Put the quacker down

Jeffrey Epstein denied bail, so possibly more inclined to spill the beans about his connections with persons in high places. A 2020 campaign strategy openly based in racism coupled with xenophobia and misogyny. Racist statements and incitement to violence that turn international ridicule of the occupant of the Oval Office to international condemnation. House of Representatives getting closer to the I-word. Released Special Counsel subpoenas cutting off plausible deniability of Individual One’s personal involvement in hush payments to women ready to go public with his affairs with them (payments that carry federal campaign finance violation consequences). Robert S. Mueller III testifying before the House next week...

It’s been a bad week for Cadet Bone Spurs. So no surprise that he’s flailing around looking for something to distract the world. And behold—an Iranian drone appears, just asking to be shot out of the sky.

So when NPR tweeted out its Tiny Desk Concert with residents of Sesame Street, I halted everything and spent 15 minutes with little fuzzy critters who sing enthusiastically if not always entirely on key.

That was so therapeutic, I went in search of my favorite Sesame Street oeuvre—and the very best advice you’re likely ever going to get—“Put Down the Duckie”.

Peace out.

Tools of the trade

I have never been able to do anything related to cooking or baking without getting it all over me. (This also extends to other things—as a reporter I once stuck flowers on a Tournament of Roses float in pursuit of a story on the process; after less than 30 minutes I had glue on the back of my jeans, my shirt, my hands and my hair—but I’m in the kitchen more consistently than other places.)

And lately, of course, I’ve been doing a lot of baking, which means there are flour and sugar particulates all over the place. When LQ came over Saturday to teach me the care and feeding of sourdough starter, I was thinking that I need flour-colored sweatpants. Invariably when I set out to bake something I’m wearing navy blue or black, and I end up with white handprints and little splatters of dried meringue all over me.

Even—and I’m not sure how this happens—on my face.

Aprons don’t seem to help, as they leave your back exposed, and I somehow manage to look like I’ve rolled in dough front and back.

So here’s my product idea: a kitchen burqa.

Only the color of flour and cake batter.

Standing my ground

So, when last I spoke with anyone from my old company, the mishegoss was strong with them. The face of the program, SM, wanted me to continue working on it as an “on-call temp”, at “20% of my salary”. Because there’s no one else on the floor who can do what I can. I’d given her my contact details in an email, but didn’t hear anything.

Well, last week, I got an email from JT, the only person on the floor to express appreciation for me, saying that SM had asked for…my contact details, and she wanted to know if it was okay to share them. Well, I said sure—and that I’d given them to her, but prolly got lost. But again, nada.

However, Monday I got an email from SM saying she’d like to chat. I replied suggesting she give me a time yesterday afternoon for a call, and she said, “Great!”

Uh, no—I’m not sticking around between 1200 and 1800 awaiting the ringy-dingy; even Comcast gives you a two-hour window. So I asked her to name a time, and we did have the call.

Well, there was a lot of interesting information, which I will not bore you with. (Although at no point in the conversation did she inquire about me, how I've been in the month since I left, what I've been doing, whether I'm in good health. I'm not at all surprised: a year ago I was out for a week recovering from hand surgery. She never once asked what the surgery was, or how my recovery was going. Likewise, when I took 17 days of vacation in November and December, neither she nor the Clown Car expressed any interest at all in my absence. I do not at all figure in the human tier of their cosmology.)  But the gist of it was she needs me to rework the business plan so the program can show potential corporate donors we have a strategy for sustainability, which of course is generally considered a Good Thing. And I of course can do that.

I let her talk; she was merrily going on about setting up a four-hour meeting with her (interestingly, she made it clear that neither JC nor LW would be involved with this; “we don’t need the operations people for this”*), and reiterating the on-call temp/20% of salary thing. Then I said, “I don’t know how that works, but I get [slightly larger figure than I’m willing to do this for, but still more than she would have imagined] per hour for this work, so we’ll have to figure out how to make it happen.”

*However, when you acknowledge that the program director really doesn’t have any strategic sense, you’re pretty much saying you’re stuffed.

To her credit, she did not drop the phone. And we will have to figure out how to make it happen, because I am not doing it for less than the rate I have in mind. End of.

I was following the advice of a woman on Twitter, who said that, when negotiating salary, you should name the largest figure you can without bursting out laughing.

Because I am #playingtowin.

Fruit philosophy

A while ago I was cleaning out the fridge and came across an apple that was way past its best-by date. Like probably years. So I whacked it up to share with the birds.

I took a detour, however, to photograph it. Because the cross-section was beautiful.

The birds liked it, too.

Gratitude Monday: You got this, girl

I had a transformative weekend, literally and metaphorically, personally and professionally.

Saturday morning a friend came over with her sourdough starter, and taught me how to feed it so I’ll be able to make sourdough stuff going forward. Making pizza dough, and then cinnamon rolls gave me enough confidence to try this. (I baked Cinnamon Rolls 2.0 last Thursday; they’re still not as good as they could be, but using a richer, eggier dough that was almost scary soft was a vast improvement over the initial release of a couple of weeks ago.)

So LQ kindly brought her starter and walked me through “feeding” it with flour and warm water. While it got going, she and I had a long chat, catching up on a lot of things since we last met a couple of years ago. One of the super things she had me do was put a rubber band around the feeder jar to mark where it was when we tucked it away to feed, so I could see how much it grew. Here it is after about two hours:

It’s kind of like watching your child go off to kindergarten—just kind of knowing you gave him all you could, and now it’s up to him.

In the evening I gave it another feeding and yesterday morning, I portioned out a half cup to be starter and put it in the fridge. I’ll need to feed it once a week, so I’ve put a recurring appointment in my calendar to remind me. The remainder I used to make…sourdough pizza dough. I was so excited when it rose like a champ, but with that slightly sour tang.

I divided the dough into four (it’s supposed to be enough for two thin pizzas or one thick crust), froze three and made one up for dinner yesterday night.

Here it is waiting to be dressed:

And with its pizza bianca toppings:

Yes, I added prosciutto; sue me.

Out of the oven:

And with the insalata:

Yum.

Pro tip: LQ warned me to immediately rinse out the dishes and implements used in tending the starter, because she said if you don't, the slurry hardens. She was right. I did rinse out the bowl and spatula before putting in the dishwasher to finish it off. But I didn't notice some little drips when I wiped down the counter. You need a blowtorch and a chisel to get that stuff off when it hardens. I'm exploring the idea of using it for some kind of construction sealant.

 But also on Saturday, I had a call with a guy I “met” on Twitter, who’s been an advocate for and ally of underrepresented people in tech for years. I happened to catch a tweet where he said the best way for him to help people looking for a job is to have a 30-minute call so he can figure out how to deploy his network of contacts. Well—because I’m playing to win, you know—I raised my hand, and we set up the call.

He gave concrete suggestions for my LinkedIn profile (meaning: he’d taken time to read it), made me describe what I want to be doing (not job title, or anything less than the deliverables I envisioned each day) and turned that description into actionable ways to present my skills and abilities. He also told me, “Set a goal for yourself; X number of applications to make each week. And when you apply to a job, identify the hiring manager (or recruiter) and send me an email with that information. I’ll see who I know who can help.”

Now, here’s the transformative, amazing thing about this: beyond taking 40 minutes out of his weekend to talk with me, he committed to give me concrete help moving forward. By assigning me to send him emails, he also made me accountable. I don’t know that I’ll send him an email for every single job, but I will for the ones that really matter to me.

Because if I don’t send him at least two per week, everyone will know I’m slacking off.

Additionally, while we were talking, he had a root around the Web and made some suggestions about job titles that I might consider—specifically ones that I’d have ruled out as being too technical for me.

When I mused that this was a good idea, that I shouldn’t filter out opportunities because I have some preconceived notion about what they require, he cautioned, “Don’t do what so many women do—not applying to a job because you don’t meet 80% of the requirements.” Oh, right. (Yeah, that’s a thing. In general, guys will apply for something if they are vaguely acquainted with 25% of the requirements; women fret that they couldn’t possibly do it because they can’t tick off every line item.)

He closed the conversation with, “You got this, girl!”

And he’s right. I watched my little sourdough starter transform itself, and I’m doing the same professionally. Like the starter, I need to tend this phase in my life. Something new isn’t impossible. I can do it, with a bit of help. I’m grateful for both these reminders.

Team spirit

I’m in the process of Kondoing my PC—I’ve got so many duplicate files and folders I may never get everything sorted. (And activities like this are when I really miss having two monitors to compare files. A laptop screen just does not feed the bulldog.)

Anyway, I came across these pix I shot of my former colleague’s office. LW is apparently a fan of the Washington Nationals. (Yeah, I don't know what the helmet is; pretty sure it's not a baseball thing, but I could be wrong.)

I don’t know how many of these little dolls he has, but they must have accounted for at least two cartons when we all had to move office a couple of months ago. (The latest being my sixth office in 3.5 years, I had a grand total of 1.5 cartons of stuff to move.)

In this he reminded me of another ex-colleague, the World’s Greatest Expert. Little pisher with compensation issues.

Anyway, now that I’ve shared LW’s idea of office décor, I’m tossing the files. Only about fifteen squillion left to check.

The scent of summer

We didn’t have air conditioning when I grew up in Los Angeles County. It was around, but our house didn’t have it. My mother would close all the windows during the summer days, and as long as you stayed downstairs it was relatively cool. Then we’d open the windows in the evening; temps fall off at night in California, not like here in the District They Call Columbia, so it was comfortable.

One of my most evocative memories of those summer nights is the scent of gardenia wafting up from the bushes in the back yard to my bedroom. So when I moved into my house in the People’s Republic, I got a gardenia bush, which I take inside in the winter and then put on the patio for spring through fall.

To tell you the truth, having to use AC here kind of vitiates that whole olfactory experience, but a couple of weeks ago I noticed the bush had sprung blooms, so I went out to take some pix.

It’s doing better than the dwarf lemon tree that hasn’t produced one single lemon in the two years I’ve had it. (In fact, it may be dying.) That’s very disappointing, because we also had a lemon tree in the back yard, and I never bought a lemon until I’d moved away from home and was appalled by how much they cost.

I’m probably going to have to replace the lemon tree, but I am glad the gardenia’s doing its bit.

Check your speed

You know, we are awash with individual and collective criminality, incompetence and downright dumbfuckery in our government, and I just can’t with it. So I’m digging into my archives and sharing a story told by Brian Shul, Maj. USAF (Ret), of his days as a pilot of the world’s fastest jet, the SR-71.

Shul flew 212 missions during the Vietnam War. He was shot down and crash-landed in the jungle, hid for days before he was rescued and suffered such severe burns that he was first told he wouldn’t survive, and then that he’d never fly again. After months in hospital, he passed his flight qualification and went on to fly a variety of aircraft until he retired in 1990.

Among those craft was the SR-71 Blackbird, which was in service from the 60s through the 80s; it was retired and briefly reactivated in the 90s. The SR stood for strategic reconnaissance, and the Blackbird was outfitted with a shedload of cool tech to accomplish that. In addition, it flew at speeds exceeding Mach 3, and could outrun just about everything, including missiles.

Shul’s story isn’t really about any of that, except for the speed. What it is about is that fighter-pilot willie-waving that I saw a lot of on the fringes of an F-14 Tomcat fighter squadron. It’s a great story, and Shul does it justice. Settle back and crank up the volume.

You’re welcome.

Sheltering in place

We had quite the deluge yesterday in the District They Call Columbia. It started in the People’s Republic around maybe 0630ish, and it went on for about four hours. It did not dropeth as the gentle rain from heaven, it poured steadily for all that time. It was like California during an El Niño year.

Moreover, it was so dark right until mid-morning that I had to turn on lights. In July, man.

We’ve been having afternoon-evening thunderstorms and showers for days now, but this was impressive. I saw a juvenile cardinal that was so soaked, I wanted to take him in and dry him off. I have never seen a bird look so miserably wet.

There were floods all over the region (including at the White House) and the morning commute was dreadful for both motorists and Metro riders. The parking lot I used every single day near the Wiehle station was under eight inches of water, which built up after people had left their cars there in the morning. So I was really happy that I was not among them.

Gratitude Monday: debugged

Today I’m grateful that last year I heeded the advice of Rodolfo, the guy who cuts my hair, and bought a bug zapper. Before I got it, every time I went out on my patio between mid-May and mid-September, I suffered multiple mosquito bites. Every. Single. Time.

Even in the time it took to dash out, grab the bird feeder and run back into the house to refill it—a matter of seconds—I was chewed on.

The first year I resorted to long sleeves and insect repellant, but that required washing it off again when I got back. Not a really elegant solution.

But the bug zapper—man, that’s Nobel-worthy technological advancement. This year I put it out before Memorial Day and it’s been working like a Trojan ever since. So much that I spent quite some time this weekend messing about in the garden (including scrupulously overturning every container that might catch and retain water), and returned indoors unscathed.

Trust me—this is huge. And I’m truly grateful for it.