Sylvia's Journal

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.

The dreaded Christmas commute home is in full swing. I pass 4 shopping centers. This slows the ride considerably. And then there is the daily accident making it a 2 hours trip from office door to hearth and hubby. Such a long commute condemns me to repeated news cycles so even the radio brings no solace.

Tessa is on the home stretch now too, driving on Thursday from Ashville NC to Pittsfield MA in one fell swoop. From there it is a short ride home on Friday. We think Tessa and Steve will still recognize us, despite all the hours we spent in doctors’ offices, but will the dogs?

Axel has been preparing the nest for homecoming – cleaning the barn (our Brazilian cleaning lady in the lead) and washing the dog-haired sheets, stale from two months of idleness. Tessa and Steve will thus move back in until they find a place of their own (anyone?) between Manchester and Boston that has room for all six of them: 2 humans, 2 dogs and 2 cars.

At work new stuff keeps piling on old. I have moved a long way from my miserable re-entry blues a year ago. Among them some pretty exciting assignments that will allow me to explore beyond the boundaries, in the outer periphery of what I am currently familiar with.

I am learning to live with my hand(icap), periodically unwrapping my hand to massage the stiff fingers but also to type a little faster. Axel massaged the hand yesterday with a ‘poet-warrior’ blend of oils (ginger, arnica and cayenne), recommended by our masseuse. I didn’t care that much about the warrior part but the poet part of the blend was real nice.

The final diagnosis on my hand is in. Only one bone is broken, splintered said the CT scan. No use to put the pieces back together, it would be nearly impossible. The battle plan is to let the pieces glom together and make the bone whole again. It would be a messy whole but who cares. The arthritic joint will be painless or not. If it is not the hand doctor will fuse everything together at no great cost to hand functionality. Fingers crossed.

I am slowly adapting to my handicap. Today I drove myself to two appointments. It was easy as long as I can use my left hand. Anything that requires right hand strength or agility is impossible for the near future. This includes changing the flow of hot or cold air into the car, cutting hard foods and doing the dishes.

I am aware that my troubles are nothing against the backdrop of the unspeakable drama that unfolded in Connecticut last Friday. It occupies every minute of our waking hours and keeps raising all these nasty questions that we cannot seem to answer as a society, like what is the problem with banning assault weapons?

I am a sinistra, a forced lefty now. One or two of the little bones in my right hand are broken according to the X-ray. Axel took the bus to the airport so he could drive me to the X-ray machine which eventually led to the emergency room for a splint and pain meds.

An now I am adjusting to a period of lefthandedness. All the things I would like to do over the next few weeks (and that require two functional hands) had to be dropped in the ‘not this year’ bucket.

I abandoned the pain meds after the side effects turned out worse than enduring the pain of the broken bone(s).  Why anyone would want to take these for fun and pay a premium price for them is a mystery to me.

I have a half cast that an be removed for scratching and bathing, a good thing. I am already quite good at putting it on an off with one hand. For other daily living activities I need help from nurse Axel. It’ all too familiar. But because of the familiarity I also know this phase will pass.

Despite the new handicap I was able to start on my yearly mustard production and was able to produce two batches with one hand and very little help. So those who were worried about a mosterdless Christmass can relax. I call it my mostardicum sinistrum.

Tessa called us from Death Valley in California. It is a matter of seeing is believing, the real thing so much better than its name. They did get a flat tire which is why she had time to call us from the tire-fixing place. Otherwise they are rather busy trying to press everything they want to do on this road trip into the remaining weeks – it is down to weeks now.

Sita skyped in a little later from her New York City hotel room, with Faro on her lap. She is experiencing the travails of being a working mother while Jim handles the day-during-daytime routine. And so when she comes home from a long day scribing of deliberations about cold chains and supply chains, he hands the baby over to her, ‘here, now it is your turn.

Faro can now crawl across a bed, a room, any surface really. And with that a new phase has arrived, the phase of The Mobile Baby. He is also recognizing us on skype and trying to touch us, drooling on Sita’s precious keyboard. A handful indeed.

We just learned from facebook that Sita is sequestered, after hours, in the UNICEF building where the conference is taking place. A suspicious package led brought in NYPD, sirens, and shut down the HVAC and elevators. They are told to keep working. Jim will have to wait with his ‘here, he’s yours,’ it seems.

We are packed for Japan and I am ready to get on a plane and stop worrying about things not done. Today was one of those days – cleaning my desk and things kept falling down on it. I am glad I am travelling with my best friend.

Just as I am over my fever, and on the mend, Axel is starting to pick up whatever strain of bugs I introduced in the house. He has to collapse whatever he has into three days, no more.

In the meantime I am trying to collapse lots of small and big assignments into the remaining three days as I would like to leave on Saturday being able to focus on what lies ahead in Japan and nothing else.

This is a challenge because most of the hours I am at the office are booked for one or another meeting. And so my early arrival at the office (6:15 AM) is helpful, leaving me a few hours to be at my most productive and most creative. There is a benefit to getting up in the middle of the night.

Much of my time now is devoted to learning or promoting learning. It is an enjoyable task because I get to explore areas that had either faded into faraway parts of my brain or are entirely new. Today we listened to two knowledge management experts of a local (for profit) management consulting firm. With knowledge its primary product, the company spends considerable resources on knowledge management and learning. We invited them to see what such a Cadillac model looks like and spark some ideas about things we could do, given our limited resources.  A few of us left with our minds spinning and much in awe. We have a ways to go but were warned not to bite off more than we can chew.  Good advice.

We had Faro and his parents over for much of the Thanksgiving holiday and although I was feeling crummy, it was wonderful to have them around and watch Faro trying to crawl, play guitar and learn Dutch children’s songs.

We also talked with Tessa who has nearly reached the halfway point of their road trip. They are starting to think about the return trip, taking the southern route, which makes a lot of sense.

After another horrendous coughing fit that woke both of us u last night, and completing my second week of feeling poorly, it was time to pay a visit to our new doctor.  He congratulated me on seeking help (of course) and then told me I had ‘walking pneumonia’.  This simply means you don’t have to get hospitalized and can keep walking, a mild form of pneumonia or bronchitis, he couldn’t quite tell.

I received an antibiotic injection and prescriptions for two kinds of antibiotics, one for now and the other as a backup to use when I get on my way to Japan and still feel crummy. I would like to enter the plane on Saturday morning as a healthy person. I also would like to come out healthy on the other end because at Narita they have giant heat sensors to pick out people with (any kind of) the flu. And who knows what happens then.

I also went to see the foot doctor for another cortisone injection because I would like to be able to walk in Japan. Lately, a walk around the block ended in a hard to disguise limp. The last shot was 6 month ago. So tomorrow I should be well again.

I notice my entries are getting further and further apart. I believe it is because of sinking from a cold into something more serious over the last 2 weeks, when I returned from Bangladesh.  Still, in the meantime we went south to DC and west for thanksgiving and north for post-Thanksgiving.

In Franconia (NH) we experienced our first snow of the season. It is really winter there. Canon mountain had all the snowmakers going on full blast when we arrived and was fairly white when we left (snowmakers still going but now complementing the natural layer that had fallen overnight).

The softly descending snowflakes on Sunday morning put me in a poetic mood, with a poem surfacing without any effort from my side. It was my first poem in ages.  Snow slows things down, even when just watching it from a warm inside. It also creates a mood of ‘now.’  Both seem to be important for bringing forth the muse.

We drove our second cousin once or twice removed (?) to Cambridge. She was part of the mini family reunion we had up there at her New York uncles’ and California aunt’s old vacation home in Franconia.

We took advantage of being in Cambridge and went to see Lincoln and then have a lovely after theatre culinary experience at a Kendall Square wine bar called belly. Although we are vegetarian wannabees we cannot help ourselves to order steak tartare at those rare occasions when it is on the menu – it was well worth the trangression, and nicely bracketed by an arugula salad and a beet/bean salad.

Despite the stuffy nose and having been in an all day meeting, there was an extension of the day at the WorldBank where I attended a Fail Faire.

Colleagues had told me about this Fail Faire and I had been skeptical, wondering why anyone would be willing to get up on a stage and talk about his or her failure. I do accept the premise that we learn from failure but somehow I couldn’t get my head around the concept of this being done on a stage and in a public place.

The WorldBank hosted the event which was well attended by a large crowd of predominantly young (inferred from the high energy at 6 PM on a Friday) development workers with an ICT interest, as this was the focus of the failures. There was much twittering around me about the lessons that emerged out of the failures – a very connected crowd.

We listened to the failure stories which were presented in comedy club style – there was much laughing and many clever slides with even more clever pictures and very little text. At the end, using applause level as the measure, we elected the church lady and the computer class in Angola as the winner – not necessarily the most insightful failure but certainly the funniest story and best presentation.

I had expected something completely different and now can understand the appeal. Who would not want to be entertained on a Friday evening, with free drinks and snacks, in the company of best friends and colleagues listen to people who fell on their faces? I’d go again but I don’t think I would ever present as these were hard acts to follow.