Sylvia's Journal

The pace of work is picking up. It is work that doesn’t require travel. I am light years away from where I was last year.  My NONPROJ status, as I am labeled on our personnel database, is turning out to be an asset rather than a liability. I have my hand in many initiatives and interact with many more parts of MSH than I have ever done. I am discovering wonderful colleagues both at HQ and by phone in the field, and re-connecting with those from years past.

I am involved in all sorts of design work, whether for events, meetings, conference or projects and realize that this is where I am at my best – talking with people, creating new viewpoints out of many different viewpoints, looking for patterns, synthesizing inputs, and finding simplicity, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it so well,  on the other side of complexity. I think it is the creativity, the starting with a blank slate that is most attractive to me, as well as the chance to follow my curiosity (‘gee, what do others think about this?’). It is all most satisfying.

I had hoped to visit with some of my DC friends but the days are full with task-related conversations and the evenings/nights with writing.  The few slots I had available as free time are being filled in one by one.

I am also learning about new technical areas and topics I knew nothing about, such as pharmacy outlets, midwife led birth centers, behavior change communication and training for rehab staff who help those with mobility challenges to get the right wheelchair, including fitting, maintenance and the fabrication of support cushions.

Today I received my first two Coursera certificates. I earned a 87.8% on the Model Thinking, not bad given that I hadn’t used my math and calculus for about 45 years. For the organizational analysis I received a 91.3%. I am not entirely sure how it was calculated but I clearly got rewarded for faithfully watching all the lectures and doing all the quizzes and exams. I had taken both courses quite seriously and am a bit wiser for it. My next course starts in 20 days, about the fundamentals of online education.

Work piled upon work today, requiring phone meeting after phone meeting with brief spurts of writing in between.  I clocked 9 hours and was so (pre)occupied that I was able to ignore all sorts of activities in the house. In particularly I managed to stay away from something I usually love to do, an assembly job that Steve completed for me.  He assembled the new guest bed that Axel and I bought during our once-a-year IKEA expedition (it takes us that long to recover from the experience).  We are now nearly ready for an invasion over the weekend: a first meeting of Sita’s little boy with his mother’s erstwhile baby sitter Goldie (formerly from Brooklyn, now Staten Island).

The weekend was, except for the IKEA expedition, quite relaxing with good food, friends and movies: Les Miserables which left its music score inside my head for two days and nights in a row now, and the Dictator, both with Sacha Baron Cohen playing his usual no holds barred roles.

The New Year’s first workweek has been completed, only 51 left to go. Every day it got a little colder. On Thursday morning when I got up at 4:30 AM it was 6°F which is -14°C. The remote starter that Sinterklaas gave me has not been installed yet.  I dashed out as fast as I could, turned on the ignition, put the heat on high blast, and dashed back into our warm house. A week from now I can stay inside and just press a clicker. I can’t wait.

Yesterday I had a marathon workday starting at 6:20 AM and ending at 6:20 PM exactly, just in time to pick Axel up at North Station. We were invited for dinner at the house of a friend in Cambridge who is off to Afghanistan for a year. She will live in Jalalabad which I think is a little too close to the Pakistani border, and wild places full off angry, bearded and turbaned men with guns. But a year will go fast, we know , and she will also be let out regularly  as per USAID regulations. The dinner was a joyful reunion of old MSH hands and Afghanistan aficionados. I realized that I was the only one still at MSH.

Today I completed two writing/revision assignments, standing at my desk, hopping from one foot to the other, the one in the  orthopedic boot that has to be angled at the right way, and the other foot with the damaged nerves underneath. Maybe a standup desk is not such a good idea right now.

Axel’s gravlax was fully cooked tonight, after days of turning and marinating. He invited some friends to help us eat it, accompanied by roasted herbed potatoes and a salad, and of course a small glass of aquavit, with gingerbread cookies for dessert .  With the snow still outside and temperatures still below zero ( Celsius) we could have pretended to be somewhere in northern Scandinavia .

After dinner Tessa gave our guests a full account of her and Steve’s road trip. It is an account of long rides across states, cold nights and rainy days in the car or a tent,  but also visits to Waring alumns and to national parks, beautiful places further west. I realize how much there is to explore in this country, and that one could probably spend weeks in just one or two states, like Utah and Colorado, to take in all these natural wonders.

It is 2013. It was a quiet and uneventful slide into the new year. We left a party with friends in Ipswich  around 11:15 PM, after singing Auld Lang Syne and pretending that the ball had already dropped on Times Square. At midnight we were home and received and gave wishes for a happy new year to each other and our daughters, by mouth, by text and by phone.

The Christmas tree, which never got decorated, has been put outside. Tessa felt very sorry for the poor tree as it never got dressed up, the only reward for being hacked down in the prime of its life. I’m happy that we have the space in our small living room back.

I was also happy to close  the chapter of these last two weeks of December, with too many doctors’ visits, diagnostic tests and inconclusive results. According to the hand doctor I am halfway through the healing process of my hand. I have to loosen up my fingers by squeezing a sponge under hot tap water. I only have to wear my splint when I go outside when there is a risk of falling. But the orthopedic boot will stay on for a while longer. It is serving me well.

Today I talked with some of my siblings, a tradition usually undertaken at 6 PM on New Year’s Eve, patiently waiting for phone lines to clear. My mother was the first one I used to call. I remember feeling sorry for her being home alone on this night that used to have an importance I can no longer understand. Now it’s just an ordinary evening, only extraordinary because of its following day off.

People ask me what 2013 will be all about. I think it will be about my new role in the organization, the role I’m still trying to fill in, requiring several conversations with my superiors.. It is an exciting, challenging and a bit daunting opportunity. I assume it is promotion, but that has not been made explicit yet.

I finally baked the gingerbread Christmas cookies that I had hoped to have made before Christmas, when everyone was here. We were just much too busy. Tessa did help with the frosting today, a shiny white-lemony coating for which she found many other uses. And now I have all these lovely (and tasty) cookies and I don’t quite know what to do with them. I think most people are done with cookies by now.

We are having turkey-rice-vegetable soup for dinner, the last left over. And then it is early to bed because tomorrow it is back to work. Happy new year to all.

We woke up this morning to a winter wonderland. It was being constructed last night as we drove back from Essex through the second nor’easter in a week. Last night it was a raging storm, this morning all was peaceful again, and white. It is Manchester at its best, not counting the summer.

Sita gave us an Ayurveda cookbook. We have been learning about the three doshas: Vata, Pitta, and Kapha. Axel needs to drink more ginger tea, and I less. I should be drinking mint tea, which I happen to like nearly as much as ginger tea. Axel thinks it’s all a bit fluffy, but I take it seriously. With all my recent visits to doctors, I’d like to be able to heal myself.

We went to our last Quaker meeting of the year. Both of us could use an hour of silence, after the franticness of Christmas. Still, the to-do lists remain daunting and kept trying to insert themselves into our meditations.

WordPress sent me congratulations on my fifth year of blogging. The blog site I use was a Christmas gift from Sita five years ago. Although I’m no longer writing every day, I’ve kept it up enough to remain a routine that I cannot quite abandon. Sometimes I use my blog to find out what I did on a particular day during the last five years. I also received the annual stats this morning. The most amazing one was a picture of the globe indicating how many views originated in various countries. People in 96 countries came to the site, some expected, like the US, or Holland, or Afghanistan. But others were quite surprising, like Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile and Argentina. It is nice that that the stat elves are doing all this work for me. My good intention for 2013 is to keep writing. I hope it will be less about health problems and more about the amazing people I encounter during my travels across the world.

My office has a new layout. After a cursory cleanout Sita judged it was good enough to start moving furniture. We got rid of my desk which was just a horizontal surface and collected stuff. The only desk I have now is little kidney shaped table that is set to its highest level so it is a stand-up desk with a barstool in case I want to sit down. It is tucked in a corner between the Afghan cupboard and the old family chest I inherited from my mother. The furniture that divided the room in half has been pushed to the side and there is a feeling of space again and also an opportunity for the extra or unexpected guest to blow up a mattress and sleep on the ground.

With the house empty I was able to do some work again in between more doctors’ visits. They are relentless, more next week, giving me a taste of what it is like to grow old and creaky. Axel calls it the fight against decrepitude. But, I’m also getting quite handy living with new handicaps.  In spite of my orthopedic boot, today I drove, walked in the snow, picked winter vegetables from the garden and let the dogs out. Although it may seem like a pain in the neck, I am quite happy with the boot. For the first time in months I am forgetting about my left ankle because there is no pain. It’s a little clunky and I’m sure my gait change will affect other muscles and probably create new problems but that is something to worry about later.

I am also getting quite adept at doing ordinary things in spite of my splinted right hand. I prepared a dish from a Norwegian cookbook, Kitchen of Light. It called for mashed rutabaga. It is a vegetable that I did not have when I grew up because for my mother it was too much associated with the war, or more precisely, the hunger winter of 1944. Mashed, with the seeds of half a vanilla bean, and a considerable amount of butter, it was delicious; probably quite different from how it was prepared during those war years. The baked cod that was supposed to be put on top of it was replaced by cold salmon, one of an slowly diminishing stash of leftovers in our fridge.

I am getting a little better at using the voice activated software but sometimes Axel can hear me shouting, no! Not that! Open the darn website I asked for! That’s when I use my hands again. It is a little faster than figuring out what commands to make. I should be more patient – this dictating business is quite nice.

It is two days after Christmas. We are in the middle of a northeastern. It is raining here while further west it is snowing. Masconomo Street was submerged. We have not seen waves this high in a long time. I have been busy with doctors’ visits those last two days. I learned that I have Hashimoto’s disease, an auto-immune disease affecting the thyroid; something I got it from my mother, according to my doctor. Luckily it is benign and there is medication. Eventually surgery is needed when the thyroid gets too big; maybe 10 years from now? Nevertheless it was not great news.

I also now have a boot on my left foot, the one not broken in the accident that should have been broken in hindsight. The boot is to give my left ankle some relief, and reduce the chronic inflammation so that the pain will subside and I can walk short walks again. I’m quite a sight with my right hand in a cast in my left foot in a boot.

I am writing this using Dragon software which I am training to recognize my voice so that I don’t have to type which is a little bit stressful with my broken right hand.

Sita, Jim, and Faro have left for Western Massachusetts, where we believe there is now 12 inches of snow. They have been with us for a whole week and it was wonderful. The house feels very empty without them.

We had some idea that this year’s Christerklaas, our own homemade hybrid of Dutch Sinterklaas and American Christmas would be different since we had a baby in the family. Instead of starting at midnight on Christmas Eve and then going on till 3 AM, we would start at 8 PM and end before midnight.

But Axel hadn’t started on his poem and surprises when 8 AM came around – we gave him an hour but 9 and then 10 and 11 rolled around. So we started 20 minutes earlier than we used to. So what.

But we are all a bit older and tired now and we stopped at 1 AM and resumed the next day around 10 AM. Despite an attempt to make things easier (one person being responsible only for one other’s fun-poking and present – but few held themselves to this new standard.

Once again I was astonished about how our son in-laws have taken to this centuries-old Dutch habit, one of them even trying to convert his own family. Maybe we are starting a movement. Fifty years from now New England rhymes and pokes fun at each other at Christerklaas, the word in Webster’s.

Aside from a ton of chocolate – a substance we tend to give to each other, my two wishes were fulfilled: a new robe, as the old one, bought on Hamra street in Beirut 32 years ago was starting to disintegrate, and a remote car starter – a luxury I had only fantasized about.

Faro got more presents than a 6 month old can handle – it is a little worrisome what small people get when all they want is hugs and kisses and a bottle now and then.

The nice surprise this morning was the white stuff outside. We are counting our blessings.

My home office is overgrown with stuff, primarily papers, CDs, books, memorabilia and then some cloth from all over in boxes. And then there is the furniture; anything that doesn’t fit anyplace in the house came to my office because it used to be the one with unused space. But the measure is full now and I have been fantasizing about an office makeover.

Sita was excited about that idea too, until she walked into the office and realized that I needed to some weeding first and told me the makeover had to wait until the place was uncluttered. After a day of hemming and hawing I finally made a start this morning by throwing out lecture and seminar notes and readings that were 40 years old. To the untrained eye it looks like nothing changed but four hours of cleaning produced two bags of paper for recycling and another with rubbish. With a little bit of luck Sita may reconsider the makeover.

Saturday evening and Sunday evening we went caroling. Saturday in Gloucester the singing was more of a jubilation, with several guitars, ukuleles, mandolins, a small harp, a key board and a piano. The management and orchestration was in the great hands of our friend Andy who knows a bit about Christmas carols and a large crowd. We ended with a formidable rendering of Hallelujah, sopranos in one small room of their enormous Victorian house, altos on the staircase, tenors in the parlor, bases in the hallway.

The power of music and singing together made me want to pick up my violin again – the one instrument that was missing. I was reminded of our West African Grass days in Senegal, with our Sunday morning practice, more than forty years ago.

On Sunday we caroled at Diane’s, also a family tradition. Accompanied by a pianist, with a smaller and older crowd, we sang more or less the same songs, not quite as grand a performance but joyful too. Here too we divided the 12 days of gifting, more or less by family rather than part of the house, creating (in both cases) much hilarity as the competition (to be the loudest) gets fierce. The group with the most youngsters always outperforms the others.

We have a full house, our daughters, their men and one baby and two dogs filled the house with noise, stuff, dog hair and baby toys. We love it.

We hadn’t seen Faro for 3 weeks and were astonished about his development. His grip on things is firm now and his movements less jerky. He can crawl across the room, propelling himself in a clever way, arm underneath his chest, knee pushing against arm, bum up and then forward. He does this with little apparent effort.

He did stare at us when he arrived, for a long time. You could practically see his neurons firing inside his brain, surging for connections (with his opa and oma) that are still a bit weak. And then suddenly there was this smile – connection made! He did the same when his auntie Tessa and uncle Steve showed up. They hadn’t seen each other for nearly three month. He is a different kid now, no longer an infant but a little boy with real boy clothes on.

The storm that covered the middle of this country with snow was wet with 65 mph gusts of wind and the cove a roiling cauldron. Anything not tied down took to the air. A plastic garbage can was floating in the harbor.

I worked from home all day which was a challenge – a squealing baby, cooing Tessa, barking dogs and other mayhem plus the stress of typing with a right hand in a cast. Still, I managed to get about 75% of my goals for the day met.

But now the weekend and Christmas holiday has started. It is time to start preparing for that.