Category: March 2023

March moments in pictures

Let’s do all of March in one big post! I am so far behind. I have a number of random pictures that by themselves don’t seem to be enough for a post (although I recognize my posts are usually much longer than what social media encourages). I just want to get caught up!

First up, pictures of Steven’s neighbor’s leaning tree in early March:

The following Monday the power company came out to deal with it. Whew!

Meanwhile, in Tucson, Laura was enjoying our pool in early March:

This was a couple of days after I almost, but didn’t quite, adopt a puppy. She was so cute! But it really wasn’t a good time to adopt a puppy.

Oh my gosh that puppy was so nearly irresistible. But she was destined for someone else. Meanwhile, Biska was in a cone for what seemed like forever because she wouldn’t stop scratching at the top of her head with her back paws.

Biska is finally better now.

John’s been in Albuquerque a lot, but one weekend he came home and we had a fun time buying stuff.

Here’s a painting my new friend, Barbara, in Tucson did. She’s teaching me a little bit about art, but I don’t think I’ll ever be this good. She’s a professional artist.

Here’s a hilariously weird huge prickly tree on campus:

And startlingly vivid sign on campus:

My maps fit perfectly in the built-in shelves along the side of the office closet! I was so ridiculously happy. Those file folders are really old and I had exactly the right amount for these particular closet shelves. It made my day. But I’m so tired of moving! And we’re not done yet.

We’re still remodeling too. Here we are having cement poured. This is connecting the family room to the laundry room, via the back porch.

Our contractor is pretty much AWOL these days, but he shows up occasionally and does something. A couple of weeks later, when the cement was obviously completely cured (it only takes a day or two), John gave up on our contractor ever returning, and just took the forms off himself. Mid-April update: they are finally back and tiling it. A month later!

Here’s an owl on the power lines behind our house. We hear him every night, and sometimes we hear the female return his call. You can tell the female because her hoot is slightly higher in pitch.

Here’s a couple of pictures of spring flowers:

That’s all for March. I’ll get going on April soon!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Kristina’s Website: Life Coaching for Adults with Autism

Congratulations, John!

John is retiring from Sandia after 29 years, and will be starting a new position with Raytheon in Tucson!!!! It was a hard decision because he has a lot of respect for Sandia and they have a lot of respect for him. He had an excellent career with Sandia. Raytheon is an unknown; it’s exciting, it’s scary, it’s risky. But we have decided we want to settle here, connect with the Tucson community, and start this new phase of our lives.

If you’ve wondered why I haven’t been posting much recently, that’s the main reason. I’ve been less able to speak my mind than normal, because John wanted to be able to tell his management before the news hit a public blog. And he wanted to wait to tell them until the offer was official. This new job has been in the works for some months now and it took forever for it to be finalized! It’s been difficult to find anything to say that didn’t allude to the probable (and now finally official) new job.

Meanwhile, we’ve been spending a lot time trying to figure out logistics. We’ve been strategizing everything from my own career, to what to do with the houses. Our primary home is in Albuquerque, as are our two rentals. We’ve decided for sure to sell our own home, and we might sell one of the rentals this summer too.

Moving benefits, real estate agents, storage units, potential medical insurance gaps, mail forwarding, new driver’s licenses…it’s a lot to juggle. In Arizona you’re supposed to get your new driver’s license immediately. The time requirement is something ridiculous, like a week after you move here. But when am I moving to Arizona? Now? Two years ago? When the moving van comes later in April? When John starts his new job in early May? When our primary residence in Albuquerque sells? Who knows and whatever. We’ve just got so much un-fun stuff to do.

But wow, we’re going to finally actually live here! Together! Yay!

Here we are, celebrating over ramen:

Here we are on a recent hike, which we mostly spent in heavy discussion about all the big moving-related issues.

We’ve seen very little of each other this winter and spring, and have been having difficulty finding time to have fun AND do the talking needed to make all the big decisions.

We’re looking forward to getting through this move and having more relaxing time on the weekends together.

Woof, Woof! There’s something up there!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Kristina’s Website: Life Coaching for Adults with Autism

Too much (and not enough) stuff

There’s a lot of heavy concerns going on in the world right now, so to distract you from all that, here is a lighthearted peek into the minutiae of my life. Specifically, the many, many, too many items of minutiae in my life. I’m not a hoarder, really. Nor did I stockpile during the pandemic. But I still have far too many duplicates of things. See, it goes like this:

Imagine I have a bottle of shampoo in both houses, one in Tucson, and one in Albuquerque. Ok, that’s fine so far. Now imagine that I’m in Tucson, and I notice that my shampoo bottle is getting close to empty. Not wanting to be caught entirely without shampoo, I buy a second bottle. All good so far.

Then we go to Albuquerque. While in Albuquerque I notice that my bottle of shampoo there is also getting low. So I buy a second bottle. Now I’ve got 4 bottles of shampoo, but two of them are nearly empty. It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable amount. Not yet.

Then once I’m back in Tucson, I notice that my shampoo bottle (the original one) has, at most, one more day’s left. I realize I need to buy a new bottle. My brain chimes in and reminds me that I’ve already bought a new bottle. Yeah, I argue, but that was in Albuquerque. My stuff in Tucson keeps getting boxed up as the house is being remodeled, so it’s actually impossible to tell. There could be a bottle of shampoo in a box in the garage somewhere. Who knows? So I buy a bottle of shampoo.

Now there’s 5 bottles. Actually, soon we’re back down to 4 because I really did finally use up the nearly-empty first bottle in Tucson. Whew.

Next trip, John goes to Albuquerque without me. Every trip we bring more stuff to Tucson. I’ve been wanting my fine collection of shoe polishes, which I haven’t used since the pandemic started, so I ask him to please bring the bin of supplies from under the master bathroom sink, which contains my shoe polish.

When John gets back to Tucson, I unpack my bin of supplies that he brought (Yay, shoe polish, finally), and I discover an extra bottle of shampoo. At this point it dawns on me that I probably need to stop buying shampoo.

Then I head back to Albuquerque with John. While in Albuquerque, I run out of shampoo. I remember that I told myself to quit buying shampoo, but since my spare bottle accidentally went to Tucson with the shoe polish, I now have no shampoo in Albuquerque. So I reluctantly buy a bottle. There are now at least 3 full bottles of shampoo in Tucson and one full bottle in Albuquerque. Or maybe there’s 4 in Tucson, who knows at this point.

Then imagine that I go on a short trip involving a brief hotel stay. It’s a nice hotel but on the first morning I discover that I hate the hotel shampoo. I’d like to buy a bottle of what I prefer and just bring the remainder home with me. But never mind, I’ll just use the stinky hotel shampoo. Because I’m not buying any more shampoo ever again!

And that’s just shampoo. Don’t even get me started on coffee!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Kristina’s Website: Life Coaching for Adults with Autism

Looking Forward

I had another CT scan this week. As usual, my results are great…No cancer found! Yay! Double Yay!! But as usual, there’s just enough worrisome bits that I never quite feel like I can let down my guard. The little spots on my lungs? They aren’t growing and aren’t thought to be cancer. All those liver cysts, some of which are quite large? Just harmless cysts. Not cancer. No cancer anywhere. And yet, why is my white blood cell count abnormally low and continuing to drop? Why are my neutrophils low? Why is my calcium high? And why is my CEA cancer marker slowly climbing? It’s still low, below the reference range, but why has it been creeping up?

I am superstitious. I have a superstition that goes something like; if I’m too optimistic, the universe is going to laugh and prove me wrong. People like me touch wood a lot. “The weather is perfect…knock on wood.” “Everything is going great…knock on wood!!” I’m the sort of person who imagines that we will die the day after our life insurance lapses. But if our lives are heavily insured (ie. expecting the worst), then we won’t die. It’s sort of a complicated version of Murphy’s law.

My superstition is all a bunch of bullshit, obviously. But the cancer could come back. I’ve been tenaciously and determinedly keeping myself as ready as possible for the very real possibility of a cancer reoccurrence (or more accurately, a discovery of “cancer-never-went-away-and-we-just-didn’t-realize-it”).

But something happened to me over the weekend that has made me wonder if maybe I am ready to start walking down the road labeled “no cancer” even though I don’t have the ability to distinguish between “not yet cancer” and “no cancer”.

Laura visited this weekend. And in addition to having a lovely time, as I always do when I get to see my kids, I also had a bit of an eye opening discussion with her. Laura works for an amazing consultancy, a large national (or international?) firm that truly walks the talk. This is the sort of progressive, employee-oriented firm we all wish we could work for. And she’s very well qualified to work for such a firm. She has two master’s degrees; an MBA and one in data analytics. She’s doing very well in her career.

I was congratulating her, and I must have said something about how I would have loved to have been able to work for a company like hers. And she said, why not? I could. I could work, in fact, for her company.

No way? No freaking way. I don’t have an MBA, I’m not a data scientist or a programmer, what would they do with me? This consultancy has clients like Google and Facebook and all those big names. What would I have to offer them?

My career seems disjointed and fragmented to most people. Life coaching, environmental science, planning, management, a little of this, a little of that. My resume has periodic 3-year gaps. Except I have always been coaching. I have been steadily coaching since 2001, without any breaks whatsoever. But my past employers have always completely discounted my life coaching, like it’s some weird hobby. They’ve eyed it with suspicion – at best.

But Laura says, oh not at all. Apparently her colleagues don’t all have MBA’s and they’re not all programmers and data scientists. She said I could be in the business advisory services group. She said many of her coworkers are actively working on getting coaching certifications. Really? They are? I was certified 22 years ago.

Which brings me to another issue. I’m old! Right? Isn’t it the culture of the youth? Does anybody even hire anyone past age 40 nowadays, much less past 50? But no, she says her company prides themselves on being “multi-generational” and she has plenty of coworkers older than me, even though her company is dynamic and not some old dinosaur.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m not old and washed up, foggy-brained and out-of-touch, with a fragmented resume, unable to make even half of what I made in my prime. Could I still be in my prime? Most of my friends – many of whom are fellow cancer survivors – are in their early 70’s. They’re happily retired baby boomers. Part of me feels right in there with them. And yet – I’m not in my 70’s and I never retired. I was just in the midst of a job change when cancer and a pandemic threw me off track. Presumably, I could work another decade. Maybe I’m only 2/3 of the way through my career? Is it time to start back up again?

How would it feel to interview with a bunch of young faces looking at the dates on my resume that start out with the number 19? Degrees in 1993 and 1999, and coaching certification in 2001. I’m not used to being the old one in the room. I’ve never actually worked for someone younger than me. I’m at the age where that’s going to start happening now. But you know what? I think I’m fine with that. If they are.

Laura made some suggestions about some refresher training, and she’s been helping me with the newer business terminology. The tables are turned and my daughter is now my mentor. Maybe that’s what makes me old!

My kids have always kept me young. They’ve introduced me to newer music, kept me up to date with the changing social norms (non-binary!) and now Laura’s helping me with career strategy. I’m lucky to have kids I can learn from as I claw my way back from the brink of being old.

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Kristina’s Website: Life Coaching for Adults with Autism