Do you find that you make the same resolutions over and over?

One of my goals for 2010 is to take more real vacations.  Aside from our honeymoon, we don’t often leave town, instead getting caught up in the daily routine of dogs, cleaning, winding down and never-ending DIY’ing

I can’t remember a year that I didn’t vow to plan ahead, make time, spend money and go places.  And yet, my spending patterns and stress thresholds prevent me from doing this – every year.

But this year, things are coming together.  Unlike years past, I’m doing pretty well in every part of my life, so I have hope that the kinds of goals that encompass lots of those areas are possible.

Like this vacation thing.

On my 30 in 30 list, I put “go to Tampa.”  I love Tampa.  Tampa was the first place I (psuedo-) lived outside my hometown.  Every week for months I’d board a plane and two flights later, be in Tampa for the week. In Tampa I first understood that places have more similarities than differences; that you can be yourself in a different city pretty easily; that flamingoes exist in the wild.

Almost every thread of angst in my 20′s played out in Tampa. Every relationship except the one with my current husband had a moment there, sometimes overlapping in high drama, always including a silent moment of solitude on a balcony like this one.

Once upon a time I was with this guy – this funny, sweet, kind, good-looking guy – who drove me nuts and made me want to throw things.  Or run.  Or scream.  Or something.

But I knew I loved him, and I wanted to make things work.  No, I was certain we had to make things work.  This was the guy for me, so we could either drive each other nuts and be miserable or try to find the skills we needed to understand each other better.  And not fight.

I went through armfuls (and SUV-fuls and bedside table-fuls) of books.  Some were nutty, some were depressing, and some were entirely too maudlin and blame-your-parents-for-everything.  Some, though, some were magical in how they opened up my world to a new way of thinking.

With the holiday season fast approaching, I’m sharing them with you in the hopes that someone in your life has an eye-opening moment, too.  The widget in the sidebar has been updated, too.

1.  The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate by Gary Chapman

You’ll have to ignore the cheesy cover picture and if you’re not religious, the religiousy prose, but it’s totally worth it.  Totally and completely worth it.  I’d bet you show your love in the way you want to receive love, and so did I, until I read this book.  But lo and behold, the things that make me feel loved aren’t the things that make my husband feel loved.  Who knew?  Gary Chapman, evidently.  So now when I want to show my husband how I feel about him, I clean the kitchen.  Or rake the leaves.  Or clean out his car.  His love language is Acts of Service.

What’s yours?

My husband read my copy, but as he pointed it, it’s a little bit “girly,” so I was thrilled to find a new version just for men.  Yay!

2. Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage by Dr. John Gottman

With empirically validated research, Dr. Gottman’s book is a real page turner.  No, seriously.  From the moment he stated that it’s not how often or how loud couples fight that matters, it’s just how they fight, I was hooked.  I often remind myself to recognize repair attempts during our arguments, and I just realized my Drop-It lesson comes from this book!  Please read.  References to this work appear in all sorts of other books I love, like “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell and “SuperFreakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, but the book stands all by itself as a useful, practical, necessary relationship book.

In tough times, I’ve been known to run crying to the bookshelf to frantically flip through it for advice.  If that doesn’t say something important….

3.  Don’t Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor

Okay, fine, this isn’t a human-human relationship book, it’s a human-dog relationship book, but don’t discount it just yet.  Learning the principles of behavior modification to use with my puppy, I suddenly realized how I might be more effective with my husband… not because he’s like Indy, but because the communication challenges for me are the same whether I’m trying to get my husband to hear me or my dog to understand.  I try to talk my way through anything, but reading this book reminded me that often, it’s more effective to act.

Interestingly, the original title of the book was “Don’t Shoot the Dog: How to Improve Yourself and Others Through Behavioral Training: How to Improve Yourself and Others Through Behavioral Training.”  Much more appropriate, I think.

Funny story: my husband is now reading this thanks to an agreement brokered in the middle of our last argument about disciplining the little hoodlums, and I’m not sure I like the situation.  I think I’ve noticed him trying to mark my behaviors and offer positive reinforcement!

4.  I Love You, Ronnie: The Letters of Ronald Reagan to Nancy Reagan by Nancy Reagan

Politics and crazy parenting dynamics aside, I love Nancy and Ronald Reagan as a couple.  Reading through his letters, I forgot he was a grown man – President of the United States of America, even – because he was so funny and silly and in love.  Boots-on-the-ground kind of practical advice is all well and good, but remembering to be silly, to be in love, to insulate ourselves as a couple from the outside world, these are good lessons.  And apparently you can buy it for a penny, so why not?

Have you read any of these?

I’m a girl who likes efficiency.  Scratch that.  I’m a girl who lives for efficiency.  I think it started when I read “Cheaper by the Dozen” in the sixth grade.  If you haven’t read the book, the real book, not the stupid movie with Steve Martin, you should.  The father of the children is an efficiency expert, charged with minimizing the excess movements of factory workers.  In a classic example of bringing work home, he teaches his kids the most efficient way to bathe – up one side, down the other.

I tried it.  It was a little bit faster.  I tweaked and adapted and modified until I was fastest, and I used the saved time to stand under the hot water and do nothing.  Ah, the benefits of efficiency.

I still think about the most efficient way to shower every day.  It’s automatic, as is my own personal race through airport screening with as few wasted movements as I can manage (rolling bag goes first, then bin with shoes and bag, followed by laptop… if I’m on my game, by the time my laptop rolls out, I plop it in my shoulder bag and am ready to go).

I became a project manager, where the name of the game is efficiency: how can I get from here to there with as little time, resources, and scope creep as possible?  How can I plan so effectively now that I minimize surprises later?  And when those surprises inevitably appear, how can I minimize their effect on my whole plan?  It’s about minimizing some things, maximizing others, and keeping the trains running on time.

Project management was built, quite literally, on the foundations of home builders.  Go to a course on project management and I guarantee you at least one example will relate to building a house.  At least. Within an hour, you’ll be told that planning is like the foundation of the house, and without a solid foundation, the whole house (“of cards” if your instructor is particularly dramatic) will come crashing down.  Construction PM’s are the uber-PM’s of the PM world.

Except I work in software.  And if there’s one thing that characterizes software development as an industry, it’s the utter and overwhelming unknown.  Unlike a house, you can’t just “know” when software is right, or done, or ready.  Unlike a house…

Actually, I’m stopping that analogy right now.  I could carry it out – legions of software project managers before me have – but it’s a bullshit analogy. 

Construction is a bullshit analogy for software because of the assumption of perfect knowledge.  To build a house on a project plan is to assume perfect expertise on the parts of the people doing the work.  Why do the people on those reality home improvement shows always get nailed by some surprise?  They lacked the expertise that is assumed when a construction company builds a home – from themselves, their subcontractors, and even their homeowners.  We’re all experts in the purpose (or potential purposes) of a home, of the general way it should look, function, and be maintained.

Not so much in software, where we still debate the merits of everything on one screen or embedded on many, prompts and requirements versus free text, replacing paper workflow or creating a new one.  Customers – or end-users or stakeholders or whatever we call them – don’t always know what they want, only that they want better. What is better? And our developers might be experts in a particular language or workflow or technology stack, but it is virtually impossible to be an expert in all of them.  Throw in legacy code or customizability and perfect knowledge becomes completely impossible.

Traditional waterfall project management fails not because we don’t know how to do it, but because we aren’t iterating on the same product long enough to get anywhere near perfect knowledge.

Building software is a lot like building a relationship.  It’s about collaboration and the collective expertise of a group of people.  It’s about estimating in an area largely unknown, about responding appropriately to the changing of priorities and goals and understanding.  It’s about constant communication, a balance between structure and freedom, people walking on the same road at the same time in the same direction (but not always sure where they’re going).  At work and in life, I don’t have the opportunity – nor do I want it – to try and fail at the same thing over and over until I get some approximation of efficiency.  I’ve already done the engaged/ wedding/ marriage thing twice.  This is not a cycle I’m willing to repeat.

There’s a better way, and it’s not about efficiency.

{To be continued tomorrow, or maybe later today, and I’ll actually manage to tie this into Twister.  Crazy, I know.}

Do you ever have moments when you think, “How on earth does someone who didn’t grow up like me get through life?”

I’m sitting on the floor in my hotel room with a little tiny needle and a little tiny length of thread from a little tiny mending kit.  I brought pants with me, great fabulous gray wool pinstriped pants from a previous life where I actually spent that much on clothing, pants with a hem that had fallen a couple years ago.  I love them, though, and one of the benefits of gaining a little bit of weight is that they fit, so I brought them with me thinking that I might need a break from my black work wardrobe.

Today is Friday.  I’ve worn every other outfit I brought, from the “I’m a freaking WOMAN” skirt and heels to the “I’m one of you folks” pants and sweater, and I would have probably worn something comfy (hi, red-eye tonight) except for this:

Looks count today — in terms of work, love and self-esteem. Dress for the job you want to have five years from now, and keep an eye toward appealing to the cutie in your life — spruce up your plumage and try a new style. Looking good can’t make you happy, but it can certainly give you a pleasant surprise when you catch your reflection in a store window. You need to remind yourself how attractive you are — once you fully realize this fact, everyone else will too.

That’s my horoscope for today and when my horoscope says to dress for the job I want to have five years from now, I take it seriously.  So seriously, in fact, that I’ve been thinking about what to wear today since I read it yesterday.

So much for my plans to wear comfy pants and a dowdy sweater.

Remember this post from Monday?  And did I mention that last Friday’s horoscope said that I’m more valuable than I think, more visible than I think, and that my bosses have something in mind for me that’s much bigger than I think?  And then after the discussion about the job I wanted, I found out two days ago that they have a bigger project for me?  Much bigger?  Like, by a factor of ten bigger?

This girl no longer ignores her horoscope (well, I never did, but certainly not after that).

I have spent the past two days worrying (in my head – my gut feels fine about this) that I’m being set up to fail, that I’m not capable, that someone somewhere has a seriously overestimated sense of my abilities.  So I read this horoscope and I think it’s a sign that I’m much more attractive – in a professional sense – than I’m giving myself credit for.  And I feel better.

Back to the hotel room floor.  I’m sitting on it basting the hem of my gray wool pinstripe pants because in five years I want to be wearing kick-ass pants and a perfectly-fitting Italian wool blazer with my $6.95 H&M tank top underneath.  That’s the job I want: the one where I feel as in control and grown-up as this outfit makes me feel today, but where I still get to be me underneath it all.

And as I’m basting – threading the needle, knotting the thread, quickly tacking the cuff up at the seams and then flying through a series of big-little-big-little stitches to hold the whole thing in place – I’m thinking, “How would someone who didn’t grow up with a mom like mine, a mom who sews for hours at a time for fun, a mom from whom we learned how to baste a hem correctly through osmosis, how would that person handle this?”

I stop, close my eyes, take a deep breath, and thank the universe and my mom for giving me this life, one where I can read a horoscope and make my day work exactly how I want it before heading home to my sweet hubby and nutty animals.

I’m on the road this week visiting our offices in Seattle for the second time in two months.  Traveling this frequently is unusual for me, though a few years ago I traveled weekly.  Being settled and happy in my life means I dread being on the road, but being on the road helps me like my job more.

Last week a confluence of events made me think I’d found the perfect “out” from my semi-miserable work-at-home existence.  A new gig seemed to fall out of the sky just for me, a more pressure-filled gig with lots of fun things like negotiating between five different teams and commercializing products on a ridiculously short timeline with customers breathing down my back.  I am not joking one bit when I say that entire previous sentence is my idea of fun at work.

But in talking with my boss on Friday, it became crystal clear that they had another candidate in mind, and while that person may not have been as perfect a fit for the gig, this was a great opportunity to bring her onto our team.  We don’t hire externally very often, much less in this economic climate.

I reached out to the hiring manager anyway, made clear my interest both to him and my boss, and told them I wouldn’t be pursuing the role because I understood their need to build an organization took priority over my personal desires but that I wanted them to know that it was exactly the kind of gig I’d love.  I asked them to keep me in mind in the future, continue to involve me in the planning, and offered to get more involved in issues relating to customers and program delivery and anything requiring negotiating.

I felt pretty good about it, but as the day continued, I was really sad.

Is this growing up?  Oh, how I miss the rush of taking a new job and seeing so many possibilities in front of me.  I miss the pay raises that only come when you job hop, miss the satisfaction of being a necessary part of a necessary team, miss the constant back-and-forth negotiations about details and strategy and roadmaps.

Did I just chicken out and bow to the whims of the org because I was too weak to push for what I needed?  Or was this the right thing to do, the best way to keep my powerful boss in my corner?

I don’t know.  I don’t.  But laugh if you must, the first book I downloaded on my Kindle was “The Secret,” and though I’m finding myself needing to suspend my disbelief to get through its somewhat campy style, I still see the underlying truth in the thing: you attract what you project. 

I met my husband and my best friend in the same week, not long after I finally finalized the paperwork on my divorce (I’d been separated more than two years), changed my phone number so my ex-boyfriend would stop calling, and began the process of moving from Knoxville.  My slate was clean, my past was behind me, and I had nothing left but hope.

I’ve lived the law of attraction. 

Lately, though, I’ve been whiny and worried and reveling in my lack of fulfillment.  Two weeks ago I followed a whim and ended up involved in exactly the kind of thing that I love.  That, in turn, highlighted the new role and how effective I’d be in it.

So rather than second-guess my unwillingness to elbow my way into a job I just know I’d love, I’m going to look forward.  I have the good fortune to be in a job in a part of the organization where nobody minds having their toes stepped on, so I’m going to believe that my future fantastic fun-filled job is already mine and I’m going to do the hell out of it this week.

It’s going to be a blast.

Anyone have any ideas on how to “have faith and believe” that I got a $20k raise, too?

My career started in a hospital, supporting and installing IT systems in a bunch of different departments. One of my favorite projects involved improving customer satisfaction measures in the emergency department.

The best way to improve the perception of good service? Scripting. Teach your super duper smart nurses and doctors to say certain things like, “I’m so sorry you’re frustrated” or “can I help explain anything more clearly?”

It’s not that they weren’t sorry or interested in helping, but they often forgot to say the words or didn’t know which ones to use.

I get that. I so get that. In fact, I get it so well, I wonder why we don’t do this in life.

Want girls not to have sex so young? Teach them how to put on the brakes. Saying no with grace is tough. Any girl can say no to someone she doesn’t like, but it’s hard to say no and not feel like you’re destroying a fledgling relationship.

“I really like making out with you, but I’m not comfortable when you put your hand there. Why don’t we stick to kissing?”

Not sure how to talk to your new husband about sex? Let’s say he never wants sex and you do.

I’ve never understood that line, by the way. Like I’m just supposed to stop worrying and then I’ll be happy? How happy will I be when I’m constantly blind-sided by things I didn’t anticipate? Or is it that first I have to stop worrying and then start being happy – two different actions? But then, what’s the action that goes with being happy? Am I supposed to fake being happy?

“Anger requires action or distraction.” That one line heard on a radio show has blown my mind for weeks. Ever since, I’ve noticed how action-oriented I am.

“Calm down.”

“Relax.”

“Have fun.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Stop freaking out.”

I can’t stand to hear any of those lines, because I don’t know what they are telling me to DO. I know what not to do (yell, freak out, worry), but not what to do. WHAT DO I DO?

Smokers often fail at quitting because they don’t take into account the behavioral aspect of smoking. Sure, you’re addicted to nicotine, but you also take “smoke breaks” and step away from your work way more often than non-smokers. When you’re stressed or tired or upset, finding a cigarette and lighter, walking outside, moving the thing into your mouth over and over – these things are actions, and they help reduce stress. If you want to quit smoking, in addition to dealing with the chemical issues, you have to replace the behavioral ones.

Think about it: meditation, exercise, yoga. Actions to focus your frustrated energy on something. Now I know why people pray in hospital prayer rooms. It’s a place to go to DO something when nothing can be done but wait.

Put another way, one of the quick-and-easy ways to train your dogs not to do something is to train them to do something else. Don’t want them to bum-rush the door in barking madness every time the doorbell rings? Train them to run to a room in barking madness instead. Voila! (Then you train them not to bark by training them to eat the treat in your hand… get it? Can’t bark while munching, since their table manners are better than mine.)

Blogging the Bright Side has given me something to do in place of reveling in my angst. I’m paying attention to my life in a positive way. I still worry, and I still panic, and I’m still going to freak out.

But now I have something to DO when I’m trying not to do that. I find something to enjoy somewhere in my world. In thinking about how to blog about the bright side, I’ve found myself firmly standing in it.

Being happy is an active pursuit of happiness, but it’s so easy. You just have to move your eyes. If that’s too much, close them.

That’s my kind of exercise plan.

Very often, we (my husband and I) forget all about foods we like to eat, defaulting to picking up fast food or going out to eat.  It’s my fault.  I’m one of those people that eats something they like and then they want to eat nothing else until they’re completely sick of that thing.  My husband is prone to the same behavior, so together, we’ll eat ninety different variations on stir fry, then not know what to eat next.

We’re trying to eat at home more often.  Him, because he likes to eat at home (it’s the same experience as a restaurant since I’m doing the cooking).  Me, because I’ve hit the point where I’m just as unsatisfied with going out to eat as eating cereal at home, and the latter is much more cost-effective.  When you don’t go out to eat for two meals per day, you can buy new lenses for your new camera, right?

If I get around to tweaking my blog, I’d like this post to hang out in the sidebar until the inevitable day that neither of us knows what we want to eat. If i’m super cool, I’ll also find great photos and link to great recipes.

Feel free to mention food you love to eat too!

• Eggs: hard-boiled, frittata, scrambled, fried or poached on greens or potatoes or tomatoes
• Breakfast for dinner: eggs and potatoes, pancakes
• BLT’s with or without egg
• Pasta with olive oil, onions, greens and red pepper flakes (also, bacon, tomatoes, cheese, olives)
• Chicken or steak tacos
• Chilaquiles
• Chicken thighs with olives, onions and tomatoes
• Loaded baked potatoes
• Wings
• French fries
• Grilled cheese

My parents divorced the year I was nine.  They were good parents, dedicated and caring parents who raised my siblings and I with love and support.  I thought I’d escaped the challenges that come with divorce, that because I was mature for my age and well aware of the reasons my parents’ marriage didn’t survive, I’d survived without a scratch.

I divorced the year I was twenty-eight, the culmination of a long, slow slide into dysfunction.

Nobody survives divorce without a scratch, least of all the daughter mature for her nine years.

Outline:

• Start with today, in my living room, in a stable relationship and stable life sometimes marred by yelling and broken wine glasses.
• I thought I knew why people divorced…