My favorite teammate, who coincidentally also shares my name, and I have a calendar item booked in our public facing calendars for tomorrow that is titled “Cross Workgroup Collaboration” with the meeting location as Snowplane Landgraaf . We are going for a one day Wintersport. I have to laugh as I read the description of the slopes, that it is the longest slope in the Netherlands.

So, while the real Dutch go to the Alps and other picturesque and rugged mountain locations for their week long Wintersport, I’m heading to an indoor ski slope 😉 This fits since I can get my thrills in a day and without feeling like I am being irresponsible by disappearing for a week. You know, the productive American mindset!

My new manager also shares our name. We thought about inviting her to come along but we figured if there was a terrible accident of some kind, our whole group would be without a single C. This way there’s always one around!

I had a meeting with HR yesterday morning at the request of my manager. Not to worry, it was not that kind of “meeting with HR”. Not that I didn’t seriously worry about that when I first got the email – on a Sunday no less. It actually was a really good meeting. We talked a great deal about what I like to do, what I want to do and how I might like to get there. Oh, and we talked about cultural differences, trust and optimism. My job definitely hasn’t gotten any easier since January. However, the environment has gotten so much better and I have an enormous competence crush on my new manager. I like her very much, she is motivating, inspiring and different. And yesterday, I gave her some of my magic lavender oil to inhale – which worked very well. Now I just have to teach her the Wonder Woman pose 😉

My pending trip to Seattle is taking up quite a bit of my spare thinking cycles right now. It seems the housing market there is tough and people are emailing me because they are aware that my tenants are leaving the dollhouse. If it keeps up, I won’t have to put it up to list. I want to make sure that the people who do live there are right for the house. There’s so many of my memories in that house – not to mention the pets buried in the yard. And the endless brushstrokes of paint that my mom would not let go of. I remember the long afternoons looking at paint and Mom pushing me to choose between Swiss Mocha and 15 other shades of white. It ended up being Swiss Mocha which was the one Mom liked best anyway. It really made no sense because mocha is normally a name associated with brown…

I remember when I first moved in, in 1999, Mom and I were painting the loft this fabulous lavender twilight color – it was called Lupine. And we started arguing over something so ridiculous, probably having to do with my refusal to tape something off properly. All the windows were open for ventilation and I am pretty sure the whole street heard us. Welcome to the neighborhood, right? 😉

The point is that my mom was really hands-on. And if she didn’t know how to do something, she would haunt the hardware stores until she got the information she was looking for. Since she didn’t have a regular job, she had a lot of time to research and grill the various employees. I am much more cautious in this respect. I look up the information first and I think about how I could do it. Then I try to do it. And then when it doesn’t work, I call in a professional 😉

As the spring is coming, I have been thinking about what I want to do with our outdoor space. Yardening always makes me think of her. I wish she was here so we could have a good argument about what to plant and where. Now I have no one to disagree with me which is dangerous!