Growing things

Since late May, I’ve tried two pots of basil out in my yard. Both of them have ended like this:

I don’t know what’s eating them, but I wish whoever it is would stop. I’m not growing this stuff for lacy beauty; I want herbs for caprese salad and tomato mayonnaise and salade Niçoise.

Iacta alea est

I spent three hours yesterday interviewing for a product management position for an industry leader in cyber security. It’s my aspirational job in my aspirational company in my aspirational industry.

A lot of people helped me with this. Encouragement, support, connections. Less than 24 hours after I sent the job details and the names of the hiring manager and recruiter to the fellow I “met” on Twitter, I had an email from the recruiter to set up a call, and the hiring manager had viewed my LinkedIn profile. That was literally two weeks ago.

(And I was able to find that information on the hiring manager and the recruiter because of a connection I made (also through someone on Twitter) with someone who works in the company. Both of these have been unstinting in their encouragement. Rob and Dave—you guys totally rock.)

In those two weeks, I’ve spoken with six people on the phone, despite last week being Black Hat (huge industry conference), and then they pulled together the interview with three of them who are locally based yesterday. Every single conversation I’ve had has been invigorating and I felt extraordinarily comfortable talking with these people. The challenge they need help with is exactly the sort of thing I love and I get the feeling that my colleagues would be welcoming and supportive.

Friends have counseled me on my interview attire; I bought a skirt and practiced wearing real shoes. (I’ve basically worn nothing but trainers for a couple of years.) I even wore makeup, which I scrubbed off the instant I got home. (The hair, however—well, it’s August in the District They Call Columbia. My bad hair day will not end until late September.) The air between GMT and PDT pulsed with the positive energy people were sending me, and I went into this interview absolutely #playingtowin.

Next steps are that they'll confer and get back to me "shortly". So now—like those folks in Casablanca—we wait…

UPDATE: Recruiter called me to reported, “so far I’ve had positive feedback”, which is what he’s said after each of the calls I had with the team. So still waiting, but there’s an exit visa about.

At last

Saturday I went to the People’s Republic’s farmers market to pick up some bits and bobs for Sunday’s dinner. This included blueberries for the pavlovas. And here’s something that I’ve not seen before:

A hairnet for berry punnets.

Now, this is what I call innovation—solving a real problem for real people. If you try to carry home any kind of berry in open containers, they jump out all over the place. And even if you empty the punnet into a plastic bag, the berries get squashed.

This is brilliant.

Yes we have no

Here’s something I thought was…interesting. They were selling bananas at my local Target:

I don’t judge.

Gratitude Monday: dinner with friends

A few weeks ago, I unpacked my good china. For five years it sat in a dish-pack in a Sunnyvale garage. I briefly unpacked it when I moved to Arlington, but never used it before it went back into a carton for the move to the People’s Republic, where it sat in a closet for more than two years.

Once it was out, however, I realized I now have enough plates to invite people over for dinner. I also dug around and found my serving dishes; yay! So last night I hosted three friends for a summer meal—chicken, squash, salad and pavlovas. I’m still working out the technical details of sourdough baguettes, so I had a backup from the farmers market. I’m a girl who likes redundant systems.

Today I’m grateful that finally clearing out that carton inspired me to invite friends to come over for supper and discussion. I’ve missed this.

Plenty to say

On one of my walks I came across this car parked in one of the People’s Republic squares. The owner clearly has a lot of opinions.

Either that, or there are a lot of holes that need covering up.

Gojira returns

Someone on Twitter posted that adding Godzilla to any movie would make it a better movie. Now, maybe it’s because the tweet had footage from an Avengers film, but the entire thread was extremely shortsighted, IMO, because everyone was focused on Marvel-related stuff. But I expanded my horizons into rom-coms, viz:

When Harry Met Sally and Godzilla

Sixteen Candles for Godzilla

Godzilla’s Best Friend’s Wedding

Godzilla Jones’s Diary

You’ve Got Mail, Godzilla

And one I’d possibly even pay to see in a theatre: Godzilla Swallows Love, Actually

Seriously—this idea has legs. Scaly ones, but legs.

Interesting...

I had a doctor’s appointment in the District They Call Columbia yesterday, so on the way to it I met up with a couple of ex-colleagues. We three had a standing meeting every two weeks to go out for coffee and chat—it’s one of the few instances of cross-department communication in the organization.

Not much has changed in the six weeks since I left. Well, except the CEO, who’d been set to retire on 1 September, left suddenly. I mean—he was speaking at a users conference on a Friday and on the Monday there was an all-hands meeting at which the board chairman announced the CEO was gone and a former CEO would be filling in until a permanent one is found.

If anyone in the company knows why the sudden departure (without so much as a farewell email), they are not sharing the information.

Oh, and my ex-colleagues JC and LW have demonstrated their utter (and completely predictable) inability to understand anything about the IT system that’s necessary to launch the program. So, without me there, all those billable hours that the consulting company they hired spends with sock puppets and words of one syllable are going to mount up to serious money.

A lot more than they’d have spent paying me market rate to run the show.

I’m actually glad I’m no longer wrapped up in all that nonsense.

Between the pages

I came across a meme a while ago that reminded me of how Archie Goodwin described Nero Wolfe’s reading habits:

"I divide the books Nero Wolfe reads into four grades: A, B, C, and D. If, when he comes down to the office from the plant rooms at six o'clock, he picks up his current book and opens to his place before he rings for beer, and if his place was marked with a thin strip of gold, five inches long and an inch wide, which was presented to him some years ago by a grateful client, the book is an A. If he picks up the book before he rings, but his place was marked with a piece of paper, it is a B. If he rings and then picks up the book, and he had dog-eared a page to mark his place, it is a C. If he waits until Fritz has brought the beer and he has poured to pick up the book, and his place was dog-eared, it's a D. I haven't kept score, but I would say that of the two hundred or so books he reads in a year not more than five or six get an A." (Plot It Yourself)

I don’t recall whether Wolfe has ever not read a category D book all the way to the end.

Gratitude Monday: Getting up

This weekend we apparently had an equal number of white supremacist terrorists’ bullets and politicians’ thoughtsandprayers flying around, so it’s a tough Gratitude Monday and I’m taking it micro.

I was talking with a friend and former colleague on Friday, lining her up in case I need an employment reference, and I told her about #playingtowin. I commented that it’s a little bit late in the game to have learnt this; she shot back, “It’s not too late if you can still get up.”

I’m adding that to my arsenal, and that’s what I’m grateful for today.