Sylvia's Journal

We have a motion sensor floodlight mounted on the studio across from our bedroom that tends not to work when you need it and it turns on when it rains or when a cat or skunk slips by. It was lighting the driveway all through the night. I know this because I woke up every hour after I had put in my 7 hours of sleep. The rains triggered must have triggered it. This time it also backlit the frost flowers on the windows and so it was a pretty sight until the rains erased them. Now I am worried about the floods that were predicted.

The weather has been atrocious since I have come back. I keep my fingers crossed for Saturday when Bill and I are planning a flight to Long Island and Block Island.

I ended up seeing Axel yesterday – ahead of schedule – because he had not completed his homework and left for class very late. The teacher doesn’t seem to mind him coming in late or at least there appear to be no consequences. We are very different in that respect. I also saw Axel again at about 3 AM when he emerged out of his study in the middle of the night, having worked on his next homework assignment upon returning from class, just when I was starting to wake up hourly. We could actually have a decent conversation in our pre- and post sleep states.

At work I am starting to slug away at accumulated tasks that are now all clamoring for priority attention. Our project ends in about one and a half year so nothing can be postponed anymore. Worse, since we are not ‘burning’ our money at the required rate, we are encouraged to do things now, not later. It is a nice problem to have but it worries the leadership because it looks as if we cannot handle the work. To some degree that is true, we have too many assignments for too few people and we are hiring like crazy (unlike the rest of the American economy where people are laid off). But new hires will not have an easy time to get themselves oriented and slowly slide into the work; besides, they have no guarantees to be employed after July 2010. Actually, that would be true for me as well, according to my contract.

The contours of my spring travel are beginning to appear more clearly on the horizon but scheduling remains somewhat of a challenge; especially since all travel has to be organized around an official evaluation mission by our main client sometime in February that has no firm dates yet. This makes it hard to plan. Usually I have all my trips for the next three months lined up and confirmed by this time in December.