I hang out with friends, but sometimes I feel I’m there by default, because of my husband. They are his friends and I’m just a tag along. If it wasn’t for his friendship, I wouldn’t be there.

At work, it’s the same. Rarely do I socialize with anyone. I could sit in my office all day and not have a conversation with anyone at all. In a building that employees 300+ people. Just a wave or hello, as I pass them in the hallway. It can get very lonely. I don’t even talk to my fellow programmers and they are right outside my door.

So there has to be something wrong with me, that keeps people away. Maybe I just need to be a nosy bitch and start sticking my nose in other people’s business. Maybe they’d notice me then.

I live and work with others. I’m surrounded. But most of the time I feel I have no one to talk to about stuff. I can’t talk about work at home. I can’t talk about home and family with anyone at work. Hell, I can barely talk about work at work. I’m even isolated there because even though I’m one of 10 developers, we do not work in teams, or even pairs. We each work on our own thing.

I feel like I’m alone in a crowd.

Ever feel like that?

With all the options for electronic and online banking, checks are becoming a thing of the past. Right?

Not so much. At least not for me.

Since Amelia started school, I’ve never written so many checks in my life. I can easily write 3-5 checks a week now! They are constantly asking for money for something. Even before school started, I was writing more checks than my pen could handle.

I think I wrote 4 checks in one night at registration. This week, I’ve written 3 checks already and I’ve still got a few more to write for various things. Field trips, school lunch orders, book fair order, classroom donations, fundraisers, school pictures…it’s endless.

And we’re only one month into the school year! At this rate, I’ll burn through my book of checks before spring!

Are you still writing checks?

I found a recipe for Blueberry Lemon Tart on the Pillsbury website. I haven’t eaten a bite but I tasted each layer as I built it. Yum!!

So when my daughter started school, the calendar was flooded with activities. I am almost obsessive with making sure every event is marked. It doesn’t even matter if we can’t attend, it still gets added.

I don’t know how I’d mange without a calendar. I always thought that I wouldn’t be one of those moms that needed a daily planner. Sheesh! I only have one kid. What do I need a planner for. It’s not like we have a bustle of activity like some families who have 2 or 3 kids that are older and in around after school activities.

But I guess my time has come. Our calendar has never been so full of reminders, due dates, school activities, etc.

I can only imagine how much busier our calendar will be as she gets older.

Are you a daily planner mom? Did you ever think you wouldn’t be?

Once we got home, I forgot all about it again. I was too busy playing with my new Mac. Then we went off to the park and once again, I remembered I hadn’t taken it. This time I knew I was in trouble. The roaring in my ears was picking up and it was starting to get quite bothersome.

As soon as we got home, I took the meds, but of course they never work instantly. By then it was bedtime, so I had to go to bed with that roaring in my ears. I woke the next morning to the same roaring. And it was loud. I was getting disheartened to think it was really and truly back. I had been enjoying the near-silence I found when swimming weeks earlier.

I went through my morning routine and made sure to take my meds even though I’d only taken them the night before. It worked though. Gradually as the morning progressed, the roaring died away. I think it really made a difference to take the med that evening then again the next morning.

The roaring is gone and the humming has maintained a tolerable, near-silence that is wonderful. I can almost forget that I have problems.

So I definitely need to remember to take my medication every day. It really does help my tinnitus.

I go back to the ENT this morning and I will be mentioning the pool discovery and the incident from this past weekend.

photo by plantetchopstick (Flickr)

Each night, I look forward to laying my head on the pillow and drifting off to sleep. It’s more than just a simple love of sleeping. I look forward to the dreaming part.

For me, dreaming is like reading a good short story or novel. With one difference. In my dreams, I get to participate. I usually play some role in the action. Not always the leading role, but an active role at least. Occasionally I’m an observer, but not too often.

The Internet has countless sites on interpreting your dreams, and every one will probably interpret it differently.

The general consensus is that your dreams are like windows into your inner conscious. Like little movies that play out your fears, desires, stresses, and joys.

My subconscious must be a confusing place. I usually remember my dreams for no more than 15-20 minutes after waking but some of them just stick with me. I dream about some pretty bizarre stuff.

I remember one dream from when I was probably around 9 or 10. My mom was vacuuming around the dining room table and my sister ran by. She hit her head on the edge of the dining room table and literally cracked her head open. Half of it was on the floor. When I recall it now, I just laugh at how crazy it sounds, but when I was 9, it was very frightening. My sister at the time was no older than 2. So yeah that could be scary for a little kid.

I also have reoccurring dreams in which I can’t see. Everything is black and I can’t seem to open my eyes enough to see anything clearly. And let’s not forget the countless dreams in which my teeth fall out. Seriously. They just come out of my gums. They aren’t pulled out, or anything horrifying. They just fall out.

I have plenty of dreams in which my husband leaves me. I had dreams of children before I got pregnant. I remember one where I was holding an older girl and a baby boy. I was breastfeeding the baby, and the older girl wanted to nurse too. That one I guess could really happen. I also remember having a child and naming her Bethany Lee. Not a horrible name, but not still not one I’d consider.

I remember a recent dream, in which there was a tornado coming. My sister and I were screaming at my mother to take cover. We were arguing with my dad to do something, because mom wasn’t listening and then right in front of us, the tornado came and took her away. It just sucked her into the vortex, right out of the doorway.

My sister has been doing really great losing her baby weight with exercise and diet. Recently she was telling me about her interest in running. So several days later, I dreamt she was too thin. And I was arguing with her that she needed to do strength training to tone her body.

So yeah. I have fun dreaming. Crazy, wacky dreams. A short story every night, where I usually get to play a role in the action.

Someone to laugh and dance and sing
To walk in the woods and gather flowers
To commune with nature in quiet hours.”

So God made little girls
With laughing eyes and bouncing curls
With joyful hearts and infectious smiles

Enchanting ways and feminine wiles,
And when He’s completed the task He’d begun
He was pleased and proud of the job He’d done,

For the world, when seen through a little girl’s eyes
Greatly resembles Paradise.

– Author Unknown

• server admin
• database admin
• development
• testing
• deployment
• user support
• anything else you can think of

As the single “team member” for a project, it can be a bit overwhelming trying to keep track of everything for the multiple projects we are responsible for.

I’m also a scatterbrained coder. I’ll work on various unrelated changes at the same time. I’m trying hard to focus on one task at a time, but it’s a slow change.

In an attempt to get a bit more organized, I’m also trying to develop some sort of accountability. Not only to show my supervisors what I’m doing all day long, but to help me keep track of what needs to be done and keep me focused on the current task.

This is where Team Foundation Server comes into play. With the new release of 2012, I now have some great features that can help me along.

The addition of My Work helps me stay on track. If I move a task to “In Progress”, I can always see this at a glance as I code and remember not to get sidetracked.

I still have trouble writing up backlog items and tasks (I forget to document what needs to be done; I just do it). But I think that the new web interface and team explorer window will help me there too. It’s just another “in my face” reminder that I need to log tasks and stories as they come up. My biggest problem is that I simply forget. And if I’ve gotten sidetracked by some other thing I need to work on, then its even more likely I won’t remember later what it was I needed to get back to.

My system is constantly changing and evolving as new requirements are realized and it is important for me to document it all. Not just for auditing purposes either.

I recently started a new project, which is actually a redesign of an existing website to resolve some hard issues. It’s the perfect opportunity to start out with a clean set of requirements and tasks that I need to work on.

The new interface also makes it easy for me to plan and later see what I need to work on for the week. If I finish everything for the week, I can move new tasks in. If I don’t get them finished, I can move them over to the next week. And with multiple projects going on at the same time, it’s even more important to plan out my task schedule so that everything is prioritized and gets done.

My biggest adjustment will be just remembering to use it. Add new requirements as they come up…add tasks. Use the functionality to plan what I need to do, do it, and stay focused on the task at hand.

A Private Swimming Pool

This time, I did get my swim on. Or something like that. I took ownership of one of the several masks and went diving down to the bottom of the deep end.

I’m not sure what is really going on with my ears, but I can say that all that pressure from going so deep in the water seemed to actually help. Maybe it balanced out the pressure in my ears or something. But since then, the roaring in my ears is gone. And as long as I keep taking my diuretic, the dull humming is also fairly tolerable. I can tell that it’s getting progressively worse as time goes on, but it seems to have switched ears and is so much better than it was last week.

I’m now convinced it does have something to do with my ears and not just a side effect of some other issue. Every time I went down in the pool, I could feel the pressure on my ears. At first when I’d come back up, it really felt like I had a ton of water in my ear. After a while, that feeling went away and I could tell things were getting better.

This morning, when I woke up, it hit me how quiet the house was. I haven’t felt that way in a while. I will definitely be mentioning this change to my ENT on my next appointment.