for classes on Mountlake Terrace (10.9 miles) after school and on Mercer Island (12.7 miles) in the summer. This woman wanted her daughter to have a friend in the class. Even though I was a stay-at-home mom, I couldn't afford the drive time to get Claire Adele back and forth. This mother agreed to take on the heavy lifting of the carpooling. Her daughter was going anyway--what was the big deal of bringing along another kiddo?

Which brings me to my theory about how far families are willing to drive their kids around based on the number of children in the family:

I am looking forward to starting my real job, which I can commute to by public transportation. There will be a three-quarters mile walk from the bus tunnel to the office, but I don't think I'll mind the exercise.

The team that I am going to join allows people to work from home one or two days a week to avoid the commute. I can see why people would want to re-claim those extra hours.

As I was driving, I thought about the people in my class who I have gotten to know over the past two weeks. A few weeks ago, I took a webinar where I was in the classroom, but the other students were streaming the class over the internet. I missed interacting with the other students. Here, I talk to people over break and during lunch. We work on group projects, all of which would have been missed had this class been taught online.

Social scientists and economists evaluate decision-making of citizens consumers. Why do I do this drive even though I loathe it so? Even though I hate it, I do it anyway. One might argue that the more I hate the drive means the more I like the class, as I am willing to put up with something I hate to do something I enjoy or get benefit from.

I am so glad the training ends in July. I think I can survive it until then.

Friday!!!

When I got off the 74 bus downtown this morning, and I was walking up the massive hill to where my training was held, I thought, "Thank God it's Friday!" I don't think I've had that thought since I quit my job before Claire-Adele was born.

I finished my first full-time week of training this afternoon. This was the first week of nine-to-five* that I have completed in ages. When I ran for School Board, that was a 24/7 gig, so there was no celebration of the end of the week because it was one continuous flow of work. There were breaks here and there, but weekends were just as busy as weekdays, sometimes more so.

My friend Mary sent me a meme with a smiling woman that read "That moment when you realize that being a stay-at-home-mom means you never actually leave work." When I was** a stay-at-home-mom, I was always a stay-at-home-mom. Weekends meant the kids were home. While it might have been a break for them, it wasn't a break for me. To be honest, sometimes I looked forward to Mondays.

This week was a hard week, but a good week. My brain was crammed full of information. I thought it would be overload, but the opposite happened. It was like I was taking an SQL and Business Intelligence immersion class. The more I was there, the more everything made sense. I was feeling better when I left on this afternoon, but my brain was ready for a break.

Jack seems to be okay with me working so far. I thought this would be a bigger adjustment for him than me. He is used to me picking up all of the slack around the house and with the kids. This week, Jack shuttled kids to and from various lessons and appointments. This evening, Claire-Adele had to be someplace by 6:00 p.m. I told Jack I'd be home in time to take her.

"No," he said. "I need to take her. I told people at work I have to drive Claire-Adele and I need to leave by 5:00." Jack now has a legitimate reason to say no to extra work, and he is using it.

I even had good luck with buses today. The 74 buses run twenty minutes apart in the afternoon. I thought I was going to miss the 4:11, but it was running a few minutes late. I saw it coming and ran to catch it. Evan, my physical therapist, would have been proud of me! When I got off the bus in my neighborhood, I was smiling. I survived.

Maybe even thrived.


* Some days this week were 8:00 to 4:00. Same difference.
** That was the first time I used "was" in a sentence with "stay-at-home-mom."

Time Traveling, or Brigadoon?

I started my Apprenti training for my new job two weeks ago. The schedule has been kind of light, as I am in a class by myself. Ha! Seriously, my position is a one-off, where I am not part of a larger cohort of a dozen people all taking the same classes. I am fine being a solo student--it just means my class schedule has gaps in it here and there.

Last week and this week, I dipped my toes into Business Intelligence and using relational databases. I had poked around relational databases on my own while I was looking for a job, but I lacked the context of how and why a company would use the information aside from tracking sales and marketing data, and cataloging Brittany Spears albums. I would do exercises on my own and sometimes the system would crash. Now when I am in a class, and the system crashes, I either learn

• what I did wrong, or 
• learn that I did nothing wrong and the system has a glitch. 

The classes keep me from getting stuck in an infinite glitch limbo, which is good.

Last night, the Apprenti program had a reception for the new apprentices. I was talking to one of the program sponsors about my career prior to this program. Before I was a stay-at-home-mom, I worked in consulting where we would use proprietary software to create our flat file databases and do the analysis. The strategic marketing consulting firm I worked for had two programmers who designed the number crunching tools, which then the analysts like me would use to program to crunch the numbers.

"That's not transferable," said one of the leaders of the organization. I had never thought of it that way. When I was working in a small and nimble firm, we didn't have time to wait for Tableau to be invented. If we wanted to do that kind of analysis, the firm created its own program to do exactly what it needed -- no more or no less.

Now, I feel like I entered a time machine, flying from 2000 when my daughter was born to 2017. I look at the tools now and think of useful they would have been back when I started working in 1991. Even looking at my volunteer work and the number crunching I did -- it would have been useful to have some of these business information tools available then.

The inverse side of time travel is the coma. I try not to think of myself as if I were in a Brigadoon like sleep for seventeen years and am waking up in a brand new world.