Excerpt from "A Field Guide to the North American Yaga":

The North American Yaga, much like the Emperor Penguin, is a remarkably versatile creature, possessing exceptional hunting and gathering skills while simultaneously exhibiting well-developed nesting behaviors.


========================================== Location: Work

Craving: Nacho cheese

Listening: "This Mess We're In" ~Radiohead (featuring PJ Harvey)




My boss is in Tokyo for the next three weeks with his family and I've been captain of the ship here in Field Services Engineering, Long Beach for about three days now. Per usual, I slipped into the role with a sigh of relief. I love the comfort of knowing that everything's done at the end of the day because I did it myself--and of being able to actually give guarantees to clients because I'm on my own timeline. The job I was left with was much more elementary than I anticipated, so I actually get the majority of my tasks done early in the day and spend the rest
of the time working up a bullet-pointed list of issues to bring up when my manager, a former NSA agent who has been inexplicably nervous around me ever since I asked him about advanced cryptography, comes into town for the week (and my quarter review) next Tuesday.


The trains are running on time. I am content.


My 401K doesn't hurt the situation. Ever since I shifted all of my elections from the more "stable" funds
into company stock, I've been almost doubling my account
value each month. It's still nothing to speak of, really, but
monitoring my small nest egg (and its rapid development) is surprisingly fulfilling.

Peter is still up with me each morning, more often than not, making the coffee and pouring the juice before settling in to write. The apartment has become a little more his domain--the groceries, the meals, the daily chores (such as scrubbing down the dishes or preventing the rogue boa constrictor from disappearing into the wall behind the kitchen sink...)--and, to my surprise, my subconscious acceptance of this has been pretty well seamless. My mother, bless her Southern housewife's heart, is consistently distressed at the notion that I would be comfortable with a partner who is not "conventionally employed". Bah. We've had numerous discussions on the topic and, somehow, I always
manage to come out on top by pointing out that her entire
argument for not choosing to embark on a career has always been that she was good at creating a comfortable and appropriately feathered nest. I then point out that not only has Peter held several "conventional" positions in the past and done well, but that he, too, is good at nest-feathering, so why should he not do as he pleases? I would need several more pages to embark on the odyssey of gender stereotyping she then mapped out. Addressing my mother's conceptions of my various life-choices has never been a simple task, but I've been deeply impressed with some of the changes in her perceptions that I've recently noticed (including her acceptance
of my choosing to live with Peter--a step forward from her
righteous anger at my living with Bret in Houston--and her
acknowledgement that my choice to avoid the role of soccer mom is not only valid but on par with her choices). Thus encouraged, I persevere--although I still wonder why it's so important to me sometimes that she understand the things I do.

But I digress...

It will be interesting to watch the progression as Peter returns to work (his personal deadline of the end of June for his hiatus to be finished is fast-approaching and he's mentioned returning to the job hunt). When I think about it, though, I'm only minimally concerned with what the necessary adjustments will be and more concerned that he
finds something that he honestly enjoys doing.

I chopped my hair off in a fit of pique on Saturday. I was standing in the shower when it occurred to me that the weight on my head was suddenly annoying. So I stopped in at my little salon and told the pretty girl with the nose ring and blonde braided extensions that it had to go. So it went. She snipped and razored and snipped and razored some more until, when she was finished, enough hair surrounded the chair to fill two more heads easily (and I had bobbed it to my chin four weeks earlier).

"My God," she said, shaking her head in time to "Anarchy in the UK" blaring on the speakers. "You have more hair than anyone I've ever seen."

I gave her the usual excuse
of two of my great- grandmother's being native and she gave the usual "ooooh" of interest from folks who consider the Cherokee more exotic than headhunters in New Guinea (I never have figured that one out...). So I'm currently running loose in some sort of Claire-Danes-in-the-Mod-Squad hair phase and really enjoying it. My tattoo is visible, but my coworkers were aware and admiring of it, so I figured it was a
relatively safe gamble. Few recognized me when I walked in on Monday. More than one person this week has asked me if I'm French and two more have commented on the size of my eyes. I just feel like I'm finally getting in closer touch with my inner dyke, which is a good thing in early summer. I've started looking for my wife-beaters to wear around the house and had to talk myself out of getting the forearm tattoo I've always wanted. One thing at a time, I suppose.

Speaking of my inner dyke--Taco Bell taunts me with Angelina Jolie. Apparently, Tomb Raider has also contracted with Land Rover for sponsorship, so I'm getting the double onslaught of Angelina and grilled burrito combos and Angelina in the new Discovery series. This could very well account for my recently acquired
craving for nacho cheese.

Angelina. *sigh*

Hell, Angelina and Katina Choovanski. I
used to mock men who fell in love with comic book heroines. I am contrite. If I ever find Katchoo (and some little part of me yearns for her to be out there somewhere), I'll marry her on the spot--or at least pursue her pointlessly for the rest of my existence. To answer the inevitable question, I don't think Peter would have a problem with this at all...