incandragon

We did the tour-thing today ... like many of our trips to compact cities, we walked and walked and walked. I'm astonished at how long I can walk when we're on vacation, given how little I walk when I'm working from home. We did the "extended" Freedom Trail walk, which was pretty much most of the highlights in downtown Boston, and also the Beacon Hill area.

I think the highlight of the trip was the Memorial Day display in Boston Commons, which had a small American flag planted in the ground for every Massachusetts soldier who had been killed in battle since the Civil War. That's 33,000 flags that cover most of a hill, and quite a sight to see.

One of the odd things about Boston is that they're "preserving" their historical buildings by selling them to chains. The old City Hall is now a Ruth's Chris, and the old Court House was recently bought by Restoration Hardware. It's weird, but if that's what you gotta do, that's what you do.

It's funny ... a lot of this town shows some of the best results from creative compromise I've seen. But of course, when they can't compromise, it's revolution.

At the end of a wonderful day full of laughter and seeing historical sites, we went to eat at a restaurant called "Journeyman." It's a frou-frou restaurant with tiny food served on pureed swirls. Everything was absolutely delicious, a little weird, and teensy. Lycangeek panicked halfway through and started snarfing bread. (We'd walked for at least six hours today, and milk foam with six lima beans wasn't going to hold him.) We did eventually get full tummies, but for a while we weren't sure if this was one of the ways Famine was making inroads in his plan to starve the wealthy.

All in all, Boston was wonderful. I'm very glad to have had the opportunity to get to know it.

Stinabat told Lycangeek, a few days ago, that society as a whole declares that women are attracted to what men think they should be attracted to, and don't really pay attention to what women actually are attracted to. The example she gave was powerfully muscular men. Stinabat pointed out that most women are more attracted to high cheekbones, sensuous mouths, large eyes, and expressive faces, and much less attracted to muscular football player-type builds.

Lycangeek asked me if this were true, and I said, "Pretty much yeah, giving room for a variety of sexual preferences. By and large women are more attracted to Elvis Presley, Johnny Depp, and let's not overlook the whole Legolas phenomenon."

This has rocked Brian's world. Seriously. He has described it as "suddenly cherries are actually blue." He hasn't stopped talking about this new rubric.

I pointed out that it kind of works in reverse, as well: a lot of what guys think they prefer are actually incorrectly skewed by outside assumptions. I told him, "Guys think they prefer long legs, large breasts, pouty lips, and large eyes." He said yes. I said "Pick who you are actually most attracted to: Inara, Zoe, or Kaylee."

Again, he was rocked. I said, "The problem there is, there's nothing I can buy or wear to increase my attraction as Kaylee."

Lycangeek looked at me. He squinted.

He said, "Well ... maybe if you were holding a WHOLE LOT of kittens."

I saw a poster that showed various indications of dog mooods. You know, various body positions (body curving to the side means friendly and polite, tail and head held high means alert) and a few facial expressions (dog "smiles" and the "feed me now" stare).

One of the expressions indicated a need for space. The dog points his nose away from you, but keeps his eyes on you. They called it the "whale eye," and if I hadn't seen dogs do it, I wouldn't know why. But yeah, whale eye. When Nigel does it, it's clear he'd like you leave the room. When Zoe does it, it's looks like she thinks you're a moron.

Not that I have kids, but I'm pretty sure when teenagers give an adult the whale eye, it's because they think you're a moron who should leave the room.

I was talking to a friend of mine -- Sunny M -- today. She has a sales position that requires extensive travel, and her husband is a contract programmer who works from home.

She was talking about a conversation she had with a friend of hers, a mother of five, whose husband is an airline pilot. The mother was lamenting that her husband would complain when he got home and the house was a mess and dinner wasn't ready for him.

Said the mom, "It's not like I'm not working all day. I've got five children. I'm busy constantly. It takes all I've got to stay on top of the situation."

Sunny M said to the mom, "You mean he's upset that when he gets home and everything is cluttered and and dusty, and there's no food ready to eat?"

The mom said yes.

Sunny M said, "The same thing happens to me. It sucks. He's probably exhausted from jumping back and forth across time zones. Plus it's not like he's just looking out the window, because I bet he's concentrating all the time when he's flying, and he's eating poorly because it's hard to eat right in restaurants and airports, and then he gets home and he still can't relax because nothing's where it's supposed to be and everything's dirty and there's nothing healthy in the fridge. Yeah, I know exactly how that feels. It really sucks."

I'm not sure if Sunny M understands why I laughed when she said that.

When my husband and I were about to be married, we did some exercises in a pre-marital counseling-type book. It was extremely useful in revealing where we had some major disconnects ... always good to get those out of the way before you actually sign the paperwork, right?

One of the "bomb" questions was a list of about sixteen kinds of intimacy, and we were each supposed to rank them according to how well we thought we did at each. Just the list of types of intimacy was interesting, all by itself, but the big reveal was that the one he thought we did best was the one I thought we did worst.

That turned out to be a huge deal, and for a week or two we had to decide whether we should actually get married.

A few more chapters (and crises) later, and Lycangeek begged that we not do any more pre-marital counseling exercises.

So I was very interested when, this past weekend, we had a "homework" assignment to look at various topics and rank them. Ranking was two-fold: first order them according to our personal views, and then to what we considered the spouse's strengths and weaknesses. Their were four groupings: spiritual focus, financial focus, career focus, and ... I guess we can call it "future focus." The end result was interesting. Not, thank goodness, a massive relationship crisis, but interesting nonetheless.

Just for starters: I ranked the items in each list by urgency, and Lycangeek sorted by importance. That was a major skew point, since I wasn't concerned about the important things (since we take care of them), so I ranked them lowest. He ranked them highest, since clearly they were most important.

I also ranked things according to our internal relationship structure, and he ranked things according to the larger social environment.

Two tiny, logical shifts in perspective, and yet the end result makes it sound like we have no common ground at all. No wonder we stopped the marriage counseling book after six chapters.

I had dinner this evening with a bunch of airline nerds and two airline pilots. Captain Denny Flannigan is a long-time pilot for United, and also a motivational speaker for customer service and the "be excellent to each another" philosophy. One of Lycangeek's Mile Flighting friends invited Capt. Denny (and his first officer) out to dinner, and since Lycangeek had been so impressed with the speech he heard Capt Denny give, I was excited at the chance to meet him. Plus, a 787 pilot, how cool is that?

My six takeaways:

1. Capt. Denny said that when he goes to a hotel that has little clicker-type ball point pens in the room, he grabs them to give as gifts to the ticketing agents. He'll say, "Here, I brought you a present" and give them the pen. Turns out, ticketing agents love pens more than magpies love shiny things -- specifically clicker pens because they're quick to use, but you can close them and put them in a pocket. Capt. Denny says it makes them see you as a real person, and as a nice person. He says it makes them happy, and ticketing agents who are happy with you are extra-helpful.

(Side note: after this story, we wondered who else would be happy with gifts of free clicker pens. We asked our waiter if he would be happy to get a free clicker pen, and his eyes lit up, and he spent several minutes talking about the importance of pens in his life, and how hard they are to keep. Note that apparently Dollar Store pens are sucky and don't count. Twist-action pens are too slow and so also don't count.)

2. Capt Denny has a zillion copies of The History of United books, and he gives them to people on special occasions. Retirement of crew, passengers who are flying their one millionth mile, and things like when he sees a United employee doing something extra special. One example was a crewman who was picking up debris on the tarmac. FOD (foreign object damage) is a real danger to jets, so when he saw a guy picking up junk from the runway, he went out, asked for the guy's supervisor's name, and gave the supervisor the book to give to the employee "officially and in front of his peers."

3. Capt. Denny said that when he gives a guy public recognition, he more often gets a thank you note from the wife. He said men are shy about saying thank you, so most of his thank you notes have started "my husband would like to thank you for ..."

4. If -- at a table full of plane nerds -- you ask a pilot how taxiing a plane is different from driving a car, you will get a room full of non-pilots falling over themselves to tell you what it's like to taxi a plane. They have, you see, flown simulators.

5. The pilot said he'd never had an accident, although he has had incidents. His goal was to get through his career "never bending aluminum."

6. Apparently Lufthansa has crazy-posh first class amenities, including private bathrooms in the 1st Class Lounge that have big bubble baths with seasonally-themed rubber duckies. The duckies are highly prized by Mile Flight Nerds.

All in all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

A friend of FaceBook and her husband have been talking about how on certain days (such as yesterday), the planets are in alignment in such a way that you can stand a broom on its bristles. They took pictures of all their brooms standing upright in the middle of the kitchen, and their friends took pictures of their brooms, and it was a little freaky.

I thought I'd try it.

( I'll be a son-of-a-gun, it worked. )

I just finished narrating "Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon" by Donna Andrews, and have begun reading "Alpine Vendetta" by Mary Daheim.

Ms. Daheim apparently found out we're narrating her books, and sent over a passel of 'em ... including some large print versions for the sight-impaired section. (We're for the Blind and Visually Impaired, so it's a pretty big section.) I think that's pretty nifty. It feels somehow different to be reading a book the author essentially handed to me.

I'm glad I was able to get to Talking Books at all, today. I've been struggling with a migraine for about a week, and it only just broke late this morning. That was not, alas, soon enough for me not to try to work through a bad case of the stupids ... I just hope my coworkers forget I was such a grumpy moron. (If I worked in the office, I'd totally buy them a box of donuts. They earned it.)

I had an interesting experience at work today. I sent an email to the other module developers saying that our manager and the fellow in charge of the e-learning/customer interface, had requested a change in how we name the modules. I outlined the change in the email. I sent it off without a second thought.

The problem with being remote is that I can't gauge people's reaction and mood. There was a flurry of back and forth emails asking about specific situations, and I responded to each. Again, without a second thought.

Then I got a phone call from the guy in charge of e-learning/customer interface, saying that the other devs were panicked about the change, and really quite upset. He said that he sat them down, explained about why the change was needed, calmed them down about it not being a Big Thing. Of course, I couldn't tell anything was wrong, except maybe a slight pushback against unexpected change.

I feel pretty good about my communication skills, and I know that being far away I need to give extra effort at conveying positivity and friendliness ... but if the people I need to work with don't share the commitment to being extra-careful with email and texts, I don't see how I can avoid the pitfalls. I have a very bad feeling about any sort of potential promotion ... if I can't tell when my people are panicking, it's going to be close to impossible to manage them.

At work our department head has started a program she calls "1% Goals." Each person in the department is supposed to come up with a way to increase their efficiency by 1%. Given the current political climate, I think it's an unfortunate title (one of my co-workers calls it "Occupy Efficiency") but it's not a bad idea ... I just wish it were a little more clear-cut.
I wish I knew what a reasonable amount of effort is ... because the first little string that I pulled -- "I shall weekly update the list of training videos available to customers" -- has turned into a weeks-long project involving multiple meetings, half a dozen people, and a complete overhaul of video-related metadata. Which, granted, needed to be done, and wasn't going to be tackled by anyone anytime soon. Nevertheless, by the time it's done, I will have spent more than 1% of my entire work YEAR on the project. That said, I'm actually feeling pretty good about the end result, or I suspect I will, when I finally manage to get there. I certainly hope overall efficiency will be improved.

I do find my self wondering what I could do around the house to improve efficiency by 1%.