The problem with a fresh commitment to work is...now I'm enthusiastic about and engaged in my work. The last two months have been filled with 12-14 hour days of trying to stay on top of two projects with looming deadlines. My downtime has been spent mostly in complete exhaustion or battling colds that I refuse to allow to take hold during the week, because I can bend even a virus to my will for a very brief while. What little spare time I do have, I've used to help friends with their personal projects, such as building a yurt - A YURT, by gods! Because I'm in California and that's the way the goddamn hippy engineers roll out here.
Nothing says "off-grid" quite like a yurt muffin.
A few friends from North Carolina wound up in Seattle for a supercomputing conference last weekend. For at least seven years, I have been promising other friends who moved to Seattle that I would come say hi. Work be damned, I needed to spend some time with the tribe of my heart and make good on some old promises.
Friday morning, I was out of Sea-Tac by 9am with a shitty rental car and no where in particular to be. I don't think I've felt so free in years. I drove around aimlessly for an hour just admiring the gorgeous autumn scenery before opting to visit the doll museum in Bellevue. After three hours of a fairly comprehensive history of dolls from the last few centuries, I meandered to lunch with friends. Saturday, S., Z. and I rattled around the LeMay Family Car Collection for well over three hours, viewing several hundred of the mostly American cars on display. My little collection of five seems so reasonable in comparison.
There was a failed attempt to visit the Snoqualmie Train Museum, but overall, the weekend was simply spent enjoying the company of dear friends.
There's a certain comfort in being surrounded by people with whom you have a bond and a history. Unguarded moments are few and precious as you become more experienced with and jaded by the world, but here, I had a weekend filled with them. I reluctantly flew home Tuesday morning and went straight into work on a mere three hours of sleep. All of the joy and ease of the weekend immediately undone, I found myself clenching teeth and hands by mid-afternoon.
I should probably romance Seattle a little more often. I still have a lot of California to get through, though.
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