z’s bubbles 2

So today was one of the rare times that I went to the airport alone AND was there a bit early.

But the time I stood there waiting for the plane to release the passengers, allowed me to realize two things.

The first one may just be this particular airport, but it seems somewhat run-down and dirty. From my childhood I remember them to be a bit more glamorous, there were more colors, more friendly employees in fancy uniforms… But then again, it might just be this airport…

The second thing was that an airport really is a fabulous place to watch people!! I found myself wishing for a more discrete camera than my phone… There were fascinating ones like the asian fitness buff next to me who was making dips while waiting… Or the Kansas-ladies with their rather showy hats (one was bright red, the other one black with fringe…)… Then you have the lost-pup guy in his early twenties frantically running between his phone, the map on the wall, his mother and the baggage clain… Or the regular-joe-gramps with old jeans, checkered shirt who had a granddaughter Gillian’s age greet him excitedly And even the absent-minded elderly gentlemen in pants that are 2 sizes too short…

Oh yes, I wished for a camera…

It all started rather well really…

I was almost on time, got to enjoy my absolutely fabulously clean kitchen… the roads were clear (though I had to scrape the car windows) and I made it to work on time.

But then…

Ah ha! Then, it all slowly went downhill.

Little routine requests turned into code changes and and witch hunts on rogue scripts. Going to a teammate with a single question resulted in four to-do items, and productive meetings ended in more questions and more follow-up requests.

In the end, I felt like I started ahead of the curve and ended a few laps behind. Not necessarily the way you would want to start out a short work week. But at least I wasn’t bored

Ah the peace one feels after a good workout It’s simply priceless!!

Today we had the farewell lunch for Julius and Fred who are going back to the Philippines soon. Amol had picked this Indian restaurant at Custer and Arapaho. I got there first as I found out when I entered the empty restaurant, but as I turned to leave again, they all showed up. It was a fairly nice clean restaurant. The food was good… Not many people were there and I think we all had a good social time there.

The funny part was as we went to leave, I was the last one as I sat in the corner, the waitress, a middle-aged Indian woman came over to me and said “I have to say, I think you’re cute” with a heavy indian accent. I was so taken aback that all I could do was mutter a thank you…

It was only in the car on the way back that I realized that this had NEVER happned to me before LOL!

It is interesting, yet scary, how sometimes we feel like we’ve been somewhere before. Earlier I noted to Ruth that it felt like this year has gone by extremely quickly. Well, shortly thereafter feelings and thoughts of being lost, of general inadequacy and failure came back. Yes, watching a movie about a love that can’t be didn’t help. No, not in the slightest.

But then I sat here in the living room contemplating things. And there it was… I had been here before. Yes, it’s not exactly the same but in some ways it is. And that is not good. Not to mention the whole if-you’re-not-moving-forward-then-you-are-slipping-backwards thing. It’s true! So many things are SO MUCH harder now than they seemed before.

But this thing… the act to “take control of your life”, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Yes, for you cholerics out there it might be, but for some of us more… peaceful… personalities, it’s an entirely big (and intimidating) bag of beans…

Some things are just really surprising… And those things seem to have this urge of just… sneak out of the darkness and JUMP AT YOU!. Sometimes they are good though. Sometimes they can even be good and interesting.

For instance, I was briefly, VERY briefly, glancing over some older (private ) musings of mine. And there it was. A brick thrown out of nowhere. A rake that I stepped on. Could it really be that the most helpful book, the one that will have made more of a difference in me this year than almost anything else was The 5 Love Languages Men’s Edition? Really? It can’t be. I mean at this time, it would be ranked up there with Zig Ziglar’s autobiography and our old copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People. C’mon, it can’t be!!!

But there it was… the understanding of love. And (oh, yes, this is going to sound every so incredibly corny!!!), the progression from the in-love infatuation to the love that truly moves mountains.

See, I did say it was going to sound corny. But it is interesting that that would be the one.

And this is so not what I had in mind when I opened this to write

Anyway. So this week’s officially over. The work-week part anyway. And it is GOOD!!! Now a short weekend is around and with it come lots of possibilities and opportunities. I wonder which adventures will cross my path…

This weekend was a mess. Yes it was a short one, but still, it shouldn’t have been a mess. But it was.

It felt like every time I finally got myself to doing something, something else went wrong. There was Cora who didn’t want to be by herself. There’s my car and it’s alarm which goes off when the battery dies, which is every 12-18 hours or so. There’s the fact that nobody picks up after themselves… The list goes on…

But now that everyone is asleep and settled, that Ruth’s grill is lit (yest at 11pm), that I know my car will still start in the morning, that I am too tired mentally to start anything anew, that I can finally find some resemblance of peace.

And have some thoughts.

Over the past weeks, I’ve been toying more and more with the idea of working more freelance. My mother would scoff since I still need to finish her store which has been in works for what… 3 years now?

But it is intimidating. After all, what do I have to offer that someone else can’t do better, bigger, cheaper and quicker? It’s a tough sell. But then, it’s like that with everything… there will always be someone. And that has always stopped me. Well, not always, but many a time in my life so far: that I had this feeling of not measuring up.

As I was sitting here at my desk, wallowing in my negativity, I stumbled upon an (old) article which shall remain anonymous and uncredited about the process of a site redesign. And as the author went through the steps… I had to chuckle… That is what one calls a web-designer? It sounded more like a project manager… there was no coding, no drawing, no rendering… It all boiled down to paying someone for a graphic set, pasting it all into frontpage and calling it a day.

Unfortunately most of the images were gone by now, but the “finished product” was still there, seemingly untouched over the last 8 years as the header graphic still fit the description the author had provided.

Sad…

I do make my life and my goals a lot more complicated looking (and feeling!) then they really are.

And I don’t mean to sound condescending towards anyone mentioned above. Far from it. I am sure they all do a great job at what they provide; and that is a different aspect for each of us. Some may be looking for a hand to hold, some may be looking for eye-candy. Some just want to be heard, and some just want it to “work”…

Faith would be something that would help, wouldn’t it? Faith in myself? Faith in that it can be done?

Interesting indeed. It always comes full-circle